I’m not sure what it is about this place, but the grief and sense of loss has surged since landing here. I didn’t come here to feel worse. I thought I was coming for something charming and alluring. It must be the sudden encounter of that very thing I have been looking forward to experiencing. Beauty has a tendency to unsettle the soul.
Beauty is fleeting, therefore it creates in me the need to archive it. Beauty does not demand it. Beauty is simply being itself. Like the prolific gorse brush that blankets the Irish countryside. Each Spring it sets its delicate yellow flowers amid prickly and disagreeable thorns. They bloom whether I see them or not. But once my eyes get a glimpse, the clock starts ticking. How can I ever possibly capture this beauty and the feeling that goes along with it?
Thankfully we now have the camera to assist the task. But It’s not enough to take a picture of an inspiring setting and never show it to anyone. The impulse to put images on social media is proof of this. Regardless of how blurry the shot of that sunset that you saw on vacation, the urge to invite us into your experience supersedes the quality of the photo.
I have a closet full of photograph albums from years of memories. But what good are they without someone to enter into the memory together? My pictures are not a part of your story. They are of no use to you.
I’m traveling alone. I’ve done so by choice because I know I still have a lot more grieving to work through. There are times the road is only wide enough for single file. That’s my current path. I know that I won’t always feel this way, and wise enough believe that this, too, shall pass. In the meantime, I keep putting one foot in front of the other.
I have nearly 30 years of archived memories and the one I cataloged and referenced them with is no longer here to recount them with me. That’s another reason this trip feels so different than others in the past. I’m starting my new library.
My deceased husband, Ross, always wanted to visit Ireland but we never had the opportunity. When Ken and I visited several years back, we drove through the beautiful Ring of Kerry, stoping at one of the many scenic overlooks, I took a handkerchief of Ross’s, out of my purse. I had brought with me to somehow connect him to Ireland. Ross always carried it for me, because he knew that I was a crier.. This was one of the ways he would take care of me, as little as it may seem. So your sweet brother in law, Ken, climbed over the edge of a cliff to tie the handkerchief to a beautiful bush that overlooked this land of wonder….Kens way of taking care of me, to ease some of the pain of grief that doesn’t go away, but changes. Somehow I felt Ross was smiling down on us from heaven above that day. Ironically, I could have used that handkerchief.