Like Water Seeping Into Limestone

The Nightly Ritual of Reading with the Cailleach

Most nights, a weight of gratitude settles over me. The day’s tasks are done and I can open a book and immerse myself in ideas that are far away from the urgent now.

At last, it’s possible to stop responding. It’s time to simply receive.

The story of a warm home and a good read before the first “down blanket cold” sleep of the season… It’s the sort of luxury we might not feel we can speak aloud right now.

But, when things feel darkest, we need to name the world - and the simple comforts - we’re fighting to create and maintain. 

So I’m beginning right here, in a cozy room where the only sounds come from the snoring cat and the dog spinning around to find just the right spot in her bed. 

I chuckle into the silence. “What?” my husband asks. “Oh, your book.”

“Yes, an account of flaming cow shit being tossed off a cliff. You laugh at what you can when the rest is mostly about geology and bird behavior.”

This, my friends, is how I am coping with life in America right now.

Put another way, no matter how faraway she seems, Ireland is still working her way through me like water through limestone.

I open myself to receive the waters from another sky over a distant sea.
I am asking to be eroded.
What’s left as the hard layers melt away… that will be the stuff that’s truly necessary to survive.

Setting out on Pilgrimage. Discovering Pilgrimage. Returning to Pilgrimage. 

Exactly a month ago, I was on Inis Mór. 

Then, in Hodges Figgis Booksellers in Dublin several days later, I stumbled across Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage by Tim Robinson. It was originally published in 1988. I still can’t believe I’d never come across this book before.

According to the New York Review of Books:

Like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, Stones of Aran is not only a meticulous and mesmerizing study of place but an entrancing and altogether unclassifiable work of literature.¹

Yes, what they said.

Reading the first few pages on the train out of the city, I learned that it’s a recent thing to call the biggest of the three Aran Islands “Inishmore.” Before the Ordinance Survey of 1839, the “Big Island” was simply Aran.

These two syllables feel true. I visited the island for the first time in 1999, and have been there a dozen times in the last twenty-five years. Every time, it’s like entering soul space. My soul’s place. Perhaps the connection really does reach back further than this lifetime. Maybe there really is an ancestral memory or some past life connection (both are equally hypothetical and feel equally true) that ties me to that island. 

The chambers of my most timeless heart simply know the rhythm of Aran, Aran, Aran. 

Every inch of the island that I’ve been able to explore as a tourist on bicycle is pure magic to me, but it’s Dún Dúchathair, the Black Fort, high above the cliffs on the far, southwest facing side of the island that casts the most vivid spell. Maybe I was a warrior who took my last stand there. Maybe I was a member of a wealthy family who built this as their cashel at the edge of the world. Maybe I was a gannet or a puffin and felt safest on a cliff ledge. Who knows. 

I’ll just have to wrap myself in the wind-wrought cloak of that mystery and construct a story around what I know:  this lonesome stone ruin, somewhere between one and two thousand years old, is the most potent place on the planet for me.

How can I escape (even if just in my imagination) to a distant island in times like these?

There was no question that I’d risk pushing the weight limit on our baggage and buy just one more book. (The stack I’d already purchased in Galway was epic. And heavy.) I even held onto some precious, foolhardy belief that these nearly 400 pages would still feel relevant when I was 3000 miles and a real life away from my pilgrimage.

But, despite the odds (and my own track record as a woman with a limitless TBR pile), back at home, when I could be reading or watching anything else, I am making it through Robinson’s dense, gorgeous prose. When I could be following the latest political outrage, or losing myself in the easiest Netflix romcom, I’m reading about rocks that predate Pangea. Rather than diving deeper into postcolonial feminist theory or reading a new translation of myths for the podcast, I am following the cliffmen down the sheer edges of the island in their all night hunt for sea birds.

Let the Rain and Sea Work through the Inner Limestone

We can be eroded if we want to. We can ask for the rainwater and the saltwater to work into our bones and strip out the excess information, worry, and outrage. We can ask the spirit of a distant island (or whatever place we hold sacred) to reveal what’s most real, most true. 

We can call on that oldest of sovereignty goddesses, the Cailleach who is sacred grandmother and the backbone of the land itself, in much the same way.

Throughout my trip, particularly in the sacred ancient places in Galway, Sligo, and Meath, I was often caught in silent, manic prayer. At various moments, these petitions were shaped like a whisper, a keen, a shriek: How do I bring this energy inside of me? How do I make sure I am changed by this place? How can I get closer, deeper, truer? What would it take for this place to make its home in me? How do I make a place for myself here?

As I shared in The Art of a Graceful Homecoming, I found a measure of peace by the time I landed back in New York. But, when you go there - when you ask “am I meant to leave behind my entire American life - husband, kids, and darling dog?” - you get shook, and you stay shook until you truly surrender to the yearning that shaped that mad monologue.

Now, I am settling, I still hear the echo of those prayers. I realize I might have been asking for something more subtle, but perhaps even more impossible: Can I shed all the veils and illusions that define my diasporic life and, somehow, learn to walk these sacred spaces everyday, even when I live a quarter turn round the globe?

This stripping down to find the prayer beneath the prayer, this all Cailleach work, of course.

The trip began with Aran, a place that doesn’t have any direct ties to the Cailleach (as far as I know; let me in on the stories if you know otherwise). But this journey, this pre-Samhain pilgrimage of mine ended at the Hag’s own mountain, Sliabh na Calliagh, at Loughcrew in Meath. She’s woven into the everything of my life right now.

In this November moment, the Cailleach is demanding that I look at less in order to see more.

This means that I create the vast quiet times by reading about the formation of karst and the construction of dry-stone walls. Perhaps this deepening relationship with the Cailleach will even mean I am more discerning about all the ways I scatter and squander my attention during the daylight hours.

We’ll get to that, I hope. For now, this nightly practice of receiving, this listening to a sacred grandmother who is older than every human worry and conflict, makes it a little bit more possible to wake with a mind and heart ready to respond to the realities of another day.

From the Writing Coach’s Desk

Clients often ask me how I maintain a just about weekly newsletter schedule when I’m also creating the podcast, running the writing group, meeting with and editing work for clients, and generally being woman at midpoint of life doing “all the things.” 

There are many different ways to answer that question, but one that I like best: steal from yourself.

If you’re someone who is wondering about how to find the time and focus to get more words out there, there’s a good chance you’re already thinking like a writer. You’re on the look out for little moments that could become a story. You’re playing with the turn of a phrase in text messages to your literary leaning friends who appreciate clever over concise.

The other day, my friend

Julie Ann Flynn

of The Meadow sent me a note to check in after my trip. She said she hoped I was still glowing after my time of reconnection to Ireland in spite of all I’d come home to in terms of US politics.

My reply: 

Yes, the reconnection is still working its way through me like water through limestone. 

That’s when I realized that this newsletter in process (which had gotten really stuck in the weeds) was really about how this holy hag - and her sacred land - is both the story and the metaphor.

Once I had this image, I could rewrite the newsletter with purpose. And make it more on-point and less preachy in the process. (Once upon a time, I thought I needed to tell you about how the Cailleach was helping me commit to less, and while that idea is still true, you didn’t need me quacking on about minimalism and protecting your attention span. I like to think you need more of what I actually wove for you above.)

And, deep thanks to my writing coaching client

Ashley Batistick

whose powerful work on desire has enabled me to enter into a more immediate, more nuanced relationship to what it means to receive.

Are you looking for support as you bring your writing onto the page and into the world?

I have a couple of spaces open for new writing coaching clients. You can learn more about my work and set up a free 30 minute consultation at www.writingcoachmarisa.com

And, I’m excited to announce that the Writers’ Knot will be open to new members on January 15. (We’ll be updating the website to open registration soon.)

Also, stay tuned for details about an addition new group writing coaching experience in February!

1. https://www.nyrb.com/products/stones-of-aran-pilgrimage