Exploring the mysteries of Ireland

I am a great believer in invitations, particularly ones that take us out of our ordinary and habitual way of perceiving the world and our connection to it. Ireland — its landscape, history, people, culture, and flora and fauna — extends a particularly strong invitation that has called to me so thoroughly and repeatedly through out the years, that I am led to extend it to others through tours that I see more as pilgrimages and writers’ retreats that tap into that deep Irish well.

Ireland has something to say to us through its gentle landscape of rolling hills and hedges of oak and blackthorn trees. And through its fierce one of wicked winds and pelting rain blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean, scouring the land of all but rock and bog. It is a land of sheep cropped pastures dotted with harebells, celandine, and miniature daisies, and bounded by stonewalls that lead down to the sea where, often as not, you will find cows enjoying walking on the sand and eating seaweed.

It is a land with a deep and scourging past that has left heart-breaking whispers of the Great Hun ger and of scars given and received. Dig deeper and you will find an even more ancient history in which you can wander amid stone circles and passage tombs that are as much a part of the landscape as the sheep and farms, motorways and housing estates.

John Moriarty, the Irish writer and philosopher, says that the land never loses its integrity no matter how humankind treats it. I choose to believe this, and in Ireland there is something about the integrity of the landscape that calls to many visitors and not only of Irish descent — I have met people of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds who have also felt this call. If we can open ourselves up to listen the land has something to say to us, as do the people, generous and gracious to a fault, and the music that can be found in most pubs, along with the good craic to be had at every opportunity. Ireland and the Irish still have time for one another.

After travelling through and living in the Irish landscape over a period of three decades, I still am trying to put my finger on what it is that draws me back, again and again. There is still mystery and time, solitude and beauty to be found in Ireland, so much so that you are in danger of returning home a poet. Or at least with a whistle on which you are determined to learn how to play a few tunes.

What is the nature of this hold Ireland has on me and on others? What is it? I have asked the sheep, but they are too intent on their grazing to be bothered with such questions, and perhaps they are right — why not let it remain a mystery.

Kate Hennessy is a writer, whose latest book is Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty (Scribner 2017). Kate and her musician husband, Garry Jones, lead writing retreats and tours in Ireland. Finding Your Spiritual Voice: A Writers’ Retreat will be held April 11-18, 2019, and September 25-October 2, 2019 (information at www.katehennessybooks.com), in addition to a 10-day tour, Pilgrimage to the Other – World, April 22-May 3, 2019 (information at www.irishbyways.com).