Lá fhéile Pádraig sona dhuit!

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

I am sending you this note totally out of regular routine because how could I not?!

Saint Patrick’s Day, our first one living in Ireland with our son, and our first living in the west of Ireland. A very special one indeed and I feel so lucky. I hadn’t planned this post at all but our wee one is asleep and I just want to send all the love in the world today.

Living in Ireland is not easy for me by any stretch, there is so much residual pain and sorrow; so much work needing done to get us to a place where we can all heal after centuries of deep trauma; intergenerational heartache & soul ache and more… but there is nowhere I would rather be to try to make a difference any which I can. There is no other community in which I would rather be putting down roots than the one in which we found ourselves at the start of this year.

As we make our way towards a future none of us can really grasp as of yet; years that hold change the like of which none of us has ever seen, it feels imperative to bed down deep. To sow seeds in whatever parcel of earth in which we find ourselves; to enter into the folds of the folk we are surrounded by; to trust the land and all we share it with to guide us through.

As we learn, here on this island, and perhaps in all of the places in all of the corners of this earth, how to balance the weight of responsibility with the lightness of being—May we remember it is a dance—every last bit of it. May we remember that we are the singer as well as the song. We are the silence as well as the orchestra of the wood; the ancient harp in the sky above; the cacophony of bone.

Today I’m wearing green velvet, the same green as Iveagh, my son’s beloved dolly. When I was pregnant with him I was locked down mostly to within walking distance of our stone cottage. I walked, twice a day, the lane way our house was at the very bottom of. On the St Patrick’s day before he vacate the seed that became him, we all sat and listened to the men in charge of this island tell us what we had to do to keep each other safe. The next year he was inside me and it had already become clear that mothers and their babies were not part of that picture of safekeeping. Maternal healthcare in Ireland during the pandemic was probably the worst in Europe and amongst the very worst worldwide. I’m only now beginning to process what it meant to carry and deliver a baby on this island during that time.

Everyone was convinced I was carrying a baby girl and if we had been we would have called her Iveagh Dreoilín — for the green green ivy on the laneway and the wee wren that loved it so. After he was born , that wren sang every day to our son, one of her many nests at the front door of that cottage, another in the ivy covered sycamore at the foot of the garden.

We are one family of beings, this much we know in those quiet moments in between this world and the others. We carry, in our bones, all that came before. We hold, in our hands, the hope for all that still will come.

On this St Patrick’s day I wish for you to know the deep peace of letting go; the soothing calm of being at one with the whole world around you; the quiet hope of a world still full of so much beauty; the circle of love that is ever renewing, without end; your place within it never in doubt.