Entering the stones
I came to Ireland with my father, who bled his romance of Ireland into me all my life, making me believe I was as Irish as those born here. But like many Americans of many diasporas, I am rootless neither able to claim America as my indigenous home, nor can I claim Europe. As children of immigrants, we do not have soil of a homeland to dig our withered roots into.All the same, I came to Ireland as it’s my father’s dream, this candle of belonging he has kept alive his entire life.
His candle flame brought me to Ireland 30 years ago, and that was the cold water when I was not welcomed “home”. I realized I was clearly American, not European. I learned that being an American was distasteful as the American tourist is often a loud buffoon.
Still, that flame burned in my dad all these years and he is not able to manage all the strings involved with traveling. I was planning the trip when we got here and I decided to indulge my passion of myth-architecture and archeology into our days. So I dragged him to stone forts, burial mounds, ruined churches along rugged coastlines. We were in to Tara, Brú na Bóinn, Kenmare and Kealkil stone circles. These are the places where kings stood, where gods spoke to the people, where the stars were lined in our hands.
In these wordless places, I thought I could steel myself against the enchantment of Ireland as she did not welcome me that lifetime ago.
Then I found myself drawn into a place with roots. To a land that holds the mystery of stones without stories, into the green hills, into a land that remembers my ancestors even if I cannot.
It is hard to separate myself from the tourist who wants to look, snap a picture, and say they’ve seen Ireland’s stones — the fairy rings, the portals to other worlds already woven into our psyches. Why do we come and stand before a stone circle with no story? To look at a mound of earth that remembers ash and bone.
And yet I stand here: stones rising from the grass, alone on a hill or hidden in a meadow. The wind moves through, and the green here is not the emerald of postcards, nor the dark forests of my American home, but a living spring-green, potent with life. Lichen clings to the stones, indifferent to our stories. The stone surfaces are smoothed by millennia of hands — sweating, hoping and cold deep into the inky darkness of rock- as the lichen pursues its unknown paths up the rocks.
The ravens wear white feathers woven into their black. They are silent unlike the black shining ones at home who beckon me for treats. The black and white Irish ravens are watchers, standing guard, wary of every step we take. My daughters and I have been long fans of corvids and see them everywhere as they watch the world without the familiar cawing of their cousins in the states. I am drawn to the white feathers- a perfect melding of shadow and light, the blending of the white and black crow. The wind lifts under them if we move too suddenly and they loft into the brooding gray skies.
Some hills still carry the myths: the Tuatha Dé Danann, the people of the goddess Danu, who came in radiant ships like the Vanir of the Norse — only the Tuatha had poets enough to keep their names alive. They stepped into Ireland with their radiance, and then disappeared into the otherworld, through these mysterious stone circles. Although the Tuatha came after the arrival of the circles, they embedded themselves into the land, disappearing into the forts and stone circles that predated their coming before the arrival of Celts.
We love myth and story and though scholars will dispute the claims of lore as fact, a sense in our bones that the lore is a fact. It is a wordless place where everything does not need to be measured or make sense. When we stand in the stone circles, we long for the mystery to return for the Tuatha to tell us their secrets.
I read about the great burial mound north of Dublin-Brú na Bóinn. The lore speaks the master god Dagda held the sun in place to allow for the birth of his child by another man’s wife- Boinn. Always these stories strike me with their moralistic framing. When do gods care about monogamy? I sense the story is an old one about the sacred trinity: mother-father-child. The river goddess- the mother Boinn connects to the great god Dagda and their divine child Oengus, the dreamer and singer. We know this divine child of Christ as he shines along all the churches in the west.
But our modern minds do not allow us to stay in myth. We want facts, timelines, explanations. We measure solstices, alignments, study the dirt and name all the chemicals. Scholars dig out bones in hills and try to make sense of what likely does not make sense to our modern minds. Now, my dad and I take photographs with my kids. We watch children climbing on the stones. My dad puts his hands on the stones and prays, sensing the gods that call him back to place that feels like home. Ireland knew how to honor death with these stones and mounds. There was no need to build anything grand- let the stones and dirt collapse back into the earth it came from. Let the Egyptians keep their pyramids.
Ireland and Northern Europe lack the grand majesty of ancient monuments seen in southern countries like Egypt or Mexico. There is a bias, a sense that elaborate monuments equals greatness, but does it really? The cost of the Egyptian pyramids was a high and still tourists measure greatness with their cameras like they do in Ireland. Are we missing something as we hide behind the lens, are we able to listen when when hang our framed picture of Tara on our wall.
All the same, without grandeur, the stones call. Their smoothness carries the oils of human hands, the longing to touch what might once have been divine. The wind moves over the hills. I place my palm to the rock, let go of answers, and listen. The blur of what is unknown gathers inside me- a wordless place.
So when I stand there, with my dad, my hands beside him on those stones, I pray to my lost ancestors. I listen. The stones tell me nothing lasts forever, not even me, then I sense the belonging we all share- belonging to the bones of this earth.
