Inishmore - June 2011

While visiting Ireland on a Celtic spirituality tour with seven other women I had the good fortune of  transcending the joy of travel -- the pleasure of seeing and experiencing new things -- to feeling the bliss of travel, the bliss of simply being in a new and transformative setting.

After traveling and walking for days, visiting ancient sacred wells, climbing rocky cairns, and participating in ceremonies all of this spiritual motion and 'doing' left me cold.  I longed simply to stop moving, seeing and experiencing.  I just wanted to be.  I'm not sure what I meant by that or how 'being' would manifest but nevertheless this continual longing and vague dissatisfaction with parts of the trip were making me weary.  I also longed for the day when I would no longer be greedy for photos and information to email back home to armchair traveler friends and relatives.  I longed to free myself from the documentation mode that is all too well developed in me.

Father Dara preparing a Celtic Eucharistic ceremony at a sacred well.

Adonia in her black trench coat.

Adonia, a fellow traveler from New Zealand, was the most Zen traveler I'd ever encountered.  She was what I aspired to be.  Simply and elegantly she moved through our days of touring, participating in all of the meditations and ceremonies, the difficult cairn climbing where rocks kept sliding out from under us as we struggled to stay upright.  She never once took a picture or furiously wrote in her journal trying to capture any of these moments.  No, she just took it all in, like a deep well, always absorbing but never being ruffled by anything.

Susan, Cali, & Karen nearing the top of the cairn.

She appreciated all of the ancient and modern spirituality that Ireland had to offer while at the same time never giving up her own sense of being.  Here was a woman who knew what she wanted to do in life and was thoroughly at peace with her choices.  Lest you think that she's the embodiment of a Buddhist nun let me flesh out her personality a bit.  She's a great lover of Guinness and would just as completely enjoy a pint at the end of the day as she would meditating at the top of Dun Aenghus, the ancient stone fort built at the edge of one of Inishmore's more frightening cliffs, tuning in while the wind and spitting rain blew all around us and the ocean churned and splashed hundreds of feet below us.

Adonia atop Dun Aenghus

While watching her elegantly placing one foot before another on our long hikes over the island I longed to emulate her serenity, composure, and good humor.  She traveled simply, one carry-on case for months of traveling, not only in Ireland but also in Europe, where she'll continue her inner journey long after most of us have returned to our normal lives back home.  She's one of the few people I know who can carry off wearing a black twenty euro packable trench coat with style.  Of course, it doesn't hurt that even the most mundane things that come out of her mouth are wrapped in a soft New Zealand accent, the kind of elegant accent that never fails to induce inferiority in Americans.  And then there's her equally beautiful name, Adonia.   Why don't  American parents come up with such lyricism for their children?

Surely, Adonia's channeling some inner goddess with an impish sense of humor and the inner strength of a conqueror.  She's certainly managed to conquer the material.  About the only things I saw her purchase on our trip was an Aran knit hat and her evening Guinness.  But Adonia's real distinction is that her serenity is substantive, not the airy-fairy New Agey spirituality that one runs into so often.  She's not one of those people with an almost Valley girl way of speaking about  spiritual experiences.  No, Adonia's a woman of substance who's very comfortable in her own skin and with the decisions she's made in life.  She lives the Zen principles of detachment, equanimity, and simplicity without putting on airs or making others feel uncomfortable.

Adonia ready to meditate in one of the island's beehive hermit huts.

I noticed myself taking fewer photos as our group wandered about Inishmore.  Unconsciously, I was starting to pick up Adonia's relaxed, observant attitude.  Don't get me wrong, I still returned home with a full memory card but my desire to 'capture' everything into a 4 x 6 image was diminishing.  I no longer felt as if I had to contain Ireland in concreteness.  Confining misty mornings, centuries old rock walls, and friendly sheep into a pixel file seemed almost vulgar, a distraction from the experience rather than a documenting of the experience.  I was starting to trust that the transformative images from this trip will be in my mind's memory file long after the snapshots have faded or been lost.