The Green Road

I dream of a horse. He is standing in a pool of water that stretches to an endless horizon, water so still the sky reads double, the thin elegant line separating above and below. It is twilight, some pink-blue-white-purple blend that signifies the in-between-ness of it. Larger than life, light shimmers off his perfect coat. He looks at me as I stand at the edge of a crowd, one part of a semi-circle moon around him. I am filled with a feeling of quiet expectation.

Months later, I step across the facets of an emerald in the ocean, Ireland. My fellow travelers and I are in the Burren, home of John O’Donohue, author of Anam Cara. We walk in contemplation over a five thousand year old untouched by cars and modern life. The road rises to meet us, step after step.

There is a sense of out-of-time-ness here. Rock walls line our path. The same rock walls used by those who lived here during another time. Many other times. Who’s to say whether those stones were placed there a year ago, or 500 years ago, or two thousand years ago?

I imagine the soundscape has not changed—the wind whistled the same way when those rock houses were homes. The sound of the wobble of rock on rock must have been the same for long-dead ears. The sound of the scuff of feet on road must have been the same under long-dead feet. Wildflowers dot the open fields carved by time and human hands... probably the same flowers that dotted the fields back and back and back. I hope the clover tasted as sweet then as it does now.

We write love letters to ourselves with chalk as we walk, purple, pink, blue etches against the gray slate, a welcome distraction from the slow progress up the steep hill. We carve words like “loving,” “brilliant,” and “makes good soup,” a testimony to how far each of us has come to be able to write those words at all. Delighted to find that it is easier to describe the ways we love ourselves than we imagined. Chalk dust floats away on the wind, whispering hopes for the future to the four corners of the world.

Exuberant now, it’s hard to stay quiet. My friend Ian has a smile from ear to ear and says to me how wonderful is this! and doesn’t hear the instructions to walk in silence. We giggle as I remind him. My friend Adam passes me sweet treats that his two boys sent along with him, syrupy sweet fruit chews explode in my mouth, both welcome and gross at the same time, a reminder of the simple pleasures of childhood.

A turn up a hill. The day is hot, the sun pierces. There is no shade—few trees live here on these hills. The occasional scrappy hawthorn clings, growing parallel to the road, showing us what it is to have constant pressure shaping the way you grow. Bent by the wind, pointing the way in which it’s been molded. If that tree could talk, what would she say? She would speak of quiet struggle, of life in hard beautiful places, of triumph and survival.

We hear only our breath, our feet, and the breeze. The wind somehow seems always at our backs, though, auspicious. We trudge up until familiar shapes snag the eye. A cross. A rock that looks like an upside down question mark. Is that rock carving natural or man-made? Impossible to tell. It speaks to me of casting doubt away for just a moment.

Nothing else marks out the spot; we would have missed it but our leader walks behind the cross across the grass, around a discreet bend in the ground, and down a set of carved stairs to a hidden holy well. The old kind of holy that came before and will outlast any organized religion.

We are each invited to descend to the water, have a moment there, and then present ourselves to the group the way we want to be in the world—our real selves—in silence. I descend to a cleft of rocks, an opening in the hill, dark, cool, blooming with life. Small offerings dot the rock shelves and I wish for something to give. I can only whisper “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Water cool and slippery between my fingers, I stand before them and raise my hands above my head to the sky, then bring them to my head.

I bless myself.

I place my hands on my body.

I bless myself.

I bend and place my hands on the green earth, fingers threaded with grass and flowers.

I bless myself.

Whole. There is no need for approval or permission. I have given it. It is a baptism of the self, a cleansing that comes only from within. Back against the earth, I lay on the grass and watch my fellow travelers express themselves silently in their own way, a more sacred act I have never seen and may never see again. Each motion is freedom.

We leave the place reluctantly. It’s been so long in the dark winter of my soul that I forgot what “happy tears,” as my daughter calls them, feel like. I want to fly back down the hill, my legs matching the flight of my Self. We continue the walk in silence, sun dappling and dazzling off the ocean around us, horizon line stretching on forever, a thin blue line separating above and below.

Far out at the curve of the road waits the van that will carry us away. Tired now, I look forward to relief of the end. Just as we reach the bend in the road there appears a horse, standing against the rock fence as if waiting. We gather around him, a half circle of stillness. He regards us with quiet recognition, looking each one of us in the eye, as if to say “I have been waiting.”