Awesome.

We held a storytelling evening a few nights before the big departure -- decorated the sitting room with scarves, lit candles and shared stories. Some were told from memory (like a Native American myth of the sun and moon, and an Advent story of a shepherd boy and a flute, and a Japanese tale of a dream that frankly came out of nowhere -- the storyteller said he hadn't actually meant to tell that story at all. Some stories, I suppose, will not be ignored), some from print (like some Shel Silverstein, or an Irish legend), some from imagination (like a character sketch involving a cow, a crow and the word 'grand', and a loving story of my time there told by another...and a story of my time there told by myself). I have never had an evening like it before, but I want to have another (and I want Clai to have another, which I think they will). It was, in every sense of the word, Awesome.

Because I can't tell my story any better than I did for that evening and for that group of people and that landscape, I will re-tell it for you.


Once upon a lifetime of stories, somewhere between chapters 1 and 23, the sky waits. It is inevitable and enormous, and ignored by most. ("Heads down! The ground is more interesting, we promise.") And under the sky there is a girl, somewhere between chapters 1 and 23. She likes to believe the world isn't what it makes itself out to be -- and she can prove it. Ever seen a sunrise? She seeks out the poetry in reality, writes things like
it's crazy, eh? how a fickle a thing this is.
reality.
malleable fantasy named truth,
or reverse that.
same difference.
pallindromic, this world of ours.
because it is. Is there even a difference between her and the Sidh? So, somewhat inevitably, she ends up in a country that introduces itself through its imagination. Where the line between this world and the others, the Storyline, is thin (where it exists at all).
HI. I THINK WE'VE MET BEFORE. I'M IRELAND, AND THESE ARE MY FAERIES.
Here, with caed mille failte on the wind, the girl finds everyone. Into this brave new life surrounded by other people like a hug, she grins back.

And time passes.

The girl looks up and out, and while she revels in the intersection of a thousand new stories and their Tellers, the sky begins to tell its own to her. In a sunrise-coloured mist twining through rolling hills and nestling over the still lake; in a thousand branches holding the weight of a thousand dewdrops of frost in cut-glass silhouettes; in roiling clouds mounting themselves to form faery clouds against the real (or real against the faery). The sky-stories drop into her heart and they are big, and in the spaces they expand she recognizes everyone, the entire cast of characters from this year of stories, and she finds she can't quite tell a story this big.
She tries, though, with a poem.

We stand on the edge and think
Whoops. This story is deep.
(We keep telling it, though)
'Cause it's already been said:
there's something communal in being human.
Collective unconscious.
The reflexive seeking of shelter from rain.
The relating of a day as it dusks,
even just with a passing in the kitchen and a "good. yours?"
The force of rhythm, drawing
dance, poetry, song, drum, speech, breath.

You know this, though.
You recognize the boat we're all in.
You've got being communally human down.
The enormous inevitable sky has nothing
on the space you create for each other
(although this girl loves it, too,
as well as you).

So you know.
But I know this:
stories are communal things, too.
Part of a massive pass-it-on that all humanity is in on.
So I relinquish my hold on this story,
pass it off with a note attached
(This was written looking up. Please mention the sky)
and try to stop trying to learn how to say Thank You better,
and just say it.

Merci.
Go raibh mille maith agat.

9 hours until i leave? how did this happen?

This is just a little post for an update: leaving for the airport in five and a half hours to head for home. Which involves an entire day of airports and airplanes. So not feeling so good now...sad, and kind of sick (like after drinking too much coffee) which i think is emotion-based, and already exhausted from a trip that hasn't happened yet.

Still, i wouldn't give up any bit of this experience for anything.

(In that sense, bring on the tears, cause at least it means i'm connected here).

(There are stories about various leaving parties and such, but they'll have to wait until i'm home and wondering what to do when i'm not surrounded by people all the time. :)

so, until then, please send all the spare well-wishes-for-flying thoughts you may have my way....and i'll see you on the other side of the Atlantic.

LOVE.