The Only Answer to the Prayer & the Question

We Leave for Dublin in an Hour

It’s a totally spontaneous decision that’s been years in the making.

That is the only way I can describe the plan to buy tickets to Ireland for myself and my ten year-old, and fly out two weeks later.

We’re leaving today.

Why this moment?

It was simply time.

And, because “Ireland” was the only possible answer to both the prayer and the question.

The Desire Puzzle (Again. Still.)

I’ve long struggled with the question of desire. Though I feel like I should be able to answer with clear-eyed ease, I tend to squirm when someone asks me “what do you truly want?” 

After I go through the virtuous, “for the greater good” answers, I struggle to wrap my lips around a response that seems true and truly mine.

But, sometimes then, when I stop overthinking it, I allow the first thought to be the right thought. 

Even if it’s only for ten days, going to Ireland, the place where I source my stories and my spirit, will satisfy me at a soul level. I just know that this trip will open me to experience - and fulfill - new desires I haven’t given myself permission to imagine.

I haven’t been to Ireland since 2018. And that return was fifteen years overdue. When I was in college in Galway and then grad school in Dublin I never would have believed you if you told me that the place I assumed I’d eventually call home would feel essentially inaccessible.

Why on earth have I lived as if Ireland was another planet and not a direct flight that could be mine the moment I pulled out one of my many credit cards?

Because motherhood, of course. Because it’s just not possible when you don’t have a mother who would drop everything and take the kids. And because we lived so, so close to the financial cliff in those early years of motherhood when I was trying to be a full time mama and start a business from scratch.

But it wasn’t just that.

Staying Grounded as an Act of (Misguided) Selfless Service

In 2006, I read Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning by the British journalist George Monbiot. Ecofeminism was core to who I was, even then, but I believe this was the first book I read that combined contemporary science, politics, and activism in such an uncompromising way.

I remember reading on my lunch breaks on a sunny park bench near the dining hall. I had scooped it from the new books cart and checked it out before it even went onto the college library shelves. 

The whole book alarmed me, but it was the part about air travel that really changed me. 

Remember, this was almost twenty years ago, long before #climatecriminals was trending. I probably hadn’t even seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (also released in 2006). It was a terribly new revelation that a flight cost so much more than a week’s pay. 

Monbiot declared we needed to essentially halt commercial air travel to stop the climate crisis. We especially needed to eliminate love miles. This is what he said in a Guardian piece from the same period:

Our moral dissonance about flying reminds me of something a Buddhist once told me: "It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do it with love." I am sure he knew as well as I do that our state of mind makes no difference to either exploited people or the environment. Thinking like ethical people makes not a damn of difference unless we also behave like ethical people. When it comes to flying, there seems to be no connection between intention and action.

…

When you form relationships with people from other nations, you accumulate what I call "love miles": the distance you must travel to visit friends and partners and relatives on the other side of the planet… Who could be surprised to discover that "ethical" people are in denial about the impacts of flying? 

His ideas caught me at a core level. It confirmed my long held, deep seated understanding (even then) that climate change is an existential threat. And, it appealed to some inarticulable need to be part of the solution. (Or, at least ensure I wasn’t part of the problem.) 

I was so completely enmeshed in modern society and its dirty power grid and its systemic oppression, at least I could do my part by keeping my feet on the ground. Right?

This wasn’t all altruism, of course. Making flight a moral issue touched some raw nerve in me - the one that was electric with my addiction to scarcity and unworthiness. It spoke to my shadow beliefs that the real rewards would come on the other side of deprivation. (We’re going to skip the paragraphs about the inheritance of Catholic guilt and intergenerational trauma, but trust me, I’ve been considering all that.)

For nearly two decades, I used the half-remembered passages from a book as one more excuse to keep me from the place I love most in the world, even as Aer Lingus and all those other carriers took thousands of people back and forth across the ocean each day.

Oh, the terrible luxury of being the very, very special one who must suffer with the terrible wisdom that just about everyone else is willing to ignore. (It’s all the more absurd considering I did fly elsewhere in that time, albeit it only a handful of times.)

What keeps us from reaching for what we love?

We’re in the midst of what Manda Scott, and others, call the polycrisis. It’s not just carbon. It’s not just soil degradation or the health of the oceans or the way AI could spool out of control or the erosion of democracy. 

It’s just about everything.

Each of us is one person staring into the face of massive systemic failures. As individuals, we are spectacularly powerless. To make real change, the only option is to find other like-minded folk, commit to action together, and then trust the movements to ripple forth.

Nearly twenty years after Heat was published, the climate news is more dire than ever, and they are building a new terminal here at JFK. We have not made any sort of collective decision to stop flying love miles, or any kind of miles at all (even in the age of Zoom).

As I sit at the gate, waiting to board, drinking a $6 water and watching the fuel trucks thunder across the tarmac, I’m aware of the cost of all this. But I’m looking at the balance sheet a bit differently.

My choice not to fly meant almost nothing to the health of the planet, but made a massive difference to me - to the shape of my work and the strength of my heart. 

The staying at home nursing the yearning and carrying feeling the self-imposed burden of “I couldn’t possibly” hasn’t done any good to anyone.

I’ve been able to make do, of course. I have my memories, dear friends and teachers, and the entire internet at my fingertips, after all. I’ve created seventy episodes of KnotWork Storytelling without touching the limestone of the Aran Islands or entering the darkness of a passage tomb. 

But oh… what more is possible on the other side?

I really haven’t a clue. I just know I am so very ready to step into the mystery.