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a dream of solstice
Dawn light began stealingThrough the cold universe to County Meath, Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling,Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stonesMillennia deep in their own unmoving And unmoved alignment. (from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney) Winter Solstice is the turning point I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely mid-winter reassurance that the light is coming. Solstice is derived from the Latin, sōlstitium, loosely translated as the apparent standing still of the sun. To ancient civilizations, it looked like the sun stood still at that moment when its rays shine directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, 23…
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Thanks Given
Thanksgiving has something to do with wherever you find that moment of transcendence - among trees in a desert city or at the break of day on the edge of Mexico's largest lake. It's about finding the light. Seeing the light. It's about Annie Lamott's Three Essential Prayers - Help, Thanks, Wow:
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home is where the heart breaks … but say nothing
Although I left Northern Ireland over three decades ago, it is still home, still the place and time from which it is impossible to emerge unscathed. None of us got away scot-free. With an apprehension I can’t quite explain, I watched Say Nothing, the series based on the best-selling book by New Yorker investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. Predictably, within the first few moments of the first episode, familiar feelings of revulsion and sadness rose in my throat. It is a harrowing scene that recreates the abduction of Jean McConville from her home in Divis Flats, Belfast, in 1972. A widow and mother of ten, she was one of the…
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when all that’s left of us is love
November 15 2013 That morning, I was uneasy, unable to shake a feeling that something was wrong. When multiple phone calls to my home in Phoenix home, I finally called my friend and asked her to drive to my house where she discovered my husband had died. In another time zone, on another continent, on the other end of the line, I remember feeling detached from news that couldn’t possibly be true. As the reality set in, I was desperate to get away from rainy, rural South Derry and back home to Phoenix, to our cozy little house with its pink door and its sun-splashed walls. I wanted to check…
