The first signs of Fall, be they a cool sunset or that first morning breeze in late August, invariably bring about a most melodramatic mood in me. It is one of great melancholy mixed with a nearly erotic sense of nostalgia. Memories flood and overwhelm my person at once, causing extreme shifts of emotion.
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In this place the common becomes magic
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Looking out the window that first time, I felt numbed. The green pastures sectioned off by ancient walls were endless. The other worldliness of Ireland's mist only further embellished the surreal nature of leaving my home in America to experience another land, one with magnetic magical currents and egregores thousands of years old.
Arriving in Shannon airport I felt the comfort of a kindred spirit and a relaxed, human and nonjudgmental reception. The progression through several flights of empty stairs felt a bit like wandering through an industrial or corporate building's stairways on the weekend. My gentle encounter with Customs was a truly foreign experience for me. After securing a ticket from the machine with instructions in Gaelic, I walked outside. It was raining with a chill in the air that was not yet present stateside in September. Once the bus moved, I was mesmerized…frozen as I took in Ireland's Western country side in between towns marked by statues of Christ the King and Mother Mary. A sense of ownership overcame me as I gazed across the cow spattered emerald pastures. So much of my own identity was affirmed in this egregore of my ancestors.
When I first touched down on the soil of Ireland, I was touched in a way that language fails me as a vehicle by which to articulate. The weather of Connemara soothed me. I found the mists comforting. Unlike the low pressure systems in America which induced a lethargic sensation, the weather in Connemara energized me. I could feel the streams beneath the ground. I felt in tune with the flow of these vessels. I have since come to realize just how important it is to know from whence I came. My own eccentricities and ways always worked to make me aware of just how different I was from most of those around me, and so many of these traits were validated by what I came to observe in my Father and in my paternal family as a whole.
It was a year ago that my Father Thomas Lyden (Errenagh of the Abbey of St Colman) left for the ultimate separation, having completed his terrestrial journey, swallowed by all this beauty. The Holy Paraclete descended to comfort those of us left behind.
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| Tom Lyden, Falkeeragh 1974 |
Only days out of the hospital, having suffered what the Tufts Hospital Neurologist described as an irrecoverable, Hiramic blow in a terrible accident in New Jersey, I found myself throbbing with intracranial hemorrhage, ad orientem in St Joseph's Cathedral with my youngest sister, my dear Aunties, my Uncle and several hundred family members and friends of my Father's. Stepping outside, I felt the cold wind pierce my head wound. Amidst the downpour of the discomfort and disorientation of my concussion, I processed around Clifden town with my Father's casket, only to behold a phenomenon that the onlookers were sure was Thomas himself. One of the neighbor's rams had gotten loose and run down into town (a fitting metaphor in itself) from the familial village of Falkeeragh just in time to step out in front of the procession carrying the coffin from the sidewalk by Des Moran's Butcher shop.
The ground was wet and sloped. The jagged ruts and edges of ancient tomb stones twisted my stance. The freshly severed veins in my forehead throbbed as the weight of my Father bore down upon my shoulder. I was unnerved at my own instability. I grabbed a shovel from one of my cousins and began to dig fervently from the mound to bury my Father until Mary Carey pulled me back, as I very nearly joined him in the grave. The dirt was wet and full of stones making it deceptively heavy. My head was spinning as the misty rain showered down upon us. The local priest led us in the rosary. I lost myself in its magic. The women began singing. Or, were they keening? With the ancestral statue of Saint Martin de Porres just to my left, my head spinning with recent conversations I'd had with my Father regarding Pio of Pietrelcina, I persevered in praying the Sacramentary while clutching my rosary and tossed my rose into the grave.
"I was a child full of intelligence, I received from god a good soul, and becoming better,
more and more, I came then in a pure body." (Wisdom, VII, 19,20.)
Thinking of you, Dad.
~ David
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| paternal fields along the Sky Road, Clifden |
