I never really thought about death until I moved to Connemara...
#2
I
The Veils of Connemara
I never really thought about death too much, until I moved home to Connemara. The profound beauty of living here, in nature, and a peace that comes with that made me want to stay on Earth just a little bit longer. ‘It might be time, if we aren’t going to sicken further, to break out of our cultural grow-bag. It might be time to make contact with wild nature’. Dreamtime, John Moriarty.
Whilst the swallows may have flown South and the gardens fallen into slumber, November on the Wild Atlantic Way blew my heart right open. The full moon in Gemini flooded the deep night with a white light so beguiling, it drew us out of our beds for moon walks, runs & swims. Moody gothic mornings gave way to baby-blue skies and glass lakes. Majestic bare ash trees surrounding our house revealed hundreds of expeditious birds, a spectacle to behold. A gusty October laid way for a still mythical November and reminded me of Seamus Heaney’s beauty ‘Postscript’.
Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open
Mary & Alan Hobart of Pyms Gallery in Mayfair, whose home we bought in Faul (pronounced Fall), left to us, a lustrous library. The works of Irish Mystic John Moriarty seeped back into my life. With titles like ‘Turtle Was Gone a Long Time: Crossing the Kedron’ and ‘Horsehead Nebula Neighing’, I dived right in, only to crawl back out, needing help from Mary McGillycuddy and Martin Shaw, to guide me through the portal.
It’s Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism, Taoism, the Upanishads, Celtic Nature and Otherworld beliefs, Native American beliefs, Inuit and Aztec Cultures, Minoan civilisation. It’s the mystics - John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Lao Tzu and the Psalmists. It’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Johannes Kepler, Herman Melville, Frederick Nietzsche, Blaise Pascal, Sylvia Plath and William Butler Yeats. It’s John & I, all winter long, beside a blazing fire in our parlour under the watchful eye of Jesse Jones’ ‘SISTERS QUENCH THY THIRST BUT NOT THY RAGE’.
‘We may face a highly disturbing future. And many have forgotten that the future to the ancient world is not an idea but a goddess- The Romans name her Antevorta, her sister is called Postvorta. She is the past. Both of them dwell within the bigger deity Carmenta. Carmenta comes from the Latin carmen– spell, song, prophesy. Carmen is the root of the word charm. So, to commune with the future, Antevorta, you have to charm it. Both the future and the past. And most important: you have to address both at once, because they flood into each other endlessly. That’s called the present. And it is a gift, really. If you can just bear it.
Moriarty’s work has sufficient charm to attract a goddess: it faces both ways, communes with both sisters, witnesses the endless back and forth between them in the present of our own lives and times. To some that is a reckless idea, to others maybe the only thing that could save us’.
Martin Shaw, “Introduction: The Trouble and Rapture of John Moriarty.” In John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village.
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Studio Ramblings & Reveries
Our collaboration with UNFPA (United Nation’s Reproductive Health Agency) launched to critical acclaim, as part of DCCI Design Week 2023. I hosted an evening with Rosemary Steen, CEO of DCCI, to discuss art & activism, systems of oppression, bodily autonomy and the plight of the refugee. Our panel was a spectacular one - director of IMMA Annie Fletcher, artist Alice Maher, Iranian artist Roza Farahini, broadcaster & presenter Emma Dabiri and UNHCR barrister & protection officer Susan McMonagle.
We are delighted to tell you that this body of work won two awards at the IDI Design Awards 2023.
If you are looking for a conscious gift for your loved ones this month, our award-winning, limited edition silk emblems (which can be worn as scarves or admired as wall hanging) can be purchased directly from my website with a percentage of sales supporting the work of UNFPA. Keith Nally, my long-time collaborator and friend, designed our spectacular packaging - ready to pop under the tree :-)
Our design studio is currently working on a collaboration with artist Jesse Jones. Jesse Jones’ new film installation ‘The Tower’ is the second part in a trilogy beginning with ‘Tremble Tremble’, which was commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
‘The Tower’ turns to the figure of the mystic and the heretic and questions ‘Who came before the witches? Based on the writings of medieval female Christian mystics, ‘The Tower’ explores the women who were burned as heretics even before the first witch trials in the 17th century. It looks to a moment of radical potential, delving into the lost knowledge of women’s devotional and ecstatic visions and evoking the incarcerated penitent at prayer and at work.
We will launch our collaboration in Spring, when the first of our foals are born on the farm - a great time to bring new work into the world.
III
Meditations, and the rest.
On arriving back to Connemara, reflecting on and reviewing the successes and challenges of the past few months, Just Beyond Yourself, arrived to me.
{ This is for my soul sister, my muse in NYC, Elizabeth Quarta }
Just Beyond Yourself by David Whyte
Just beyond yourself. It’s where you need to be. Half a step into self-forgetting and the rest restored by what you’ll meet. There is a road always beckoning.
When you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon and deep in
the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time, that’s how you know it’s the road you have to follow.
That’s how you know it’s where you have to go. That’s how you know you have to go. That’s how you know. Just beyond yourself, it’s where you need to be.
(Listen to the reveries of Whyte himself at wakingup.com with a mention of the breathtaking Burren in Co.Clare and wisdom from John O’Donohue :-)
Until January, I wish you a fun and fruitful month x x
🙌