Hello

Composing a web biography that offers some authentic introduction to the friends and strangers who will make their way to these pages is quite challenging. It needs to be more and less than a litany of the seasons of one’s life, their happenings or discoveries; it needs to be a modest revelation of the reason for one’s life. And for me that reason is very simple: to praise. So let this be my preface to what is a kind of memoire: a gathering up of the traces that time and events, people and the gorgeous Earth have inscribed on / in this existence named mine.   

 

So here is where it all begins:

 

Undergirding this webpage you can see

the emerald island of Eire boldly

surfacing the north Atlantic, the westernmost

rim of Northern Europe on the European

continental shelf, part of the Eurasian Plate.​​​​​​​​​​​ 

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This is where - as poet John O'Donohue

would say - the clay of my self was given. 

Dark, rich, ancient clay of the island of saints

and scholars, of poets and playwrights, of nuns

and monks and natural naturalists.  And of justice seekers and freedom fighters; of deep wounds and an on-going search for healing wells and holy wells, of myth and magic and all of that.  This is what I feel to be home though I have never lived there.  Yet, somehow my heart and soul live in the memory of something most elemental - of bog and glen, of stone and moss and animal kin, of the tender lyricism of everyday speech.  All that.  And more than that.  And more...

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From this island all my ancestors came forth with all their names and stories completly unknown to me, yet I research them.  From this island my mother Bridget came forth, and my father Patrick, and all their lineages.  From the West they came forth, from Connaught - from Leitrim and Sligo, from Roscommon and Mayo and God knows where else.  

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My mother's people came from Knock, to which God's Mother came one rainy night the evening of Thursday, 21 August 1879 near the gable wall of the local church where my grandmother would be musician - Kate Dignam who would become Kate Noone.  Her mother, Ann Moore was alive at the time and living in the field adjacent to the church, but she was not among the witnesses who were few and largely members of one family.  But our family benefited from the religious revival that Mary brought to that little town as they offered hospitality to the droves of pilgrims who began to visit the place for the grace She upswelled in that space.  And I have walked with my sister around that chapel and knelt in that church many times many years later and treasure the visitation of Mary to my people - the survivors of the Great Hunger and the impoverishment of colonialism.  The desperate  poverty of so many kinds...

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