I found this essay by A.E. today and I realized, though for only a year, I was blessed in having lived myself on a hillside in the northwest of Ireland. I would have stayed there for an eternity, but Fate had her own plans.
Now I watch the waves as I walk on the sand of a beach far, far from Ireland. It is Ireland that is in my heart. In my blood.
ON AN IRISH HILL
It has been my dream for many years that I might at some time dwell in a cabin on the hill-side in this dear and living land of ours, and there I would lay my head in the lap of a serene nature, and be on friendly terms with the winds and mountains who hold enough of unexplored mystery and infinitude to engage me at present. I would not dwell too far from men, for above an enchanted valley, only a morning's walk from the city, is the mountain of my dream. Here, between heaven and earth and my brothers, there might come on me some foretaste of the destiny which the great powers are shaping for us in this isle, the mingling of God and nature and man in a being, one, yet infinite in number. Old tradition has it that there was in our mysterious past such a union, a sympathy between man and the elements so complete, that at every great deed of hero or king the three swelling waves of Fohla responded : the wave of Toth, the wave of Rury, and the long, slow, white, foaming wave of Cleena.
- A.E. from The Tower Press Booklet, January 1906
Photograph © Denise Sallee 2012
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