8.2.25 - The Atlantic

Mythic time

Yesterday, when I took off to the West, I had this strange sensation of occupying mythic time. It's difficult to explain mythic time, but the closest I can get to it is being like an eagle and flying high and seeing everything at the same time. Having this aquilian perspective on things. Seeing everything at this height, but not spatially, rather like time. For instance, thinking of how people who repeated those stories by the fireside - that if they could see me now taking off, in a matter of hours, arriving at the shores of Tir-na-Og.

For the most part of the journey I traveled that way, until I arrived in Fermanagh.

It has been a very very long time since I've been to THIS PART of Fermanagh. They say time heals all wounds, it depends on how deep the wounds are. Some wounds would never be healed. But as soon as I arrived on the Boa Island Road - I now know Boa does not refer to a python constrictor, but the Cow, Bothar Inish Bo, as it were, and I said, I think I know this place. Of course I know this place... but also, the road takes you over several islands and over the water... over a series of bridges... and for the longest time, I used to think, well he doesn't care... he has just gotten on with his life... but what I realised when I drove through the place was dear god, imagine being trapped here, were every single landmark would remind me of all the times shared, conversations had, a landscape marked by and which witnessed everything which took place. 

It was impossible to not care, to forget, to have everything from the highest peak to the most deserted island marked by memory... and all those memories good... I now understood that it was a kind of suffering. That too is existing in mythic time. And the land told me that. You were never forgotten. Never. Everything that was done here, it has stayed here. Mythic time.

It was a wonderful wonderful decade of knowing and not knowing each other.

And then the healing happened. Me zipping through the land. In mythic time. It gladdened the heart. 

Finally, the glamour which the RSPB exuded on me had also left. Time had worn that away. I now knew it as just another corporation. It was no better nor worse. Well possibly worse. I saw it for what it was. Everything I saw it for what it was and in that moment I understood.

The West

Then I crossed the border. So many things had changed about the roads. I had Google Maps to guide me through, but there were roads which were never there - even the A5 which I had never been on... I missed the Ballygawley roundabout with its strangely tight cropped trees.

But, as I crossed the border and the Irish words appeared, it was strange - I cannot describe how I now felt a closer connection with the land because I now speak a tiny bit of Irish...

I headed to Bundoran, thankfully, not entering it, then towards the outskirts of Sligo. Benbulbin appeared and then through sheer witchcraft just turned and dominated the landscape.

Goolge maps took me directly to the Atlantic. It was a very small road. I was amazed how every road in Ireland was now known by the satellites. You could no longer be lost here. 

I walked to the beach... knowing it was the Atlantic... and the light, the light, the light, the light.

For some reason I had the entire beach to myself. It was just the sands and the sea foam and the horses of Mananaun racing each other. The selkies and the elementals playing with each other. The stones which were all tinged with fossils, which we hundreds of millions of years old - these beings exist outside of mythic time. They are timelessness itself.

I thought to Lugh, little Lugh, who waved to Ireland as he left on Ocean Sweeper to be with Mananuan in Moy Mell, in the West. I saw now how you would say that the Land of the Ever Young was in the West and the Sun lived in the West. I understood it now. Really took it into my bones. I was glad that I had come here by myself. 

That I didn't involved anyone else. That I was able to think and immerse myself into the very atoms of the air itself.

I wrote a poem in my brain but it disappeared like sea foam... but I have captured some of it here...

Come feather and scale,

Come bone and tail,

Come moon and star,

Come water and air,

Come light and grass,

Come present and past,

One moment to last,

As we hold these fast.