Travelling home

Part 1: At the feet of the Himalayas
Part 2: Enjoy this moment

Maggie moves onwards and wings back to Kathmandu, before heading to Canada via Hawaii. We become friends on Facebook. But I know we will never meet again. Some days later I am back at my Oasis Hotel in Thamel. Another friend, whom I know from Denmark, turns up from Eastern Nepal. He and I, together with Abhash have dinner at a Halal Afghani place, and we move on to the funkiest club in town. They do great cocktails. If you close your eyes you can imagine Jimmy Hendrix, Thin Lizzy or even Bob Marley vamping each other out, waves washing over us as the music swirls higher and higher. And then silence. It is a fitting last evening in Nepal.

My flight from Delhi is in two days. There is a strange mood in the city. No one, certainly not I, know exactly what is going on. I read it is good to wash your hands. And how safe is Uber? I know how to navigate New Delhi. I plan the intervening days with quiet calm. Expensive hotel lobbies are solitary places, and that is where I spend my time. Far from the crowd feels best. It is eerie and surreal.

I know Indian cities, and I know Indian countryside. Indians are my brothers and sisters. That’s how close I feel. They are my grandmother too. I study the faces around, knowing that something ominous is gathering pace. The rich will probably survive. They are not really my people. The rich look the same everywhere.

I sometimes look at younger Indians, and know that they will never know the India I have known. And I want them to do well. I have seen their roots. On one of my first trips to India, way back, I befriended a beggar. We sat on the pavement one evening and watched the moon. We could not speak, but I sensed his destiny, even when I could not sense my own.

Karma is a hard doctrine, if it really exists. And we all step out of our own ring of fire, for short moments, leaving a cage. Maybe the Covid will be a global cage. Yes, there is panic in the air, like animals sensing an oncoming storm.

On my way home

The flight to Helsinki is on time, a subdued gathering of passengers. It is the last flight from a war zone, a virus field of destruction. And where are we heading, and to what? My flight is the 11th of March. Two days later Denmark will be in lockdown. What’s going on? How fortunate for me that there is a connection from Helsinki to my regional airport at Billund, in the west of Denmark.

Everything is so quiet, and my taxi driver is scared, and needs the fare. The fare to my home is half the price of my flight ticket from Delhi to Billund via Helsinki, with some meals thrown in. Think about that! How guilty do I feel? Maybe just a bit, or maybe not at all.

I live in the Danish countryside with friends in a large restructured country property. Surrounded by forest, lakes and trees it is a rolling landscape of pastoral serenity. The trees are still bare in early spring, the birds are back, and the grass is coming alive. I am quartered in an annex, by the main building, and quarantine is easily administered.

I rest for the first 24 hours. No problem about that. Laundry, post, storing, and paying bills are all taken care of. Time is my own. The people around seem quite affected by the national mood. Two days after my arrival, Denmark goes into a national lockdown. Something big is going down.

Our youngish prime minister presents the measures with authority and seeming compassion. She is an impressive lady. How do they know all this stuff? I am happy to chill after the last weeks travel. I still have a newly-acquired book to read, and phone calls to make. I have lots of catching up. I’m just happy to be home. I feel safe. Denmark is super safe.

Living in the countryside is its own bubble of separation. I moved from Copenhagen 30 years ago. No more city life. It’s a preference, but one I would not change. The silence descending over the country is awesome. I have not watched TV for more than two decades. Who has time for that?

The trees and garden and fields and birdsong are my news reports. Each fresh weed or blade of grass tells a tale. Quiet country roads became funereal and still. We are surrounded by stillness unheard before, riveting with its primordial timbre. A kind of silence which is always there but never previously heard. We all heard it, and are affected individually. Pythagoras’ celestial harmony became our choir. The planets moved closer, and the night skies became clearer.

The news accelerates a global oneness, announces a warning of a coming Apocalypse. That’s how it feels. Are we living in the final days, close to the coming of you know who, or what is going to happen? And the wave of experts is astounding. Facebook goes into the centre of our brain. We are all a part, all becoming one. Each algorithm bumps into the next one, like frenzied traffic on some mad highway. There is a frantic scramble to compare notes, assure our loved ones that all will be well. All is well. People are dying and people are going weird. It is difficult to know what is real.

My quarantine passes, with no alarming indicators. My friends and I find our daily footing, small projects, distractions, hesitant at first, attending the global snowball, fireball, hoping we will not be impacted. Time slows down. It takes Venus 243 Earth days to rotate once on its axis clockwise, as it moves around the sun. We move into this Venusian frame, a new time experience, thrilling and wondrous. All is slow but sure. Sure in its passing, unreal in its strangeness. Our lives slow down too. Our inner axis is in some shift too, at least mine is.

As the outside noises of our lives, the normal stage settings ebb away, a global spring tide washes us onto the shore of our own lives. The old saying “when the tide goes out, you can see who was skinny dipping,” rings a loud bell. Exposure happens. The full waters of life give us solidity, room to flow and manoeuvre. Low tides leave us hanging on a shore. I feel more naked: more transparent, anxious, restless.

Food and wine and connection are good anchors. But I feel some cracks in my system opening up, some fault lines shifting, moving back or moving away from who I am or where I am.

Everything in my life to this point is complete. And then I knew. I need to move, and be home in Ireland. I have left Ireland too long ago. My family is in Ireland. It is not only about family. It is tribal. If I die, I should be amongst my people. The Irish are my people. I miss my people. I miss the song, the sounds, the sheep, the fields, the wind, the rain, the laughter and the madness. I am going home.

All the emigrant’s aching heart came to me at once. The pain of distance, the sorrow of not being a part, the marginalisation of an earlier imprint, a conscious voluntary leave-taking with an involuntary unconscious attachment, an attachment persisting under some surface of bravery, of denial of all that could or might be still. Would it be too late for redemption, for knowing, for allowing? It needed a place, and a time, and the time had come. A debt of love was calling.

Back to Ireland

Many of my friends are as surprised as I am at my decision to move to Ireland. It is crazy timing, with the whole world in a pandemic lockdown mode. I have no choice. It is an irresistible visceral impulse, neither to be ignored nor overheard. Moving through images of global crisis, scenarios of bankruptcies, interrupted lives, with a sense of some appalling abyss moving closer, I pack my car and make a marathon trip through Europe in sweltering summer heat. I board a French ferry at Cherbourg and sail 17 hours to my homeland of Ireland.

Arriving during the pandemic is quite impractical. My Irish passport gives me a welcome at Rosslare. Crossing the frontier from ship to land is like that moment when the Red Sea parts and Moses and his people pass through to the Promised Land. Only an exile can understand, an exile who has known the glory of youth and who has felt the earth under his feet and smelt the sea and pastures on the wind, and the loss of that landscape. It feels like relief and promise.

Mother Ireland, Máthair mo Chroí, I am returning, I have not forsaken you, run away; I am back, back as a promise. It feels personal and surprisingly emotional. It is obviously my own promise to myself, made long ago, in some half-forgotten time.

The silence of the Continent has followed me here, has been here already before I have come. I cannot meet my family due to lockdown regulations. I rent a small house in a remote country area in County Clare, knowing just one person in the region.

After a life of being surrounded by friends and people, I am suddenly alone on the side of a mountain in a remote spot in rural Ireland. Was this what I had been dreaming of? I am not so sure. No one had been dreaming of what is unfolding. It is a dream, a waking one.

Again, I quarantine. Again, I have no symptoms. I am home and healthy. At school, I had learned Alexander Pope’s Ode to Solitude. I was 14 at the time. He was 12 when he wrote the poem.

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest! Who can unconcern’dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day.

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix’d; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

Romantic view indeed, something from a different era. The lockdown of the pandemic ushers in a timeless frame, and in that stillness, all ages are joined together.

The Covid is pulling us all back to basics, veils of sophistication rip gently to the side. Solitude is around me, in front of me, closing in. Am I now a troglodyte with central heating, a hermit on a hill, an outcast with no name, a stranded fish out of water, a social leper, a misfit, a prisoner of my own fantasy, and for how many years?

The beauty that surrounds me haunts my eyes, feeds my soul, whispers with invitation. I structure my day, a scaffolding of recognition like some ordered construct, framing the hours and the minutes, impregnating meaning, in reciprocal fashion. Time is being, being is time.

Scarriff is in the midst of eastern Clare, not far from the banks of the Shannon, to which it is connected by a waterway. There are a few shops, an ancient hardware store which sells everything, a couple of petrol pumps, a souvenir shop with cups and saucers, tea towels, bedside lamps and charming staff.

This place becomes my Mecca, a microcosm of rural Ireland, from where I can relate and know what I have only pondered from afar. I am in awe, a child adult, move into the pulse of what it has become in my absence. I am a blow in, for sure. “Am I even Irish?” might be a question; am I a different kind of Irish with a different knowledge, another memory, another history, another heart. Irish emigration is overpopulated by people like me, with secret histories from faraway places. Mine is my own, and has its own authority, its own legitimacy. My money is valid too. I cannot assume any right, even if there is some. I am just a visitor as long as I do not belong.

Using the words of Abraham Lincoln, in another context, I am now finding my own “mystic chords of memory,” absorbing the landscape, knowing indeed that my body and soul were grown in this soil, recognising and re-merging with my own belonging. The small, windy lanes of Clare become a pilgrim’s path, the stone walls and Burren pathways are arteries feeding a vision of primordial memory to my soul and to my eyes.

Each day brings me a new destination, a new vision of beauty, a place of awe. And there are many. The fields become a patchwork of poetry, each hedgerow opens a new stanza, another metric, different colours, more texture, revealing a fresh truth; they stretch back forever, a story, a logjam, jarring tapestries of history, unravelling links of long ago.

The lockdown quietens our movement, draws nature to the fore. I move where there is any opening, any tiny invitation, some doorway into conversation with the people around, who like I are confounded or perplexed by what is in the air. Faces and people emerge, each story deals in different ways with its own impediment.

Character shines through, traits come to the fore, interruption reveals individual constitutions. I have my own practical needs for food or household embellishments, and each acquisition becomes a social exploration, an excuse to mingle and observe, to find recognition, and gather more understanding of who and what we are, and who we might become. My little house has a wood stove, a comfortable bed, a great sofa and all that can make life convenient. There is a guest room, and in spite of stringent lockdown I have visitors along the way. The neighbours further down the road have a beautiful Labrador called Molly. She sits outside the French door of my bedroom every morning waiting to say hello. It is an offer of friendship.

Scarriff and East Clare have long been home to a new Ireland, a mixture of days gone by and days to come. O’Brien’s butcher shop is now the Co-Op, a vegan gathering place, a centre of Bohemian nuance. It offers food and books and clothes and space in a garden for informal gatherings. Tuesday mornings brings me to the Irish conversation group in the garden, returning me to memories of days with Conradh Na Gaeilge. There is singing too, but more than all else friendly faces, who are willing to chat and share their tune.

There are singers and poets and storytellers, hungry for exchange. There is a different kind of famine in the air. We have food for our bodies, but are hungry for a modern day Mass Rock, searching for a communal sacrament, a place where souls may gather and feel as one. The pubs are at low tide, and in the convoluted system of close/open/close again it is difficult to know where and when we can go inside. There are many discontinued conversations, broken connections, which are only at the dawn of their knowing.

Epilogue

Three years later, I look back and see that so much has changed in my life. There were many more twists and turns in the road, further discoveries, geographical switches, I tried to make sense of to myself even when I didn’t understand what was different inside.

It became less important to continuously engage in social exchanges, and there began a subtle shift towards more alone time. I was alone. I found within myself a greater willingness to let the world pass by and let it take care of itself without me sticking my nose into everything. This was forced upon me. My initial reluctance began to melt and I saw myself in a way I had never had time to observe before.

It was fortunate that I had my meditation practice, and important too that I could develop more patience and trust. I was in a new life, and I was alive. (Here I would like to thank my friend Bodhipriya in Clare, Ireland, for welcoming me to her home and for introducing me to her friends and her world. Her generosity and welcome is not to be forgotten.)

It was different from before – nothing bad. It was not some state of cosmic abandonment, only new circumstances, and it was all right. A sense began to grow inside that this was my moment to show up: to show up for myself and for all that life had offered me, right up to that very moment.

Related articles

• Enjoy this moment – Sudas writes from Nepal during his visit in March 2020 (Part 2)
• At the feet of the Himalayas – In spring 2020, Sudas travels to Kathmandu and visits the surrounding area (Part 1)