I wrote this poem last October in a writing salon with Patrice Vecchione at Gabriella Café in Santa Cruz, where her art show Imagination Migration was on display, a flock of hand-colored birds carrying flowers, maps and pencils in their beaks. I didn’t guess then how much I would need imagination to move into my next chapter, our next chapter.
For me, today is a day for remembering the courage and wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. “We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline,” he admonished in his “I Have a Dream” speech. “We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence.” Although he was talking specifically about civil rights for black Americans, his sagacity transcends the March on Washington in 1963. Dignity, discipline, and nonviolence are his guidelines, and just as important, “We cannot walk alone.”
Today I’m also remembering the four freedoms Franklin Delano Roosevelt articulated in his State of the Union address on January 6, 1941: the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. Today I call on our collective creative energy to imagine a future of freedom and justice for all.
Dear reader, at this time of winter darkness, about to light the fourth candle on the Advent wreath, watching for the return of light heralded by the winter solstice, and admittedly overwhelmed by the consumerist frenzy that hijacks Christmas in our culture, I wish you sanctuary — your own pool of light in the labyrinth — and a pathway to hope in the New Year.
Strolling through the center of Kildare, you can’t help stepping into Brigid’s footsteps: this figure revered as Celtic mother goddess and Christian saint smiles at you larger than life from murals on McHugh’s Pharmacy and the Firecastle Pub. Since 2012 I have been part of a circle in Santa Cruz acting to keep Brigid’s legacy alive, so it was with the spirit of a pilgrim that I spent an afternoon around the corner from the pub at the site of the fire temple where a flame was kept burning in ancient times to honor the goddess and later the saint who bore her name. For centuries before and after Christianity came to Ireland, women tended that flame to the sacred feminine until it was extinguished during the Reformation.
Photo courtesy of Carolyn Brigit Flynn
Leaning against a stone wall that marks the old boundary of St. Brigid’s monastery, I pulled out my iPad for some writing en plein air in a field of green grass dotted with white alyssum, yellow cat’s ear, and old gravestones. Gray clouds drifted across the sky, and birdsong mixed with the distant hum of traffic from town, clattering from the restoration of the medieval round tower on my right, and soft-voiced visitors drifting into the cathedral. Before me was the fire temple, surrounded by a short rectangular wall with stairs leading down to a depression in the earth, empty now as a breeze danced through the sea of yellow flowers. Once upon a time this enclosure might have been round instead of rectangular, formed by hedgerows instead of stone. Long ago it did not share this field with a Christian church and cemetery; now it does, a tangible reminder of how devotion to the goddess transformed into a fidelity acceptable to those in power, transformed, but in the red-hot heart of the fire, one and the same.
This is part of why Brigid appeals to me: she accommodates a Christian sensibility, and she holds the ancient impulse to honor the sacred feminine, just as that primal instinct lives inside me along with the Catholic tradition I was born into. In the heart of the fire and in my own human heart they are one and the same because each mirrors the spark of the One beyond all names and forms and even gender, the fire inside each of us meant to be the light of the world.
In 1992, as a new millennium approached, the Brigidine Sisters in Ireland began a process of discerning their mission which led to opening a small center for Christian Celtic spirituality in Kildare called Solas Bhride. A year later they re-lit Brigid’s flame in the market square of Kildare, carrying a spark of that flame to Solas Bhride where they have kept it continually burning ever since. Our retreat group spent a morning and an afternoon with the sisters there, learning about what Brigid can teach us today about caring for the planet, hospitality, peacemaking, and contemplation. The main building is constructed of circular rooms in the shape of a Brigid’s cross, and in a concluding ritual in the round room where a pillar candle burns with Brigid’s flame, we each lit a tea candle from that original ceremonial spark of 1993. As part of the Santa Cruz Brigid’s Circle, I take turns with eighteen other women tending her flame, and it thrilled me to carry the seeded wick of that little tea candle back to Santa Cruz to light my candle at home.
During those days in Kildare, it occurred to me for the first time that the real flame I’m tending is the one inside me – kindled by something greater than me but my responsibility to keep burning. How to do that? Fire needs oxygen and fuel. For each of us the fuel may be different. My flame feeds on contemplation and connection to community, nature, and the Divine. (Therapy, books and chocolate help too.) Fire can also be smothered or doused. I confess, this year anxiety has dimmed my inner flame, the big problems of the world that don’t diminish the little ones in my personal life even though I try to keep them in perspective. At two in the morning the challenges of my aging parents keep me awake as much as climate change and the political divisions cleaving our country. But when I’m anxious or afraid, my inner light can’t shine outwards the way it’s meant to. Maybe mindfulness practices like meditation and deep breathing, practices that calm anxiety and help put fears in perspective, are vital tools in the basket of a flame tender.
Years ago, when I was in thrall to some trouble I’ve forgotten now, a friend placed her hand on my chest and told me, “You can come from a place of fear or of love.” How many times did Jesus tell his disciples, be not afraid? This might have been more than a beloved teacher’s reassurance to his frightened friends and followers. Maybe it’s the prerequisite to the greatest commandment of all, a key for each of us to tending our flame.
As I write, we have just passed the midpoint between the autumn equinox and winter solstice with celebrations of Halloween, All Saints Day, Dia de los Muertos, Samhain. The days are getting shorter and cooler, and we may feel trepidation at the darkness ahead. How to tend my flame now? In a time of trouble when I am susceptible to fear, it begins with faith in the light. The feast day of St. Brigid is celebrated on February 1st, the cross-quarter day between the winter solstice and spring equinox known as Imbolc in the Celtic calendar when the goddess Brigid is also honored. At the beginning of February winter isn’t over yet, but we feel it yielding. Lambs are born, crocuses bloom, and sunrise comes earlier; light lingers a little longer each day. In this way Brigid reminds us (in the words of a song by Cyprian Consiglio): “There is a light that can overcome the darkness. There is no darkness that can overcome the light.” Even now our flames can be vibrant — especially when joined. The ritual of lighting a candle to Brigid both symbolizes and feeds my faith in that light. Fear is a bushel over the lamp. Love is the array of lighthouse mirrors that reflect it far out to sea.
I’m honored to introduce my travel buddy and beloved partner, Thomas Hood, sharing a little more of Ireland’s magic through his travelogue.
Upon arriving in Dublin it didn’t take long for the joyful embrace of Irish culture to entrance with its magic spell. Buskers, one after another down Grafton street, wove a musical tapestry, each with his or her mastered genre. Throngs of tourists and locals mingled together, doing a surprisingly deft dance as they gracefully squeezed through Dublin’s pulsing arteries. Back at our room in Townhouse on the Green, homespun hospitality greeted us like kinfolk and provided an elegant shelter from the storm of jet lag and the frenzied crowd.
An abrupt Dublin day and half later, we joined a magnificent sisterhood, the writers of Flynn I shall call them, to bus our way to Kilkea Castle. The castle itself provided its own mystical magic as did getting acquainted with the sisterhood during our three days there. To walk through a castle, however altered through time, is to experience antiquity that we of the new world can only read about or see in film. Walking down the winding stumble-steps of a turret imagining marauders stumbling their way up, forced to switch swords to their left hands (all the architecture is designed to create advantages for the protectors), it’s easy to throw oneself back to the fifteenth century, protecting the realm.
Then we were off to the Beara Peninsula, piloted by Padraic who drives a bus as though it’s simply an appendage guided at subconscious level like an arm or leg. What lay ahead is a day I won’t forget.
It started with a golfing experience unlike any other. The Berehaven Golf Course encapsulates the ruggedness and beauty of the peninsula in its rocky escarpments and deep green undulating landscape that nature has delineated with rivulets, spillways, and endless wild inlets pervading the western coast line. We arrived without proper arrangement to find the jovial David in a downstairs room that looked more like an old horse race betting parlor than a clubhouse. He went into a dark musky room filled with clubs dating back thirty to forty years and piled together two sets of mismatched clubs. Perfect, uttered my playing partner, in all seriousness. As I tried to pay, David said, nah, just pay when you’re done, I’ll be out playing ahead of ya (leaving the ersatz clubhouse unmanned). The ensuing nine holes, while full of miscues, missed chances, and misjudgments, on holes with tees and greens hidden in unlikely places, was filled with wonder. These fabled lands, with singing stones, melodic rivers, and trees of wisdom, whether holding a golf course or Neolithic spiritual site, are full of wondrous sights, sounds, and mystical feelings.
While in some ways a silly superficial pursuit, golf, like many activities carried out on the land, can take you to a deeper place. One that requires a sense of harmony with the geography and an inner focus that can put you in a transcendent state of oneness with the battered club, the scruffy ball, and the trappings of landscape you might barely notice if simply walking through. Without your senses constantly assessing wind direction and speed, the height of the hills, the relative girth, height, and porosity of the tree in front of you, you’ll fail. You’ll fail even more surely than your lack of natural ability has already doomed the day or put at least at dire risk.
As we limped back to the makeshift clubhouse, really a pub in disguise, we felt the glory of tired accomplishment — a battle lost to the elements of land and sea but victory in our acceptance of unfamiliar difficulties and our ability to listen to the magic surrounding us. After a search through the underbelly of the dilapidated structure we wound our way to the top floor where we found David and his playing partners saddled up to the bar and a round of Guinness. I managed to leverage him away to take payment for all our rentals and golf rounds, and he said, oh how bout ninety five euro. If you were to place it in our area, a course in a hallowed location like this would cost twenty times that amount. My favorite golf experience in a long litany of courses, and it was practically given to us. A pittance charged, a spirit of generosity unmatched. Ireland.The Irish.
That same day, serendipity struck again. After dinner we were deftly Padraiged (the man deserves to be christened with his own verb) over the rugged Beara coast road to Jimmy’s Pub in the village of Allihies. The rumor of a Friday night gathering of local musicians was a siren song luring us away from our B&B in Castletownbere. We de-bussed, the sisterhood and I, and ambled through the pub door not knowing what to expect. Immediately we were thrown unceremoniously into a scene that would have been right at home in centuries past: a circle of of troubadours, poets,and performance artists, maybe twenty in all, basking in Celtic harmonies. These cherubic faces were lit with a particular joy I’ve seen only among musicians collaborating in the spontaneity of unrehearsed song. Outside the circle, locals listened intently when they weren’t heading toward or away from the bar until called upon to join in chorus.
Immersion is my goal in foreign cultures, and spotting a seat at the bar amidst three patrons, I quickly bellied up and was encircled by the three. They were clearly local and regular given their countenance of casual comfort — not entirely due to their respective levels of insobriety. Finally getting the attention of the inundated barmaid Maureen, I ordered the sacred libation, Guinness.
Now, the Irish are not shy, and within a few seconds Billy, Dickie, and Mikey, were talkin’ me up. Men in their seventies with kid’s names, representative of the youthful spirit ubiquitous in Irish culture. We lovingly jostled one another with jibes and jokes while lively tunes wafted throughout the rustic pub.
Before long, one of the circle of artists stood up, her flaming red mane scattered down her back. With a presence that commanded the room she fell into a performance piece that captivated the by now unruly crowd. The Hag of Beara! (A local fable.) With the aid of a red coat thrown over her head she morphed into the Hag herself and led the captured choir in choruses between spoken words — words sometimes poetic, sometimes an improvised wilding. This was beyond anything I’ve seen in my decades of music festivals and plays. Context is everything, and here I’d been tossed into a setting that felt more fantasy than reality. Later I found out that the red witch of Beara has a PHD, and it was the first time she had ever done that sort of thing. Gobsmacked, I sipped my Guinness and sat in wonder. What next?
A myriad of tunes followed, and at some point, after a quiet pause, I heard a particularly alluring voice rise a cappella in Gaelic song. I stood, peering over Dickie’s head to see who this songbird might be. What?! It was one of the sisterhood singing a gorgeous Irish song…in Irish! How the hell did she get in this local jam, how did she know this long song in the ancient Gaelic tongue, and where did she learn to sing so beautifully? The answer to these questions and perhaps all such questions:“It’s just the magic of Ireland, lad.”
Walking in Mullaghreelan Forest on a free morning during my writing retreat in Ireland, I saw no one despite three cars in the parking lot. For the first time during my five days in the Emerald Isle I’d put on my new orange raincoat and was grateful for my waterproof boots. A gentle rain was falling, but here under the canopy of oak, beech, and sycamore I hardly felt a drop. The soft music of raindrops landing on broad leaves plied my ears, and fresh, moist scents filled the air, but I was comfortable and dry, like sitting on a porch during a storm except I was enjoying one of my great pleasures: a solitary walk in the woods. With only trees for company, my strong and sturdy legs moved down the path, no goal but the joy of movement and the necessity of returning to my starting point before lunch. I was in motion and at peace.
This is what my soul had been longing for: this moment in the Irish countryside, damp earth beneath my feet, trees sheltering me from the pearly gauze of rain indistinguishable from gray sky. I paused to listen. The sound of cars rolling down an unseen road, steady and rhythmic as the susurration of a distant sea, came from outside this place. Inside the forest I heard only the patter of rain and a single bird warbling. Leaves trembled when kissed by water drops, and it was as if the whole tree was shivering with pleasure …
I would like to end the story here, with my conscious mind recognizing the sacrament of the present moment and not with what happened next. It was so embarrassing I told no one, not even Tom, till weeks later: I got lost.
In the list of what to pack for the trip to Ireland our tour guide Carolyn Flynn had told us to bring a compass if we planned to hike alone. In all my years of hiking alone I’ve never carried a compass; it seemed excessive to add one to my already full suitcase, and there was nothing about Mullaghreelan Forest to suggest I might need one. The park was barely a mile across surrounded by farmland on three sides and the road to Castledermot on the other. I’d snapped a photo of the map at the entrance and set off down what looked like a main trail, certain it would be easy to turn around and retrace my steps when the time came to head back.
Enticing paths crisscrossed the park, and a half hour into my walk, beguiled by the woods and the rain, I decided to make a loop instead of going back the way I’d come. Maybe I’d find the wishing well I’d noticed on the map and expected to see by now. Except what I thought was a trail around the perimeter that would lead me back to the entrance petered out. I turned back to pick up a lateral path, but it too narrowed and disappeared. Okay, maybe the loop wasn’t such a good idea; I’d find my way back to a familiar path and retrace my steps after all. Yes, surely this broad leaf-strewn trail was the one I’d come down, but no, it hadn’t come to a T quite like this. Which way to turn? The roadway shouldn’t be far, but now I couldn’t hear any cars, only raindrops on leaves. I surely wasn’t in danger in a tiny park surrounded by occupied Irish countryside, but I hadn’t seen a soul since I entered. No one knew where I was.
Suddenly the forest seemed large, and stories drifted into my mind of the Fair Folk, those supernatural beings said to dwell in the invisible Otherworld that exists alongside our own. It had always been easy to shrug off tales of their mischief as a charming bit of Irish folklore, but now, alone in the woods, I remembered that to this day Irish farmers plow around ring forts and fairy mounds, that people cautiously avoid referring to the Good Folk by a name I dare not mention here (think Tinker Bell and a word that starts with F). Suddenly the stories seemed plausible, and wasn’t leading travelers astray one of their favorite pranks? Had I trespassed in some blundering American way? The longer I wandered, the more I wondered if I had fallen for their lures, easily tricked like the stranger I was. Why oh why hadn’t I brought a compass?
Then I remembered the phone in my pocket. I pulled it out and took it off airplane mode. Yes, I had four bars! Apple Maps located me in the forest and showed a way out. Relief and chagrin poured through me and also a good measure of gratitude – not to modern technology but to Themselves. I’ve no doubt they could have tinkered with my device or tampered with its tenuous connection to the internet if they had wished. Instead, they tricked and teased me just enough for me to know I’d been enchanted by the magic of Ireland.
I am deeply, happily at home here on the California coast where I was born, but my soul has a second home in Ireland, the land of my ancestors, and it is calling me. When I say Ireland, I’m not thinking of a country with borders but of a place like Yeats’s Lake Isle of Innifree
… where peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
Ireland is more than a mythical, poetic place with an ancient name though. Tom and I traveled there for the first time in 2019; he has Irish heritage too, and both of us felt a surprising sense of homecoming. Was it a cellular memory of the geography or simply comfort among warm and welcoming people with good humor and a heart-lifting accent? I’m not sure, but I remember it vividly, and when I say that Ireland is calling, I mean that my lungs want to fill with the air rising from that mossy, rain-soaked island, air that has its own moist texture my cheeks want to be bathed in and a scent my nose is longing to smell. My eyes hunger for forty shades of green; my legs are eager to stride down a country lane between rock walls and across grassy fields. I can almost hear sheep bleating, waves crashing against sandstone cliffs, the silence that soaks ancient standing stones.
Ireland is calling, and I am answering. For many years my beloved teacher Carolyn Brigit Flynn has led writing retreats in Ireland she calls Landscape of Soul and Story, and for years I’ve heard rapturous reviews from returning travelers of beautiful country and ancient Celtic sites that inspired deep feeling and luscious writing. The 2016 group actually filled a gorgeous book titled Sacred Stone, Sacred Water with poems, essays, and art. I dreamed of going myself, but the tours were always scheduled in September to catch the best weather — just when I was always returning to Foothill College for the beginning of the academic year. Now, a year into my retirement my dream is about to come true.
Soon I will be in that place where my great grandmother prayed Ave Maria, where perhaps a longer ago grandmother tended a flame to the goddess Brigit, and an even longer ago grandfather helped raise one of those standing stones. All are waiting for me: lilting voices and gentle rain, ancestors and stones.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
It has been a hard season of injury, illness, and grief in my family, and I will carry that weight with me, knowing that Irish earth and stone can hold it. Travel is an art, Carolyn reports her tour-guide father saying. Along with extensive packing and travel details (Bring comfortable, waterproof shoes!) she offers suggestions to prepare our spirits for this journey: “make sure to have unencumbered time to allow your meandering/dreaming/writing self to emerge.” My bags aren’t packed yet, but I have the notebook I will write in. In my deep heart’s core I am ready for this pilgrimage to the land of soul and story.
Sometimes, early in the morning when I’m making mochas for Tom and me, I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to scoop coffee beans from Brazil into my countertop grinder or cocoa from Cameroon into my frothing oat milk. As temperatures rise, will the high plateaus and island jungles where coffee plants thrive become too hot, too dry? How much longer will the world’s infrastructure sustain shipping these commodities across oceans and continents, and does it even make economic sense to do so? It’s not hard to imagine a time when my seemingly small daily luxury becomes an unaffordable delicacy.
Whether or not I can continue drinking mochas is obviously the least of our worries when it comes to climate change. Having breathed the smoke of wildfires and wiped the ashes from my car windows, I know this. But wondering about the future of coffee and cacao, these beans that bring delight to people all over the world, reminds me how precarious life as we know it is. It reminds me to take pleasure in the work of my hands while I can, brewing, frothing, blending, to appreciate the faraway farmers and their trees, and to savor each sip. In the quiet of early morning, these questions remind me to whisper, “Thank you for these precious ingredients. Thank you for the miracle of this moment.”
Although I was brought up to say grace before dinner, “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts,” I lost the habit when I went away to college, and I’m trying to get it back now, to say a silent thank you before a meal or even repeat aloud that old Catholic blessing from my childhood. Occasional nudges help. At potluck lunches with my writing group my friend who was a preschool teacher leads us in a song she used to teach her young students, and at family dinners my mom reminds us to bow our heads and offer thanks. A couple I know holds hands for a moment of silence before picking up their forks, a moment of private connection and blessing.
Too often, though, I forget. Even now, when gratitude has become a highly recommended mindfulness practice, I too often take it all for granted – the farmers, truck drivers, and cooks responsible for getting the food I eat from the earth to my plate and (not to get carried away, but let’s be blunt) the plants and animals that died so I might go on living. It’s an extraordinary transaction when you think about it.
What can I do about climate change beyond what I’m already trying with my solar panels and plug-in hybrid car? It’s too much to hope that my personal gratitude could inspire global stewardship, which is what we need, but Pope Francis’ title for his 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, inspires me. Echoing Saint Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun,” laudato si means “praise be to you” in medieval Italian, and the encyclical opens with the saint’s reminder “that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us.” Even if you don’t believe in God, acknowledging Mother Earth with a moment of appreciation before consuming her fruits seems only polite.
Will gratitude save the world? Not by itself, nor does it absolve me of responsibility, but I like to think that the butterfly effect gives wings to any personal energy of appreciation. Maybe thank you can turn into action: signing a petition, planting a tree, using less and sharing more. For me, saying grace is one way to resist the apathy and despair that big problems paralyze me with, and one act of resistance can lead to another, awareness the beginning of caring for our common home.
Given the mocha in my cup and the food on my table, it’s the least I can do.
I wrote this poem four years ago while on retreat at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, CA. Readers of Anam Cara by John O’Donohue may recognize my title as a quote from the book and some of the ideas it inspired in me.
Note: One can’t plan this day ahead of time because it can only begin after a good night’s sleep. This is the first required ingredient. The others are solitude and contemplation, both to taste. Optional ingredients are up to the cook’s imagination – mine include a mocha, forest bathing, and a good book – but vital to the recipe is a balance between work and rest, indoors and outdoors. Finessing this balance is different each time; you can’t rely on what worked before.
Directions
Rise at dawn — or stay in bed if blessed with euphoric sleep or if you are having one of those drowsy delirious dreams that will make you smile all day. Be gentle with yourself at this threshold, offering a light caress to the nighttime you are departing and an open palm to the invitation of the day. I aspire to slip from sleep as easily and reverently as I dip my fingertips into holy water. There is a small opening now which, David Whyte warns, “closes the moment you begin your plans.” Do not make plans. Only assess whether you have the required ingredients of solitude and a good night’s sleep.
Now comes a tricky bit. Without scalding the morning or burning your reverie, peek at your calendar, the one in your head or on your phone. You are not planning now, just taking the quickest of looks to see if you have any obligations today. A wide-open day free of appointments is best, but that is an optional ingredient as it is rarely ready at hand in the pantry. Besides, a commitment can add that je ne sai quois that will be the perfect unexpected spice for your day, the crack in the bowl which the day itself will repair.
The Kingdom of Enough 
