Ireland: When a Dream Comes True: Everyday Magic, Day 1,127
- Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
- Sep 21
- 5 min read
I must have been five or six when I first saw a picture of Ireland and knew I would go there one day.
I'm not sure where this came from -- I don't have any Irish ancestry (99% Ashkenazi Jewish). I can't verify past lives, although I once dreamt of being a tall, beautiful blond nun somewhere in Ireland. I have no lost loves or third-grade penpals from this place. Still, it was an unbreakable pull, my yearning to go flaring up in waves over the years.
Then it happened, thanks to the confluence of Brave Voice, my co-leader Kelley Hunt's twin feeling about Ireland, and the right people at the right time -- namely Brave Voice staffer and friend Erin McGrane and her marvelous husband Jeff Freling (both experts at organizing such trips). Months of planning, hundreds of details to detail, and off we went on Aug. 29. Some 20 days later, Ken and I returned down the chutes and ladders travel vortex to land home where we try to stay awake past 8 p.m. and not wake up until real morning.
How did this dream come true and what does it mean? I let the question breathe me in, knowing travel itself is a way of dreaming: waking up in another land where we're living a parallel life in another time zone composing itself out of entirely differently-choreographed weather, music, and, in the case of Ireland, such musical speech.
The dissonance of time, travel, and place makes its own strange and lovely music. It harmonized well with the music threading through our travels, starting with our Brave Voice week at the Falls Hotel in Ennistymon (County Clare), brimming with music and musicians, side trips to ancient beauty, and writing, singing, wandering, eating, and trying to sleep and wake at the right times. When Brave Voice ended, we traveled further along the Wild Atlantic Way with our friends Peter and Rosalea before heading to Galway and Dublin.
But these sentences don't convey what it was to walk in the sun and rain alongside the Cullenagh River in Ennistymon to the fabled Salmon Bookstore. Or, as a long-time tea-drinker, revel in a country that is all about pots of hot tea. Or cry at the deep beauty of singer Roisin Ní Ghallóglaigh's stunning voice as well as at the vast Cliffs of Moher. Or set people off to do lively writing prompts in an ancient hotel where Dylan Thomas hung out (married as he was to the hotel owners' daughter, Caitlin Thomas). Or wake to a window with a tree full of giant Jackdaws, large crow-family birds that rule the roost and bring their own kind of Jackdaw luck (beware!). Or watch the giant tumble of green mountains come into and out of view as my friends and Ken learned to drive on the left side of the road across the Dingle Peninsula.
There were also challenges common and uncommon to travel, but like most leaps to unknown places, we found charms and compensations to ease our way. We stumbled into the garden variety adjustments and discomforts of strange sleep, occasional digestive hubbubs, and confusion on how to make phone calls.
But there was also the virus-variety trouble. "Don't get Covid," I told myself going into this trip, but that's what happened to Ken, our friends, and me. After a moment of panic rising from my belly to my throat, and a late night for us/ early evening for her call with my reassuring doctor back in Kansas, I realized it was relatively okay. We were in a window-filled rental on the western edge of Connemara, surrounded by mountains, curly-grassed and windy-flowered fields, and ocean inlets. I made a pot of soup, and we whiled away the hours napping, reading, watching movies, and occasionally yelling out, "rainbow!"and rushing into the fierce wind and rain for a better look. I lost my sense of taste and smell in a B & B in Galway just as another rainbow filled the window. We found Covid tests, cough drops, and painkillers in Dublin pharmacies, I regained my full senses within a day, and eventually, each of us tested negative and felt more than relatively good again.
In between and throughout, so many surprises, which are the hallmark of a dream trip (which is always more than you could imagine). A sampling of what I learned:
Polish is the second-most spoken language in Ireland (waves of Polish immigrants arrived 20+ years when Irish growth opened the doors wide).
The trees in the world-class and not-all-that-known National Botanic Garden are hundreds of years old, some looking like their bark collaged together ancient faces.
The owner of the O'Connor pub in Cloghane won an actual Emmy, which he delightedly placed on our table.
Roads (aside from highways) were often just one and a half lanes wide (sheep-sized more than car-sized) with no shoulders because of the beautiful rock walls. And the sheep. So many sheep, sometimes climbing the rock walls and spilling over to hang out with each other in the road.
No one gave us grief for being American, and in fact, commisserated and talked openly about the struggles they'd been through in their country.
The day after I recited Yeats' "Song of the Wandering Aengus" at the Poet's Corner pub in Ennis, Roisin Ní Ghallóglaigh sang a song made from this poem.
The green hills of the Dingle Peninsula were as green as the Flint Hills at their peak but even more so.
The tide came and went steps from our rental in Cloghane (Dingle Peninsula), filling up, then emptying a large stretch of the bay.
Dahlias were sometimes twice the size of my face.
The food, which people advance-complained to us about, was delicious, especially fish and chips, which we sampled in many places.
Walking multi-cultural, polylingual Dublin felt like wandering New York City.
It is so possible for the weather to change at a fast clip between driving rain, hot sun, big wind, rainbow, sideways rain within any ten minutes that most of our walks had me adding or subtracting layers, hats, and expectations.
Just about every Ireland resident I talked with more than a few minutes felt like someone I could have met in my home community but with a more surprising (to me) accent, including David, the waiter each morning at our Dublin hotel. A Polish immigrant, he taught us a new Polish word each morning.
Most of all, like all dream trips, this one will be landing in me for a long time to reveal itself.
But this is what travel is and does. To draw on the wise words of Ireland's beloved W. B. Yeats, "The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." Travel sharpens our senses, so that out of the visible, the visible can emerge.
Now, a week after eating left-over Guinness beef stew in our Dublin hotel room, imagining how, a week later, I would be sitting on my porch, I'm on the porch, thinking of the young girl who was me and knew she had to go to Ireland. I'm telling her, Look! Your dream came true. It just took about 60 years, but what is time to a dream?
Wow, that is so beautiful to hear about. Thank you for sharing this.
Going to Germany, to visit the village my namesake great grandfather came from, to walk in the house where he was born and grew up, nearly unchanged in the century since, was the most awe inspiring event for me. I cried myself to sleep nearly every night in amazement. Family is still there. I was the first to go back after he had left. Now, several of us from both sides have visited the other and we are one family again.