At the Edge of Ireland Read online

  Julie Aldridge by Celia Teichman

  It began almost immediately in her cozy counseling room overlooking Castletownbere harbor. We were talking about the peninsula and its ability to lure people into its mysteries and magic. Julie grinned. “Well, first it’s the landscape, I think. There’s a kind of gateway here at Glengarriff. The town itself can be touristy in the summer with its weirdly humid Gulf Stream climate, those two fancy botanical gardens, and the gorgeous hidden valleys back in the forest there. You’ve got to explore those. It’s another world. But if you turn west, and pass through that invisible gateway, you’re into a different form of energy altogether. Some people can’t stay here on Beara for long. Others find it very hard to leave. Must be because—like everyone tells you—we’re sitting on this enormous crystal bedrock here! It also all depends really where you are in your own evolution. If you need to go deeper or find space for your own creativity—Beara’s very conducive for doing work on yourself. Expanding your artistic eye, writing that novel, opening up new channels of health and happiness for yourself and for those you love too.”

  “Well—you certainly look happy enough!” said Anne. “Beara obviously works for you.”

  Another enticing laugh from Julie. “Yes but it’s not for everyone. Certainly not the way we—Jim, my partner, and I—live…a tiny cottage near Eyeries up on the mountainside, no running water, no electricity, no TV…oh, and no car!”

  “No car?! How do you get around?” asked Anne.

  “Walk…or get lifts.”

  “That’s a heck of a walk—over the top from here to Eyeries. What is it—six miles? Maybe more?” I asked.

  “Almost seven. But it’s a lovely experience. Except in the winter. That can be a bit nippy! Sometimes I think we’re crazy. I’m originally from Sheffield in Yorkshire—the Full Monty city. That’s a strong place too, but I never really learned to love it like Beara. The landscape is so powerful here. It works on you whether you know it or not. It’s like a purification process just living here. That’s why we’ve got our little cold, damp cottage—we’re living intentionally at a pretty primitive level. But it’s real. I’ve never felt so connected to anyplace before—at all levels. When we first came to Ireland we traveled around with a tent for five months looking for…something. And then we found Beara, and we were, well—transfixed and transformed! It was like we’d entered one of our own fantasy dreams. We couldn’t leave. Even now if I have to nip over to England to see family or whatever, I always feel the land trying to hold me back. And that’s after years of living here!”

  “How did you get into therapies and counseling?” asked Anne.

  “I suppose it just sort of came—but of course it was possibly already cosmically preordained! I thought I’d be doing some painting. Trying to sell a few canvases to make ends meet. And I must admit, that side of things is working out pretty well. I’ve just had an exhibition at Anam Cara, and some galleries are now interested. Jim was planning to do some computer work—teaching, programming, and whatnot. It was all very vague, but we both sensed that we only have this one life and time seems to be relatively short and there was an awful lot we wanted to do without distractions and without wasting energy going after material things we really didn’t want or need. So, as we opened up to the place, the place sort of opened up to us too. In the most natural and gentle of ways. It showed us—reminded us—that the human being is so much more complex than most of us imagine. We often end up barely scratching the surface of our own lives. But when you do release different facets of yourself, you’re on an incredible learning curve. You start to love yourself and all those new facets of yourself more and more. Then you find yourself opening up to similar kind of facets in other people. You see things—into things—much more. It’s like, the deeper you go inside yourself, the wider you can spread your understanding…your empathy and love.”

  “And out of that…empathy…comes an ability to heal?” Anne asked.

  “Yeah—eventually it can. If you direct it that way. But not all at once. I can’t say suddenly you become some kind of mystical guru—because I’m not mystical at all really, and I’m certainly not a blinking guru! I’m really quite pragmatic. I think, to a large extent, we’re all capable and in charge of our own healing. All that’s needed usually is someone to listen, to really hear, and to suggest where the paths to recovery might be. How they might be used through—well, all kinds of resources—imagery, art, and art therapy; I teach a course in that at Cork University now—and all the various holistic processes. They’re all different, but their potentials and benefits are similar and all mutually reinforcing.”

  “And then there’s your ‘flower remedies’…what are they?” asked Anne.

  Julie laughed once again. We were learning to love that laugh. “Ah…,” she began, “oh, heck—look. I’m finished here for the day. I was going to set off home when you arrived…”

  “Walking?” I asked.

  “Right—walking. Or getting a lift…whatever. People know me and stop. I usually don’t need my thumb! And in this blinkin’ bonnet I’ll get a lift in no time flat! So why don’t you come back to the cottage. See how we really live in the rough on Beara. We can walk or…”

  “We’ve got a car outside. So why don’t we…”

  “…Go by car. Lovely idea. Let’s went!”

  It was a beautiful evening. The air was crisp and the lowering sun bathed the Caha hills in a soft golden light. And when we arrived on the northern slopes of the peninsula, the cottage, hidden in a thicket of tangled trees down a narrow unpaved lane, looked like something out of one of those syrupy sweet Kinkade paintings. It was outrageously romantic, unbelievably cute and coy, with its whitewashed walls highlighted with Greek blue trim, and explosions of flowers all around the windows and doors. At the side was a small, neatly sheep-cropped lawn shaded by trees. Beyond the end of the cottage, fields and hedgerows fell gently down the flanks of the hills to a curling series of coves along Kenmare Bay and the purpling massifs of Macgillycuddy’s Reeks on the Ring of Kerry.

  “Absolutely perfect! We’ll take it!” gasped Anne.

  Julie smiled. “Our reactions precisely when we found it eons back. Despite no plumbing, no water, no electricity, no heating except for the peat fires…”

  “No problem!” Anne chuckled. “We’ve lived and roamed the globe in very small motor homes—writing travel books—so we’ve had some experience of basic living—but this place is just…gorgeous!”

  And the mood of cozy country living continued inside the cottage. The furniture in the living room arced around a glowing peat fire and looked comfortable and well used. Mouthwatering aromas wafted out of a small kitchen at the side. “That’s Jim’s bread. He must have been baking this afternoon. He’s out tonight, but there should be a couple of loaves waiting…yes, they’re here! Fat, brown, and beautiful. So—you might as well stay for a bit of supper, if you want. Won’t be too much—thick homemade soup and fresh-baked bread. Sound okay?”

  We both nodded. Whatever Julie offered was fine with us. And she was laughing again as she led us along a narrow hallway to “my art studio, actually the old cowshed that can still smell a bit you-know-what on warm days.”

  “They say it’s a healthy smell,” I said.

  “Who does?”

  “Well—my grandmother did, I think. ’Course she never actually lived in the country, so she didn’t really spend too much time with cows!”

  “Lucky her. We’ve got a dairy farm just down the lane here, and believe me, I can think of far healthier smells. Thank the Lord for aromatherapy!”

  Julie pulled aside white coverall sheets to reveal some of her latest paintings. “I’m doing almost all landscapes and seascapes now. Very ethereal…”

  They were amazing. Even in the fading dusk light, the gentle turquoises, lemons, and soft scarlets she’d chosen for the canvases glowed like Caribbean beaches. And she’d very delicately run threads of gold leaf across them, like sunlight o
n slow surf wavelets—you could almost hear their ocean rhythms and sounds rippling sloppily across blond beach sands.

  “Beautiful—absolutely beautiful!” said Anne.

  “Is that what you teach in art therapy—this kind of evocative mood?” I asked.

  “Oh, no!” said Julie. “No—this is very much my own work. Therapy art’s entirely different. You’re trying to get people to dig out traumas, stresses, hidden fears—to help them release all these and transform them into new, more positive healing perceptions and energies. Their canvases can get pretty brutal at times—they paint out their problems. Big and colorful and violent as they want. But the changes can be really amazing—I’ve seen dramatic transformations right here in this little room. I can’t talk about it too much because the clients need total privacy—I promise them that. But it certainly works…”

  I nodded in agreement. “And near-deaths can do that too. Anne and I have had a few traumas in that area. And each time it’s like you, as you say, feel utterly transformed—given a new life. It’s an amazing sensation! And an amazing opportunity to reinvent your whole future…”

  Julie laughed. “Yes, I’ve seen so many new lives emerge…”

  “Is it mainly blow-ins you work with?” Anne asked.

  “Actually, it’s about fifty-fifty—locals and blow-ins. And I’ve learned so much from my Beara clients. At first I was staggered at how much pain and suffering lay behind that patina—that surface thing of all the Irish friendliness and charm. You can’t look at anything here in isolation—it’s all part of interwoven continuances—the individual, the family, the clan, the land. A whole complex matrix of interrelationships. That’s why the healing process can be so layered and challenging. We understood these linkages once—intuitively. We tapped into energies—earth energies like ley lines—through standing stones and circles and all that ancient stuff. But we’ve forgotten all that—lost the powers. Partly because there’s been so much suffering here—the terrible famines, the poison in the land, and the horrific memories of the people about the wars, the Troubles, the slaughters, the hard-slog marriages, the layers and layers of guilt injected by the priests—it’s all still lurking here, if you dig deep enough…and in order to heal, you need to dig deep!”

  “And flower remedies can help with all this?” asked Anne.

  “Actually I was talking more about art therapy,” said Julie. But then she proceeded to give us a condensed summary of the principles and purposes of flower remedies. I lost track of some of the details. Anne said it involved using tarot cards and other methods to discover each individual’s needs—physically, mentally, and spiritually. Then Julie blends various flower essences she buys in tiny bottles from the USA into customized sipping fluids primarily to help restore balance in bodily systems and “blown circuits”! It all sounded harmless enough. I assumed a lot of the “healing” would come through simple belief or faith in the process itself—the driving force throughout so much of the holistic world.

  ON THE WAY HOME to Allihies after a truly superb supper of a thick soup, made from homegrown vegetables, and Jim’s crunchy wheaten loaves, we were comparing notes on Julie and all her ideas and activities. Then, without any preamble, Anne said quietly: “I’m going to go and see her next week.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” I said. “There are a few more things I’d like to know, especially about her art therapy.”

  “No,” said Anne. “This is different. I’m going to see if she can help me with my FMS.”

  There was a long silence. For many years Anne had lived with this pernicious muscle condition known as fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). Essentially, in her case, it caused tremendous fatigue and debilitating pain throughout her body. Many doctors rejected this and other similar disorders, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, as “hysterical ailments” or “women’s problems.” Fortunately, enough evidence has since been generated to prove beyond any doubt that these are indeed potentially serious life-changing conditions. In Anne’s case, as the problem worsened, she had to cut back on her consultancy work and her work with AWARE (a nonprofit organization she’d founded to serve adults who are blind or have low vision); and to resign from her position as a university professor in Japan. That was particularly disheartening, as we both loved our four years there on Kyushu Island and had managed to effectively combine her teaching and our journeys in Europe for the Seasons series of books.

  Her FMS was now in its eighth year. She had tried every cure in the catalog, all to no avail. In the past, I know she wouldn’t have paid much attention to “nontraditional” cures, but as the traditional remedies had all proven to be utterly useless, I could sense a definite change in her attitude. Julie had apparently spotted something was amiss when she and Anne were chatting together in the kitchen.

  Rather than go into any more detail about holistic processes that neither of us truly understand, I’ll merely summarize the outcome of this strange experiment in “flower remedies” as—utterly transformational! Within a short time of taking a few of these little drops of flower essence fluid every day, Anne suddenly found the pain and fatigue diminishing for the first time in all those eight long years. A month later there was virtually none. I felt my wife had been “returned” to me—with her previous high energy, enthusiasm, and celebratory lust for life. And today, almost two years later—there has never been a single recurrence…

  And to add to Julie’s accolades, three other friends who visited us during the ensuing months from the USA were captivated by her laughter and uplifting spirit. Each in turn revealed their challenges to her, from mild depression and family concerns to postcancer stress. And Julie dutifully developed customized flower fluids and even sent requested refills to the USA after they’d returned home. Gratitude and gushing thanks rolled in from across the Atlantic. And she smiled and laughed and sent notes of encouragement to our “recovered” friends who still talk about our “lovely, laughing healer” with admiration and awe. Julie, of course, who is one of the most modest “healers” we met on Beara, always emphasized that the process is primarily one of self-healing. She never seemed to accept direct credit for any of her cures. We had the odd sense that while she knew she was tapping into little understood but apparently effective forces and energies, she preferred not to analyze them too deeply. And Anne, whose work in vision rehabilitation has always focused so much on the inherent inner strength of self-help, obviously agrees. But yet, the amazingly rapid pace of her FMS healing occasionally makes us both wonder…

  And I also certainly know that the somewhat cynical naysayer described at the beginning of this chapter (me) has now matured a little. And while maybe not yet a total convert to the mysteries of nontraditional healing, I’m certainly a far more enthusiastic supporter of these unusual people on Beara who offer their knowledge, wisdom, and lives to help others in a wealth of holistic ways.

  Thank you—and more power to you all.

  13

  Leaving Beara for the First Time

  WE REALLY DON’T WANT TO LEAVE. Particularly on a day like this. After almost a week of miserable gray glop, our last morning of the spring season on Beara, and the dawn is crisp-clear. Within an hour, the sky is pigeon-egg blue dappled with tiny white curlicues of cloud. The Skelligs are there too, no longer playing hide-and-seek in the sea hazes, but bold and proud as galleons—seemingly close enough to us to stroke their razored, almost reptilian ridges.

  The tall grasses along the stream are swaying in the faintest of breezes, the buttercups beaming with a gilded sheen, and the daisies virginal white and nodding like a happy host of behatted schoolgirls. (Forgive the overindulgent imagery, but I was feeling rather Wordsworthian that morning.) Behind us are the rugged remnants of the tin mines, the chimneys and stone-walled engine houses, broken and black against the brittle summits and strangely eroded flanks of the hills.

  Over a fold in the half-moor of abandoned fields with their collapsing walls peeps the gaudy strip of houses, pubs, and shops of
Allihies. The carnival cacophony of colors seems almost too blushingly self-conscious, especially as across the rest of the sweeping landscape bound by high ridges, most of the cottages and farms are demurely white or, at their most flamboyant, a delicate shade of lemony cream. This is a color echoed in the broad sweep of our sand beach, that unexpected bonus of copper ore tailings once washed down to the sea from the mines up on the hill. And then—of course—come the greens of the fields and pastures and inbye plots in a patchwork quilt of fervent late spring fertility. You could spend a year painting these and still not exhaust the patterned permutations of green in every imaginable tone and hue.

  And as the sun begins its daily arc, the land seems to change shape constantly. The slowly moving shadows expose a welter of bumps and lumps that could be—and in most instances actually are—anything from ancient neolithic ring forts or stone circles to more recent ruins of the old “famine-era” houses, tumbled in tirades of wrath by avaricious eviction-lusting landlords or merely long collapsed through structural fatigue and the ever-increasing weight of sodden, mold-ridden thatch.

  One thing is obvious from all these shadowy presences—this has been an active, well-used land, far more populous than today. And when the mists float across these bumps and lumps here and when the twilight blurs edges and diffuses things, you can often sense the soft sussurus, the eerie echoes of layered existences.

  And we shall miss them—all of them. And we shall miss even the gray glop days when those proud Skelligs vanish and the unshorn sheep look like bags of rags scattered among the gorse and marsh grass. We shall miss our Beara. Very much.