Dear Friends,
This week I opened Instagram to find that a young woman (@nicknacklou) with breast cancer whom I’ve followed since I was diagnosed a year and a half ago has died. Nicky chronicled her cancer, but more so her joy as she lived out her motto to “go grab life.” Considering why so many people followed her, her husband wrote: “Since diagnosis, at the worst time of our lives, we chose not to mourn the time we are losing, but rather to celebrate and cherish the time we have left.” She compiled a living, rather than a bucket, list and fulfilled many wishes on that list.
My living list includes travel, but I got bogged down recently in the anxiety and tedium of planning for a while and needed a reorientation to go grab life.
For the last couple of months, my wife and I have been preparing for a big travel adventure. On Sunday we fly to Ireland, something we have wanted to do for a long time. We are seizing our moment while we are able, while I’m feeling good, before COVID spins out of control, and while fall brings pleasant travel weather.
I abandoned myself to anxiety for a time while planning this trip, and I am not even a passenger in a car on the opposite side of the road yet! The tasks of trip planning, transportation and lodging reservations, ensuring I have enough medical coverage felt burdensome and fear crept in. At some point I realized I needed to get a grip and remember that this trip is actually fulfilling a wish, rather than exacting punishment. I’ve been making my way back to anticipation.
I’ve been fumbling my way through Irish Gaelic on DuoLingo for quite a while. I can hardly speak a word of it. We have been readying ourselves by trying to understand some of the outline of Irish history. We’ve watched movies on the Easter Uprising and the War for Independence and the Troubles. I’ve been trudging through an Irish history book, trying to fix some kind of overview of hundreds and hundreds of years in my head. I love history, and look forward to learning more on this trip, but I realized I needed a perspective shift.
I reminded myself that what really called to me for this trip is an experience of spirit in Ireland. I turned to Irish writer John O’Donohue. In an interview, he talks about the landscape, and how it is always in Presence. He says that Celtic spirituality was an outdoor spirituality, and nature was the place where the Divine became visible, so one has only to go out into the landscape to experience this. I exhaled with the simplicity of this suggestion.
His book of blessings, To Bless the Space Between Us, includes a blessing for the traveler:
When you travel,
A new silence
Goes with you,
And if you listen,
You will hear
What your heart would
Love to say.
The urgency of filling my mind with timelines, untangling a difficult language, completing lists of tasks fall away and with this, the anxiety quiets. I course correct by degrees and reorient myself toward pilgrimage.
O’Donohue continues:
A journey can become a sacred thing:
Make sure, before you go,
To take the time
To bless your going forth,
To free your heart of ballast
So that the compass of your soul
Might direct you toward
The territories of spirit
Where you will discover
More of your hidden life,
And the urgencies that deserve to claim you.
I can feel a quiet space growing in me again and understand that this is the real preparation I need. Silence, listening, wandering into the landscape, discovering what wants to be revealed – this is what awaits me. I wonder what the urgencies that actually deserve to claim me will be. I’ll let you know what I find.
Until then, I wish you a still center to feel the compass of your soul guiding you.
Thanks for being here. Please share this with folks who might be interested.
Lots of love to you, fellow traveler,
Maija
Song of the Week: a little Irish fiddling from Martin Hayes with The Common Ground Ensemble in The Boyne Water.
I'm SO happy to hear of your travels to Ireland! I will be thinking of you as you walk the land and find the Presence in the spaces in between, in the people and their stories. Blessings and joy to you and your wife on this sacred journey. Can't wait to hear the stories upon your return.
with love,
Christine XO
Oh my sweet, don't let travel anxiety sour this joyous adventure! Lassie, it's a grand place to be enjoyed. Take an umbrella, your passport and wife. You don't need much more than those things. They have stores, electricity, food and warm and loving people. I am thrilled you are fulfilling your living list! Are you sure you don't need a wee leprechaun in your luggage??? Just sayin'. Love and Hugs, Sparky