Balancing life and a chronic illness
Oh, you can bet I am willing, I am usually more than willing. When physical restraints curb your potential, you realise that you want so more from your own life, and out of your own reality. Life is moving forward outside your medically induced world, and you feel annoyed when healthy people don’t realise the worth of their bodies, their unused potential. It simply reminds you that being chronically ill sucks.
Balancing life and a chronic illness
Reality. It’s what’s for breakfast. After some feeble attempts trying to write a few paragraphs the past few weeks, it was back to the drawing board each time. Not good enough. Already done this. Needs more research. Too tired. Not fit enough. You know moments like these, you sit down, determination almost physically squeezing ink out of your pen. Cup of coffee at the ready, you start and a few minutes later you have to hold on, waiting for energy to kick your bum to open up your half-closed eyes. Reality. Seamus Heaney once said “writing is a snapshot of consciousness”. I was lucky being semi-conscious this week. I could hardly make sense of myself during those few moments I tried to put pen to paper.
Kick-Ass Ireland
Some days I sit still and think about how my life became a dream full-circle. There’s William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Brendan Behan. Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Land of Heart’s Desire and Yeats’s grave. Dubliners, Ulysses and Bloomsday. The mountains, lakes, Dublin, Sligo and the Shannon. Brú na Boinne, Corcaigh, Beara, Daingean Uí Chúis, Zú Bhaile Átha Cliath, craic agus ceol. Brian Ború, Michael Collins, Theobald Wolfe Tone and Daniel O’Connell. Seven hundred years of cruelty, yet still able to endure hard times. Writers, dancers, taps, tin whistles and uilleann pipes. Books, almighty libraries and small bookshops selling secrets. Friendships gained, lost and renewed. New alliances forged in foothills and strengthened on mountain tops. “You, the Irish” becoming “Us…
Ireland, still here
"Ireland is still the protagonist in my life that runs away with its stories, and drags me along in its clear chants and rebel songs. I hear tears falling on the sound of uilleann pipes; I feel the waves when I read Seamus Heaney’s ‘Lovers on Aran’. I’ve walked with James Joyce and listened to William Butler Yeats. It feels as if my heart came home. In my mind, I was already part of Ireland."
12 years of poetry, books & dreams
12 years ago, on this very day, I moved to Ireland. Sometimes it still feels like a dream within a dream, of seeing, hearing and feeling new stories, of meeting wise and old, playful and young. Thinking back, I always have William Butler Yeats in the back of my mind. He is definitely my favourite Irish poet, although it would be an injustice not mentioning the fantastic work of Seamus Heaney, James Joyce’s Ulysses and many others blessed by the Irish gift of the gab. Below are just a few of my favourite poems by Yeats, so do enjoy!
From The Frontier Of Writing, by Seamus Heaney
The tightness and the nilness round that space when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect its make and number and, as one bends his face towards your window, you catch sight of more on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent down cradled guns that hold you under cover and everything is pure interrogation until a rifle motions and you move with guarded unconcerned acceleration— a little emptier, a little spent as always by that quiver in the self, subjugated, yes, and obedient. So you drive on to the frontier of writing where it happens again. The guns on tripods; the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating data about you, waiting for the squawk of clearance; the marksman training down out of the sun upon you like a…
Ireland, a masterpiece
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. (Seamus Heaney) Ireland is where strange tales begin and happy endings are possible. (Charles Haughey)