Dreaming Ireland

I’m an American.

As for most who can claim that name, this means my ancestors came from many places.

But the largest, by a long way, part of who I am, well over half, is as a child of the Irish diaspora. Four of my great grandparents were born in the old Sod…

And so I can’t completely ignore today. Even if it is a silly holiday we Americans observe. Memories of a Catholic missionary drowned in green beer.

But aren’t our dreams of holy lands always something like that?

And life itself, life itself?

Sometimes this sotted dreaming leads to blood and fire. And here in this country, in my childhood and beyond, nostalgic dollars funding killing in a distant land for obscure goals rarely standing up to any close scrutiny…

Like so many diaspora dreams…

And, yet, there is something in that longing, that heart feeling.

Something deep and true
about who we are and what home is…

A pointing.

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And a remembering in our bodies of something that in fact lies not in the past but in the present.

Here…

Now…