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“let your soul and spirit fly”
“Each of us, as we pass through life, leaves traces of the passage. Sometimes the signs are as slight as a bent leaf, a twisted twig, or a seed dispersed. Sometimes, we leave behind the husks of former selves or castaway restraints. While following these trails, we grow ever more aware of our lives in connection-to our foremothers, to the elemental truths of nature, to the selves we hope to become. Woven together, we begin to see the shifting patterns of our intertwined lives. The studio work represents my journey, my passage.” ~ Sarena Mann One afternoon, in the central Phoenix kitchen of an Irish friend, I glanced up from my cup…
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Language of Cancer, Leontia Flynn, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood
the lovely uselessness of poetry
For World Poetry Day 2015. The freedom and the lovely uselessness of poetry is its whole point. ~ Leontia Flynn My parents were raised in rural County Derry, Heaney country, where they learned to be thrifty and resourceful, and also – when all else failed – to believe in the mystical powers of “folk healers,” those individuals uniquely gifted with “the cure” or “the charm” for whatever ailed us. Consulted only after it was determined that they had flummoxed the medical doctor, the folk healer meted out charms in all forms – plasters, poultices, and brown bottles. It was to such a man my father once turned after the local doctor…
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Act Two, Castledawson, Family, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney
my mother’s day dance
In Ireland, it is Mother’s Day. In Arizona, it is just another Sunday that finds me thinking about my mother – ma – in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, and my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen, but on the sandy edges of California before the fog rolled in late on an August afternoon. Facing each other, a blanket stretched between us, she stepped towards me, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to…
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Awesome Women, Edna O'Brien, International Women's Day, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rural Ireland, Women Writers
Thank you to a scandalous woman . . .
“Make It Happen” is the 2015 theme for International Women’s Day. Edna O’Brien has been making it happen for me since I first encountered her Country Girls, many years ago. I wrote this for her last year, and it still applies . . .
