Off the backroads on the Ring of Beara~
County Cork Ireland
Ancient Ireland sweeping in again
with all its unbaptized beauty:
The calm evening,
The Whitethorn blossoms,
The smell from ditches
that were not christian.
-Patrick Kavanagh, Irish poet
I love this place so much. There is something my bones remember, no matter how far removed and disconnected we've become. Being American, my family has lost connection to our ancestral lands. (Most of my ancestors are from the Celtic nations, also mixed with British, German, Dutch & Swedish.) We've even lost the need for an intimate relationship with the land we live on in the present. The dominant paradigm disconnects us from Nature intentionally and projects faith onto a distant and abstract idea instead. But I know that we were once indigenous. I'm a descendant of the tribes of Europe and we were once rooted in land bases for many generations. My bones still know that an intimate knowledge and relationship with the land is possible, even here and now after so much has been done to negate that.
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