Tell it all

Today I write for you all.

I write to say the things upon my heart and the things outside my front door. With a cup in hand I feel the rain, the first in many months filling our tanks with life - the birds still singing, still singing.

And my heart aching for a land I barely know. My Irish neighbour wrote me from Dingle peninsula today - sent me his heft and beauty against that dark blue sea - this place where this grandmother lived - this place I swam in the summer of 22 among the faery and the beasts.

So while I am lost at land here in this place, my heart is also everywhere, everything at once. And in my morning dance I can find grief and be an avatar to all other emotions: joy, wonder, amazement - the twisting and twirling to Irish fiddle and harmonium brings me tears and also a sense that I am Irish - as Irish as any man I could find - so where does that leave me now?

Happy, full of emotion that a woman came and stirred up my heart sufficiently to do wild things, to encounter another wild western isle and that this same heart goes on beating for her, and her emerald land - my emerald land. I’m grateful. I miss the best things we had, and appreciate the reprieve from the worst, and stick to knitting a life, any life, wherever I am, right now.