“Pardon me, do you work here?”
I asked a kind looking man in rain slicks standing outside the boat ticket booth. I was dripping with the light rain of the warm morning, the entire upper legs of my jeans darkened from the water running off my very waterproof jacket onto my very not waterproofs pants.
“I don’t do much in the way of workin’” he smiled, seemingly unaware of the throngs of wet tourists searching, frantically, for a boat that might take them close enough to safely consume today’s natural wonder, the Cliffs of Moher.
The cliffs that Andre the Giant scaled by rope, where Wesley and Inigo Montoya dueled – a brief distraction from Montoya’s quest for revenge. His life’s purpose. His life’s torment. I suppose, in the way we are all tormented by the fragility of meaning. He was defending his very dead father’s honor, after all.
“What are you after, Lovie” the kind man in rain slicks followed up, after delighting in his joke about work. About not work. He laughed the kind of laugh that is without sound, just a fast rising and falling of the chest and shoulders. Simple delights. He had a grounded sweetness about him that was unapologetically wrapped in a kind of humble mischief. The kind that emanates from old sailors, the kind that is both sweet and salty, mostly salty – that draws you in and blurs the line between wisdom and reckless, that keeps you up singing until dawn, that is beautifully unembarrassed.
I suppose, the real answer to his question, of what was I after, was just that: mischief wrapped contentment. Simple delights.
Yet, instead of allowing the real answer to escape, I spoke of little things and left the big things unsaid.* I inquired about a taxi to get up the road a mile. It was raining, after all, and I had all my luggage.
“I’ll pop you up there Lovie, not a worry.” he responded.
The Cliffs of Moher – where I’d spent the morning, on a boat, consuming – rise like giants from the sea on the west coast of the Emerald Isle where they continue their war with the Atlantic Ocean. Where they have been at war for a very, very long time. Lest we forget the Wildness. The vast sea and godly winds ever-so-slowly reclaiming, ever-so-constantly reminding, reWilding. The waves beat against and wear away the foundation of the cliffs until the land above cannot withstand and comes tumbling, crashing, falling into the sea – sacrificed to wild waves. Sheep, castles, flutes… all fall. Something about gravity.
“What makes you free?”
The Irishman asked causally as we drove up the misty road toward Doolin town. He’s asked the question as if it followed naturally from his previous questions: How are you doing and Where are you from?… As if it has the same tenor and texture. How are you doing? Where are you from? What makes you free?
The question, What makes you free? pierced my comfortable, wet, melancholy. He couldn’t know, after all, of my overly intellectualized search for purpose and freedom… my search for access, for feeling…
Access to an unnamed thing I lost before I could remember.
He smiled softly at my silence.
“Ya know, what makes you feel alive?”
To my bumbling about collective creation, about music and dancing… about being fully present with all the elements yada yada, he responded,
“Ah, yes, spirit, I suppose ya mean”
We quickly had the perfunctory exchange of names. We’d both forgotten that social ritual in the gentle chaos of soft rain and causal freedom.
How we are called. What we are known by.
To be known… That was a conversation for another time.
“D’ya know what makes me free, Gerga?” he asked.
I answered with my eyes.
…Then, Joe talked about the Wild – the mist that gathered in sacred conference at the tops of the cliffs, the feeling of heather between his toes, the water that washes over his feet when he steps on soft moss – did I know how soft moss could be? He spoke of the brilliant colors of rain clouds, and the wicked strength of the sea. He talked of Antarctic dreams and the thrill of meeting Kind people.
“D’ya know what I mean?” He asked, “about the Wild?”
—
Above the border dispute between land and sea, above the ragged cliff face, on the top of the 700’ ft sheer, there is another battlefield in the War of Wildness. Less dramatic looking, to be sure, but perhaps more dangerous, as gentle insidiousness tends to be.
It is a landscape of large swaths of green, rolling hills and grazing livestock. Families of Puffins fly overhead, passing the princess castle and the crumbling, picturesque stone walls overgrown with deep green ivy and spotted with wildflowers. Uncommon city words abound here…bucolic, verdant, pastoral, quaint …
Standing at the top of the cliffs, the wind howls orders – “look again” – see the flower-laced stone walls in their painfully straight lines, divvying the land into parcels to be bought and sold, controlled, locked, imprisoned. Lines to hold in place the perpetual the lie of dominion, to maintain the illusion of order, of permanence. The princess castle, a fortress against the elements, a futile attempt to protect against the Wildness – to suffocate it, to punish those who exhibit its tendencies: The Wildness of wind and swords and famine and heart -the Wildness of beasts and spirit and freedom and love… Inside those walls of jewel-crusted confinement and good grammar, its indentured servants, barred in by corsets and crowns and politeness, faithfully defend a more ordered life.
These fields, these castles, scars over wounds long ago inflicted and never quite healed. Wounds to spirit, to land, to animal – human and non-human alike. It is difficult to hear the songs and stories trapped under straight lines and tended, manicured countryside. The prison of written words makes it hard to hear a subtler, deeper, ageless kind of communication, that is surely whispering, still. The stories of the ones who left no lines or stones. Songs that imperceptibly mix with the wind.
And here, on the frontlines of the War of Wildness – the Wild Atlantic Coast of Ireland – the Wildness, it screams – demands to be recognized, to be grappled with, demands we feel our place in the world, feel its power.
At the top of the Cliffs of Moher, facing the magnificent and raging sea, that smashes against the walls of rock below, with the princess castle at my back, the wind blows hard. And there, braced against it, I suddenly doubt my connection to the earth. The fragility and tenuousness of my relationship to gravity is suddenly alive in me and spreading across my chest.
It is well within the wind’s power, after all, to reject gravity’s claim to the mass of me, if only temporarily, to lift me from my path, and teach me to fly. Bones, empires, wildflowers…all fall.
So strong and wild and erratic is the wind, I can’t decide if I should carry on or turn back, to turn my back. It is dizzying as it oscillates between deafening force and eerie stillness. The more I debate, the more I try to analyze my options, the harder it blows – so hard into my face, that it pushes all the thoughts from my head. They fight desperately, the thoughts, to stay inside, comfortably spinning – to contemplate, to reflect, to fester, to procreate – we are at the very edge of the earth, witnesses to the war, after all. Lots to think about… But the wind only grows in strength at their resistance, refusing their return until, at last, they surrender. And only after, when the wind settles once again into silence, can I, now thoughtless, hear. I can hear the artful, colorful churning of the sea to the accompaniment of bird songs. I can hear a distant flute that is dreaming of a quest… wanderers called into the hills by the gentle beckoning of ewes. I can hear whispers from every direction.
And despite the many-thousand-year attempt to contain and tame the Wildness – here – it is quite evident the battle continues. As fierce as ever.
In one way, my heart is calmer knowing we haven’t lost. The Wild ones.
And in another way entirely, it constricts in fear against the furious waves and howling wind and deafening impermanence, desperately seeking the safety of order.
Maybe, rather, my heart is calmer, not because of the battle itself, but because the battle here, at the edge of the earth is also the battle waging inside of me. My Wildness fighting against containment of manners, social orders, clothing, borders, egos, love laws, and words – the harsh, blunt mechanisms I trap my feelings inside, where they live severed from the sensuous place they derive.
But only sometimes.
Or maybe, upon further examination of the calmness of my heart, is due to the fact that my infidelity, my disloyalty, to both sides and my connection to each, is nurtured here – due to the relief that the war is raging still and that neither side has fallen to the other.
Indeed, it would surely be a lie, if I denied my love of quiet, serene mornings in my manicured apartment with light sifting magnificently through the ordered panes of glass, and the succulent leaves of potted plants.
Indeed, it would be a lie if I didn’t look across rolling hills and landscapes dotted with princess castles, and stone walls crumbling from the weight of time and the strength of wildflowers, that can’t help but call me into the transcendental… and sigh at its beauty.
But only sometimes.
The bucolic beauty of neatly partitioned land. What does it mean to feel nostalgia for a time that was never mine and I don’t want to return to?
The straightness of stone walls belie the jagged, broken, multi-dimensional rocks that have been forced into place to make them.
Now, at least, they are resting, the broken rocks, and decorated with wildflowers.
Fights for freedom tamed by the banality of time.
Docile animals tagged and spray painted for easy identification, I presume.
I’m not sure they mind. I’m not sure it matters.
They are unfazed by the demanding wind and, unlike me, ignore its plea to be felt.
They don’t even look up.
And maybe, perhaps, war is the wrong metaphor. Perhaps it is a dance. A bloody, powerful, rejoicing, grieving, exuberant, dangerous, and ageless dance.
God only knows. Whoever knows god.
I, however, do not.
Not anymore.
—-
“You know, Lovie” Joe said, “can you make me a promise?”
I nodded emphatically
“Next you have a moment. Go down to the sea or a river. Wild Water. Take off yer shoes and lay down with yer head directly on a rock. Pull yer knees up, so as the soles of yer feet touch the earth. Let yer arms just fall. Ya know? And listen. Listen to the water flowing. And forgive yerself.
Let it go.
Let the water wash over yer eyes and mouth and over yer whole body.
Let it wash away some of the hurt.
Won’t ya do that fer me dearie?”
As I watched the words fall unassumingly from his mouth, I felt my head tilt, the way it does when somethings strikes me, and I nodded slowly, feeling my eyes glaze at witnessing his gentle and sweet magic.
“And if you see someone else during yer travels” he added, “who you tink might be hurtin, offer ‘em to do the same, so they know it’s possible to let some of that hurt go, to be free”
And with that, as matter of factly as he’d asked what made me free, he got out of the car, helped get my luggage, and hurried me to get out my wet clothes, wouldn’t want to catch a cold, after all.
And with a unsentimental farewell, he climbed back in the car.
“Safe journeying now” he bid through the window as he closed the door.
“Don’t ferget to take off yer shoes” he added with a kind of double wink and drove off into the rain.
The Wildness of Kindness.
A joe-sized mark on the universe*
* reference to The God of Small Things
Journey Hard Speak Easy 