My apologies for the lack of posting -- I've had computer problems.
My four-year-old bounded joyfully
down the path, her dress flapping behind her, into the deep forests of the
Wicklow Mountains of Ireland. She stopped between the giant trees, put her arms
out and twirled around, spinning through shafts of green sunlight from the
canopy above. She ran her fingers through the shaggy moss, lifted pieces of
wood from the ground and inspected the tiny nightmares underneath, and peeked
in the crevices as eagerly as if they were Christmas stockings.
Almost every weekend I brought her to
one of these old woods, remnants of the cold rainforest that once covered this
island. Here we found mushrooms big as saucers to bring home and cook with
dinner from our garden. Here we sat on giant roots that extend like jetties
over the river, and watched the fish and tadpoles gather under our toes. Here
we fed the greedy mobs of ducks, sparing bits for the shy coots and moorhens
hiding in the reeds, and silently watched kingfishers flash like jewels in the
trees or grey herons lurk like gargoyles over the water.
In a hollow of these mountains,
fifteen centuries ago, Christian monks escaped the collapsing Roman Empire and
the savagery of pagan barbarians, and built self-reliant communities of
believers that outlasted wave after wave of warlords and empires. In this
redoubt generations of unsung heroes copied book after book by hand, saving
Western Civilisation -- history, science, law, philosophy, theatre,
mathematics, architecture, democracy and the Gospel.
In later days, when foreign soldiers
invaded this island, felled its forests and tortured or starved its people,
rebels gathered in these mountains to organise a resistance. Most were hunted
down and killed, but farmers across the country sang their stories in secret --
until a new generation took up the cause, and another, and another. Each
rebellion built on the memory of the ones before, until the final one saw a
nation of dirt-poor farmers defeat the world’s greatest empire.
As my daughter plays at being a
pirate or Viking, I wonder if any real pirates or Vikings, not to mention monks
and Druids, walked these same paths before us, sat with legs dangling over the
water, and watched the ancestors of these herons. In every civilized age we
humans left the pressures of civilization for time alone in nature, and
“whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” as Ishmael says in Moby Dick, we return to nature to
restore us – even in this already damp and drizzly country.
Such places have always made men feel
closer to God; no wonder Jesus and John wandered in the wilderness, and the
monks sought these valleys to build their refuge. Even now a local priest
occasionally says a special Mass under these trees, the congregants gathering
in this first and greatest of cathedrals.
In the woods around us our neighbours
keep alive other very old rituals. Once a year, the day after Christmas, local
men dress up in woodland gear and gather around a statue of a wren, the little
songbird that is so frequently heard here and so rarely seen. Then other local
men covered in straw costumes --- “straw boys” -- sneak up and steal the wren,
running away as all the local children scream in frightened delight. The
children chase the straw-boys through the woods, parents trudging up behind
them until the wren is retrieved.
It’s a tradition much older than Santa
Claus, dating back thousands of years in one form or another to Druid times and
rich with ancient symbolism. Ireland has become a modern country now, with
televisions replacing sing-a-longs in most pubs and the younger generations
learning more from their smart phones than from their elders’ lore -- but a few
fragments of its ancient culture survive, like the woodlands themselves.
For a child these woodland paths are
also treacherous, and not just from straw-boys. Stinging nettles line the sides
of every Irish path, waving their stalks at passers-by. Their touch leaves a
painful welt on the skin, and modern suburbanites now spray poisons to suppress
them. The old country men and women around here, though, explained that a bit
of dock-leaf cures the sting, and from the time my child was a toddler she knew
how to treat a nettle encounter.
My old neighbours also explained that
cooked nettles have no sting, and are both healthy and delicious. A bit of
research, online and in the kitchen, proved them right, and soon my daughter
and I were making them into soup, tea and wine, and I tried pickling them,
adding them to beer, and using their compost in the garden. Instead of trying
to spray them with poison, we began to look forward to harvesting them every
spring – wearing gloves, of course – and kept secret our favourite nettle
patches.
My girl stopped to smell and pet
every flower along the path -- oxlips and primroses, meadowsweet and clover. At
first I ignored them, but here too my elderly neighbours opened my eyes and
showed me I was looking at a salad bar, an herbal tea shop, an emergency
medicine chest and the makings of a wine collection. Again I confirmed their
folk wisdom with research and personal testing, and soon I was planting some of
the same weeds I had once uprooted, making them into tea, dinner and
drinks.
Once everyone here grew up with such
knowledge, as did every Druid and caveman before them, going back as long as
there have been humans. Only in recent generations, when most humans have lived
in cities far from the natural world, has the thread been broken, leaving
hungry people surrounded by food.
In these woods my daughter learns
that everything has value in its proper place; even as she cringes from
spiders, she knows they eat flying insects that pester us. If we didn’t have
the spiders, we would be tormented by clouds of pests, so we can thank them for
their service. We decided we would name the spiders; this one became Harvey,
this one Floyd, and then they weren’t as scary anymore.
We also see that death is not the
end, even in this world; a fallen tree feeds a billion creeping things, which
feed birds and hedgehogs. Next time we pass here the tree has erupted with
mushrooms, and eventually we learned to recognise which ones were edible and
poisonous. The fallen tree leaves a gap in the forest, a flood of daylight
reaching the forest floor, activating the seeds of thousands of flowers, so a
death in the forest brings an explosion of colour.
In a few years a sapling will fill
the space, its young leaves sheltered from the winds by its aunts and uncles
until it comes of age. On autumn evenings its turning leaves will bathe the
woods in an orange light, like a candle against the darkness.
We see the same pattern with people;
here in a small community a death leaves a vacancy in the church pews, an empty
stool in the pub, and a tender place in the minds of friends and family. In a
community, though, no one dies unremembered. Here funerals are preceded by a
wake, a party for the deceased, where all the friends and family drink, tell
stories, and share tears of laughter and mourning. The family and friends then
carry the coffin to church for the funeral -- sometimes for miles down dark
country roads, with the people in front lighting the way. It’s a proper way to
go, making your death a celebration of your life.
“Papa, what does it feel like to
die?” she asked me once.
I don’t know first-hand, honey, I told her -- I’ve never died.
“Why do we have to die?”
If we didn’t, I said, no new babies could be born.
“I wish it didn’t have to end, though.”
I know. But that’s what gives it value.
Each moment with my daughter flickers by like cars on the road, too swift to
observe closely. I want to halt these days -- the walks in the woods and over
mountains, the sing-a-longs and adventures, the moments of her sleeping in my
lap at the end of a long day-- to trap them as golden moments in amber, a Still
Life with Four-year-old. I want to throw a hook into the blur and reel in the
moments, pore over them, plead with each of them to stay a little longer:
please don’t go. Linger with me.
But they won’t. I started writing this ten years ago, and my daughter has since
become six, and ten, and thirteen, each age with its own heartaches and its own
moments of comfort and joy. I was lucky to be able to raise her in this
countryside, but the challenges of raising a child are the same anywhere these
days -- to help them grow straight in a bent and twisted world. Each year, as
she becomes more her own creation and less mine, I can only light the path and
hope she takes it, even as the world grows darker around us.
In exchange for my service, she has given me far more than I imagined I could have. I cannot extend my life’s length in this world, but my time with her extends its depth.