February Path Finding

“When it's not always raining there'll be days like this. When there's no one complaining there'll be days like this. When everything falls into place like the flick of a switch. Well my mama told me there'll be days like this.”

—Van Morrison, “Days Like This”

43 degrees and raining. Sunset, 5:43pm. Sunrise tomorrow at 7:41am. Current time 4:44pm.

I have established a routine and it’s quite nice. Now, with a handle on classes, I feel like it is time to get to work on research. I meet next week with the archive assistants for the Seamus Heaney Centre collections to make plans for my study of poet Ciaran Carson. He’s a true poet of place, grounded here, a lifelong, prolific poet of Belfast.

I’d been seeking to capture what it is about Irish poets and their precision of language and voluptuous diction, when I heard a good description in a documentary entitled Ireland:Power of the Poets where Margaret Mills Harper said “It’s important to read Irish poetry because it’s delightful. It’s rich in the mouth like biting into a good apple.”

It’s luscious and thick. It’s like for each image, the poet chooses the one, most plump, and busting with visceral imaginings and meaning. They didn’t pick an image that would make do, they chose an image that won’t quit. It’s a lesson in not settling for the adequate.

I think this shows up in culture here too, in the way things are a bit more attentive; table service expects you to take your time, coffee is not usually “to go,” people linger and tell long tales, people talk a lot, and I’ve found it difficult to slow down and listen. It is a challenge for me, because I am impatient. It’s about being in the moment and completely listening to who is in front of you. I made a challenge for myself when I started this semester that I would put the phone down and be more in the moment. Not wanting to pay cell roaming has helped me do this. I’m only relying on WiFi. So it means going old school for mapping, remembering road names, paying attention to my surroundings. I was letting those things slip with a constant reliance on the phone. Now I have a little more research and memorization. I have to try a little harder and resist the urge to just get things done, but instead, make the effort to level up. I’ve started asking myself on all my projects; how can I push this further? How can I find and go past the edge? How can I cross a new threshold into discovery?

In other discoveries—I went to The Crown and Liqueur Saloon for Guinness Pie.  It’s a heavily breaded Irish beef pot pie, served with mashed potatoes and peas and carrots. It’s not something to write home about. It needed less bread, more beef, and a lot of salt. I usually don’t eat beef, so this was a stretch. My great grandmother, Emma Easter Sipes Gentle made a much better beef roast —that would melt in your mouth. And, with veggies grown in the back yard in a small garden by the railroad tracks off Shelton Avenue. The Guinness itself, however, was grand. I still have the 15s and a good bakery on my list, so don’t you worry.

I’ve been drawing too. I decided I’d be map-making, plotting my poems on a landscape, and drawing the places I’m seeing. I’m doing mixed media in pencil, colored pencil, and watercolor. It has been good to have time for drawing.

I made many travel plans. It’s daunting, I feel like I should just be still a bit, but time is short, and if I’m going to see and experience this place, I need to move beyond Belfast. I’ll visit Edinburgh and Glasgow first, in March, then in April, Rathlin Island, Doolin, Dingle, Cliffs of Moher, Aran Islands, Cardiff, Wales for the Fulbright Forum, back to Galway for a literary conference, then in May, a tour of castles, and in June, Saint Andrew’s Scotland for the Fulbright debrief and finally Kingdom Kerry. I feel like I’m on tour! Speaking of tours, next weekend I’ll see Van Morrison on Saturday at Queens and Sturgill Simpson on Sunday at The Telegraph. I taught Van Morrison in the Belfast poetry class, so I’m super stoked to be able to see him. I don’t think he does many concerts anymore.

So it’s busy and interesting. Still. It’s hard not to feel like I’m missing something. I have missed some significant events for my family this past week. And while they didn’t expect me to be there, I expected to. I guess that is the nature of life. I often wonder about the sacrifice of my choices; what am I giving up to be here? Am I following the best path? What if I had not come here? Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel” reigns in my head; “surely it would have been a pity not to have seen the trees along this road,

really exaggerated in their beauty,

not to have seen them gesturing

like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.”

Luckily, I usually trust my path and find fortuitous connections everywhere. I might even mistake it for divinity at times, so I don’t dwell. But I do miss y’all.