Dun Aengus
And when you go, try to go before Easter
Dun Aengus
And when you go, try to go before Easter, taking the Queen of Aran from Rossaveal, out to the island when the wind is fresh and the rain still cold and the fires still bright in the harbour pubs. Then rent yourself a bike from Michael Mullen who stands there where the pier first meets the land so there’s no need for conversation along the gusty road except the one you hold balanced between the wind on one side and the ocean on the other. At that time, March has yet to lose its edge and somehow the roads still hold the history of winter’s easy quiet and somewhere at the back of it all and out of the west, you can hear each clear invisible voice speaking to you distinct and whole, giving you the full inheritance as you ride along the Boreen Oir in the teeth of the wind, your eyes wet with the searching cold until you can see it above you and to the left, brooding on the cliff edge. Don’t stop to layer your mind with the necessities of history but walk without looking to right or left, straight through the glass lit exhibit guarding the path like a somnolent post-modern dragon about to ensnare you and break the clean, airy, outside approach but plough straight on, leaving your bike to stand below while you take the path at a full walk, impatient to reach the edge above, cradled by the curving walls, crawling the last few feet to the unfenced edge where the sea’s a tilted table swelling against the rocks three hundred feet below and the snow isn’t snow but the upward spume from breaking waves and your mind isn’t your own but a troubling of edge and current, going this way and that, as if you were both fluid and substantial, alone in this world, and communal with all horizons, an airy something and a solid witness, a visitation and a disappearance, someone made up of neither regrets nor anticipation but a ghost of other ghosts, a visitor at the cliff edge of history, hearing in the voice torn away in the wind, a blowing away, a first promise, a shouted pledge for the year to come. -from The Seven Streams: An Irish Cycle
Your reading of "Dun Aengus" this past Sunday as part of your Three Sundays in November series of reflections immediately took me back to my own memory and experience on the edge of the cliffs at the Brough of Birsay in early May 2023, during an excursion to Orkney, Scotland. I soon revisited my photographs and videos from that experience. There was something so exhilarating and freeing about being on such a vantage point, where the energies of land, sea, and sky collide. It's where the soul longs to perch and ponder the beauty of this life.
From only where she still hollows within the way I once arrived on pilgrimage years gone by that she’s reshaped me of the declaration from that kneeling edge .