I feel a post about windows brewing. I saw many a good window today.

June 30

I haven’t spent a ton of time watching Irish films. Actually, I haven’t spent a ton of time watching movies in general, much less Irish ones. But I was particularly impressed with one we watched in class this week. Instead of jotting down notes about lighting, costumes, or scene cuts, I found myself scribbling quotes, lines of poetry, and themes that paralleled ideas I’ve come across on the trip so far. If for no other reason, I thought these little inspirations were a pretty good indication of a well-made movie. I can gauge how much a like something by how motivated I am to remember it later.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is historical fiction, chronicling the struggle between the Irish Republican Army and the insurgency of Black and Tans, British soldiers, in Ireland in the early 1920s. It shows how the confusing and often complicated conflict affected lives on a local level. Moments were incredibly heartbreaking.

A huge theme was the evolution of two main characters, brothers, who start out fighting for the radical IRA trying to win Irish independence from Britain and end up on different sides of the argument. Betrayed and near desperation, one brother reminds the other that he didn’t even want to get involved in the conflict in the first place, but now that he has, he can’t get out even if he wanted to.

It seemed to me that many of the young men found themselves fighting for things they believed in (to varying degrees) but nonetheless found themselves making choices they never wanted to make. I started asking myself how these young men ended up there. Why they kept acting like they didn’t have a choice when, clearly, they did.

The end of the movie reads a letter the main character, Damien, pens to his spouse and quotes, “Strange creatures we are, even to ourselves.” Maybe why we make choices isn’t always clear to us, or even a conscious decision at all. In Clockwork Orange, I will always remember the priest being the only one to express concern over the inhumanity of taking away human will. In fact, according to that character, free will, or choice, is the only thing that keeps our humanity afloat.

It’s a common literary theme, I’m aware. A friend of mine reminded me that even in To Kill A Mockingbird, Scout Finch admits she didn’t like reading until it was taken away from her. But it’s a powerful theme, and one that I keep running into. In one of the closing scenes of The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Damien reflects on his involvement with the IRA and his choices regarding his family and fellow Irishmen. “Its easy to know what you’re against,” he writes. “Quite an honor to know what you’re for.” And I think he has a point. Having a choice may be the most important aspect of our humanity, but maybe it takes losing it, or the threat of losing that freedom, to know exactly what we would do with it. (507 words)

June 29

If there is one thing I learned from Kinsale, it’s that the life I should be striving for, and probably should have been living this whole time, is that of an Irish dog. I would even forego the ability to see in color for the days of long walks next to fuzzy grass, splashing on rocky beaches, and lying on the warm floors of hillside cottages. Okay, maybe they don’t all live in hillside cottages. But just about every tenth person I encounter walking on the street is accompanied by a furry friend, and I can’t help but envy how loved these animals seem to be.

There are big, shaggy dogs. Small, fluffy dogs. Short dogs with black, wavy hair and half-folded ears. Skinny dogs with slender noses and muted splotches. There are old dogs, and young dogs. Dogs on leashes, dogs in laps on buses, dogs napping next to restaurants. Even more amazing than the abundance and beautiful array of these animals, is their collective behavior. Not once have I been, or seen someone, accosted by one of these dogs. A few show interest with a couple quick, exploratory sniffs, but not a single one has tried to smuggle their way onto my bus seat, or into my purse, or tried to eat my face off when I pet them (unlike my psychopathic puppy).

They must feed these dogs something special over here.

In all seriousness, they have it made. Every dog I’ve seen is attentive, curious, tongue-slopping-out-content. And why shouldn’t they be?

For them, the present moment is never anything more, never anything less than simply that: right now. Every meal is completely and totally welcome, satisfying that immediate sensation of emptiness. Dogs never eat because they are bored, or lonely, or stressed, or procrastinating, they eat because that’s exactly what their body tells them they need at the moment. Every walk is an adventure, every sniff a hunt for buried treasure. I can only imagine that the wind smells sweeter, the sun feels toasty, the ocean tastes saltier when you aren’t anticipating it, you aren’t lamenting yesterday’s greatness. And this is exactly how I imagine an Irish dog to approach life.

Based on the very limited observations I’ve made so far, their days consist of waking up to the smell of coffee drip drip dropping in the kitchen, followed by a sufficient romp around fluorescent green gardens. There is probably some eating, some running, maybe some more romping, until their owners decide to take them to the sandy or rocky beaches (either one will work) of the Irish countryside. The next few hours include racing up and down the shoreline, sopping wet, maniacally happy, chasing items of interest in and out of the water. Of course there are several, if not a bunch, of other dogs and puppies to play with who are all equally excited and encourage them to run their hardest, jump their highest, bark their loudest. And according to a recent theater show I attended at the Cork Midsummer Festival, nearly 44 percent of dogs sleep in a bed with their owner at the end of the day.

These dogs have the right idea. The more I can learn from them, the better. Less conscientious, more content. Less neurotic 20-something trying to figure out life, more trusting, appreciative, tongue-slopping-out-panting, happy Irish dog. (558 words)

June 28

Well, its finally happened. I woke up to the rain today. Well, if we are being accurate, I woke up to the 945 church bells ringing. When I opened my curtains to bask in the morning sunlight of our day off, gray clouds seeped in and tiny dots of water speckled the window. Sigh. It was bound to happen sometime.

You might think this damp, bleakness is unwelcome, especially after such a bright weekend. But its not. In fact, its quite welcome. More than welcome, even. Appreciated. I keep falling asleep and dreaming about home. Not in any particularly nostalgic way, just realistically enough to trick me into thinking I will wake up there when I’m blurry-eyed and hungry for Cheerios. I can’t help but wonder when my dreams will be about Ireland. Most days I’m still waiting to wake up from this. For some reason the rain makes this feel just a tiny bit more real. For right now, at least. I can smell the earth soaking up the weather. I can feel the water hit my forehead and hear my shoes squish and squeak a little on the pavement. While this is not the first time I’ve ever felt rain, nor is it actually any different from other rainy days in the states, being able to feel that cool mist calms my creeping apprehensions and confirms that I am, in fact, here, right now, not dreaming, but wide awake. (241 words)

June 25

Ping. Ping. Ping-ping. Flags clink against hollow tin. Katie, Michelle, Tricia and Molly sit in front of me on the sand, backs resting on the exposed rock. Cheryl and Tom dip their toes in the sparkly water as a young girl rides her chocolate brown horse into the surf. Matt is sprawled out on a floating dock several hundred feet out into the ocean. Puppies sprint after rocks, shells, sticks into the waves. Kinsale is sweet.

The one thing everyone can agree on is how we can never explain to anyone what this place feels like. Pictures are too dull. Words too empty. And still, we try. What choice do we have?

The thought crossed my mind last night that most of life is purposed around this frail attempt. Whether we write books, film movies, record music, take photos, shoot television shows or are just writing emails, talking to our friends on the phone, chatting with a stranger, there is a commonality in our shortcomings. Its probably true that some people are better at finding descriptive words and others are especially talented at snapping a camera lens at just the right moment, but in the grand scheme of things, how successful are any of us at recreating that feeling for others?

Anne Lamott writes that she believes there is no point in a hopeless novel. Everyone is acutely aware of the terminal nature of life. Some of us may even be aware of our puny significance amongst the confusion and chaos that tends to direct most situations. But this is precisely why novels serve such an important purpose. Regardless of how inadequate we know we are at imitating the intricacies, the grandeur, the complexities we encounter daily, we still try. That gives us hope. Or, at least, it gives me hope. I try to remember that when I’m sitting in a particularly enjoyable spot, or laughing at something particularly silly, or glowing with warmth inside when connecting with someone over something particularly surprising, that I probably won’t be able to do my emotions justice. But there’s no reason I can’t keep trying. (353 words)

June 23

Last night, after spending the day in the warm sun and cool, salty breezes of Cobh, we decided to celebrate the eve of our first day off from class. In short, a large group of us took the liberty of making this the fourth night of celebrating (and toasting to) Ireland, and didn’t fail to deliver obnoxiously American bouts of behavior. The juxtaposition is a first for me. I can still hear the hum of the green and yellow train cars pulling us into the Cobh shore. The glaring sunlight as we climbed the hills covered with purple, blue, green, yellow houses is still making my eyes squint. I can see the splotchy and weathered gravestones of the Lusitania victims. And I can taste the heel of my tuna and corn baguette soaked in potato leek soup that we—quite proudly—found for a mere 4 euro. As the train left and Cobh went sliding back to where it came from, I couldn’t help but feel like I was riding on a metaphorical hyphen: constantly in between, slipping from place to place physically and mentally.

In a slightly more compromised state of mind later that evening, I found myself accidentally engaged in one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had thus far. Occasionally glancing over at my classmates dancing to Michael Jackson and Cascada in a sea of equally uninhibited Europeans, I felt myself sliding on that hyphen again. The young Irish man was genuinely interested in how young Americans can be so disinterested in the rest of the world. He didn’t understand why it seemed that most Americans have no interest in travelling. I wasn’t sure I agreed with that, but maybe on a deeper level he had a point. Maybe Americans don’t seem to be interested in travelling emotionally or mentally past their comfort zone. The American-centric culture is so pervasive in the states I’m almost surprised anyone is able to break free of those self-preserving clutches. Now, I’m really not American-bashing as much as I am just mourning the loss (or was it ever really there?) of open-mindedness and compassion. Ireland was one of the first countries (if not the first) to have a woman president, according to my new friend. While Ireland’s president serves mainly as a figurehead, he was adamant that women are capable of more empathy and that influenced their governing. He was shocked to hear that American children grow up learning how heroic European explorers were, and how our country was based on freedom, democracy and individual liberties, but never hear about how barbaric and exclusive (respectively) their means were to achieve such greatness. However, this Irish friend was quick to admit that Irish are quite xenophobic themselves and that its human to hear and believe stories as they are taught to us, regardless of the merit.

It occurred to me that this is true of almost anyone. We value things based on how we have learned to value it—not necessarily because they deserve it. Whether we are overly proud of our country, or regrettably not proud enough, I believe the things that resonate most deeply within us are those things that inspire the best in us. I was re-reading an old journal entry I wrote from April about my thoughts on “heroes” and “people as concepts.” But my concluding line fits this train of thought quite nicely, I think. It reads, “Half the time we aren’t in love with people, we are in love with the concept they inspire in us.” And maybe that can be true about more than just people. Maybe it can be true about Cork, or Cobh, or Ireland, or America. These things aren’t supposed to mean one singular thing to everyone, or even to one person. My time in Cork is almost exclusively based on what I decide Cork means to me right now, the kind of person I am when I’m here. And for that, I am grateful for this hyphen sliding me back and forth, in and out of cities, sobriety, empathy and curiosity for that beyond my experience. (685 words)

June 22 4:00am

Some people notice architecture. Some people notice personality types and quirks. Me? I notice shoes. It’s honestly the second thing I always look at, second only to eyes. I feel one can tell a lot about a person based on their footwear. One’s daily aspirations, one’s daily habits, almost one’s hopes and dreams—depending on the shoe, of course. It leaves me with a strange sense of curiosity. Where these people are going. Who they were. Who they want to be. It’s probably the most superficial way to judge a person, but I believe clothes (and shoes) work as an extension of one’s being. Clunky, skinny, dark, light, jeweled, beaded, heeled, laced, slip-on, leather, rubber, canvas—they all convey a certain choice, a certain preference, a certain statement. The interesting thing is that in Europe, there are so many different kinds of shoes, and the majority I cannot recognize. My sense of judgment is momentarily suspended. And maybe that’s the best thing that could be happening to me, at this point.

Instead, I’m forced to look closer at three passing women, walking together, all carrying shopping bags. First, I realize they are wearing sandals all with a similar strap, and that strikes me as interesting. And I as I look closer at the women, I notice how similar two of their postures stand. I slowly realize those two women actually look exactly alike, and are most probably twins. The third woman clearly emerges as their mother, with a slightly older face, but remarkably similar attributes. When I understood their relationship (or pretended I did) a little better, my interest in their story peaked. Did they realize how similar they all looked? Did they know they were all wearing an extremely similar variation of the same shoe? Did they care? Or were they just so close that those things tend to happen incidentally? My mind drifted imagining their conversation. What they had been shopping for. Where they were headed next? Were any of them married?

Normally, these thoughts wouldn’t have been given a chance to grow simply because my initial judgment usually narrows the field of people I’ll allow myself to get to know. But without this built-in schema, I find I’m noticing a lot more about a lot more people.
My preoccupation with shoes may be a little ridiculous, although irrelevant most times. But I know things are slowly changing within me, and these are the silly ways that I can tell it’s happening. (404 words)

June 22 11:20am

There is a Shel Silverstein poem that still floats around the back of my mind sometimes. The kind of poem that I don’t necessarily live by, but one that tends to show up more often than not, and often when I don’t expect it to. It chronicles the tale of a fellow who expected to simply splash in a particularly splashy puddle, but found himself sinking in the smallest, yet deepest lake.

Ireland feels a lot like that small, deep lake.

It parades as a puddle, a short, fun trip. No major urban cities. No extensive time or emotional commitments. Yet here I am, four days deep, and I can feel myself getting lost in the rising bubbles of conversation, the currents of the Cork streets. I guess it might be unfair to say that this was entirely unexpected. I had every expectation that Ireland would be beautiful, and fun, and splashy. My surprise comes at how deep it is. How I can feel every part of my life being slightly influenced by the choices I am making here and the situations I am experiencing.
Before I left home I spoke with an old friend form high school who had just returned from a trip to Nicaragua where she spent a month helping orphans learn English and rehabilitating women stuck in prostitution. Honestly, my heart dropped a little when I realized my trip had no philanthropic value—how are stories about drinking at pubs supposed to compare to that?—and I started to question how valuable my time here would really be.

Now, while I realize I’m not making any major strives in the social justice or world health fields, I think this trip will be rehabilitating in a different, perhaps more personal, sense.
And I can’t wait to get my feet wet. (303 words)

“glub—glub
he thought it was
the biggest puddle
He’d go splashing through.
Turns out it was
the smallest lake—
and the deepest, too.”
-Shel Silverstein

June 21

I’ve never been a big believer in destiny or fate. You know, the silly explanations people chalk up and use to excuse all the work and coincidence and magic of life. But it caught me off guard when one of the girls on the trip already had me pegged for it. While her words, “I know you aren’t into anything institutionalized…” seemed a little extreme to me, she clarified to mean “things like marriage,” to which I could do nothing but agree. I had a surprisingly interesting conversation with a friend on the trip the night we saw local Irish music at The Pavillion. The night was wonderfully entertaining. We got dinner downtown, shared ebony Irish coffees and split pints of frothy Hoegaarden until the show was ready to start. Before the lights dimmed in the upstairs venue and the circle tables of people were still chattering to keep busy, Matt and I started discussing movies. See, I am in the film class and he is in the travel writing class while in Ireland, but he is the one that likes movies and most of my experience is with nonfiction writing (although I’ve never spent concentrated specifically on travel writing). I spewed my gripes about the sensationalism and commercialism and blatant disregard for an intelligent audience in American movies, and how I find it mind-numbing. Matt agreed, but pointed out that most people want that in a two-hour movie, which I couldn’t really disagree with. But somehow the conversation got turned to the issue of “love.” Personally, I think love, like a million other social practices, is nothing more than a cultural construction. While I absolutely believe in the challenge, the inspiration, the encouragement, the learning, and the loving that comes when you connect emotionally and intellectually with someone, I am convinced that “love,” as a western idea, has been confused with “romance” and tends to leave a very narrow window of what is acceptable and “good.” The institution of marriage for example, is extremely culture specific. But for some reason, many people believe this is only one acceptable way to express a healthy, loving relationship. Or that, marriage is the ultimate loving relationship, and it is up to us to find the find person that fulfills this for us, before it’s too late.

Other cultures see it differently. India, for example, has a long history of practicing arranged marriages. While it probably stemmed out of some sort of necessity because of their equally long-standing caste system, the perspective is not nearly as cynical as Americans like to believe. Instead of seeing arranged marriages as an infringement on one’s personal choice at happiness (although I suppose it does happen), many Indian people trust their families’ judgment for choosing a spouse. After all, they have lived their entire lives with their families’ at this point; who would know them better than their parents? Their parents are also usually looking for spouses who are compatible financially and have similar values as their own family. They aren’t looking to ruin their son or daughter’s lives, they are trying to match them with the best possible partner. I’ve heard Indian people say that they have their entire lives to get to know each other; marriage, for them, is the process of learning to love someone.

For whatever reason, I relate more closely with this approach to love. I have no intention of demeaning it, or de-mystifying it, I just appreciate when I can understand things on a practical level. And being able to learn to love someone sounds much more believable than waiting around for the perfect partner to fall from the sky. Unfortunately, this is the perspective that I am constantly bombarded with from American movies. This is the sentiment that our cinema, our media, our culture keeps perpetuating. We expect things to just happen magically—by fate—and don’t want to believe that working for something as emotional as love could actually build us a fulfilling relationship.

As frustrating as it is sometimes, this is also how I tend to feel about writing. For whatever reason, I just expect the words to fall out of the sky and dance around my page until I string them into beautiful sentences. Sadly, that hasn’t happened yet, either. And I think the more I can understand my relationship with writing, the more I will be able to learn to cultivate it. Maybe even love it one day.

With that being said, something about Ireland has me thinking we are all here for a reason. It’s incredible that each person seems legitimately interested in contributing to a more well-rounded and fulfilling six weeks. As a journalist for NPR at JMU Martha Woodroof once wrote, sometimes it’s about deciding whether our desire to have functional relationships will trump all our excuses not to. In this case, I think fate could be the biggest excuse to overcome so far. Not necessarily to ignore fate, or discount destiny, but to understand where their place in the world is and when we need to take matters into our own hands. (850 words)

June 17

I could feel my eyes get warm, start to tingle, with that slight burning feeling that comes right before your tears do. I’ll admit I felt silly, stupid even. Maybe it was the faint dizziness from the combination of anti-depressant and sleep medication. Maybe it was the fact that it was well past 3am the day before I left for Ireland and my anxieties were starting to get the best of me. But I pushed those excuses aside and went ahead and admitted to myself that I was honestly moved by what I had just read.

There is something incredibly powerful about feeling completely understood and spoken for (not to mention better articulated than I could ever hope to be) that literally brought tears to my eyes. The irony-- or maybe genius-- hasn’t failed to escape my attention that the passage is (appropriately) about what reading, and writing, and books can mean. The power that these pencil scratches, pen marks, key strokes possess.

The magic of this passage is that it applies to my entire life. My entire struggle to figure out and express just exactly how it is I understand life. How I’ve learned to understand other people’s stories. How I’ve learned to tell mine. My favorite part, though, is the feeling that I’m not the only one that feels this magic. As the clock flirts with 4am, and my neck starts to ache from craning it to read, I can feel my insecurities slowly creep back up. Pressuring me to stop writing. Because it isn’t good enough. Because it isn’t unique enough, profound enough, different enough, new enough, poignant enough. And I think this is when I start to try to write exactly what I want, how I want, as truthfully as possible. (295 words)

“Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life—wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean. Aren’t you?” –Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird