Irish Writers & The Symbolic Life
“If you want to know Ireland body and soul you must read its poems and stories.”
Irish Writers
I created the Irish Writers series on Instagram to share some of Ireland’s extraordinarily rich literary heritage with you. For such a small island, Ireland has produced some of the finest writers in the world. Playwrights, poets, short story writers and four Nobel Prize winners, to name but a few, it is an extraordinary heritage.
The earliest writing in Ireland dates back to the 7th Century. Over the years, many of the writers in Ireland have drawn inspiration from a sense of place, language, the use of historical images, mythology and the landscape of Ireland herself as inspiration.
“I’m an Irish poet, I always have been and always will be….so much of a poet’s formation is to do with rootedness, not just in a place but in a past…For good or ill, I am constructed by that past, from the journey of those events and the struggle of that history.”
Eavan Boland
Many of the Irish writers of this small island wrote about what it means to connect to a sense of place, to connect to home, to connect to Ireland, to its native language, and this, too, has often been an expression of a yearning and sense of exile within. When we know who we are, who our people are, and what our heritage is, we come into the ground of our being. As Yeats pointed out, we need to know the writers, poets, and playwrights of that landscape and country to come to know Ireland in our own body and soul.
“Ireland for me is moments of its history, its geography, a line from a Synge play, the whiff of night air… I open a book, a school book maybe or a book of superstition, or a book of placenames and I have only to see the names of Ballyhooly or Raheen to be plunged into that world from which I have derived such a richness and an unquenchable grief.”
Edna O’Brien
In all of my work, I draw inspiration from the rich heritage of Irish Writers to deepen your inner life experience and sense of self and heritage. This series is designed to deepen your connection to Ireland, to the heart and soul of the country, and to the rich literary heritage of its people.
Latest Irish Writers
“When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart.”
Poetry and the Inner World
Poets write about life, love, passion, hope and despair. They write about places, events and experiences in their everyday lives; they open our eyes and allow us to feel emotions that we might otherwise not feel or are unable to express. Through the symbolic and metaphoric, poetry can take us beyond our literal analytical minds and drop us down into an embodied soul experience.
Poetry invites us into our inner world, the inner landscape. It enlivens us, moves us, and touches our hearts. It has the power to support us in life’s transitions, allowing us to feel less alone when we hear and connect to the felt sense of the poem and, in turn, the soul of that poet.
Poetry, art, mythology, and dreams are mediators between the unconscious and the conscious mind. Like any art form, poetry has long been a medium for expressing the inner world, expressing what is often inexpressible, connecting into the deepest emotional and intuitive experiences of what it means to be a human being.
Not all poetry will resonate with everyone. For one person, one poem or poet will really speak to them. For another, it will not because our inner landscape is unique. What it does provide, like all art, is a way to access the deeper archetypal truths that are an aspect of our personal and collective unconscious.
“The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.”
Walking Between Worlds
In my new Walking Between Worlds series, we cross the threshold into the Inner World and the realm of the spirit in an immersive journey of self-discovery and sacred time or ‘deep time’, which encompasses the past, the present, and the future. It is the time of landscape, cosmology, dreaming, the space for the ‘subtle body’, and the time of the soul. This is the symbolic world. This is the landscape of poetry.
In modern society, we are often disconnected from the symbolic life, making us feel alienated and fragmented. We also can feel exiled from our personal and cultural heritage and lineage, our personal symbols, such as the symbolic references that resonate if our ancestors grew up in Ireland, (when we did not), and yet we feel it, somewhere within, it resonates. There is a world of images and symbols that speak to us deep down, but we don’t quite know why. We can often feel a sense of yearning, a sense of exile. From a core aspect of ourselves, we can feel a sense of yearning within.
William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
By William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
It's so interesting that this poem by W. B. Yeats often appears in the top 10 Best Irish Poems list. It speaks to a deep longing to return to a place, a place of being, beauty, presence, wonder, “the deep heart’s core.”
Deepening the Senses and this new series aims to support you in reconnecting to your own inner world and to cultivate a relationship with that deep heart’s core, to spark your creative instinct, your sense of wonder and curiosity, exploring the mystery of life, attuning to the symbolism of the Celtic rites and ancient lore, and to make conscious the ancestral lineage, building a relationship with your depths, to help you return to a sense of a home within. Walking Between Worlds aims to connect you to the symbolic life.
Through the power of metaphor and imagination, we have a connection to the sacred and the mystery. We yearn to transcend and to know that inner life, that sense of the sacred in our daily lives, a sense of meaning and purpose. So often, this is what we feel we are missing. When I speak of the ‘sacred’, I speak of a call to meaning in our lives, to touch the mystery, the numinous, a call to wholeness. The sacred that connects us to something larger than ourselves, Poetry is a powerful and very beautiful portal into the unseen world within us all.
“Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slated roof,
I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me”
Seamus Heaney
A Herbal , Human Chain 2010.
The poet Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s poet Laureate, was often asked in interviews when he first discovered poetry, the feel for it in his body, for the very first time.
In one interview, he says:
“When I think back, it’s sensation, really, rather than intellect that returns to me. A feel for places. I mean, the body stores so much. I can remember holding the handles of a horse plough, for example, with my father’s hands over my hands to help me guide it. When the plowshare would hit a small stone in the furrow, that traveled back up the handles through the grip into your own hand like a little bleep. I still remember that, but I think that’s not uncommon, is it? What is stored bodily is very important for memory, and I think that other bodily sensations later on can bring it all back.” (1)
Heaney was once asked about the value of poetry. He said, “If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.” To fortify your inner life and your inwardness is to cultivate an inner anchor, a sense of ground, an authentic self, and an inner home within.
Therein lies the gift.
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Walking Between Worlds
Spring Program
This four-month program engages with the Celtic world and spirit. It is set up so you will have weekly content to explore in digestible amounts, mixed in with a monthly LIVE workshop to explore the concept with the group. Each month builds upon the next, exploring another aspect of the Mother Archetype and allowing you to fully experience, reflect, learn and heal from the mother wounds in your life.
References:
An Interview with Seamas Heaney - IN Brick, A Literary Journal vol 86
