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A Galwegian writer describes herself as essentially a hermit whose most important relationship is with nature. She shares insights about anger, social conditioning, injustice, and her strong childhood memories of Connemara, where she experienced the sea, wildlife, and the landscape that shaped her identity.
The Galwegian says she is essentially a hermit and her most important relationship is with natureas long as we are communicating and making an effort to understand one another.
However, I am far less agreeable when I see evidence of injustice or inequality. I think we all suffer from a massive ignorance of the harm our everyday actions and thoughts can cause. My middle names are Marie George. I love my middle names.
Marie was traditionally given as a middle name to all children, male and female, in my family. George was the name of my mother’s father and her eldest brother. They were both men of the sea and died when she was a very small child. I also think of my middle names when I listen to Van Morrison’s song “Madame George”, which I first heard when I was a teenager.
I am probably essentially a hermit. The most powerful relationship in my life is with nature. I believe in the necessity of art, and especially in music, for the survival of what we call spirit. I can get angry about many aspects of social conditioning that lead us into an acceptance of certain beliefs and rules, including some of which are embedded in the law.
I can get angry about homelessness and about global politics and how we can watch genocidal massacres happen while we feel ultimately powerless to intervene. In my personal life I rarely experience anger but when I do it is of the killer variety. Anger is often described as red. Mine, when unleashed, is a deadly white.
‘I feel guilt and rage about living in Australia while my family is in Ireland’What is your strongest childhood memory? Standing on the rocks of Aughrusbeg in Connemara, looking across to the empty horizon and wondering what lay beyond. Hearing the hum of an outboard engine at dawn when the curraghs were heading out to sea to check their lobster pots. Or an incredibly calm night where you could hear every ripple of water and every bird sound.
Meeting a hare on the beach or on the road just before sunrise. Visiting our neighbours to collect fresh milk given from their cows or their freshly made soda bread. Travelling in our old green boat to the islands to collect a boatload of live lobsters, to Inishbofin to visit the Concannons and to Inishturk South to visit the Wallace brothers. I am the youngest in the family.
It defined me insofar as there was less pressure on me to choose a well trodden path into a future. It also meant I needed to raise my voice more often to be heard. But overall, I think I was afforded more freedom than my siblings were and I got a lot of loving because I was the baby.
My parents continued to call me “bébé chou” or “la petite” no matter what age I was, until the end of their days. I think I have been at my happiest when I have completed a piece of work that I can stand behind, when I can land back “home” with the knowledge of work well done after all the challenges involved in making it.
I am fundamentally a happy person, although I am extremely pessimistic about our species, about what we are doing to this planet and to one another. I firmly believe we are in the last days of the Anthropocene and it’s high time we left. That said, I still have hope. I see the beauty of every moment and can experience great happiness in every moment.
So I guess I am a pessimist who can’t help being optimistic. Charlie Chaplin. I think he’d get it. I wish I knew.
I think or hope that our essence lives on in those we love and in those who loved us. That’s what I would like to believe. We light our candles and we grieve for our loved ones who have gone. We speak to them, we sing to them, we create many rituals to communicate with them and we’ve been doing that for centuries.
So there must be something in it. I don’t really have any regrets. I have many wishes still to be fulfilled. If not in this life, in the next.
So maybe I regret the shortness of life as we know it. In the next life, I would love to be a brilliant musician, singer and songwriter. In my opinion, music is the highest of all art forms. It’s our universal language and we don’t even have to understand it to receive it.
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