At the Edge of Ireland Read online

  “So this was the guy who came to my workshop. He was in New York at the time…He was quite a well-known photographer, and he was also starting to make movies. Anyway, he’d been working in the city for three or four years and decided he needed a change. So he wrote to his friend and told him he thought it was time to build that boat for their world-sail odyssey. And he told me that it was just ten days later that he got a call, and he was certain that it was his friend speaking. But it was actually his friend’s father. And his friend’s father said, ‘On the very day you wrote that letter, we had word that our son was killed in Nicaragua…in the troubles out there…’ and he said they were going to have a private funeral. But then he said, ‘As one of his closest friends, we’d like you to come.’

  “So—they had the funeral, and it was a very moving affair. And the father then said to the photographer, ‘You and I have got to do a memorial sail for my son.’ They weren’t going to go around the world, but they were going to go to the Aleutian Islands. The father had his own boat all ready. So they were vittling the boat for the trip and they went to get final supplies and whatnot, and when they were on the father’s boat, he saw this knife—this beautiful, multifunction knife. And he must have made some kind of remark…what a wonderful knife it was or something like that…Anyway, they moved on, got the stuff, got on the boat, and left the harbor. Pretty soon…it was totally amazing, actually…they soon got into a heavy swell on the sea. The boat really was moving around a whole lot. And what he told me happened was a bottle of champagne that they’d brought with them to drink a toast to his friend who was killed…it opened all by itself. They didn’t open it. He said it was very eerie. The two of them just stood and stared…The bottle was there open and the cork was on the other side of the galley. And they both sensed that he was there with them in that boat. So they drank the toast to him and the father wanted to give my friend a memorial gift. He’d seen how much he’d admired the knife, so he said, ‘You were my son’s best friend and this was his favorite knife…’ So the father gave him the knife—and that was the very knife he gave away at my workshop.”

  Michael paused to let the images sink in. There was a thoughtful silence. Then Anne smiled. “Lovely story,” she said.

  Michael nodded: “Yeah…yeah, it is. But it’s not quite over yet. Y’see—what happened at the workshop was equally wonderful. Because, who should receive the knife, but a woman. My friend had told his tale, and there was hardly a dry eye in the room. And they passed by chance…we do this kind of musical chairs chance ritual when it comes to who gets which of the gifts. Anyway, this woman, a striking, mature but troubled lady, got the knife, and she held it for a long time, stroking it. And then she spoke. Quietly but with a strength she’d not shown before at the workshop, she said: ‘I couldn’t have had anything more appropriate for me at this moment in my life than this knife. I’m in a shitty relationship and I need to cut my way out of it. And this knife is going to give me the courage to do what I have to do—and I shall always be grateful. Your generosity will help me release myself…’”

  More silence. We sat with Michael, not saying anything. Then: “It’s always a magical process,” said Michael. “The spirit of releasing something you value and seeing it bring meaning and value to someone else…the true gift that keeps on giving…yeah, I know that’s some inane advertising jingle for…something or other…”

  “Diamonds, I think,” said Anne.

  “Right. Quite possibly.” Michael nodded. “But in these sessions, these exchanges, it really means something…What’s the point of accumulating stuff, especially when others can benefit. David—what was that zany country song you were singing the other day?”

  “Oh, that…,” I said, not quite able to remember the words. “How’s it go? Something like: ‘La dee da, la dee da, la dee da…/ Where I’m going, I won’t be comin’ back/And I’ve never seen a hearse/With a luggage rack,’ or at least I think that’s the gist of it.”

  “Yeah, I guess that just about sums it all up!” Michael laughed. “No luggage racks. So—share yourself and give away as much as you can before someone else ends up doing it for you when you’re gone!”

  OUR FRIENDSHIP WITH MICHAEL continued to grow over the months on Beara, culminating one amazing evening when he invited Anne and me and some of our friends, newly arrived from America, to celebrate the finale of one of his week-long workshops…as will be revealed later…

  Michael also told us of other healers and therapists and counselors living on Beara. Some had attended his workshops, others he’d met socially. Their range of practices varied enormously, from massage therapy, homeopathy, and reflexology to art therapy, craniosacral, color, crystal, and aroma therapies and various forms of meditation including the more “down-to-earth,” nonmystical Vipassana and Metta traditions. Yet despite all these different approaches, the purpose of these “healing” techniques seemed to be to help enhance sound holistic foundations for our poor confused human spirits—spirits often broken, distorted, or abandoned in the welter of worries and stresses and traumas in the world beyond Beara. Souls distorted in a solipsistic confusion of endless consumption of things not needed and virtual reality living that eliminates the true, the tangible, the “now” of a simple existence. People in despair and suffering, even in the most idyllic of places and circumstances, thinking themselves unworthy of true happiness. Others fluttering around the edges of their own lives, unable to see how all the apparently unrelated coincidences dotted along the path of their existences were actually benevolent stepping-stones to a potentially joyous future.

  MARJÓ OOSTERHOFF SUMMED UP her purpose in offering various meditation instructions at her small Passaddhi Center high on the Caha flanks between Hungry Hill and Sugar Loaf Mountain and overlooking Bere Island and Bantry Bay. “Vipassana means ‘clear seeing,’” she told me with a beguiling smile and a slight Dutch accent. Her silver hair moved slightly in breezes that rolled up through the hedge-bound pastures below and wafted through the huge open windows into the main meditation room. A plump, furry, three-legged cat came and sat itself on my knee. Marjó laughed—a youthful laugh, full of honesty, and a furrowless face bathed in what I can only call a “giving” spirit. She was one of those rare individuals you know you’re going to like almost before anything is said.

  Once the cat had snuggled its way into a ball on my lap, Marjó continued. “This kind of ‘clear seeing’ helps us touch and understand our mental, physical, and emotional processes. We begin to see patterns and habits more clearly, and we can undertake journeys of pragmatic self-discovery. It’s not about getting mystical experiences. We don’t do levitation here! Very verboten! It’s simply about emerging from living on automatic pilot, from being only half awake, and learning to live life more fully—more open-minded and open-hearted—with a lot less fear and clinging to things. And this process can be reinforced with Metta or ‘loving kindness’ meditation. This helps us make friends with our minds and release ourselves from our cunning chronic little critic who’s always trying to sabotage our natural ability to wake up and love ourselves and thus truly love others and live fully. We remove unnecessary boundaries that we often create for ourselves, eliminate fears and blocks, and come to see the inherent interconnectedness of things.”

  Marjó has been offering many of her short and long (ten-day) retreats for up to ten people on a donation basis since 1999. “It gets harder each year to do things that way, but it still feels right…and somehow we get by. I spend time in Burma most years on retreats and—wow! When you see what those people have to put up with over there, it makes our challenges—our lives here—seem so very easy. I’m constantly amazed by their grace and peace in the midst of so much disease and poverty and hunger—and overt injustice. What I learn from them—which increases each time I’m there—I try to share with others here…and I think it’s helped quite a lot of people. At least”—Marjó chuckled—“that’s what they tell me…I try to explain how quickly and eerily
tragedy can enter our lives and change everything in an instant. I emphasize how vital love is—there’s no time to waste on arguing or unloving behavior. A simple message, but you’d be amazed how people react—like sudden transformations!”

  “YES, I DEAL WITH that quite a lot too,” said Alan Hughes with a strong rugby player’s laugh. “Although when most people come here they have no idea at all what the heck my craniosacral therapy is. Do you know?”

  “Well, Alan, I must be honest, I suppose I cheated a bit,” I said. “I picked up one of your brochures in the Supervalue supermarket down the street and got a bit of background. I know it’s called a ‘gentle, hands-on therapy,’ although it started to lose me with all those references to cerebrospinal fluids and craniosacral congestions and restrictions. But what did fascinate me was that one of our friends here said you had ‘magical ghost hands’ that applied no pressure on a body at all and merely floated over sensitive points and yet she felt as if they were relaxing, easing, a dozen places at once. She said ‘I could see Alan’s hands over my legs but I could swear I was actually feeling them up around my shoulders and my head where he’d been a few minutes before!’”

  Alan laughed. He was a lean, good-looking (rugby-playing) man in his late forties with blinkless—almost hypnotic—blue eyes. His office was next to the enormous church in Castletownbere across the road from Jack Patrick’s, our favorite local butcher. Alan had spent his youth in South Africa and then zigzagged through a “mé-lange-career” in photography, computer programming, store management, water sports, and more recently “serious gardening” and African drumming with a Beara drumming circle. His fascination with different forms of healing began with a visit to Beara in 1997 and then a series of intensive courses in Indian head massage and Reiki, Thai, and Hawaiian massage, aura-soma color therapy, sound therapy, and craniosacral therapy.

  “Why Beara?” I asked.

  “Well—I have some ‘Irish roots.’ My grandfather was from Limerick. But I discovered the peninsula by accident. I was traveling—‘rooting’—around, trying to avoid the tourist crowds on Dingle and the Ring of Kerry. And I found Beara and I sensed it was one of those unique places—a sort of real genuine power point. You could feel it in the air and the land. I’d seen Deirdre Purcell’s Falling for a Dancer movie—it was filmed in and around Eyeries here where I live now—and it was like Wuthering Heights, you could just sense that vast natural power of the cliffs, the islands, the ocean, the whole wild tone of the place!”

  “And how does this craniosacral therapy work?”

  Alan laughed again. His blue eyes glinted but, as from the start of our chat, hardly ever blinked. I felt if I looked too closely I really would be hypnotized. “Well—fast version—at the core of our bodies is the cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions and bathes the brain and the spinal cord in sort of wavelike ebb-and-flow movements. The other pieces—bones, organs, and whatnot—each follows its own particular pattern of movement. So with the hands of a trained therapist, these movements can be perceived and manipulated, especially to relieve strains and stresses stored up in the body and mind, which can restrict overall holistic functioning. It’s a strange process and hard to explain, but I use my hands to identify ‘congestions and blockages’ and then reflect them back into the body to remove them. One analogy is a mirror. If I hold a mirror in front of you, you may see in the reflection that you’re frowning and then, if you decide you’d prefer not to be frowning, you’d relax your eyebrows and smile. And—poof!—the frown is gone…”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Well, it took me almost three years of hard slog to get a diploma in this, so it’s obviously a bit more complex. But, in essence, that’s what I end up doing. Helping unblock blocks. The point is that, in most cases, the ‘health’ of the body is there. You just need to release it. You can never control everything—life’s a random crapshoot. The Creator’s got all the aces! But we can help enhance the edges—that old saying—‘Life throws you curves so you learn how to swerve.’ So—I suppose that’s my main job. Teaching physiological and psychological driving skills!”

  MARY PADWICK—ONE OF Beara’s leading reflexologists—giggled when I quoted Alan’s job description. She was an attractively vibrant woman living with her photographer-husband, Neil, and immensely proud of her son Matt, whom we’d met and who directs all the administrative complexities at Dzogchen Beara.

  “But Alan’s right. That’s really the essence of all these healing practices here. I remember way back when we lived in England, Neil treated me to a health farm weekend for my birthday once, and boy!—they had the lot! Yoga in a dozen different forms, acupuncture, reflexology, Reiki, massages, tai chi, hot stones, dancing circles, crystals—you name it. It seemed a bit wacky at first, but wonderful in a way. A whole new world for me. And I asked—what’s it really all about? And one of the therapists told me: ‘It’s very simple—the body is a mass of energy pathways and channels, and some get blocked and need help in opening up again. After that, the body usually has ample capacities to restore its own equilibrium. All you have to do is work with the body—but don’t get in the way of allowing its own healthy generating powers to do their job.’”

  “Everyone here, all the healers I’ve met, seem to make their roles appear very simple and obvious,” I suggested, staring out of the windows of their home overlooking the vast panorama of Bantry Bay and thinking, You could heal anything and anyone in a setting like this.

  Mary laughed. “Well, it is simple. I always knew I had a gift for listening to and helping people. The key I find to my way of reflexology is to open up to each person and allow them to trust you while you’re working on the foot exercises. Once they sense you’re truly focusing on them, they allow themselves to improve and to heal. In the end—no matter how sophisticated the techniques you use—it’s their choices about themselves that really make the true difference.”

  There was warmth and translucence in the way she expressed herself—definitely the kind of therapist I’d seek out if I ever needed one.

  Mary’s husband, Neil, had been working quietly with his photographs in a corner of the living room, only moving when he spotted spare slices of Mary’s amazing homemade ginger cake. (“It’s Delia Smith’s recipe. Not mine,” she said modestly.) But he’d obviously been listening to our conversation and finally added his own opinion. “I honestly think that one of our main problems today is that we limit ourselves by the false and very incomplete logic of scientific knowledge when all the major forces and energies are infinitely powerful and way beyond any kind of logic.”

  That seemed to sum up what Mary was saying, so we spent most of the rest of the time admiring Neil’s remarkable high-resolution landscape shots of Beara. “This peninsula is just full of these vast panoramas,” he said enthusiastically, “and I’m starting to produce a whole series of cards to sell locally—plus some very expensive megablowups for affluent blow-ins. They seem to love them and find them ‘very relaxing’—so I guess it’s my small contribution to all these healing activities on Beara!”

  “I WOULDN’T CALL THEM affluent—most of the blow-ins I meet here are carrying backpacks and eating day-old sandwiches,” said Julie Aldridge, founder of Soul Ray. The sign on the door next to the supermarket was a little frayed at the edges, but there was a pamphlet pinned to the hallway wall inside explaining that Soul Ray offered a variety of services, including art therapy: “A unique approach to emotional and psychological problems…enabling access to your deeper understanding as well as strengthening your imaginative and creative potentials.” And it also mentioned something about “flower remedies.”

  “What in the world are flower remedies?” asked Anne.

  “Never heard of them,” I said. “I thought I’d seen just about every kind of therapy there was offered on that notice board in the supermarket—I even found some new ones today like shiatsu, ayurveda body massage and acupressure, pulsating magnetic fields therapy, asana, pranayama, trance-danci
ng, hyperthermic chamber therapy, timeline therapy, mora and hydro-colon therapies, chakra and regression therapies—oh! and kinesiology and iridology. And all this in and around little Castletownbere. If they had someone doing Kabbala training, we’d just about have the lot.”

  “You’re forgetting angel channeling,” said Anne with a grin.

  “What?”

  “Angel channeling. Using the power of your own guardian angel, or something like that. There was someone talking about it on Irish TV last week…”

  “Okay—if you say so, although I haven’t seen that offered here yet! But ‘flower remedies’…I’m stuck!”

  “Actually,” said Anne, “it says ‘Peralandra and Bach Flower Remedies—offering gentle support during times of difficulty, stress or crisis.’”

  “So—let’s go and ask this Julie Aldridge what she’s really doing.”

  We climbed two long flights of stairs, and just as we reached the door to the Soul Ray office, out stepped this very tall bundle of energy, high spirits, and infectious laughter.

  “Oh, hello,” she said (with that very infectious laugh). “I’m Julie—are you coming to see me? I was just leaving…”

  “Well, we’ll come back—” Anne started to say.

  “Oh, no no—come on in. I’m not going anywhere special. I just needed a break. Fancy a cup of tea?”

  And that was it. We were smitten. She was lovely, lively, and seemed to float about on a little cushion of joy and giggles—all topped off with a dainty broad-rimmed bonnet sprouting ribbons and feathers. “It takes me forever to put this thing on, so—if you don’t mind I’ll leave it on. I’m trying it out for a wedding next week.” Ah—zaniness personified. I sensed we had found a potential new friend. Anne was laughing a lot too, along with Julie—always a sign of instant-bonding. And as it turned out, there was actually some serious and very valuable bonding to be done with Julie in our future on Beara.