North East towards West

Belfast. Hooray! When I arrive here today from the Dublin airport by car, I’m met by an icy wind, rain, hail. The girl in the café where I shelter until it passes says: “Oh! that’s Belfast. The sun will be shining in a moment.” And she’s right. Blue sky jostles the clouds briefly but the wind is still chilling.

The city has a hybrid quality, perhaps because I’m projecting the sectarian and political past onto my experience of it.  There are many skin colours, languages and accents here. It’s not just a Presbyterian//Catholic village. I’m bemused and confused by the chaotic inner city road junctions as I try to find my hotel. I spin around the CBD for over an hour, occasionally pulling into illegal parking spots to try and get my bearings. Even with the GPS I’m lost, until I stop and ask a woman for directions. In what is such typical Irish fashion, she goes to great lengths to make sure I know where it is I’m heading. “Over there, Dunagall Rd. Near that rusty-looking building. Keep to the left mind as you go around the round-about.”

But I didn’t and had to circle again to get it right. Finally, the hotel emerges in a road I’ve travelled down at least twice already. It was there all the time. The adrenaline subsides. I’ll have a bed for the night, which, with all things jet lag considered, is saying something to be sure.

Leaning west and on to...

What is West? I lean into (or onto) something that summons while it connotes: a paradigm. Can I remain within (or without) those frames? Am I too sensitive to connotation? I am travelling west to experience places so why be caught in the net of cultural and political artefact? Because everything is cultural and political. Even landscape?

The land/scapes of western Tasmania and western Ireland are geographical positions, lands that pause at edges creased by the sea. Rivers flow into the sea, across ecosystems that merge and diverge. Diversity is always present...

Leaning West

Soon I will travel to Ireland’s west coast, to the Burren, to its escarpments, castles, and narrow winding roads. I will enter a landscape unprepared for what it may offer my senses and imagination. For four weeks I will look, listen, smell, taste, and move within its physical and emotional borders.

What is this imaginal space? From here, in south east Tasmania, I imagine a grey sky, a steady cold wind and rain. The grass will be green along the roadsides and in the fields. Rocks will persist, broken by gulfs of gorse and blackberry. I base these assumptions on my experience of Connemara, a short distance north, across Galway Bay, where, in Leitir Mealláin (Lettermullen) last year, I walked on narrow roads between flat grey rocks that rose like over-inflated cushions in neglected fields of weeds. And hearsay: oh only rocks there in the Burren, but unique.

I’m preparing myself for something harsh and damp. Nothing like the dryness of Provence with its limestone cliffs, terracotta homes, heat haze and dominant blue skies. The Burren will be green and grey. Before I muster my energy for the long flight and driving I will head to Tasmania’s west coast, to the Tarkine, a space too of rock, cold winds and green but with forests and sand and very few houses. There I will reflect, revive my senses and take my memories, in my body, to the Burren.

day's end

sigh at the sky

as its lights go out

sun

a winter horizons

as I block this heat at my window

grapes

a vine smooths a trellis

lumps form

to juice

what

what of now?

salute the carpet, festering

greet a bird in tapestry, caroling

here

they say it's coming

now what?

did

you?