Connemara

An Irish breakfast. Yum.

Goofball on the bus

Green.
Tiny house on a lake, used for lambing.
Yay! I'm out of the bus! One of the many beautiful, clear lakes we passed.

Suzanne at the lakeKylemore Castle
Angel gargoyle on neo-gothic church - Kylemore estate
I love Eddie and Helen. If ever you need a b & b in Galway, go to the Four Seasons on College Street. Seriously. They are warm and welcoming, have lots of suggestions on where to go, and Eddie keeps telling me to slow down, something I really need to hear. Eddie helped Suz and I choose where to go yesterday. We decided to go to Connemara, a region north of Galway. We'd never been there and the trip included seeing mountains and eating lunch at an abbey!

The drive was so GORGEOUS. We stopped along the way, to visit with Connemara horses and to walk down a lane with thatched roof houses and granite walls as far as the eyes could see. The sun broke out and with the green fields, blue sky and white puffy clouds everywhere, it was straight out of a fairytale.

We stopped for lunch at Kylemore Abbey. After seeing small homes and green fields for two hours, it was a bit hard to believe the castle once it showed up around a bend. A placid lake in front of it... trees surrounding it... it was surreal. Suzanne said it looked like a pop-up book and it did.

But I have to say, the tour of the estate was a bit boring. The castle was nice but seemed really sad. It was built by a man named Mitchell Henry, for his wife Margaret, who died three years after it was completed. I swear I could feel his sadness in there. The place was flat energetically and I felt a bit like I was trespassing. Maybe the trespassing feeling was on account of the fact that the nuns now own the property and I'm a lapsed Catholic? ;-) Anyway, the disappointment went away when we ate our lunch. It was SO GOOD. Suz and I shared a huge plate of salmon, corn, potatoes and carrots, with this really good cream sauce. It filled us up till later that night.

Ooh, I'm going to interrupt myself. Do you know, it stays light until 11 pm? It's crazy. We go out to eat dinner and so far for three nights have been shocked when we take a look at the clock and it's after 9 p.m. The sun is still up there in the sky, actin' like it's 6. It's got me thinking about how clocks really are irrelevant and we eat, sleep, according to the sun and the moon.

Which leads me to something else. Sun, moon, paganism.. I am a spiritual person and work with the divine feminine a lot. And Suzanne and I noticed last night that we are really in a masculine realm here. When we asked nbf ["new best friend," Dad] Eddie where we could find the stone circle we saw in a brochure, he said, and I'm paraphrasing, we're good Christians. That's Pagan. That all comes before Catholicism and we tend to look forward and not back. Everyone comes out here to look at castles and all that but we were poor, and had hard times. Those weren't our homes so why would we want to visit them? We look forward.

It was a perspective I hadn't thought much about and I liked that he said it.

One site I found describes paganism as this: "Paganism, in the broadest sense includes all religions other than the true one revealed by God, and, in a narrower sense, all except Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism. The term is also used as the equivalent of Polytheism (q.v.). It is derived from the Latin pagus, whence pagani (i. e. those who live in the country), a name given to the country folk who remained heathen after the cities had become Christian." So basically, those who didn't conform but remained in tune with the earth's and sky's rhythms were called pagans.

I sense some fear here around this. If people acknowledge stone circles, folklore and ceremonies performed outside the church, it is a direct slap to their belief systems and it is wrong. I even felt a bit of it from a woman in the tourist info center, when we asked her about info on Brigit's Garden, a sculpture garden just north of Galway that celebrates the goddess Brigit. It was like pulling teeth. Finally she went to a cabinet behind her, unlocked it and pulled out a brochure for us. Oy. We're going to try to get there tomorrow.

Anyway, yesterday was an amazing and thought-provoking day that ended with a good Italian meal and a dance party in Eyre Square.