(I've become rather bad at actually posting these ramblings...I write them, then think I'll come back to double check them and then post, but no, I write them, and forget. So here's a few from the last month that I've decided to publish...I've included the original writing dates on them so hopefully that'll remind me in times to come of the times when they were written!)
(16.07.2014)
For those of you whose gaelige ain't so good, that roughly translates to, there's no seaside/beach like your own seaside/beach-it's a slight paraphrasing of "níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán fein" (in Dorothy-speak, there's no place like home)
I spent part of last weekend in Sligo, just seeing family and catching up on some SJP stuff. A colleague of mine had been away on a mini-surfing break last week, and seeing the photos of the sea and the waves and the shore made me desperately want to be back home, back beside the sea, back to the waves. So yesterday morning, I got up and went to the beach (with my booties. My new kneecap and I are brave enough to go into the water, just not stupid enough to go over rocks with no grips on my feet!)
It was around 10.30 and the sky was cloudy and grey. It seemed like rain was on the way, but, to steal a quote from Alfred E. Neuman, "What, me worry?!" I figured once I was in the water, I'd be wet anyway. So, swimsuit on, booties on, and off I waded.
I'd forgotten that, once you get over the chill, the sea feels so beautiful against skin-it's a strange sensation, one that can't be compared to the feeling of the treated water in swimming pools, or the tepid crap that flows in houses. The sea is something magical, something special. I will never forget that first look around after surfacing, Benbulben to my left, and the first beach, with Knocknarea peeking over the edge of the cliffs to my right.
Although after 10 mins, my knee (and eventually calf & quads!) were killing me, and yet, I couldn't bring myself to get out of the water. It was still such an amazing experience, to swim with the flow of the waves sometimes, to swim out against them, to dive through them other times, and occasionally, to just lie back, and let the wind and the waves take me along. Lying back, looking up at that sky was bliss. Grey clouds drifting, the sounds of waves breaking, birds flying and a feeling that I could've stayed in that moment forever.
I stayed in for almost half an hour, thinking about everything and nothing in between, my family, my friends, those who've gone before me, and how they enjoyed the sea and the scenes that I was drifting along in front of. It crossed my mind how lucky I am to be who I am, where I am; that I'm not a Palestinian, a Syrian, that I'm not living in suffering every day, that my brother is still here, that at least I was there with my Aunt when she passed, that Sligo is not just where I'm from, but it's something within my soul.
Were it not for growing up in Sligo, spending my teenage years beside the sea (albeit with the most bad grace possible, apologies to the parentals!), I don't know if my love of the sea, of those moments of listening to "water lapping, with low sounds by the shore"*, would have such an indelible effect on my soul as they do now. There is something uniquely spiritual about sitting listening to the sea, to ebb and flow of the water as it glides across sand, as it rushes in and out through the stones, and there is something amazingly awe-inspiring about the power and strength behind the Atlantic waves I've witnessed over the decades that have pounded the beaches and the rocks around my home county.
We humans are supposedly made up of 90% water, so I guess it makes sense to feel so at home in it. Yet there's a calmness, an "at homeness" that I feel in the Atlantic that I've never felt anywhere else, not the Mediterranean, not the Irish sea, not the North Sea....maybe the old phrase "Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile" (Irish for one beetle recognises another beetle") holds true, maybe somewhere, something inside instinctively recognise this place called home.
Or maybe it's just wishful thinking. Who knows. All I know is that there is a soul soothing comfort in that sea that I have never felt anywhere else and that days like last Sunday are something rather special indeed.....and most certainly, níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán fein.
*p.s. I know Yeats was talking about lake water lapping, but the sea does it too..!
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