Letter from Nothern Ireland 2

11-24-05

Hi Meave,

The task of charming my way through the North of Ireland continues. I had the pleasure of spending the first part of the day with two gentlemen I met last night at a small zen sitting at a “Peace Farm” outside of Portstewart. Michael met me in the morning and took me out to see Giant’s Causeway. The stepping-stones themselves are not as dramatic as they make it look in the postcards, but everything else was just tremendous.

The day was so windy and blustery that the sea was a mas of white, just roiling and sudsy. Gusts of wind would fling clouds of sea foam in to the air, and they’d be airborne thirty feet up, and land like little jellyfish on the heather. The path wound around the side of a cliff, and the wind was so strong that it was hard to walk. I never thought you could be blown backward while walking downhill! It was quite exhausting.

The columnar basalt hexagons that make up the walkway pavers are about the size you could wrap your arms around, but in places they reach up to the sky, it seems.

My camera batteries chose this time to expire.

Michael and I walked back uphill, knowing we’d have some help from the wind, but never suspecting what would happen. You stretch out your arms, lift up your feet and…you’re running. Running out of control, pushed by the wind. Up a very steep hill!

We had a snack of bananas and yogurt looking at Dunluce Castle, and talked. Michael was born in the Bogside in Derry and was sent to live with relatives in Donegal when he was little. Before television came, nobody in this little fishing village knew they were poor. They had thatched roofs and cooked in kettles hung over the fire. At his uncle’s place, fish hung to dry in the rafters. At night, people would leave their doors open and go visiting up and down. In the late 50s his aunt got one of the first televisions. When a program was over, they’d look up and see that the room was full of neighbors who’d crept in to watch.

Although Michael never thought of himself as disadvantaged, there was one time he caught sight of a little Protestant boy with huge shiny cheeks on him, and Michael remembers thinking that nobody he knew was in a position to have extra fat like that.

When he was in Donegal his uncle arranged for him to meet the oldest man in the area, who was 108. Little Michael was met by the man’s son, who had come to town with some money his father had given him in order to buy shoes. The son was 79 years old, with bleary eyes, and Michael could hardly fathom that this very old man himself had a father. The oldest man turned out to be tiny, just a wee shrunken man with bright eyes and a long white beard. He was so happy to have a guest, and he chattered away at the little boy.

On our way too and from the Causeway, we passed through the town of Bushmills. Although it’s seen as a quintessentially “Irish” whiskey elsewhere in the world, Bushmills is so Loyalist as to be Scottish. The town had that hard edge of a community that is fighting against something; there was a tangible forbidding air to it. It wasn’t a place you’d want to stop for tea.

Michael said when he went to Israel, he was told, “if you get a Palestinian guide, you’ll be Palestinian; if you get an Israeli guide, you’ll be Israeli.” After a morning hearing about life as a Catholic in an era when Catholics were poor and had no civil rights, I was about to visit the other side.

We met Billy, my other host from the meditation group, at a café with a sweeping view of the Portstewart waterfront. The wind was still whipping things up, and the waves were crashing over the sea wall in places.Time for a cup of tea.

Billy and I drove to Derry, through Limavady, the area where he grew up. It was some of the most beautiful farmland I’ve ever seen. We went for a walk round Derry’s town wall, which is a stunning piece of human work. Really worth a visit. The walls held King James at bay for over a hundred days, and the people inside were eating dogs and rats and whatever they could find.

Billy told me about being a little boy and how exciting it was to see the marches and merriment leading up to Christmas. Right outside his house in the town, they would burn a thirty-foot effigy of the man who tried to sue for peace during King James’ siege of Derry. A group of apprentice boys grabbed the keys and prevented him turning over the city. Finally the king left, and the apprentice boys were heroes, the peacemaker the villain. It was thrilling to see that burning man every year-- no trip to a remote desert required!

As we got over to the Bogside area, we could look down from the wall and see some of the murals and the back of the“You are Now entering Free Derry” sign. Billy pointed out the Catholic cathedral whose courtyard figured in Bloody Sunday, and the mural of Bernadette Devlin, the Republican who bodily attacked the Home Secretary on the floor of Parliament the next day. The shock of those events was still evident in his voice.

Everywhere there are survelliance cameras, even more than in most towns in the North. A looming radio survelliance tower on the Bogside side of the city wall is to be torn down; it really is a threatening-looking behemoth of fear. In any public place, you are on at least five cameras. It's quite disconcerting, and I'm thinking I won't go back there after my sidetrip to Galway.

I find that I’m not very interested in visiting “political” hotspots. Driving through Bushmills was enough to remind me that partisan graffitti, murals, flags, etc. are all hallmarks of a festering wound. Investigating the wound and renewing its sting in my own heart doesn’t interest me. I am very interested, however, in how people turn towards healing it.

It shouldn’t be surprising, but I am quite impressed that the Zen pracitioners I’ve met are a mixed-background lot, and that they are able to talk about the rhetorical excesses of each side with equanimity and humor. To pursue an interest in meditation seems to require a proclivity for thinking outside the confines of sectarian boundaries. To hear the practitioners in Belfast talk about the well-meaning missteps of the Ulster-Scots language movement was like hearing Portlanders discuss the bizarre habits of stereotypical small-town Oregonians.

Among the more charming un-PC missteps involved in transalating offical government documents into Robert-Burns-style dialect: "disabled children" comes out as "wee dafties." Modern terms are a challenge as well. For "telephone" they came up with "langblather"!

I have a sore throat and have been losing my voice. Interestingly enough, this makes my accent much less prominent.

Take care, sweetie,

Delia