Anam Cara

As humans, we need a forceful dialectic of physical, sensuous, elemental interaction with landscape. If you look at the wildlife about us—rabbits, birds, foxes—there is a seamless kind of wildness in them. There is a sense of fluency with the place they are in and the way they move in it. One of the reasons that the post-modern mind is so packed and tight is that we have lost touch with our wildness. One of the most natural ways of coming home to your wildness is to go out into a wild place. Visually, this is often evident in people’s faces. Years ago, when people worked more on the land, they had a winnowed look on their faces. Now there is a great homogenization of our appearance. Similarly in the way people walked. Land people walked in a land kind of way. The spread of the land was on them, as we would say. Now more and more people walk in a corridor fashion, unlike the peasants who walked the land in their own way. I love the word “peasant.” Those who use it in a derogatory manner are just uninformed, naive and vulgar. It is very difficult for people of the land to find a vocabulary for the dignity of their work and presence and belonging in the land. So much of modern opinion is fashioned in the urban world and by urban forces. How much of the television we watch refers to the land in a way that would make the people who live on the land feel they are in a noble setting? Very little, I suspect, and yet if we go back in folk consciousness there was a time when that was the most beautiful way to dwell on the earth.

WATER

Having climbed up Máméan we have a bird’s-eye view and we realize how much water there is in this landscape. There is a huge conversation in Connemara between granite and water. All around us are beautiful lakes, with mountain streams pouring into them. I love mornings after heavy rain when you hear the music of the water finding its way down the mountains. Chiffon-like streams ornament and bedeck the mountain as they weave their way. I wrote about this in a poem about Gleninagh, which is only down the road from here.

Gleninagh

The dark inside us is sistered outside

in night which dislikes the light of the face

and the colors the eye longs to embrace.

Night adores the mountain, wrapped to itself,

a giant heart beating beneath rock and grass

and a mind stilled inside one, sure thought.

Something has broken inside this Spring night,

unconsolably its rain teems unseen

onto Gleninagh Mountain’s listening depth.

Next morning the light is cleansed to behold

the glad milk of thirty streams pulse and spurt

out of unknown pores in the mountain’s hold.

From Echoes of Memory

Now it has started to mist and rain. The rain is never far away here! I welcome it because one of my fears is the way the government relentlessly nurtures the tourist industry. Ireland is a small country and if the tourist numbers aren’t modified it could be overrun. Voyeuristic commercial tourism can do a lot of damage. The English scientist Rupert Sheldrake was asked what single change he would recommend for the new millennium that could make a difference to the world. His reply was that every tourist should become a pilgrim.

There is something eternal about the landscape. It wants to address us but we are not subtle enough to pick it up. The radar of our senses, while beautiful, is incredibly limited. This is illustrated for me by a parable I was once told. There was a stone in the corner of a meadow and under that stone lived a colony of ants. They were just ordinary ants but among them lived a genius ant, an Einstein ant. One day the board of the colony addressed the genius ant, telling it that there was nothing more for it to learn and it would have to leave them and go out into the world. So on a misty October evening the colony bestowed its valediction on the genius and it made its entry into the world. There happened to be a totally non-metaphysical horse grazing nearby. Regardless of how brilliant our genius ant is, it will never be able to perceive the horse, such is the disproportion in size….So I wonder are there presences all around us, that because of the disproportion between our senses and their presence, we are not picking up at all? We are seeing a lot more vacancy and voids in the world than actually exist. Maybe it is the role of the artists and mystics to attend to the seeming emptiness about us and find incredible riches there. Wendell Berry is one such artist. He is a farmer and writer who lives in Kentucky and he attends deeply to nature. I will conclude with a beautiful poem of his from the series Sabbaths, entitled “I Go Among Trees and Sit Still.”

I Go Among Trees and Sit Still

I go among trees and sit still

All my stirring becomes quiet around me like

circles on water,

My tasks lie in their places where I left them,

asleep like cattle,

Then what is afraid of me comes and lives

awhile in my sight,

What it fears in me leaves me and the fear of me

leaves it,