"There is human time and there is wild time" Clarissa Pinkola Estes This year as part of the Waterford Imagine Festival I will be hosting a Sunday morning walk on the wild side at Carrickavantry Lake. The numbers are very limited and you can book here. The walk will be a real life, real world sharing of contemplative . . .
The mad excitement of rural living
How did rural living get to be so exciting! When I started to blog in 2011 I didn't have a plan or any idea where I might be going. In my work life I had chosen to follow an activist path rather than an artistic one. Gradually over the those years, I began returning to creativity. What I never would have predicted was that I . . .
In the bluebells
If you bear with me and my one minute video, you will share a precarious event, somewhere along the lane to Carrickavantry Lake. What you won't see is that I have a jagged briar wrapped around one leg which left tooth marks all over my calves, and that I am trying not to breathe in case I create camera shake. I've . . .
Would you?
Would you be mad for that little speck of rainbow in the deep rain filled sky? Or this bush, with its brazen head of golden curls? And would you love how he made a fence from sawn up trees, lining them up on the ditch like children, posing for family snaps? And would you be giddy about the woolliness of those lads? How they make . . .
Flying free
We organised the first International Women's Day Celebration, in 1986. My baby, just a few weeks old, came with me that night. His Dad looked after him in a room downstairs while I facilitated the meeting of about 150 women. If needed he could be brought up to me for a feed.......such are women's lives, the personal is always . . .
A mile from home
Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. Gary Snyder There comes a point in every journey when you turn for home. For me it's the last twisty turn of a boreen, onto our meandering lane. This first bend of the lane is also the top of a hill and just before I set off on the last mile, I can take in the sweep of the lake, the valley and the . . .
The wildest thing
"Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness." Mary Oliver See more images from my wild garden and from Ireland's lush . . .
Pride
Maybe some day, some one will be able to articulate what it meant to be part of a YES Equality canvass team in the Marriage Equality referendum? Some have said it was the best experience of their lives, that it lifted them out of hopelessness about political change, that it gave them back a sense of pride in their true . . .
Something precious to belong to; home.
Today it is the stillest, sunniest spring morning. To the east the hill of gorse is in full flower and the exotic aroma of sweet coconut brushes against my jacket. Birdsong fills the fields as nest making and nest guarding goes on. In the distant sky the Coastguard helicopter is rumbling it's way out over the Copper . . .
Comeragh Mountains
The Comeragh Mountains lie towards the west of County Waterford. All year long we can track the sun as it sets further north or south along the high ridges, from one solstice extreme to the other. Like our elders, we tell the season and the hour by it. The weather comes to us from these mountains too and so every . . .
