August 30: The time spent the past two weeks has been richly rewarded with insights. As it turned out, it was a distraction to create files, spend the time downloading pictures so that I could write a blog entry. Instead of all the busy work associated with maintaining the blog, I carried this small notebook and jotted down momentary thoughts and insights about people and places. I have been inspired and changed by what I have seen and heard, looked at and listened to over the past ten to twelve days. There will be a change in my blog writing and the framework I am using. I want to explore deeper the experiences of homecoming, landscapes and rootedness.
No matter where you wander through life, if you have a place you call home, what does it means to return to that place, the land that sings deep in your soul?
On my first day back on this home trip, Patrick Kavaugh's words sank deep into me that "we get to our destiny in the end". As I think back on the past weeks, the firmly spoken words of this man from Monahan, have followed me everywhere. He talked of a simplicity of going away and of returning. I want to explore that more deeply.
The last two weeks have been a wonderful mixture of time. The time spent at Strandhill in Sligo sequestered in the shelter of the sand dunes. These were simple carefree days with my 5 year old and 2 year old grandchildren building sandcastles, eating ice creams, having a pub lunch or two (often after the ice cream), and flying our kites high and low, racing after their trails and loosing them in the tall dune grasses. I was brought back into the memories of my own childhood at Rossnowlagh beach.
Time was also taken up with a trip up to Dublin's National Concert Hall so we could catch RTE Orchestra's musical tribute to Bill Whelan and his works from Timedance (1981) to Riverdance (1994) to the spell binding "Seville Suite" composed in 1992 as a precussor to Riverdance. Even with all his travels, and his international reputation Bill Whelan spoke of his strong his sense of home, of landscape and rootedness in Connemara and in traditional irish music and instruments. The concert was a 21st century counterpart of a bardic experience.
What did it mean for me to be in Dublin again? I always have mixed feelings about Dublin. Here I went to a boarding school for five years out in Dalkey. Mention Dalkey these days and at once people think of Enya, U-2, Maeve Binchy and others. On the one hand, and on the surface, the energy and life in Dublin is infectious. It is a place to be. I love the choice of restaurants, wine bars, and pubs, places to hang out, and the regeneration of historic sites like Collins Barracks, Kilmanham Goal, and Smithfield.
Yet, I also feel that it is a city devoured and devouring. The Celtic tiger ran loose touching every facet of the city's wealth and culture. Dublin lost its small small town soul. It is has evolved into a sleek slick and multi-cultural European city with more in common with its European counterparts that with regional cities outside the Pale.
What is missing in Dublin is the connectedness with the rest of Ireland. Is there something about the politics of a capital city that separates it from the rest of the country. A sort of inside and outside the belt phenomenon. I get even more of a sense of distance when I am in Dublin now than I did before. While there we stayed at the Buswell Hotel off Kildare Street (and Leinster house) on Molesworth Street. An internet find with a great price for a decent hotel in the city center - one more sign of the impact of the Irish recession on hotel prices. The hotel is housed in a structure that dates back to the Georgian period and was built in 1736. The actual hotel started on this site in about 1861. The ambiance of the hotel from the reception to the bars reeked of being close to Leinster House. Walking past the leather chairs and dark paneled bar to the right of reception, on our way out for the day, I caught a glimpse of several grey hair politico's deep in conversation. I could nt help but wonder how many political conversations have taken place here over the years.
