Irish stuff and hope
Mar. 16th, 2005 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonI find I am in need of hope this evening, so maybe some of you are too.
Here are some totally random bits of hope:
If ever you run across a kind of cheese called Irish Ardrahan, and you like semi-stinky cheese, do get it, whatever the cost. It's heavenly. Our splendiforous local co-op has a great cheese section, particularly all the stuff from local dairies, and various kinds of obscure, hard-to-find things. One of my lovely housemates was talking to the big cheese guy there, who recommended the Ardrahan. Wow. The unexpectedly familiar taste of Ardrahan, a hand-made product made in a part of Ireland from where some of my people once came, gives me hope.
My son came home from school having been taught a number of Leprechaun stories by his kindergarten teacher for St. Patty's Day. He recited several of these to me (including the one where the gold-hungry farmer catches the wee one, extracts a confession about the location of his gold beneath a particular fairy tree, but forgets to bring his shovel, so marks the particular tree with a ribbon, and upon a return with his shovel, finds the trixy wee one has marked *all* of the trees in the area with ribbon...) At the age of 5, he remembered every bit, and is quite the storyteller, an buachaillin ban, and that gives me hope. We always need good storytellers.
And it's Spring here. Well, not yet, not in snowy New Hampshire, not for *sure*...but it sure seems that way. After 18 inches of new snow over the last weekend, every day this week has been sunny and bright, gorgeous blue sky days with highs above freezing, and the snow is melting melting melting, despite feet of snow in the banks alongside the road where I plowed it last week, the dark gravel of the road bed is starting to appear, the darkness capturing the sun and accelerating the melting around it. And the trees, they are stirring, waking, restless...you can just feel that sap rising, rising, up into the tree trunks, up towards the branches, out into the tight, swelling buds, just aching, trembling, to burst forth into tender, proud, showy new life. But the trees up here are wise, knowing the ways of Winter, and early, early Spring, so they hold tight to their warmth, wait and are patient, holding back their life's blooming for a few more precious weeks. Ah, Spring, full of promise and laughter, ticklish delight and the deep shivers of long-remembered ecstasies, waiting to be repeated again, and again, and again. And that gives me hope.
I am reminded by the words of Judge M. Woolsey writing on the supposed "obscenity" in James Joyce's arcane and brilliant Ulysses, in 1933: "In respect to the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring." And that bit of blithe, genuinely pro-life wisdom from 1933, refusing to bow to the forces of puritanical censorship, gives me hope.
There are those of my ancestors who suffered defeats, setbacks, disasters and calamities to which my own worst personal nightmares would seem like blissful light-hearted delights. And they survived, and passed on their genes, and their stories, and their hope, even in the face of despair and bone-wrenching grief. Their hope, made manifest in the very fact of their lives, and mine, gives me hope.
I am reminded by words written by one of my great inspirations, Rainer Maria Rilke, about people not too different from those who, today, make me doubt for our future: ""Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it."
May we open and read, and perhaps even understand some portion of the letters we have all received, as treasure, from our ancestors. And what we do not or cannot read, let us pass on to our children and hope that they will succeed where we have failed, turn our incomprehension into knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. And that gives me hope, that is hope.
May we all dare to hope, now and ever.
Here are some totally random bits of hope:
If ever you run across a kind of cheese called Irish Ardrahan, and you like semi-stinky cheese, do get it, whatever the cost. It's heavenly. Our splendiforous local co-op has a great cheese section, particularly all the stuff from local dairies, and various kinds of obscure, hard-to-find things. One of my lovely housemates was talking to the big cheese guy there, who recommended the Ardrahan. Wow. The unexpectedly familiar taste of Ardrahan, a hand-made product made in a part of Ireland from where some of my people once came, gives me hope.
My son came home from school having been taught a number of Leprechaun stories by his kindergarten teacher for St. Patty's Day. He recited several of these to me (including the one where the gold-hungry farmer catches the wee one, extracts a confession about the location of his gold beneath a particular fairy tree, but forgets to bring his shovel, so marks the particular tree with a ribbon, and upon a return with his shovel, finds the trixy wee one has marked *all* of the trees in the area with ribbon...) At the age of 5, he remembered every bit, and is quite the storyteller, an buachaillin ban, and that gives me hope. We always need good storytellers.
And it's Spring here. Well, not yet, not in snowy New Hampshire, not for *sure*...but it sure seems that way. After 18 inches of new snow over the last weekend, every day this week has been sunny and bright, gorgeous blue sky days with highs above freezing, and the snow is melting melting melting, despite feet of snow in the banks alongside the road where I plowed it last week, the dark gravel of the road bed is starting to appear, the darkness capturing the sun and accelerating the melting around it. And the trees, they are stirring, waking, restless...you can just feel that sap rising, rising, up into the tree trunks, up towards the branches, out into the tight, swelling buds, just aching, trembling, to burst forth into tender, proud, showy new life. But the trees up here are wise, knowing the ways of Winter, and early, early Spring, so they hold tight to their warmth, wait and are patient, holding back their life's blooming for a few more precious weeks. Ah, Spring, full of promise and laughter, ticklish delight and the deep shivers of long-remembered ecstasies, waiting to be repeated again, and again, and again. And that gives me hope.
I am reminded by the words of Judge M. Woolsey writing on the supposed "obscenity" in James Joyce's arcane and brilliant Ulysses, in 1933: "In respect to the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring." And that bit of blithe, genuinely pro-life wisdom from 1933, refusing to bow to the forces of puritanical censorship, gives me hope.
There are those of my ancestors who suffered defeats, setbacks, disasters and calamities to which my own worst personal nightmares would seem like blissful light-hearted delights. And they survived, and passed on their genes, and their stories, and their hope, even in the face of despair and bone-wrenching grief. Their hope, made manifest in the very fact of their lives, and mine, gives me hope.
I am reminded by words written by one of my great inspirations, Rainer Maria Rilke, about people not too different from those who, today, make me doubt for our future: ""Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it."
May we open and read, and perhaps even understand some portion of the letters we have all received, as treasure, from our ancestors. And what we do not or cannot read, let us pass on to our children and hope that they will succeed where we have failed, turn our incomprehension into knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. And that gives me hope, that is hope.
May we all dare to hope, now and ever.
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Date: 2005-03-17 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-17 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-17 04:28 am (UTC)Silly little things give me hope. I started some tomato seeds indoors a week or so ago, and they've just begun to poke their noses up in the past couple of days. I love the first few days of seedlings. Dave took a photo of the flat on Sunday, in fact - you can just barely see one little tomato fellow poking his nose up in the back. Now they're ALL up and reaching for the sun (okay, reaching for my plant light until the ground thaws outside). I like to peek at them several times a day because they grow SO fast when they're tiny like that. The plant light is suspended above a shelf near the floor, so you'll often find me down on all fours, peering at the baby plants to see if I can tell how much they've grown in the last three hours. And I grin a big silly grin and talk to them. I don't know why, but that gives me hope.
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Date: 2005-03-17 05:28 am (UTC)And thanks, Chel, for putting into words what I feel when I go outside these cold mornings. There is warmth in the air, the stream runs strong under the ice, and relatively soon the snowmelt will reveal the ancient earth and granite in the hills. The natives around here tend to complain mightily about it, but I'm looking forward to mud season...great things happen in mud! Hmm...there's a bumper sticker...
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Date: 2005-03-17 01:15 pm (UTC)Or a mini-series..."Next, on the History Channel, "Great Things That Happened In Mud!"
Hmm, that would most definitely not include anything having to do with a siege of any part of Russia...
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Date: 2005-03-17 01:59 pm (UTC)New seeds definitely give me hope. Thanks for sharing that.
I'm picking out my tree seedlings (ash, rowan, hawthorne, apple, etc) from the catalog, eagerly anticipating bringing out the backhoe and shovel and planting them as soon as the ground thaws...
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Date: 2005-03-17 04:08 pm (UTC)Shoulda woulda coulda and there's always hope for next time.
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Date: 2005-03-17 04:18 pm (UTC)During my years living in Hawai'i, mud-sliding down breathtakingly steep cliffs was a popular sport, and much fun, like like sledding without the sled (or rather, just the sled yer born with ;>)
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Date: 2005-03-17 04:31 pm (UTC)I do appreciate this post and your talk about the ancestors. I called them in last night for exactly the reasons you relate here. Hope.
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Date: 2005-03-17 04:57 pm (UTC)Speaking as someone just entering Mud Season (here in the Nawth, the (hopefully) brief season between Winter and Spring), warm mud is a *heck* of a lot more fun than cold mud.
You're very welcome. I found I needed a booster shot of hope, and I thought at least a few friends might as well.
I remember someone once telling me that one of the reasons working with blood ancestors is so powerful is that they were the ones who survived, the ones who fought, and lived, long enough to pass on their body's gift of the life, the form which you now carry, or they survived to be remembered and carried in the memories and hearts of those who live. And the ancestors of inspiration are those whose words, songs, art, etc, lived, those relatively few whose works, deeds and creativity survived in some way across the miles and years to inspire us.
Now many, many of those whose works and memories are now gone were totally worthy of being remembered, but the ones who survived also carry with them that particular power of survival, that force, that gift, and they did, they can pass it on to us, that we may act and live in ways which inspire our own descedants (whether of blood, memory or inspiration). "Inspire" comes from the Latin "inspirare," to breathe into, to pass the spark, to quicken the soul and the spirit towards being more fully human. My ancestors inspire me.
And there is hope in that. Our ancestors survived, thrived and created through things we can barely imagine. And if they did, we can too.