The Humbling Depth of My Ignorance

Beloved friends,

The words above were hanging in the little cabin on the shore of Lough Mask where I have just spent a week with my husband and his parents. It captures my current feelings about our trip to Ireland: if I talk to you about my trip, what would I be saying? I feel like I am just scratching the surface of these experiences, though they are in the past. There is so much to contemplate. The seeds are in my soil but they need time and water and sunlight to blossom and bear fruit. I know that this will happen in my meditation practice internally and in my friendships socially. Also, I said last week that I would speak of this experience and I know that trying will be useful, so I shall try here, with you.

When I discussed this with James last night he said that something he's working on right now is holding space for beginning without certainty. This resonates with the friendly curiosity which is at the heart of my meditation and lovingkindness practices. Today I aim to share with you some the threads I am holding in my heart. Some are woven, some are knotted; all have ragged ends just now. In doing this I am thinking, as I so often do, of words I read when I was young from Hilton Als: "... which is the place where most writers live, educating themselves in public, stupidly, valiantly."

I will do my best.

The motivation for this trip was a promise made by Paw, my father-in-love, to his father: that he would visit Ireland, where Paw's grandparents were born. When James' folks invited us to join them they kindly asked if there was anywhere I wanted to go. I said, "Could it be Scotland? Some of my people are from Scotland." My mother-in-love asked where and when I replied I did not know, that my people did not tell old stories, Ma generously offered to research my ancestry.

That is how I came to stand in front of the Irish Palatine Museum which documents the history of a group of Protestant families from the Palatine region of Germany who immigrated to Ireland. The building was closed for the season, but Ma had spoken with a local woman who assured her that my family name was among those on a plaque inside the building. It turns out that my people had come not from Scotland, but Ireland, though most of them were not Irish. There's an O'Neil on the papers I have been given, so some are Irish; there is more to learn. The ones I had thought were Scottish based on some snippet of conversation from my childhood were actually German Protestants who, under religious persecution at home, came to Ireland to be tenant farmers to the Protestant English landholders who wanted more Protestant tenants for this land they had stolen from the largely Catholic and Celtic Irish people. My ancestors spent a couple of generations there before emigrating again to Canada. Standing in front of that monument was the first time in my 54 years that I knew of a direct link between myself and distant historic events. It was a staggering feeling. Imagining the personal tragedies which might lead to and result from such loss and displacement helped me to understand many things about my people. The humbling depth of my ignorance was a powerful thread through this trip.

Ignorance took a humorous form on our first night in Dublin, where we sorted our jetlag before heading to the countryside. We dined at a restaurant where the host took a shine to us, seating us at their best private table and spending a good bit of time chatting with us. Thanks to Luke for your kindness. At the end of the evening Luke told us a story which was clearly intended to be very funny about the problem of crack. Crack - by which he clearly meant the drug – had finally reached Ireland and this was a problem because Ireland already had crack, which... seemed to be a good thing? It was late, we were wacky with jetlag, and we'd been drinking wine, so we simply smiled and laughed in what seemed like right places with no idea what Luke was talking about. Back at our hotel the internet helped us belatedly get the joke: craic, pronounced crack, is "fun" or "a good time" in Gaelic, and a cherished quality in Irish culture. This explainer about craic vs crack is both instructive and full of craic. Here is the Irish musician Hozier (of Take Me To Church fame) speaking about craic.

Our folks were very excited about pub culture, so each day we stopped somewhere new for a pint, which gave us many opportunities for sharing the craic. A local fellow popped into the family selfie we were shooting at Sean's Bar, which is the oldest pub in Ireland and possibly the world, a fact discovered when a wattle-and-wicker wall was uncovered by renovations in the 1970s; coins in the wall were from the 900s. That is not a typo: 900s. Dude just stepped into our photo, grinned, and waved back laughing as he walked away. At the Thomas Connolly we met a stained glass artist named Enda (which he said is "bird" in Gaelic) and the barman, Paul. It was 11am and Paul and Enda were both hung over, but upon hearing that we were there to explore family heritage they both came to chat us up, ask us questions and tell us stories. Upon our departure Paul told us we'd been good craic, which was the highest compliment of our trip.

This leaf of ivy was plucked from a stone wall in front of the remote farmhouse outside of Sligo where my husband's great-grandmother lived before immigrating to the United States. It is a stand-in for the photographs of this day, which feel too precious to share; please imagine us standing there, awestruck, teary. Imagine us, too, among moss-covered gravestones in a churchyard, my white-haired father-in-love with his hand pressed to his mouth and eyes glistening, reading his family name upon the stones. Each of us standing alone and coming together, embracing, again and again.

Before this trip I would have referred to Charlynne and Jim as James' parents, despite their cheerful insistence on calling me daughter rather than daughter-in-law for 25 years. Something shifted among those gravestones. I felt into my bones how family is formed by people choosing one another. When I lost my companions in the incredible National Museum of Ireland - Country Life, which documented how our ancestors would have lived from 1850-1950, I found myself saying simply that I was looking for my family. I found them, over and over again.

I live in a forest beside the sea on a peninsula at Earth's 48th parallel. Éire, Ireland, is a large island just a little higher up, and the climates are quite similar. I recognized many things as homelike: salt air, blackberries, ferns and mosses, fog. What was striking and quietly gutting to me was the lack of forest. Some of this was the work of the Irish people removing trees to clear land for agriculture. What truly killed the forests of Éire, though, was colonialism: they were slaughtered so that the Irish people resisting English occupation could no longer hide there, and so that their timber could feed the ravenous hunger of the English navy in the 16th and 17th century, building ships which went on to support wider colonization. Each day we drove for hours. The land was beautiful, lushly green, but we never reached the forest my body kept expecting in a countryside. When we did see big stands of trees they were far too dense and only pine, clearly being farmed for timber. My heart ached for this. I am speaking of the trees, and I am not.

Upon arriving home, a dear friend who I speak with daily mentioned how she was feeling about her grandparents in Lebanon. I knew this: that her grandparents were in Lebanon. I was reading the news of the expansion of war there during my trip. And it never occurred to me that this was happening to my friend's family. I never asked after them, or her. The horror of my lapse in this took my breath away. With contemplation I realized that I have the assumption that war is something that happens to people that I do not know. This led me to fail, upon reading the news, to connect it to the people in my life, with my beloved friend. Ouch.

I am sitting with all of this, humbly. With the legacy and ongoing existence of settler colonialism. With my place/s in that. With a new intimacy with family and history and humanity-as-a-whole, somehow. With my privilege, my ignorance, my efforts to grow. My meditation practice is a refuge and a workshop for me in this, as is the community in which I practice – which includes you, and these words and this moment, dear reader. Thank you. In my work I am seen often in my shine; today I come to you in my rough-hewn aspect, trying, perhaps stupidly – it is certainly not for me to say whether valiantly – to break free of my ignorance, to know my belonging, which is painful and beautiful.

My closing prayers have settled this year into new form. The exact words dance a little, but the heart of it is steady and feels right for this moment:

May the time we have shared
help you to know peace and wholeness,
freedom and belonging.
As we nurture these things within us,
may we help to spread them onward,
to be of service to all.
May all all beings everywhere
know peace and wholeness,
freedom and belonging.

May it be so.
May it be so.
May it be so.

Resources

Love in Action
My final meditation course of the year will run from October 12 - November 23. We'll be exploring how shifting from a conditional to an unconditional model of love empowers us to approach life with friendly curiosity, identify core needs for ourselves and others, and express needs and boundaries. Simple, gentle, transformational support for living. I'd love to share this with you.

Life is a Story
I enjoyed reading Matt Haig's The Midnight Library on the plane. Thanks to Stephany.

The Dance of Existence
This depiction of the actual movement of our solar system, not merely in space but through space, absolutely blew my mind and set my heart dancing.

Experiments with Living
Have you read about the store in Montreal which offers shoppers three tiers of pricing for their groceries? Shoppers can choose a discounted Solidarity price, a break-even-for-the-store Suggested price, or a Pay-It-Forward price that subsidizes the discounted rate and operation of the store. Oh, yes.

Making Impossible Change Possible
This was some of the more intimate and inspiring coverage I have seen of the decades-long process which resulted in removing FOUR dams from the Klamath River and the restoration process which lies ahead.