A Visit to the Ancestors This Saint Patrick's Day

My family has listened to A Celtic Sojourn, a show on Boston’s GBH Radio, since I was a child. 

Because of the pandemic, my girls and I have been able to watch live streams of both their Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day concerts. These online events haven’t replaced big family gatherings or filled the gap left by my eleven year-old’s cancelled Irish dance performances, but those nights, all filled with music and dancing and poetry, glow a little brighter than all those other evenings spent on the couch over the last year. 

I love the way Celtic Sojourn host Brian O’Donovan describes this season: “It’s March, the ‘high-holidays’ for Irish culture around the world.”

This year, of course, the celebrations are all muted and permuted. 

I’m not chauffeuring my dancer to perform at corn beef and cabbage dinners all across the county, like I should be. Instead of heading to hear the local Irish-ish band, we’ll crank up the stereo, open the windows, and shiver as we raise a glass with friends on the back deck. 

And yet, bits of unexpected magic keep finding us, even without the parades and proper pours of Guinness.

Healing the Wounds of Another Year When March 17 Didn’t Happen

This morning, I had a session with a client who shares my love of Ireland. In fact, we both studied in Galway as juniors in college and missed each other by just one semester.

She originally hired me as her writing coach, copywriter, and online marketing consultant, but our relationship has shifted and grown. Now, I am her story healer, too. We begin each session with a simple question, “do you need the practical or the magical right now?”

(Actually, that is never a simple question, is it? The pragmatic “writing for work stuff” is always infused with the work of the soul, especially for healers, creative entrepreneurs, and transformation professionals who pour their hearts and souls into their work.)

Today, it was clear that she needed healing and support. She needed help detangling the knots of everyday life and this sense of being tossed from one crisis to another. Like so many, she was feeling the weight of this one year anniversary of The Great Pause. Perhaps there was a sense of mourning, of “I can’t believe we’re missing another Saint Paddy’s Day,” too.

A Whisper From the Ancestors

I called on my most trusted tarot cards - a deck that found me back in 1999 during my first year in Ireland. Following their lead, we were called to step out of the modern-day snares and endless b.s., away from the stress and the strain of keeping a business growing and a family happy in the midst of the long drawn out disruption.

We were called to visit her ancestors in a wild place just outside of Galway City. 

And so, I led her through a journey back to those rocky shores, back to the lands of her grandmother’s grandmothers. We were in search of a story, a message, a blessing.

With permission, I’ll share it with you here…

“You’re fine,” said a woman from deep in the past on a small patch of land in a place called Connemara where the Atlantic wind and waves never cease. 

That was all she had to say. And that was all this granddaughter of her heart needed to hear.

Returning from that journey across the miles and years, we talked through the layers of meaning in that simple phrase. We talked about the deep, deep blessing that this ancestral grandmother offered.

May You Have Fine Saint Patrick’s Day

We moderns have weaponized “fine” into shorthand for “not good enough.” If someone asks you how you have been and you say “fine,” that answer offers something between “absolutely terrible” and “you don’t really want to know.” 

“Fine” implies merely surviving in a world that declares you’re not really living if you’re not thriving.

What if we could liberate “fine” from all that judgement and disappointment and the sense that things should be better?

What if we remembered that fine wine, fine art, and finely-woven cloth are to be cherished and prized? 

What if we could hear the voice of the ancestors as they took in a deep breath of sunshine and salt air and sighed “‘Tis a fine day”?

There was a message, a blessing in this for my client, a woman who strives to care for all the people, the animals, and the details as she strives to care for herself, too.

There’s a message and a blessing here for all of us, I think.

Perhaps it’s the gift of perspective. (When we strip away all the 21st century stuff and focus instead on the people, the land, and the animals in our lives, wouldn’t life be the right kind of fine?)

Perhaps it’s the permission not to endlessly quest for the epic and the awesome. (Which isn’t sustainable anyway… we’re not meant to live in a constant state of peak experience and we really don’t want every day to be a holiday because that too would run thin.)

Perhaps it’s simply a blessing.

You’re a fine one. Have a fine day. Sure, if the sun rises, it will be fine tomorrow.

Let yourself be fine, just for a moment, and then see if you’d like to be fine for just a minute more. When you hold this sense of “fine” within yourself, might it become just a little easier to face the next crisis and embrace the next moment of ecstatic joy?

Can I help you unlock the stories and untangle the knots? During a Story Illumination Session we can follow the calls of the ancestors or wherever the energy wants to take us.

Want more stories of Ireland? Get a copy of The Sovereignty Knot today. Order  from your preferred bookseller or get a signed copy from me!

The Woman and Her Irishman by Guest Storyteller Brenna Layne

Over a century ago, the orphanage burned to the ground, and a chapter of my family's history went up in smoke. With the papers charred to ash, all anyone knew about Timothy Sullivan was what they could remember—that he had been allowed to keep his birth-father's name (an unusual practice at the time) and that he'd been left at the orphanage by a woman with long black hair. Every year when St. Patrick's Day rolls around, my family retells the stories of our ancestors. Timothy's begins in fire and mystery, but it's the woman I wonder about. The suggestion in the story has always been that she wasn't Caucasian, that some Irish immigrant had taken a Native wife or lover.

Last week, the internet exploded over the release of J. K. Rowling's new series of stories set in North America and heavily featuring Native American mythology viewed through a European lens. Many First Nations people decry Rowling's cultural appropriation, while Harry Potter fans spring to her defense.

I don't know what to think. I've been reading articles about cultural appropriation and trying to understand. There is so much rhetoric on all sides. What I do understand is that stories have power. They tell us who we are, shape the way we locate ourselves in this world, pit us against each other. They bring out the best and the worst in us.

So what does it mean that part of my story is missing? Sometimes I try to imagine all the nameless women who came before me, their faces and loves and lives lost to history. My head spins, and the hugeness of not-knowing threatens to overwhelm me. How do I understand myself if I don't know where I come from?

Stories are tricky, and trickiest of all is that there comes a time when we must begin to write them for ourselves. So I pick up the threads, the floating flakes of ash borne on a century-old updraft, and set out into the wide world to discover who I am.

Brenna Layne is a writer and mother in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where she chases words, kids, critters, and sunsets.