The Stone and The Wool Below the Steeple

6-6-2018

Portrush Northern Ireland

Our northern most point laying down against the North Sea.

We left early yesterday and arrived here late.  Drove country roads all the way, lazy and laid back, snacking, napping, stopping at the occasional church that would show its steeple above the land, easy way to catch us.  Seems below every steeple in Ireland is the sublime beauty of our own desire for transcendence and what is the downside to stopping by for the balm of that?  We are now camped in a very modern home, lots of glass and stainless, clean lined rectangle, over looking the North Sea.  Betty is buried under a thick comforter and I am on my second cup of rich black coffee.  We are surrounded by green fields freshly mowed all spreading down to the sea and in the middle of this, between us and the sea, is the Portrush Country Club’s golf course which our hosts informed us will host the British Open next year.  It is like it sounds.

We are winding down our ten days, lazy “and lay back” reminding me for all the world of the Neil Diamond song “I Am…I Said” lost between two shores, The North Sea and The Great Tennessee River.  Nothing suits me more than being laid back, I was born and raised that way but it seems now I find it harder and harder to get back there.  Ireland has done it for me, the ancientness of it all, the stone.  The stone that makes up this island and has shaped most of what I find sublime about it, the dividing it up, the pens, the castles and homes and most of all the churches, stone used to connect earth to heaven.  It is the materiality of this land, the chosen substance, the national fabric, the reflection of its being.  And then there is wool, not that of the sweater or cap but what wraps the living beast of this land, the sheep, and the irony of these two materials being the piece goods that has made this land and this people and still sustains them against the harshness of this spot, the hardness of it, the cold and damp and isolation of this land.  It is hard rock stone and relentless seas and the eternity of the air above, all of this makes up my feelings this morning as I lazily am.  And there is where I will spend my day, between the green rock land and the sea with sheep all around and under the steeple called sky with The Cross atop in paradise and with my lover, two cords and with my God, three and that abides laziness because a three stranded cord cannot be broken.

Neil Diamond, “you are the sun I am the moon, you are the words I am the tune, play me.”  My Irish balladeer this morning singing about my beloved and me. 

Outside our widow last night.