Goleen Heights

The Obsessive Diary

Glasgow airport alive with Scottish lads off to the game in Boston. I’m assuming it’s Boston. I’m assuming it’s football. I’m not really keeping an eye on these things. Pints and short haircuts, dads with sons nervous to be with the big man now, go on son, get yourself a drink. Young, red hair. Glasses as thick as bottles. Edgy as hell. Foot tapping, fingers twisting under the table. He’ll be throwing up before Monday.

Girls with their hair in rollers as if they should be under the heaters in 1950 stroll through Departures in shorts and fake tans with their make up done and all that’s missing is the outfit. Will they fly all the way like that? They must be going to a wedding. And now the lads that gather about the table beside me are all wearing t shirts, Reiss’s Stag Do. Ibiza 26. It’s not football that’s brought them. Reiss is getting married. They’re going to have a night of it. A weekend. I wonder where the bride is.

Three days later…

It went like this. A propeller plane, it got up ok and it flew just fine but when we dipped through cloud toward Cork the seatbelt sign came on and so did the sudden drop through atmosphere, the pressurised cabin sending my stomach up into my mouth. I am not a good traveller. I get motion sick just staring out to sea. I cannot get on a boat. I once spent three days in bed having made the mistake of Surfboard Yoga. As for rocketing to earth in a rackety two-hundred seater with cheers going up with each churning plummet, even writing those words makes spin.

We made it, I queued for car hire but when my turn came, “I’m sorry ma’am but your licence is expired” and that small piece of plastic handed back. Shit. I didn’t know such a thing was possible. I rang A whose gathering I was heading for. Wait a minute, I’ll call you back and five minutes later my friend’s broken down, they’re at the railway station, can they come to you? A car but no licence, a licence but no car, we, my new travelling companions heading for a solstice gathering in West Cork were a match with me made in heaven. Except this. He was a fast driver. And I sat in the back.

They’d had the journey from the seventh circle and so moods were frayed. Everyone was tired and wanting to get there. The roads to Goleen Harbour are winding small. I got sick.

I left the conversation to keep my head still, my eyes focused on the green hills. I told myself it was going to be okay. An hour in I said, would you mind if I sat in the front? And N said, I thought you’d gone a little quiet. I watched the satnav crawl from 20 mins to 19, the miles dropping with equal tempo to the bile rising. I thought I’m never going to make it and remembered hurling from the family car, sick flicking in the back window. We turned into the final bumpy off road track and I got out.

The sudden firm earth and all hell broke loose. I was vaguely aware of the car stop starting away as J caught sight of me in the mirror, wavered, and drove on. But this wasn’t the end. A gathering in this remote and beautiful place and I was out for the count for thirty-six hours. There was no getting up to see LH play, no feast, no hellos and how are yous. There was me in the cabin with the Irish Atlantic still as a mill pond and the curlews and cormorants and lapwings and knots singing praises to the sea and themselves. There was a body taken and a mind gone to swirling hallucinations. When I tried to stand a force turned the world upside down. When speech was near me I felt the waves churn through my system. A would come and say what do you need? and I would say stillness and silence and away she would go again. There have been thirteen months of change. This, by the cliffs, was the first time I have stopped. She said later she sat by my bed and watched my lips turning blue, my eyes rolling back in my head and I remember a moment her face appearing, Shall we call a medic? and my answer No. I felt calm. And there was also this: seven thousand miles away my son was having something wild and later, when I was back on planet Earth and not travelling dimensions I had seen before but not for many years A and I would put the two together. There was some astral mothering going on. I was with him. I saw. I had been called. He and I were in the dimensions together.

I knew this much later when returned and lying in the stretch tent while H over from Germany entranced us in sound bath - this after I woke suddenly at the dawn, solstice morning, and felt the call to the cliffs, found my way to a group and slid down beside A who thought I was dying if not dead, her face the picture of you’re back! I knew it when I took my mother’s ring, heavy with grief that I’ve carried for a year, and threw it in certain dive into the sea. I knew it when I looked at my jeans and sweatshirt and realised all this time I’d been wearing his clothes. The interconnection of us all. Have I said before that we are one?

And so I danced, when I was returned from liminal mothering and the dissolution of thirteen months of change. I swam and took saunas and cried and danced and praised these heights and this place, Goleen Harbour, portal that you are. C, who was my angel through it all, who kept appearing with painkillers and electrolytes, said you held the place between land and sea for us, and she meant as the party raged and stomped through the shortest night and I lay on my back, the cormorants calling, the ocean a mill pond from my bed. The next day we walked for Gaza. The last night we danced until my boots broke. Goleen Harbour, my Irish friends, the intricate and inexplicable tapestry that places here and here, the higher workings that ask for submission, I love you.

Eleanor