Travels in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland

I am sitting here in this cafe in Woodland, California. I’m suddenly struck with a sense of my roots and can feel the memories of my ancestors. Many of the older white folks here in this restaurant could originate from the same stock as I do. I know that many of my recent ancestors came from Ireland and probably from Leinster (Dublin) and perhaps Ulster (Belfast). My Irish roots may also track back into Scottish Borders country in the 1600s.

We have these conceptions of our differences and the distances between us in space and time. The last 600 years of history, back to the Medieval times and the dawning of The Enlightenment, seems like a long haul. In fact, the people in this restaurant and I are sitting with our common DNA and all the embodied patterns of hundreds of years that included many wars and countless adventures. It is all written into our chassis. I am aware that the legacy of all my ancestors is sitting here with me in this cafe in Woodland, California. So what’s the point?

My experience of such moments is teaching me that my conceptions of difference and separateness are superficial at best. At one level these distances in space and time seem very real and at another level I see how they are kind of made up. What makes us unique from one another is a really tiny bit of our DNA plus all the big social influences like those that are hitting us today. Granted, there is a huge difference in terms of technology, society and the much greater complexity we live with today than our ancestors 600 years ago. They would have no clue about this world we are living in today. To them this would have all been magic and the devil’s own craziness, or perhaps God’s miracles. And yet the folks sitting around me here in his cafe, me and maybe all of you reading this are made from the same stuff. The same nervous systems and the same old unskillful ways of reacting to the world even though we now face such greater complexity and ambiguity.

I leave in a few days for Dublin and will spend a week in Ireland enroute to Edinburgh. There will be great merriment and celebration of my daughter’s wedding in Edinburgh and I even get to wear a kilt (yikes). What a day it will be! That salubrious event is what prompted my tour of Ireland and Northern Ireland. My first stop after Dublin airport will be a Tesco superstore and a foreign exchange desk somewhere outside of Dublin. Then I will drive two hours north to my hotel in Belfast. It may seem strange to start off in Belfast. However, I am aware that the roots of The Troubles as well as all previous conflicts are what led my ancestors to Ireland and then on to Kentucky.

So why is that important? Well, when I see the conflicts we’re facing in the United States today, especially with this upcoming election, the civil wars in Northern Ireland might prove instructional. In many ways we’re still back in the 1600s with Scots fighting Scots while they are fighting the English and the English are terrorizing Scotland. The failure of Bonnie Prince Charles led to the exile of many Scottish people to Ulster (Belfast). Out of the frying pan into the fire? Who thought that you could escape the violence of English persecution and land in a place where those who love the Union Jack (mostly Protestants) and those who want to establish the Republic (mostly Irish) were locked in bitter battle.

My Irish and Scottish ancestors ended up in Kentucky where our Armstrong clan settled as poor farmers. My grandfather’s family settled in Grayson County where they eventually found themselves in the American Civil War. In the mid 1800s the state of Kentucky was caught between North and South and had to eventually give way to another group of people demanding union. I’m struck by all these parallels and repetition. All those hundreds of years of people fighting one another.

This is happening in me as I sit here in this wonderful local cafe. I am looking into the faces and listening to the words and laughter and deeply enjoying the common day camaraderie of local people. After Belfast, I’m headed to the walled city of Derry (hopefully via the grave of the poet Seamus Heaney) and then down the Northwest coast of Ireland to the birthplace of Yates. At that point, the Connemara and Connemara National Park will be calling me.

Connemara attracts me because I have been listening to John O’Donoghue for some time. His wonderful allusions to the roots of Irish mysticism establish me in the soil as well as in the blood and the bone of the Irish lands. He speaks so elegantly and profoundly, I hope to experience some of the magic that inspired him. After a short stop in Galway, I head to Dublin for a day so I can worship at the foot of the Book of Kells. If I have time, I will visit the Dublin Gaol, as I am told they tell the story of The Troubles well.

There are important veins of our culture and our laws that found their way through these Irish isles. All the way from the Greeks to the monasteries led by Catholic Bishops who protected so many of the great works written in Latin. I’m given again to this remarkable sense of time and place and space stretching all the way from deep Greek, Roman, and European roots, back here to little Yolo County California. There is a wonderful and sacred sameness that we all share. It’s that feeling of the sameness that stands in dark contrast to all the illusions of separateness and difference. Belonging lives here with this simultaneous sameness and sparkling uniqueness. But not so much in the wars.