TRIP INTO KERRY

A brief break from blog posts to bogs and fence posts and back again. Back by fluttering flame in the grate, contemplating and waiting for words to filter down and wrapped in a cloud of unknowing.

Really no big deal within diversity and scale of worldly world’s activity everywhere ongoing. Memory traces of tracks and trails over hills, cloud-cloaked mountains sombre and slumbering, stark impressions on reflection at leisure in hindsight.

Ruminating random residue in a timeless continuum of artistic assimilation and needless relevance. Revisiting the essence of the flow and flux of feeling following skeins in the weave in the mode of meditative music.

This oblique poetic preamble a strategy of finding and following a flow and not leaning on limiting lines of literal language. Or, in worldly words, and shifting gears to sound succinct, simply a lift with friends and a longstanding invitation to their neighbouring homes in the mountains. Timely, not before time, and relatively outside time unless memory is a measure.

In the back with car and trailer packed and stacked with books and oriental bric-a-brac between their strenuous full day weekly stints on a market stall and then returning home to relative relaxation.

Down tunnelled lanes of backroad trees in soft drizzle, stopping on the way for week’s supplies at a vastly stocked yet almost deserted huge supermarket, floor-space the size i strangely never saw before and seemingly manned by just one man. Spaciously quiet and somehow surreal in the scheme of things.

Rounding a wide curve of road above a valley in sparse traffic and in big sheep country, the land large with sheep dotted and distant. Low grey cloud above reedy slopes punctuated by sporadic solitary small wind-bent trees, and clustering mostly around scattered farm cottages.

Along a slumber of mountains evening darkening through rain-spotted window glass, till down a winding gated track where the dog is glad to go on ahead, park and enter, sheltered from a passing wave of nightfall rain.

With reference and reverence to rain and there normally being no great lack of it in Kerry, ironically coincident with the duration of my stay, the water pump burned out needing replacement.

Most noticeable if you have to tiptoe to the toilet in the night and the water bucket needs a refill from an outside barrel tricky to reach for in the dark depending on a torch. Minor whimsical contrasts of change from a current combination of cabin fever and convenience duly designed by the universe.

Needing new inspirational material and a round-about ramble on a rough tufted terrain of bracken and bramble, stacked-stone walls and vast vistas vanishing in shrouded cloud cover to infinity and taking three dozen photo shots.

With this random word-sketch an interval of impressions between probable inspirations, a free form foil for a few photos. Knowing i’ll most likely create something totally and typically unrelated.

Fixing a fence with a friend in sporadic shifts and tea breaks and talk of travels in remote cultures. Replacing weathered posts and pounding in where possible around a small garden plot bordered by gnarled and knotted trees, to keep the sheep out. Sheep wire wrenched taut, barb-topped and hammered home with assorted dwindling staples and joking “tension causes a fence.”

In a sensitive space of bare perception the largeness of the land eludes the net of language, as it does the spread and web-work of managed enclosures. Dark mounded mountains dome-topped and looming down sheep-cropped and grass-gripped slopes.

Endlessly weathering and cleaving the clouds, communing like the ebb and flow of tides, and in mutual contrast mutely defying the human need for clusters of sheltered intimacy.

One wonders how it might have looked or was inhabited in the metaphorical realms of extreme antiquity. The Tuatha De Dannan tribes before the Fomorians moved across the land. But this is always now and what is real is relative to the presence of the beholder.

Turbulent times torn between the tamed and the wild, neither yet evolved out of duality and domination to unify one with all within a habitat of wholeness and harmony.  

In the wondering and in the land as one, a longing and a loss eluding language. Actually a projection of currently emerging subliminal patterns of thought, needing present silent attention in the timeless now.

Change is certainly afoot yet which way it may chance to walk is beyond definition of such a measure. While this is just a subjective sketch, a word-painting, improvised and open to any and every interpretation. Just a trip into Kerry. From blog posts to fence posts and back again. ~

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker.