Liscannor, Ireland

November 12, 2023 by Rose

Liscannor, Ireland: rest, rainbows, and rejuvenation.

Liscannor. A tiny town on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. There’s Lahinch across the horseshoe bay, with white houses pebbled along the hazy kelly hills. I ask a local how to pronounce it.

“To the English, it’s pronounced Lis-CANN-or. To the Irish, it’s Liscannoooor,” she says with a ghostly purse of the lips and a brogue roll of the tongue.

Night.

Travelers, weary from a month on the road, we settle into a cozy beach cottage and light a fire in the black stove. A previous dash to the country store has rewarded us with a crisp wine, and we clink our glasses. As the room warms, we peel off our layers of coats and scarves and finally sweaters, our socked toes curling to the heat as we bask in the embers.

Afternoon.

A strategically placed Irish novella beckons from a bay window—first him, then me, and then we chat about secrets hidden between delicious words.

A tumult hurls rain sideways, loud as breaking glass. The lap blanket gets pulled to the chin with a smile.

A season in a day here, soon the sun gleams and glistens, turning grass the famous emerald, and gray stone to a true gold. And, yes, a rainbow, its full arch so clear that if we each run to a side, we swear we’ll be soaked in its paint.

In the past, the village folk got together and created a park with lovely stone benches. Not facing each other, but each facing the sea. There is no sitting across for such a view—Ireland is for holding hands and silence and stirring of souls.

The Atlantic is a raging, smashing, crushing giant bull, stomping and snorting, tossing the spray straight up with such a mighty blow, that the water is momentarily suspended there, afraid to come down again. And soon, with a season in a day, it whispers and laps and shimmers gently to lovers and sleeping babies over smoothed rocks and boulders, and seabirds can tiptoe on its shores once more.

Morning.

He is now making breakfast—our last before we leave. And I am on a stone bench, pondering, then simply being. The stone is chilly through my jeans. And it’s time to go. The sun filters glowing ribbons down on me, whispering stay. But that’s the beauty of Ireland. You never really leave, once you’ve been here.

Liscannor Ireland — Stone benches for pondering and just being

Patchwork Muses in Umbria, Italy

November 12, 2023October 22, 2023 by Rose

Patchwork Views and Cobble Strolls

I walk down an ancient cobbled path, to a view of vast rolling hills, like a quilt draped over a pile of sleeping cats. Squares of green tufted candlewick trees, a plain beige patch here, a striped green and brown vineyard there, a golden plowed field with mustard peeking through in vivid yellow.

Descending steep stone steps, I see a grotto with a statue of Mary to the right, and a marble bare-breasted maiden to the left. Viva l’Italia!

The wind is soft as the sky, with its gentle haze muting the colors—just a little. Italy doesn’t do ‘muted’ for long.

I arrived in the dark, delivered to the tip-top via a treacherous drive up, up, up, inches away from the craggy crumbling bluff, the driver confident and nonchalant.

The thing is, that’s how to do it. Perceived danger is a funny thing. Like the light mist, it can be gently dismissed by a calm confidence that all will be well.

A surprise gust of wind catches my attention and hair. Yes? I ask the sky as if it will answer. I often open my ears to the possibilities, the avant-garde, and the muses skipping and floating, invisible and playful.

“You see me?” I ask out loud as my dark tresses flail about. “I see you, too.”

Talking to the wind is not crazy. It is connecting to all that is, not just the plain old atoms and molecules and facts and the concrete.

What is wind, anyway? Molecules, tossed about wildly, carrying the atoms of people and trees and dinosaurs and stars. That’s the real circle of life. Oh, the stories an atom could tell.

A cat, its coat patched in shabby gray, meanders, nonchalant as the driver, and is on her merry way after a rather royal sniff to my offered hand. A queen walking among the common folk in disguise, her cloak didn’t fool me—the flitting tail was a dead giveaway.

Silver-edged clouds glow uncannily, stealing the scenery—they want their moment, too.

Patchwork clouds and patchwork fields and patchwork cats; patchwork atoms and patchwork me. We’re all just pieces of each other, really—we people, animals, earth, sky… cats.

I smile.

I’m no philosopher, but that sits well with me, as I sit, well, in Umbria.