Monday, May 20, 2013

A Love Affair with a Place by Beppie Harrison



Home is easy to love.  It’s home, known and familiar. Usually coming home brings a little sigh of relief. Your feet know the shape of the steps. Shabby or neat as a pin, its warmth wraps around you.
So how is it that sometimes we go to someplace entirely new, completely alien, and foreign, and from the first time our feet step onto the ground we feel we belong there?  This is not home, but in some inexplicable way this is your place, too.
That’s how I feel about Ireland.

I first started to think about Ireland as a place, as somewhere that intrigued me, years ago, when I was in college.  I was drawn to Irish writing, the medieval ballads as well as the writings of the Irish scholars, learned men during a period when there were hardly any others in Europe – the period we call (not entirely accurately) the Dark Ages.  Then I discovered William Butler Yeats, and fell in love.
Not long after that, I married an Englishman and went to live in England.  Unfortunately, it was just about that time that what the Irish so characteristically call “the Troubles” began.  It was the old Irish/English impasse all over again: the Republicans, from the Irish Republic, in the overwhelming majority Catholic, wanted Ireland as a whole to be free of English (now British) domination. The people of North Ireland, overwhelmingly Protestant – many of them descendants of the Scots Protestants that Cromwell and his successors planted on the soil of northern Ireland, having first cleared away the Irish Catholics who had owned the land before – wanted to remain part of Great Britain. Using religion as a cudgel, both sides did their best to make the life of the other side intolerable. Good men on both sides were killed; women and children were blown up by omnipresent bombs.
I went right off Ireland.
It wasn’t until over twenty years of warfare made the population too weary to continue that an uneasy peace settled, which gradually became less uneasy. The barricades came down. The barbed wire was rolled and discarded. Belfast became almost an ordinary city, no longer under continual siege.
And finally I came to Ireland and lost my heart all over again.
What is it that won me? Part of it was the history. Much of it is as ugly as the Troubles themselves. The Irish were never a calm and peaceable people. The ancient history, muddled with legend and myth, is full of fierce warriors, both men and women, and brilliant tales of their beauty and bravery. The Irish fought each other before they fought the English.
It’s been over 800 years since the English (mainly then the Normans, the new conquerors of England itself) first set foot on Irish soil and made themselves at home. For 800 years the English have tried to make the Irish English, and for nearly the whole of the 800 years the Irish have fought back.  The Reformation added new fuel to the fire after Henry VIII reformed the English church to become Protestant. The Irish by and large chose to remain Catholic. The signs of their battles are all over the country. Ireland is a land of ruins – beautiful ruins, many of them now, weathered and sturdy even in decay.
More than that, Ireland is a land of talk. Story-tellers of magnificent tales, true or not. The same Irish who loved to fight are the Irish who now love to laugh and make wry jokes about the state of their country. An Irish pub is a warm and welcoming place, a window into the common life of the Irish people.
 Ireland is green. No one could have guessed that the good Lord had so many shades of green to spread around the rolling hills and rocky plateaus of Ireland. There is good land to grow crops on and much more stony, stubborn land to be conquered before it can be fruitful, but all of it is green.
I came to Ireland late, but when I came home to my cozy, familiar home, the distant seductive sound of Irish music was still in my ears. I’ve been back since, and I’ll be going again.  And in the meantime, part of my heart still lives there, and part of Ireland lives with me.
- Beppie Harrison 



19 comments:

  1. Ireland is one place I've alwasy wanted to go and never have. Lovely post. I tweeted.

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  2. It's wonderful. Like England in many ways only shabbier in more places and less organized. It's the countryside and the people that I am most in love with --

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  3. I've been to Ireland and love it there. It's so beautiful and green. The people are enchanting.

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    1. They are indeed, and the Irish lilt is so mesmerizing to listen to!

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  4. Oh Beppie, you made me sigh with longing. I want to go--now. Maybe someday--sigh again.
    Dory

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    1. We've stayed on both coasts -- the west side is hammered by the Atlantic, so there are spectacular cliffs, but the soil is a lot rockier. The east coast is much gentler, with wide wide beaches much of the way, and when we spent a week at a cottage there, barely noticeable surf. Although I gather the Irish Sea can throw a temper tantrum when so inclined!

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  5. I will go there some day. My Irish roots call to me across the sea. You made it so alive with your post.

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  6. Thanks, Jill. It is a wonderful place to visit, and of course if somebody offered me a cottage by the sea to live in I wouldn't say no. If I got tired of living in the country Dublin is only a short hop away, compared to US distances. I remember everyone we talked to around Drogheda where we stayed on the east coast was so astonished we were proposing to drive to Galway on the west coast for lunch. Well, the drive was under two hours, and we had a lovely lunch -- plus the drive through magnificent countryside as a bonus.

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  7. I can feel your love of home. The way you talk about Ireland is the way I feel about the Rocky Mountains. :) I would love to visit Ireland some day, too.

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    1. My mother felt like you, Stacey -- I remember how in Hawaii the green sharply ridged mountains (as if a giant raked his fingers down them) were not the mountains she was hungry for. She longed for the Rockies. Well, specifically the Wasatch Range of Utah. She's buried now in the middle of a whole lot of her family, in an old cemetery cradled at the foot of the mountains. My husband, the rose lover, has planted rose bushes all around the headstones there --it's a wonderful, peaceful place.

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  8. Someday I would love to visit Ireland! Your description of the land and the history surrounding the country are wonderful. Thank you for sharing your experiences, Beppie!

    Lane

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    1. Ireland is somewhere very special to me and I haven't a clue why. One person suggested maybe I lived there in another life! The only Irish blood I have that I know about is Scots Irish, as a descendant of those Protestant Scots that the English planted in what is now Northern Ireland, with the notion that they would convert all the pope-loving Catholics around them. Didn't happen, and we're just staggering away from the last epic Protestant/Catholic clash. What's the quote? Those never learn from history are bound to repeat it . . .

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  9. OMGoodness, Beppie! You describe EXACTLY how I reacted to Scotland. I've lived in/visited 49 states and 8 countries, but not one of them affected me like Scotland. I lost my heart within the first couple of days, and when I reached the Highlands, it became a forever thing.

    So much of what you wrote about Ireland is true also of Scotland. I haven't been to Ireland yet, but if I live and do well, I want to.

    Màiri

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    1. I did try to reply, but apparently the blog had read your email, and I assume my reply drifts aimlessly through the internet somewhere. Someday we should visit both countries together -- I'll show you the magnificence of Ireland and you can show me all the things about Scotland that you love.

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  10. Absolutely beautiful, Beppie. Ireland has always held a lure and I'd love to visit someday, especially after your words and pictures here. Thank you for sharing!

    Barb Bettis

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    1. How nice of you to say so, Barb! The pictures are those my husband took when we were there a year ago. This year it's England only (sigh). But we're taking our two oldest grandsons (11 and 13) and I think it makes more sense for their first trip to be one country only. I must admit I occasionally worry about whether pre-teen energy and that of a woman of a certain age will dovetail, or if my husband's pictures of this trip will mostly be of me collapsed on benches here and there.

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  11. Oh Beppie! I've longed to see Ireland for so many years, and this has only rekindled my desire. I look forward to hearing more.

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  12. Selena, watch out! I will soon be pouring out material about Ireland and the Irish -- well, if next spring counts as soon. I think I've definitely decided on self-pub, and plan on bringing the trilogy out then, one volume a month. Assuming I can keep up the pace, of course . . .

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  13. Beppie--Ever since I can remember--literally--I've known that as much as I love the home where I live, it isn't really mine. It's kind of rental property. Ireland is mine. Specifically, the West Coast. Even more specifically, the very tip of the Dingle Pensinsula, although there are other spots in Ireland in which I can hear old voices and know they are mine. It is, yes, the green, and yes, the history and the people and the wild wind and the towering rhododendrons and the dark, close pubs where neighbors saw away at their fiddles and make them weep. It's the peat smoke and the way the Irish use the English language. It's the story-telling(all you have to do to get a conversation started in Ireland is ask directions) and the generosity and the unparalleled hospitality. It's Yeats and Joyce(whom you can only understand if you're reading him on Irish soil) and Heaney and Synge and the early monks who wrote poems in the margins of illustrated manuscripts. It is the indescribable, instinctive sense that you are standing on your place on earth that understands you better than any other, that welcomes you more warmly, that protects you more carefully, and that ignites your creative flights more generously.
    I go every 2 or 3 years like a person seeking a water hole in the desert, and I'm refreshed. And I've walked enough of it that I have an entire page on my website devoted to the places I love where I've stayed, eaten, visited and celebrated. And I love to share those with everybody else, even knowing that chances are they won't feel the same way I do.

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