A witch lurks in the woods around Sarn Helen, north Wales
A witch lurks in the woods around Sarn Helen, north Wales
on a path through a pathless forest
or a maze, a labyrinth.
As she walks, she spins
and the fine threads fall behind her
following her way,
telling
where she is going,
telling
where she has gone.
Telling the story.
The line, the thread of voice,
the sentences saying the way.
Ursula K. Le Guin1
I knew the road was there, but I couldn’t find it. The way wasn’t marked, and there were so many possible paths to take. The Ordnance Survey map should have provided a clue; I could just about see the name of the track, but I’d left my glasses behind in my B&B, and the print was so tiny that I couldn’t make out in which direction I needed to turn at the start of this journey to find my way onto it. I find Ordnance Survey maps challenging at the best of times; maybe I’ve wrestled with too many of them. They seem to have a life of their own, and I can never get them to fold back up properly. I did my best and stuffed the crumpled map back in my little rucksack, and as a result, instead of going straight on as I later discovered I should have done, I headed with an entirely unwarranted sense of confidence off to the right. So it was that I found myself wandering up and down a seemingly endless network of deserted tracks in the beautiful Gwydyr Forest, which neighbours the village of Betws-y-Coed in the Snowdonia National Park in North Wales. Meanwhile, a small handful of kilometres to the north, old Yr Wyddfa himself looked down at me and laughed.
There was some irony in the fact that I was losing my way while looking for Elen of the Ways. Or, to be precise, I was looking for Sarn Helen (sometimes, Sarn Elen): Elen’s Causeway, the old Roman road which runs through North Wales. This 260-kilometre-long road connects Aberconwy in the north with Carmarthen in the west – though there’s still some debate about its precise route, as there are long stretches which have been lost over the centuries and are now unidentifiable. Many sections of it have been overlaid by the modern road network; other parts can still be seen in something very close to their original form. The road is named after the woman who is sometimes called Elen of the Hosts, sometimes called Elen of the Ways, and also sometimes identified with Saint Elen of Caernarfon. Elen is an elusive character, existing in the tangled, gnarly borderlands between myth and history. We find her most memorably in ‘The Dream of Macsen Wledig’, a story within the medieval Welsh manuscript, The Mabinogion, most of the contents of which emerged from ancient tales in the oral tradition. In this particular story, Elen is said to have ordered the construction of great roads through Wales.
I seemed to be intent on repeatedly heading off in the same wrong direction at the beginning of my journey: I had also veered off to the right on my first foray into the forest that morning. But this was such a lovely path that I followed it anyway, even when it became clear that it was taking me in a different direction from the old road which was marked on the map. I made my way along a couple of different tributaries, accompanied by the softest of rain, walking entranced through mysterious fairy-tale woods thick with gnarly logs covered in moss, and lichen-encrusted rocks cosy under thick blankets of shiny ivy. One particularly striking cluster of tree stumps in front of a large, dark crevice in a rock face looked for all the world like a pair of shaggy-haired, horned monsters emerging from a cave, arms outstretched, staggering towards me. A tall, dead tree reached out to me a thin arm with long thorn-like fingers; it had a crooked nose and tangled vines for hair, like an old witch of the woods. I began to see faces in the rocks. I passed dark pools and ditches gleaming with jewel-like frogspawn; tiny streams tumbled down from the mountains, finding the most unlikely paths, carving their way through ancient channels in tree-root and rock.
For sure this tiny road was magical – but it wasn’t Sarn Helen. And then it stopped, quietly petering out into the trees. I brought myself to a halt and stood there perplexed, for all the world as lost as the archetypical fairy-tale heroine in the dark woods. Looking for the right path, and failing to find it. Lost down another dead end.
It wasn’t till that evening, back in my B&B and poring over the map with a magnifying glass, that I understood the mistake I’d made at the very beginning of the journey. So I set off for a third attempt the next morning, and this time I followed the direction the path had been pointing in all along. I passed through a small gate, and finally set foot on Elen’s Causeway.
Unlike most Roman roads, Sarn Helen is not straight; it winds its way across north Wales over high moors and through hidden, wooded valleys. It is a remarkable piece of road-building through challenging terrain, and as you look at the remote mountainous landscape through which it passes, it is hard to imagine its construction in the first place, and harder still to imagine Roman troops marching along it. The road climbed steeply at first through this beautiful forest of Gwydyr, which stories tell us once was filled with great oaks. Now, after centuries of felling and of managed forestry, it is mostly coniferous, but in recent years there’s been a resurgence in the planting of native broadleaf species. It spreads across an undulating landscape which rises to 300 metres above sea level and is divided by the various valleys of the rivers Llugwy, Lledr and Machno – all of which are tributaries of the River Conwy. Mostly, the forest’s growth is quite open, so from time to time there were spectacular views over these valleys and up to the mountains of the Glyderau, the Carneddau and to Snowdon.
But I wasn’t there for the views, I was there for the road. Its old surface was cobbled and uneven; I stepped carefully, always conscious of the texture of the ancient stones underfoot. I walked sometimes with my eyes closed, in deep awareness of the continuity I felt so strongly in this place, knowing that I was just one more among countless pairs of feet that would have trodden this path down the centuries. My steps overlaying theirs, never wiping them out, just joining them. Adding another layer of memory across this well-walked land. In places the road was bordered by banks a couple of feet high, thick with moss and lichen, studded with trees. Sometimes the banks would give way to a low drystone wall; at other times, heather fringed the edges of the road and spread out into the woods I was passing through. Close to the abandoned village of Rhiwddolion a rocky outcrop loomed over the path. I looked up to see a single sheep high above me, lying down on a narrow shelf cut into the sheer rock face. Unperturbed, it tracked me with its eyes as I ambled past, just following for a while the road which Elen made.
~
The handsome and vigorous man who came to be known in Britain as Macsen Wledig was the emperor of Rome, where he was called Maximus. One day, at the end of a meeting he had called with the thirty-two kings whose countries were subject to Rome’s rule, he suggested that they might all go hunting together the next morning. So at daybreak they set off together, Macsen and his kings. They rode through the cool, crisp air of the morning until they came to a green wooded valley through which ran the great river Tiber, and they hunted there till midday. By that time the sun was fierce and scorching, and so Macsen decided to stop and rest. His attendants gathered themselves around him and rested their shields on the shafts of their spears to shade him from the sun, and they placed a gold-enamelled shield under his head. So Macsen slept . . .
. . . and in a fine stone castle on a misty island far, far to the west, a weaver of dreampaths cocked her head to the east, and cast out a thread. As Macsen slept, he dreamed. In this dream he was riding farther on along the valley they had hunted in, following the Tiber to its source. After some time he came to a mountain, a mountain so high that it seemed to touch the sky. When he crossed over it and reached the other side, he looked down onto the most beautiful land that he had ever seen. Several mighty rivers flowed down the mountain and out to the sea, and Macsen travelled on along the banks of the largest of them. Finally, he came to a city by the coast, and in the centre of the city there was a vast and beautiful castle with high towers of many different colours. And he saw a great fleet of ships at the mouth of the river, the largest fleet he had ever seen. One of the ships was larger and fairer than all the others; half of it was gold and the other half was silver, and a bridge made of whalebone arced across the water from the ship to the land. Macsen dismounted from his horse and walked across the bridge and into the ship. As he stepped on board, the sail was hoisted and the ship began to sail across the ocean.
On they sailed, and eventually the ship came to rest on the shore of the fairest island in the whole world. In his dream, Macsen travelled along the length and breadth of this country, from sea to sea. He saw beautiful green valleys, great woods, towering mountains and rocky precipices. He had never seen an island so rich, so diverse in its landscapes. And then finally, approaching the rugged far western shore of this breathtaking land, he saw another island, a little way out to sea. Between him and this smaller island stretched vast green plains surrounded by high mountains, and from the highest mountain of all a great river flowed down through the land and spilled into the sea. At the mouth of that river stood a castle, the finest that Macsen had ever seen, and the door of the castle was open, so he went in.
Macsen found himself in a magnificent hall. Its roof was made of silver, its walls of glittering precious gems, and the great double doors were made of gold. Golden seats and silver tables filled the hall, and in the centre of it, two red-haired youths were playing a game which looked like chess. The game-board was made of silver, and the pieces on it were made of gold. The youths were clothed in jet-black satin; bands of red gold, encrusted with sparkling rubies and other fine gems, bound up their hair. They had shoes of fine new leather, fastened by buttons which also were made of gold.
Beside a pillar at the far end of the hall was a grey-haired, clear-browed man sitting in a chair of ivory, with two golden eagles carved into its back. The man, who gave the impression of immense power, had gold bracelets on his arms, many rings on his hands, and a golden torque around his neck; his hair was held back from his face with a golden diadem. A game-board was laid out on a low table before him, and he held a rod of gold in one hand and a steel file in the other. Macsen saw that he was carving out pieces which looked like chessmen for the board.
Next to him was a young woman, sitting in a great chair of red gold. She was so beautiful, so blindingly beautiful – she shone brighter than the midday sun – that Macsen could hardly bear to look at her. She wore a gown of white silk with gold clasps at her breast, and an overdress of gold cloth. The gold circlet on her head was studded with rubies and gems and pearls, and a girdle of gold was wrapped around her small waist. In Macsen’s dream the woman rose from her seat; he walked towards her and took her in his arms, and then they sat down together in her great chair of gold. But just as he was turning to face her, into his dream crept the sound of dogs chafing at their leashes, and the sound of shields falling against each other, and the beating together of spear-shafts as the canopy constructed by his attendants collapsed, and the neighing of horses and the sound of men rousing themselves from sleep . . .
. . . and so the emperor awoke. But all he could think of was the beautiful woman in his dream, and the great love that he had felt for her. And so, with the saddest face and heaviest heart in the world, he returned with his hunting party to Rome.
For a full week, Macsen languished in his rooms. He didn’t go out, or eat, or drink; no song or tale could interest him, and he couldn’t be persuaded to do anything but sleep, for it was only in his dreams that he thought he might see her again. One day, Macsen’s senior adviser told him that all the members of his court – indeed, all of the people of Rome – were whispering against him. ‘Why are they doing this?’ Macsen asked, and his adviser said, ‘Because no one can get a word out of you, or an answer to a question, or a judgement on a matter of importance. And so they say you are no true lord.’ And Macsen said, ‘Bring to me the wisest men of Rome, and I will tell them why I am so sorrowful, and ask for their advice.’
The wise men of Rome were brought before the emperor. ‘In a dream I saw a woman,’ he said to them, ‘and for lack of her there is neither life nor spirit in me.’ Macsen told them the full story of his dream, and at the end of it the wise men answered, ‘Lord, this is our counsel: that you send messengers to the three directions of the world to search for the land and for the woman in your dream, for surely they may be found. And the hope of good news will comfort you in the months ahead.’
So Macsen sent out messengers, and they journeyed throughout the world for a year, seeking information about the land he had sailed to in his dream, and the woman he had seen in the castle. But when the messengers came back to Rome, they knew no more than they had known when they set out. Macsen was filled with sorrow, and a great wave of hopelessness descended on him. Then his senior adviser spoke to him again. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘let us go out to hunt in exactly the same way you went on the day you had your dream, and we will see if we can trace the path that was laid out before you.’ And so the emperor went out as if to hunt, and came again to the green wooded valley of the great river Tiber. ‘This is the place!’ he remembered, and then the details of his dream began to come back to him. ‘This is where I was sleeping, and in my dream I followed the river westward to its source. This is where it begins, the path that was laid out for me in my dream.’
And so thirteen messengers set out from that place at Macsen’s command. Soon they came to a high mountain, and on the other side of it were vast plains, and large rivers flowing through them. ‘Look!’ they exclaimed to each other. ‘This must be the land which the emperor saw!’ And as Macsen had instructed them, they travelled the full length of the greatest of the rivers until they came to its mouth at the sea, and there was the vast city, and the many-coloured high towers of the castle. The largest fleet in the world floated there in the harbour, with one ship that was larger and fairer than any of the others. And again they exclaimed, ‘Look! This is the place that the emperor dreamed about!’
They took berths in the great ship and crossed the sea, and so it was that they came to the island of Britain. And they travelled across the island until they came to the great high mountain of Snowdon; then they journeyed on until they arrived in the territory of Arvon, and saw the Isle of Anglesey laid out before them. ‘Look!’ they said to each other in wonderment. ‘Here at last is the island the emperor saw in his sleep!’ They made their way finally to Aber Sain, and to a great castle at the mouth of the river. The door of the castle was open, and they went in, and entered into a marvellous, rich hall. And there in the hall were two young men playing a game which looked like chess, and a grey-haired man in an ivory chair carving golden chessmen, and a beautiful young woman beside him, sitting in a chair of gold.
The messengers knelt and greeted the woman, hailing her as the empress of Rome. She frowned at them and said, ‘You look and behave as if you are honourable men, and so why do you mock me?’ The messengers assured her that it was no mockery. ‘The emperor of Rome himself has seen you in a dream, and now he has fallen in love and cannot live without you. So tell us: will you go with us to Rome and be made empress?’ And the young woman laughed at the messengers and said, ‘If it is true that the emperor of Rome loves me, let him come here himself to find me.’
So the messengers hurried back to Rome, and told Macsen what they had seen. ‘We will be your guides, lord,’ they said to him, ‘over sea and over land, to the place where the woman you love lives. We know her name, and her kindred, and her race.’
And so Macsen set off at once, with his army at his back. They landed in the island of Britain and Macsen conquered it, taking it from Beli the son of Manogan and his sons, all of whom he drove back to the sea. After his conquests he rode on to Arvon, and at Aber Sain he recognised the castle from his dream. He hurried through its wide-open door, and on he strode into the magnificent hall, and there at its centre he saw Kynan and Adeon, the sons of Euday, playing at gwyddbwyll, the ancient game of destiny and divination. And he saw Euday himself, the son of Caradawc, sitting on a chair of ivory, carving out golden men for his own golden game-board. And there beside Euday, sitting on a chair of gold, was his daughter, the maiden Macsen had seen in his dream. He knew now that her name was Elen.
Macsen knelt before Elen and said, ‘Empress of Rome, all hail!’ That night, she became his bride.
The next morning, as was customary, Elen asked Macsen for a wedding gift. He told her to name whatever she wanted, and he would see that it was done. So Elen asked to have the island of Britain for her father: all the land from the Channel to the Irish Sea. She asked for the three adjacent islands for herself, to hold under her title of Empress of Rome. And she asked finally that three great castles should be made for her, in whatever places she might choose in the island of Britain. To all of this Macsen agreed.
Elen chose to have the greatest of her three castles built at Arvon, and Macsen stayed there with her. So that he would not be homesick, earth from Rome was brought onto the site of the new castle. After that, the two other castles were built for her at Caerleon and Carmarthen. When the castles were finished, Elen looked around her and declared that she would create great roads which connected one castle to another, and which crossed the island of Britain. So Elen it was who caused the great roads of the land to be built, and her army watched over her roads and used them to travel up and down the country to keep it safe. And that is why they are called Sarnau Elen: the Causeways of Elen. For Elen was a native of this land, and the men of Britain would not have built such great roads for anyone other than her.
~
Elen it was who built the roads, and so it is that some call her Elen of the Ways. It’s not as unlikely an idea as it may sound: in his ground-breaking book The Ancient Paths,2 historian Graham Robb argues convincingly that many of the roads attributed to the Romans actually were founded on old Celtic tracks which already formed a great network across Europe. These long, straight roads were created after exacting surveys and precise geometric analyses, because the Celtic peoples were surprisingly sophisticated astronomers and engineers. And so it is entirely possibly that these old causeways which are known as Sarnau Elen, as well as other such roads, were founded on paths which had been constructed and used by native people long before the arrival of the Romans. In this respect, it’s interesting that Elen has her road-building equivalents in other Celtic countries. In Brittany, for example, the giantess Ahès, the old goddess of the Osmises, the Gaulish tribes who occupied the land before the arrival of the British settlers, is credited with the creation of causeways. The Roman roads throughout Brittany, then, are called the Chemins d’Ahès, or Henchou Ahes (in Breton), and the stories say that Ahès built the roads herself, carrying with her the rocks and stones which were needed. Following the same mythical thread, we find that ‘Chemin d’Ahès’ is also a name given in Brittany to the Milky Way.
Elen, like so many other female characters in The Mabinogion, is a representative of Sovereignty, the goddess of the land, and Macsen’s dream is reminiscent of an aisling – the Irish word for a mystic vision in which a spéirbhean (literally, a ‘sky-woman’, a woman of the Otherworld who personifies the country of Ireland itself) appears to a hero. There are two main features of an aisling: it offers a vision of a beautiful Otherworldly woman who the dreamer subsequently longs for, and it inspires the dreamer to set off on a quest to find and win the woman he has seen in his dream. This is what happens to Macsen, and Elen is the Otherworldly guide who reels him in along the thread of her dreampaths, bringing him to her so that he can serve the land as its king. The imagery in his dream is full of Otherworldly symbolism: Elen’s two brothers are playing gwyddbwyll and Elen’s father is carving new men for his own game-board. The gwyddbwyll board symbolises the land in Celtic mythology, and it is usually possessed by a king or a representative of Sovereignty. That Elen wields the power of Sovereignty is also clear from the fact that she summons Macsen to her; she will not go to him, even though he is the Emperor of Rome. As for Macsen: his worthiness to be king is determined not only by his success in the challenge that was set him in his aisling – to follow the dream-paths back to Elen – but in the way that he conducts himself, and so demonstrates his merit. Only Elen, as the representative of Sovereignty, can bestow the kingship on Macsen, and so the marriage between the two represents the ancient sacred marriage between king and land.
The old story is very clear on this: that it was Elen who caused the roads to be built, not Macsen. The story firmly states that the men of Britain would have allowed the roads to be built for no one but her, because she was ‘native to the land’: the land’s representative. She might have determined that an alliance with Rome was appropriate for her nation at that time, but both the power and the guardianship of the land remained hers. It might be that the sites of the three castles were chosen by Elen because they were already linked by older pathways; the story does not tell us. But the building of these roads is the reason why Elen has now come to be associated in the minds of many with the ancient native trackways, and why she has come to be known as Elen of the Ways. In the same spirit, Elen can be seen as an ally on our pilgrimage, an indigenous guide who accompanies us and helps us to find the way, as we forge our own pathways to reclaim the sources of our native wisdom.
It’s time for our Heroine to set herself firmly on her way. She has survived her Descent. Now, she emerges out of the darkness and takes the first hesitant, stumbling steps along the hard path which lies ahead of her. Joseph Campbell refers to this part of his monomythic Hero’s Journey as ‘the Road of Trials’, which he defines as a series of discrete tests, tasks or ordeals that the Hero must undergo (and in which he sometimes might fail) in order to achieve transformation. ‘Dragons have now to be slain,’ announces Campbell – but slaying isn’t the Heroine’s way. She would rather engage with the dragon than kill him, entice him into her purposely diverse team, harness his unique skills. The Heroine’s path is different from, perhaps complementary to, that of the adventuring, all-conquering Hero. In the Otherworld, the long, hard process of transformation has been initiated; fragmented and dismembered by her experience in the dark, she starts now by searching for the lost pieces of herself. She needs to reveal her strengths as well as to uncover her weaknesses, and one of the key purposes of her Journey is to break through what she perceives to be her own limitations, so that she can not only identify her unique gifts, but develop the resources necessary to use them. The Journey requires her to explore the source of her own belonging, find her centre, begin to recover an understanding of her own place in the great, connected web of the world. She is walking her way back into being.
As in any pilgrimage, the path winds its way across unfamiliar, uneven territory, and this long, arduous Journey requires endurance, stamina and focus. There is nothing for it but to keep walking. Step by painful step; one foot in front of the other. The path will vanish behind you: there’s no way back now. It’s hard, to come back out of the dark. It’s harder still, when you emerge, to hold onto the learning, to the gifts imparted by that deep, rich cauldron of wisdom whose potion you tasted while you were there. It’s hard, once you understand just how far you must travel, to face up to the long, challenging road ahead.
That is why we must look for help along the way. The most valuable allies are those who teach us that we cannot succeed alone – and more, that it is meaningless to succeed alone, for an essential feature of the Heroine’s Journey is uncovering the power of community. There are many kinds of allies, and some of them are human. People who help us to find the path, or who help to keep us safe as we pass along it. People who offer us sanctuary or wisdom; who teach us necessary skills or set us challenging tasks which help us to grow.
Moya McGinley’s work is based at Cosán Ciúin, or Tranquil Paths,3 the name which she gives to her four acres of land in County Leitrim in the north-west of Ireland. From her home there she offers ‘sessions and teachings to nurture body, mind and spirit – encouraging rest, renewal, growth, healing and transformation’. Cosán Ciúin represents a dream come true for Moya, a warm forty-two-year-old with prematurely white hair, who laughs easily and has a rare ability to make you feel perfectly at home as soon as you walk through her door. As do Luna and Chara, two beautiful and deeply enthusiastic dogs who Moya rescued from the local pound. ‘For as long as I can remember I have wanted to settle in a rural space, surrounded by trees and wildlife,’ she tells me as she pours tea (‘a hot drop’) and offers up some particularly fine homemade scones with jam. We’re sitting at an enormous wooden table in the large open-plan kitchen/living room of her lovely old cottage. ‘When I was young I felt very connected to the natural world – especially trees – and to animals. I think that, as a lost wee child who didn’t fit in the world or among her peers, nature was what saved me. I always wanted to pass that gift onto others.’
Although she quibbles with the word, Moya seems to have been set on a healing path from a very young age. She wanted to train as a nurse when she left school, but was persuaded that she should go to university first; so she did a degree in social science. But nursing still called to her, and eventually she gave in to it, left her job in youth services, and began her training. ‘I loved nursing,’ she says. ‘I was an A&E nurse at first, and I always felt that it was a real privilege to be with people in that space. Later, I worked with a local palliative care team, helping them to set up complementary therapy services. But throughout my nursing career, the problem came, as it always had and always would come for me, with the system. It was very patriarchal: hierarchical, rigid, rule-bound, and purely focused on treating symptoms. Although people were talking about holistic medicine, there wasn’t really much sign of it being put into practice. We never got to look below the surface, it was all about just damping down the physical symptoms. And there wasn’t much spiritual care, which seems to me to be such an important part of healing someone.
‘This way of doing things didn’t feel right to me, or safe. People had no freedom to be creative in their work, and all the time I felt stifled and suffocated. I began to feel as if, by staying within the system, I was condoning it. A few years before I’d begun to train in a few different complementary therapies and practices – meditation, shamanic practices, life coaching – and started looking for some land in the country where I could practise, and do the kind of deep earth-based work which mattered to me.’
As soon as Moya saw the land she now lives on, she felt that it was the right place. Carved out into four relatively flat fields, surrounded by woodland, it lies at the bottom of a lovely green valley which, she tells me, creates a strong and beautiful echo. I ask Moya what her vision had been when she first came here.
‘It was simple enough,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to create a haven. Some little centre where people could just . . . come. Just that. Somewhere they could come to step out of time, begin to look beyond the rat race that most people are caught up in. I never really had any fixed ideas beyond that; I’d had quite enough of fixed ideas! My intention was simply to move in, and then to see what would emerge from being here, out of the land itself. I had to spend three months or so renovating the cottage, and then my focus turned outside. Two of the four fields had been grazed and weren’t in bad condition, but the rest of the land hadn’t been touched in around twenty years, and was overrun with brambles and rushes – you couldn’t even get into it in places. And so I began to clear some of the tangles, spending a lot of time out there, just being in it. I walked every inch of the place, again and again. And as I walked the land the idea of forming a labyrinth took hold.’
‘Why a labyrinth?’ I ask her, as we walk along a green path bordered by long grasses and straggly wildflowers, and soon find ourselves in the large open field where Moya tells me the labyrinth is situated. Standing on the edge of the field, I can’t see it at first; all I can see is more long grass and straggly wildflowers. But I’m trusting that there’s something out there.
‘I’d never really thought about it before, but when the idea came to me, it made sense. For some time I’d been organising walking meditations with friends. We’d walk in places all over Ireland, sometimes for a day, sometimes for a weekend. We thought of those walks as pilgrimages. And that idea of pilgrimage, of purposeful walking, has been so important to me, a real anchor in my own life. Walking slowly on the land, often in bare feet. Feet on the earth, massaging the earth. And a labyrinth is another, more contained, form of walking meditation.’
Triple-spiral labyrinth, Cosán Ciúin, Leitrim, Ireland
But Moya didn’t just create a conventional labyrinth. ‘To use a classical labyrinth pattern didn’t feel right, because that pattern comes from elsewhere, from another culture. I think it’s so important to reclaim our own Irish ancestral traditions. And that has been my inspiration and my guide for everything I’ve done here at Cosán Ciúin. We have our own traditions here right under our feet; we don’t need to be going somewhere else to find them. It’s all here. The land is steeped in it. Something which is ours, which comes right out of this land and our interactions with it, as opposed to something we’ve just been told about, which belongs to another place, another culture.
‘And so I imagined a triple-spiral labyrinth, because the triple spiral is an ancient symbol strongly rooted here in Ireland. And the idea of walking it onto the earth seemed so significant. This image has been present for thousands of years at the ancient sites of our land, carved into the stones at sacred places like Newgrange, for example, and I believe that experiencing the triple spiral in this way creates a strong sense of linking with our ancestors. As a symbol, it’s often taken to represent rebirth and transformation. Which ultimately is the purpose of any pilgrimage.’
We walk into the field which is alive with early morning insects, and as Moya points it out to me, if I stand on tip-toes I can finally make out an enormous triple spiral pattern mowed into the long grass, complex but perfectly formed. I find myself wondering how on earth she managed to get it right on such a scale. It’s a big labyrinth. She has already told me that, if you walk the entire path, along the three spirals to the centre and then back out again, the journey is two kilometres long.
‘To begin with,’ she says, ‘it was important to me that the labyrinth was as natural as possible. I feel it should be impermanent, just a path mown into the meadow. I wanted the land to be free to reclaim it, to return to being wild and natural if the time comes. So I wasn’t imagining any great complicated infrastructure. But even so, I had no idea at all how to make it! Fortunately, when I was talking about it to a friend, she said that her husband would be great at figuring out such a thing, and the next thing I knew he’d sent me a design by email, very technical, telling me how I’d measure it, and all . . . I looked at it and it was all very impressive, but I still hadn’t a clue how to get started, so Niall and Claire came down here, along with another friend, Marie, and we mapped it all out in sticks and tape in a single afternoon. And there it all rested, over the winter.
‘In spring 2014 the land sprang to life with new growth and so I started mowing a path through the grass, rushes and wildflowers that grew naturally in the field, following the pattern we’d staked out. And what I love most about this labyrinth is that it’s not manicured. Some parts are boggy – like life, there are muddy patches which you can get stuck in! It truly is a living, growing evolving being – it changes week by week as the growth around it changes, and then it enters into a period of rest over winter. The only permanent thing I did was to plant birch trees on the turning points, to mark the spots.’
Moya chose birch partly for practical reasons, because it’s a compact, narrow tree. But she chose it also because in the old Irish Ogham alphabet, which is based on native trees, the birch is the first letter. ‘So, symbolically,’ she says, ‘birch is about new beginnings. And that is what the labyrinth is about. It’s a rebirthing, as you spiral in from the edge towards the centre, and then walk the path back out again.’
The labyrinth is the perfect metaphor for the Heroine’s Journey, and the beauty of a labyrinth is that it is not a maze. There are no dead ends, and you cannot take a wrong path – because although the path may twist or wind back on itself, it leads always to the centre. And there, at the centre of the labyrinth, no matter how many times you have been there, you might still discover new insights; you might uncover old wisdom or gain new knowledge. Then you walk back out again, taking back out into the world the gifts that you have received in the centre.
Moya leaves me alone to walk the labyrinth, but her two black cats, Ash and Willow, follow me in and roll on the grass in front of me as I begin to walk. Turning back on myself at the centre of the first spiral, I am startled by a flash of warm brown as Chara hurtles past, completely unheeding of the nicely mown paths, resolutely and joyfully following her own bliss. The morning is bright and warm, and it is early enough in the summer that the midges aren’t yet biting. The only sound in the valley is the song of birds. I set one foot in front of the other, walking slowly, sometimes closing my eyes and lifting my face to the sun, sometimes watching the ground under my feet. Going in and coming out again, circling around as if I am a partner in some strange, archaic dance with the land. At the centre of each spiral I stand still for a moment, wondering what I will take back out with me and then what I will bring to the centre. And so I come to see for myself that the process of meditatively walking a labyrinth is indeed reminiscent of a pilgrimage, and to understand why it was that during the Middle Ages the practice of walking the labyrinth at great Christian sites like Chartres became entangled with the pilgrimage tradition. Labyrinths created in the stone floors of the cathedrals often marked the end of the pilgrim’s journey, and so became a symbol for the spiritual journey which they had undertaken, assisting with the process of integration. And as I emerge two kilometres later to the welcoming wag of Luna’s tail, I am calmer, surer and smiling.
Although it was Moya’s unique labyrinth which initially drew me here, I find other treasures at Cosán Ciúin. There is an ‘Ogham wood’, planted with representatives of each of the twenty trees in the Ogham alphabet – the old runic language which is often carved into ancient stones and pillars. ‘Again,’ Moya tells me, as we walk through a field planted with saplings, each section labelled with the relevant Ogham rune, ‘planting an Ogham wood is about focusing on our old traditions and customs. And reclaiming those traditions is all about inspiring others. If someone comes here and has a sense of connection to our ancestral energy, to the long history of our belonging to the land, then we can pass it down to new generations who will learn something from us about how to be in the world. Ogham is about a connection to that older time and place, and to our ancestors. Like the labyrinth, it’s about understanding and then keeping the significance of the old ways. And they’re all about connecting us to the natural world, showing us how to be fully part of it. Trees connect us deep, deep to the earth. There’s a wisdom in trees. Each tree has a different energy and something to impart to us.’
As we walk back to the house, Moya talks about other projects she’s working on, and her future plans. ‘In autumn 2014 a large polytunnel was erected which will house home-grown produce – vegetables, fruits, herbs and plants. We created a fire pit at the site of an ancient fulacht fia, a Bronze-Age cooking pit. And in November 2014 the culú was dreamed into being beside the fire-pit. Cúlú is an Irish word meaning “retreat”, and the cúlú will be used in many ways. It can be covered and used as the old sweat-houses were used for purification purposes; it can represent a cave, the womb of the earth, to allow retreat and contemplation. As with everything here at Cosán Ciúin, I have no doubt that it will evolve over time.’
‘And for the future?’ I ask. She stops and points to a thicket in a nearby field.
‘There’s an old well over there which is very overgrown – I hope to clear and renovate it. Ancient wells still hold a lot of significance here in Ireland. This one is close to the fulacht fia and was likely the source of water for it. Ultimately, I plan to create a learning space in one of the sheds. Looking at old maps from the 1800s, I discovered that there was once a schoolhouse on this site. So I’d like to continue that history of learning, offering workshops and retreats so that people can come and be immersed in nature. I see the land as a big healing force. I feel as if the land here is getting ready for it. So, to go back to your earlier question, I suppose my overall vision now is all about bringing people here to show them ways of reconnecting with the land, ways of remembering.’
I wonder whether Moya sees herself, along with the land here at Cosán Ciúin, as a kind of guide to help people find their own paths in life. Beautifully modest, she demurs, but eventually I extract her agreement. ‘I guess so,’ she says. ‘My passion is teaching. I suppose the way I work is all about path-finding, path-showing. And I think what I bring to this work above all is the ability to hold space for people while they connect, and learn. I want this to be a safe place that people can step into, and to keep them safe while whatever needs to happen for them, happens. I like to think I can walk with people for a little while, as they walk along the path of their life.’
We all need allies to help us on our journey. Our European folk and fairy stories are full of them, and many come in human form: the wise old woman in the woods who offers advice, the fairy godmother who offers gifts . . . The kind of allies we’re talking about here are different from the friends and family who might support us as we struggle along our path: more likely than not, they are people who enter our lives only briefly, offering up a clue or two which points us in the direction we need to go.
I happened upon my first such ally when I was twenty-one, visiting my mother in those first few months after she’d packed up and moved to her tiny cottage in Wales. So fleeting was her presence in my life that the significance I assign her sometimes seems out of all proportion. But there she was: Lorna, a woman probably in her early thirties, who lived alone in a tiny, crumbling old cottage at the top of a hill. There was no road in, only a long, steep, narrow footpath, and the dark, damp house she occupied had no electricity or running water. My mother knew her well enough, but I didn’t ever find out much about her; I knew only that she had once practised as a nurse, but was now practising astrology. I didn’t make friends easily in those days; I was reticent and gave little away. And I was in awe of Lorna’s strength of character, her solitary self-sufficiency; I was in awe of her simply because she could chop her own wood. Because she wasn’t afraid to live up a hill by herself; because she loved living close to the land. Because she was free. There was a part of me that so badly wanted to be her – but I couldn’t begin to imagine how. Lorna was everything I was not: clear about her own needs and boundaries, courageous, intrepid. She might refuse to be part of what she called ‘the system’, but I was still oh so young – and wouldn’t it be a failure to live like that?
But Lorna was so obviously not a failure; she was living in precisely the way she wanted to live at the time – and then, after a couple of years, she moved on. I held on to the image I had of her for many years, an image of what it might be like to be a resourceful, resilient woman who seemed to be, in every way that has ever mattered to me, free. If Lorna could do it, I thought, wondering ten years later whether it was possible to survive without a regular salary in a very basic partially renovated cottage in the wilds of Connemara. If Lorna could do it, again, taking another leap of faith another ten years down the line . . .
There are human allies, for sure, but for women especially, so many of our allies in the old stories are animals – from the birds who sing of truths and secrets, to the ants who help sort the grain – and so it is in mythological and folk traditions from all over the world. In Celtic mythology, there is an especially close affinity between animals and women. Women are not just helped by animals, they are accompanied by them, and often (as in the case of the Irish crow-goddess, the Morrigan) take on their forms. The Ceridwen story, which we encountered in the last chapter, is in many senses a story about becoming animal. Ceridwen initiates the shape-shifting dance with Gwion Bach; in order to be rebirthed as the greatest of all bards, he himself must learn what it is to become animal, to understand not only the wisdom of humans, but the unique and very different forms of knowledge possessed by the non-humans who share the planet with us.
This is the real importance of animal allies in our native traditions: that by understanding what it is to become animal, we participate in an ancient form of knowledge – a knowledge of the body and the senses, rather than merely of the intellect. Animals are teachers, and more often than not it is women who mediate their teachings. The most common companions of divine women4 are snakes, horses, dogs and birds, and each of these creatures offers a different kind of knowledge and wisdom. This ancient perception of animals as so much more than mere companions, so much more than just a source of food, can’t be assimilated into the worldview of a society which sees animals as inferior to humans, devoid of emotion and intelligence, and lacking in spirit or soul. But coming to understand our kinship with them is an important part of truly seeing ourselves as part of the web of life on this planet, and our stories tell us that, above all, it is the gift of women to bring this understanding to the world.
Perhaps because we have the capability of giving birth, perhaps because of the intensely physical cyclicity of menstruation, women have a deep, intuitive understanding that we too are animals, belonging to a world filled with other living things which are like us in more ways than they are different from us. Women too have been declared to be inferior to men; we know what it is to be afraid, and to be hunted. It’s only natural, then, that we should closely identify with animals, and embrace them as allies and as teachers on our journey. But with that kinship comes responsibility, and so perhaps it is time to reclaim our ancient role as Mistress of the Beasts, as their protectors; perhaps it is time to guard them as they have so often guarded us. To insist on recognition for knowledge and intelligence in all its forms, no matter how unlike us those forms might be. And by accepting animals as our equals and our allies, by helping and respecting them, we help ourselves: not only do we share in their knowledge and wisdom, but we make of the world a less lonely place.
Allies are there to help us during the tests we will inevitably face as we follow the path of our pilgrimage. Allies help us prevail. In all the old stories, the Otherworld was above all things a testing ground, and as we travel along our way we will find our share of adversaries and obstacles. They’ll test our strength and resolve, and sometimes the obstacles which are presented to us will seem insuperable. Some will be internal – self-doubt, fear, negativity – and some will be external: there will always be those who try to trick us, to lead us down dead ends. But it is the testing which makes us strong; the testing which helps us to learn. The old stories teach us this, too, and so we find ourselves at Gorsedd Arberth, a mound in the green and gently wooded hills of Dyfed, South Wales. It is the place where the story of Rhiannon, a prominent and strong-minded figure in early Welsh mythology,5 begins.
~
There was a mound near the palace of Pwyll, king of Dyfed, which had a strange reputation: anyone who sat on the mound, it was said, would either suffer wounds and blows, or would see visions. One day Pwyll himself decided to visit this mound to see which of those things would happen to him, and as he sat on top of it he saw a beautiful woman in golden robes riding below the hill on a shining white horse, with three birds flying around her head. She went past so quickly that Pwyll had no time to call down and ask her name, so he sent a rider to pursue her. But no matter how fast the rider went, he couldn’t catch up with her, even though she seemed to be riding quite sedately.
The next day Pwyll returned to the mound, hoping to see the beautiful woman again. But although she rode past in just the same way, the rider who Pwyll sent after her still could not catch up. On the third day, Pwyll himself pursued the woman, but he did no better in reaching her, no matter how hard he pressed his horse. In desperation he abandoned his pride and called out to her, asking her to wait. ‘I will gladly wait,’ she said to him, ‘though it would have been better for your horse if you had asked before!’ She introduced herself as Rhiannon, the daughter of Heyvedd the Old, of the Otherworld, and she told him her story.
She was trying, she said, to avoid a marriage which had been arranged for her against her will, to a nobleman called Gwawl ap Clud. She said that she would rather choose her own husband, and as it happened, she was thinking she might marry Pwyll, if he would agree. Pwyll agreed wholeheartedly, and so Rhiannon told him that she would marry him in a year’s time.
The year soon passed, and Pwyll journeyed to the palace of Rhiannon’s father for the wedding feast. Pwyll sat next to Rhiannon, and together they greeted their guests. One of them, a large, noble, brown-haired man, approached Pwyll and asked if he would grant him a favour. Generously, and as was the custom at wedding feasts, Pwyll said that he would – but, too late, Rhiannon rebuked him for his foolishness. She had seen that the man was Gwawl, her former suitor, and indeed, the favour he went on to ask of Pwyll was the gift of Rhiannon herself. Pwyll could not break his word, and so a wedding feast for Gwawl and Rhiannon was set to be held in a year’s time. But before the grief-stricken Pwyll left her, Rhiannon took him to one side and gave him an empty bag, and told him how he might use it to thwart Gwawl when the time for the wedding came.
Following Rhiannon’s instructions, Pwyll came secretly to Gwawl’s wedding feast, disguised as a beggar. He asked Gwawl for a bagful of food, and as was the custom, Gwawl granted his request. And so Pwyll held out the bag that Rhiannon had given him – but no matter how much food was put into the bag, there was always room for more. Exasperated, Gwawl asked whether it would ever be filled, and Pwyll admitted that it was a magic bag and would not, unless a nobleman were to tread down the contents of the bag with both of his feet.
Impatient to be done with it all, and encouraged by Rhiannon, Gwawl rose from his seat and stepped into the bag. Pwyll quickly pulled it around him and tied it up, trapping Gwawl inside. Pwyll then called to his men, who were waiting outside the palace. They quickly overpowered and imprisoned Gwawl’s men, and then they began, each in turn, to deliver blows to the bag. Gwawl soon begged for mercy, and Pwyll released him after making him promise to relinquish Rhiannon, and to leave without taking revenge. And so the wedding feast continued, and Pwyll and Rhiannon were married.
Pwyll took his new bride back to Dyfed where they lived together happily and ruled well. But three years passed before Rhiannon became pregnant, and during that time the people had begun to mutter against her, saying that Pwyll should not have brought a stranger to be their queen. Nevertheless, he refused to set Rhiannon aside, and now there was great rejoicing throughout the land when she eventually gave birth to a baby boy. But on the night of his birth, the child disappeared while Rhiannon and her six handmaidens slept. Her women woke first, and were terrified to find the baby gone. Fearing punishment, they decided to make it look as if Rhiannon had killed and eaten him. And so they killed a young dog, and laid its bones by Rhiannon, rubbing blood onto her face and hands. So it was that Rhiannon woke to find her baby gone, and the women accusing her of infanticide and cannibalism.
Despite the advice of his courtiers, Pwyll would not send his wife away, but he set her a penance instead: she must sit every day by the gate of the castle at the horse block, to tell her story to travellers. She must also offer to carry them into the castle on her back, as a beast of burden.
The same night that Rhiannon was giving birth to her lost son, another birth was taking place nearby. Teyrnon, the Lord of Gwent Is Coed, had a fine mare, and every year on the first of May, the mare would foal – but the colt would immediately disappear. Annoyed by these disappearances, Teyrnon took the mare into his house to let her foal there. She bore a large and beautiful colt, but then there was a tumult outside, and a clawed arm came in through the window and tried to drag the colt away. Teyrnon jumped up and cut off the arm, and so saved the colt; then he ran outside to discover who or what had been trying to steal his colt. He could not see anything in the darkness, and when he turned back to his house, he found an infant boy lying on the doorstep. Teyrnon and his wife decided to raise the boy as their own.
The boy grew unnaturally quickly and was strong and golden-haired, and Teyrnon began to see in him a resemblance to Pwyll. Thinking back on the news of Rhiannon and her punishment, it came to him that this must be their child. He and his wife decided that the child must be returned, and so the next day they set out, with the child riding the colt that had been born on the same night that he had been kidnapped. Great was the joy of Rhiannon and Pwyll when they came to the court and told the story, and returned the child to his true parents. They named the child Pryderi, and he became king of Dyfed in his turn, when Pwyll died.
~
Rhiannon, another representative of the goddess of Sovereignty, rides out of the Otherworld to take Dyfed’s king, Pwyll, as her husband. She is feisty and resourceful, and at first she sets the pace in their relationship and seems to hold all the power. But even Rhiannon cannot escape the need for testing: she is distrusted by the people of Dyfed, betrayed by her own women, and doubted by her husband. She must endure her penance in order to survive, while nevertheless telling her story to all who would hear it, and firmly sticking to her own truth.
Like Rhiannon, above all we must uphold our own truths as we set off along our new path; we must always insist on telling our own stories. Our stories come directly from a woman’s heart and mind, from the real, lived experience of inhabiting a woman’s body and occupying a woman’s place in the world. Generally, our stories will stand in stark contrast to the ideas of womanhood that are imposed upon us by the patriarchal world we live in – and it’s important to critically examine those cultural myths of femininity which, if we succumb to them, will prevent us from completing our journey.
There are so many stories that are told about us and against us, some of them so cleverly and so extensively interwoven into the fabric of our daily lives that unpicking them can be hard. For young women especially, one of the most pervasive and pernicious myths of all is our culture’s insistence on romantic love as the pinnacle of life’s achievement. This isn’t just something that crops up in old fairy stories or romantic pulp fiction: the new, contemporary stories we are constantly fed in books, movies and other forms of popular media still insist that, whatever distractions we may meet along the way, the real purpose of our lives is the acquisition of the ‘one true love’ that we’re told everyone is looking for. The soul-mate, the perfect love. Once we achieve it, that story goes – once whichever modern-day equivalent of Prince Charming we might prefer, human or vampire, comes along and rescues us – everything else falls into place. It’s all downhill from there; all we have to do is live ‘happily ever after’.
Another such myth tells us that the only way to belong and to be popular – and therefore to be happy – is to conform to whatever expectations society might have of us, whether we are suited to them or not. Those expectations often focus on bearing children, along with the creation of a stable family unit and a fine, well-managed family home. Another myth declares that possessing and cultivating beauty is the best way to get ahead in the world. That good, healthy female sexuality is dependent on youth, beauty and the acquisition of consumer goods. Above all, that we are weaker and less clever than men, and so we must be dependent upon them.
But the truth is plain: we are neither stronger nor weaker, neither more nor less clever. The very basis for comparison lacks validity: we are, quite simply, strong and clever in different ways, and in order to create a world which works for all of us, women’s different ways of being and relating to the world must be valued too – and valued for what they are, rather than held up against a standard which we can never meet. The myths of masculinity must also be challenged before healthier ways of being can replace these outworn and damaging images of femininity – but we have to start with ourselves.
So, as we progress along the path of our journey and begin to actively challenge the stories that have been told about us, about our roles and our place in the world, we must also learn how to outwit the domineering masculine which is so prevalent in our culture. Only then can the authentic wisdom of the feminine be recovered from the dark places where it has been buried; only then can the Voices of the Wells be heard again. And through all of the tests we face we must hold onto our own truth – the truth that we each have been forced to confront in the dark, deep caves of the Otherworld.
During the course of each of our journeys, we’ll for sure come up against at least one great temptation; it’s one of the major tests we’ll have to endure. We may encounter situations or people who will seduce us off the path, and lead us to make decisions which prevent us from completing the journey. Each one of these temptations will present itself with its own set of unique dilemmas, and the choices we will be forced to make are unlikely to be easy. At every decision point along the way, we will need to stop and ask ourselves whether the path which we are proposing now to follow is a part of the true journey we set off on in the first place – and, if it is not, whether that path is worth giving up the journey for.
All too often, the temptation which challenges us most is the lure of an easy life: a nice house, a well-paid job; security rather than uncertainty. Often it comes in the form of a possible partner who, while being very attractive, does not share the values we’ve now come to espouse. Sometimes we do not realise that we are being tested; sometimes it seems as if we have no choices about the path we take. But we always have choices, and if we do find ourselves straying significantly from the path, it may be years before we can find our way back – if, indeed, we ever do.
One morning, fists clenched tightly at my sides, I walked into the shed where my husband was whiling away the hours re-arranging his vast collection of old bottles, cereal boxes and other antique advertising material for the umpteenth time that month, and told him that I was leaving him. My heart was pounding fit to burst and there it was again, that old clutching sensation at the base of my throat, and I didn’t know whether I was shaking with terror or horror or some poisonous cocktail made up of a good measure of both.
After two years in Connemara it had become apparent that I couldn’t stay. There was no fault in the place and my relationship with it, no flaw in my original determination to forge a life there. Yes, I was still struggling to get to grips with how I might earn a living – but the main and insuperable problem lay in my relationship with Len, which had always been fragile and now was failing under the weight of an excess of proximity.
Len was twenty years older than me, and I’d met him when I was a PhD student, unhappy and desperately isolated in London. I’d always had difficulty making close friends – no doubt in good part a function of the way I’d grown up, of the secrecy and hiding – but once I left school and said goodbye to the built-in community that comes along with it, it became close to impossible. I found it hard to create intimacy, to open up to anyone, and that meant that I found it particularly difficult to enter into romantic relationships. I’d had a couple of casual boyfriends during my teens, but since I’d left for university at eighteen I’d found myself living like a nun. I felt as if in some senses I’d been an adult for most of my life, which meant that boys, and later men, of my own age all too often seemed impossibly young. I just couldn’t find a way to relate to them.
Perhaps, having been abandoned by mine as a very young child, it was inevitable that I’d fall for someone who was almost as old as my father. But in so many ways Len was exactly what I needed at the time. I was so deeply locked inside myself, so very alienated from everything and everyone around me, that I’ve often wondered what might have become of me if he hadn’t happened along. And happen along he did, the friend of a neighbour, as I was topping up the battery of my small motorbike with water on the street outside the Tottenham flat I was then sharing with a young woman called Angela, who was a newly qualified vet. It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and I was inappropriately dressed for the job in a floaty blue summer dress, long hair flying around in the breeze. He later told me that he found the incongruity irresistible.
Len was funny and loved to laugh, and he taught me what I had never properly learned as a child: how to play. He made connections with others effortlessly and instinctively, and by watching him make easy friends of complete strangers I finally began to understand how I might engage more easily with people. And also, I finally learned about physical pleasure. It was the beginning of a brand new awareness of and comfort with my own body, of a more physical, sensual way of being in the world.
But although Len was a very charismatic and creative man, over the years he had been incredibly difficult to live with. He had always had obsessive tendencies. It showed itself first in an ever-growing collection of ‘memorabilia’ which gradually took over every room of every house we had ever lived in. Shelves and shelves of dusty old tools, bottles, jars and other ‘ornaments’ lined every wall. Almost every time he went out he would return from some car boot sale or junk shop bearing another box of ‘treasures’ for which display space had to be found. This small stone cottage had become cluttered and claustrophobic, not to mention bizarre, and over the past two years he had also managed to fill up a large purpose-built shed.
Over the years, his obsessiveness had extended into his behaviour towards me, and now that I was spending all of my time with him in a small cottage, it was getting worse. I felt as if I had exchanged one prison for another. I have always needed long, cooling draughts of solitude to be able to participate fully in the world, but now I could hardly get out of the house alone. He was suspicious, jealous, distrustful. Not only was I feeling trapped and stifled, but I was becoming increasingly concerned about where his behaviour might lead.
Sometimes, if you have grown up in certain ways, a fear of being seen to fail can outweigh the personal cost of continuing to live in impossible circumstances. It took me a long time to accept that I would not be failing by leaving this marriage – I would be failing myself by staying. I badly needed to let go. The trouble is, when you have spent a childhood trying to mend broken things, holding yourself and your immediate environment together when everything looks as if it might fall apart, pretending to the world that everything is fine and normal when it is not, then the idea that you might yourself shatter something – anything at all – is unthinkable. But it wasn’t just the marriage which I felt I couldn’t give up on: equally unthinkable was the idea of walking away from my dream, because that little old cottage in Connemara represented to me everything that I held true, an image of everything that I wanted to become, everything that stood against the Wasteland I’d inhabited for my entire life.
Finally one morning, startled awake out of a dream of dungeons and chains and torture chambers, I curled my toes into the rough coir-matted floor at the side of the bed and discovered that the decision to leave had been made.
It wasn’t at all easy to arrange. Quite apart from the fact that I had nowhere to go, Len was not a reasonable man. I knew that my only safe option was to just pack up and go, leaving him in possession of the cottage and pretty much everything else we owned. I had grown up in a low-income family; although I had been fed and clothed and had a roof over my head, living on very little was a familiar skill. I didn’t need much – and yet leaving behind what little I now had was a hard thing to do. Partly because this dream had been entirely mine, though Len had followed willingly enough; and partly because he hadn’t contributed financially in any significant way during our entire ten-year marriage. There was still a small short-term loan on the cottage which he, unemployed as ever, had no means of paying, and which besides was in my sole name. I would need to continue to pay off that loan over the coming three years, and at the same time, to keep myself fed and housed. I needed a proper job, and I needed it fast.
Never burn your bridges. I hadn’t burned my bridges, and so it was all too easy to play it safe, and to accept a job offer which coincidentally came my way just at that time, from the American branch of the tobacco company I had once worked for.
Sometimes along the path, temptation comes in the form of an easy way out; and if that was an important test on my journey then you could argue (and oh, how I have argued) that I failed it. In so many ways I was taking a step backwards. When the going got tough I ripped myself away from the land and ran back squealing to the safe, smug, paternal embrace of the Wasteland, exchanging my much-loved wellie boots and shabby peat-soaked waxed coat for the old straitjacket of smart shoes and business suits. It’s only with the benefit of many years of agonising and hindsight that I’ve come to understand how this seemingly wrong choice led me to places – both internal and external – that I might otherwise never have known. It’s taken me the best part of two soul-searching, self-flagellating decades to come to terms with that choice, and to acknowledge the benefits of the insights and learnings which would set me back firmly on my path some years later, but in a much more sure-footed way, and with so many more valuable skills and resources.
At the time, America was far enough away that I thought I’d feel safe there, and I intended the job to be temporary – maybe a year or two to tide me over during this difficult time, until I could regroup and figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Because I still didn’t know what it was, the work I’d always wanted to do that had heart and meaning. I knew only that I needed to live in a place where there was space to breathe, where there was the possibility of solitude and the freedom to make my own choices. I had always imagined that I wanted to write, but what I really wanted was to be a writer, because I had no urge to write any particular thing; I didn’t feel as if I had anything original or compelling to say. The truth was, my vision was blocked. The years of academia followed by corporate life had deeply undermined my sense of who I was or who I might be, and I couldn’t see any way to use the skills I’d acquired in a meaningful way.
For now, though, the decision was made and the words were said. After an impossibly difficult few days, I got myself to Shannon airport and on a plane to Atlanta, Georgia, from where I would take a connecting flight to the small, friendly city of Louisville, Kentucky. Although I needed the work, if this job I’d been offered had been in a big urban centre, then I’d have had to turn it down. Two years in Connemara had taught me that my days of concrete jungles, of commuting and choking on traffic fumes, were long gone; I needed green places in order to thrive. But I’d been to this beautiful state before, and I remembered the thickly wooded hills and gentle rolling fields of the ‘blue grass’ country, dotted with white-fenced horse farms. I remembered above all the vastness of the wider American landscape, and the sense of elation and freedom that comes with access to so much open space. I promised myself that I would immerse myself in America’s desert and mountain wilderness whenever I could.
Back in the familiar comfort of a first-class airplane seat, torn between relief at having escaped from an impossible situation and guilt at abandoning my husband and my much-loved place, I allowed myself finally to chew over the deep uneasiness I was feeling about going back to work for a corporate entity. I had never had any interest in the world of profit and loss, shareholder value and ‘stakeholder’ dialogue, and after two years in the wilds of Connemara, such curious concerns had become utterly foreign to me, seeming to belong in some parallel universe which I could hardly believe I’d ever inhabited. But here I was back again anyway, simply because I needed an escape route and I needed a job.
In spite of my disquiet and my grief, I arrived in Kentucky with an open heart, and I loved it at once; there was something about the greenness of the land and the friendliness and deep courtesy of the people which reminded me somehow of Ireland and made me feel at home. And to my great pleasure, it soon became clear that my new colleagues also were infinitely nicer and kinder than any I had ever worked with before. In contrast to the ultra-conservative head-office arrogance and vicious, back-stabbing politicking I’d experienced back in England, the culture of this American subsidiary was changing rapidly, becoming more open, forward-looking, radical. And yet . . . I was nevertheless working for a tobacco company, and it was impossible to feel good about it.
When I first arrived in Kentucky I lived out in the country, not far away from the much-loved, multiple award-winning American writer and environmental activist Wendell Berry. Berry is a second-generation tobacco farmer who has always strongly supported tobacco-growing programmes in Kentucky, while acknowledging what he has called a ‘serious moral predicament’ because of the known health consequences of using tobacco.6 I was in a serious moral predicament of my own. Every day of the five years that I eventually spent in America was filled with inner conflict.
On the one hand, I had what most people would have considered to be a very nice life. I was really very comfortable – too comfortable, for sure. My old childhood needs for safety and security were well satisfied. I was paid well, and at work I was appreciated by my colleagues; I soon took out a mortgage on a lovely little house in a subdivision on the outskirts of the city. I went west on vacation whenever I could manage it, falling in love with the desert clarity of Arizona and the mountain wilderness of Montana. But on the other hand, I had known, and still longed for, something more. I was very much aware that I had stepped off the path I had dreamed of for so long, and lived for too short a while. I felt as if I had fallen by the wayside.
Then, little by little, my initial love affair with America began to wear off. Once the novelty of a new place and a new independent life began to fade, as the months turned into a year and then two, it became clear to me that I had landed in a country to which I could feel very little connection. It was such a remarkable, beautiful country – but I was learning a lesson which would be emphatically reinforced in the years to come: place wasn’t enough. I couldn’t relate to the culture. I loved the open-hearted friendliness of so many of the people I met, but I didn’t belong in an America which seemed to me often to be focused on the acquisition of wealth and status, on acquiescence and conformity as the only acceptable way of being, with its remarkably conservative politics and the constant, sinister presence of the deeply patriarchal religious Right. I foundered on this continent in which I had no history or ancestral connection, and I couldn’t find a way to transplant my own native Celtic traditions there along with me. I for sure had no connection with, let alone right to, the traditions of the people who were native to this land. This, quite simply, wasn’t in any sense my place.
Above all, although the work I was doing was now focused on advising the company on the development of safer cigarettes, I didn’t know how to handle the ‘moral predicament’ (and the sheer unpleasantness, in a litigious and savagely anti-tobacco America) of continuing to work for a tobacco company. I still wasn’t living the life I’d dreamed of, wasn’t doing the meaningful work I’d always longed for, and the years were slipping by. I began to feel trapped, as if once again I had no choices, no way to pull myself free. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. And so, inevitably, my symptoms of panic returned: this time, with perfect resonance, taking the form of hyper-ventilation: a constant gasping for breath. I was thirty-seven years old, and it seemed to me that I was right back where I had started, seven years before. The Wasteland was all around me, and I was living in it again. But beyond a vague yearning for wilderness and wide open spaces, and a longing for something called ‘home’ which I couldn’t have begun to define, still I had no real idea about what I might become instead. It was about time for a serious midlife crisis.