For those interested, new photographs are up on Flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/scrawledinwax or just here. My skills in photography are quite limited, but I hope you enjoy them.

The mountain that Kylemore Castle is cast against has a statue of Jesus on it about two-thirds of the way up. There’s a path that leads up to it. You hike up and, once in a while, you get a clear view through the trees and the ground has abandoned you. Once you’ve finally scrambled up the rocky path, all that is left to do is stand in the wind, let it fill you and suck in the picture-postcard view.

The only living things around are sheep who, ever so kindly, are just eager to stay out of your way. Other than that, it’s just rock and moss and grass. Sure, you know the craft shop is down there. You can see the buses pulling in to the carpark. But that’s not why we are here. Up here, this is the real stuff, what I was after – the green, the coast, the mountains, the country. Having only ever lived in cities, it is such an amazing, liberating thing to be enveloped by such a full emptiness, such a happy hollowness.

Far off, you might hear the tire-noise of an eighteen-wheeler. It’s a loud, harsh sound, the roar of big rubber on road. It’s the one sound that, no matter where you are in the world, reminds you that civilisation is never very far away. But surrounded by all that – the clouds kissing the tops of the peaks, the sunlight glinting off the lake’s deep grey-blue surface and the clean, windy silence – well, it may as well be a light-year away.

Why do we leave? Why do we run thousands of miles from home, only to then flee the city and perch ourselves atop mountains? What do you do when there is nowhere left to escape to, when you might as well be on the edge of the world? Why do we search out little bits of the real when, deep down, we knew it was a lie all along?

We leave because we love home. We leave so we can return.

So, here I live, among rocks and moss, mountain and sky. I’ve spoken of what my reasons were for working a tedious job, of what and why I sacrificed to find some peace and a little peace of mind.

So, here I live, among rocks and moss, mountain and sky, searching for something. I mean, I left didn’t I? I must be searching for something. For what other reason did I come here if not to find something?

So, among rocks and moss, mountain and sky, I seek, asking the questions I have asked for months now. But what was I hoping to find? Surely not that. I mean, what am I, sixteen? Jesus. All along, have I been looking for, christ, an answer? Have I really been that naïve? Dear God.

Questions, questions, this is all there is now, the emptiness of no answers and the wrong questions. People ask me questions and I give people answers. This is my role in life. I had a tourist couple ask me which of two hats was more Irish. I asked someone else this question and passed on their answer. So what? The important questions were answered in the asking. These surface queries merely filled the gaps between the decisions already made. My real questions? They were answered in leaving. We leave so we can return. We escape to rocks and moss, mountains and sky because home is the warm and brittle grey of the city.

We leave because we love home. We leave because home loves us.

The search for an answer is a wild goose chase. But one more question remains: why go back? Why return?

My fingers tremble as they type. The clouds are hovering low, weighing on the mountains out the window. This – this is more than a kiss. This is a shove.

It seems that in my cryptic efforts to steer people towards this blog, I have created a little confusion over what exactly I am up to these days. And while the general answer remains the same as ever – I have absolutely no bloody idea – the specific answer is that in my efforts to escape and renew myself, I am now living and working at Kylemore Abbey, a tourist attraction in Connemara, a rugged and rather remote area in Western Ireland.

Kylemore Abbey, as the name suggests, is an active convent housing a dwindling number of Benedictine nuns. It started out life in the nineteenth century as Kylemore Castle, the home of Mitchell Henry, a wealthy English doctor who built it as a wedding present for his wife. In the early twentieth century it was put up for sale to pay off the debts of its then owners and was purchased by an order of Benedictine nuns who had fled Belgium during the First World War.

Long story short, opulent castle becomes a killer pad for some nuns who, between meditating and praying, open up an exclusive convent school for girls .Unfortunately, due to a lack of new women willing to get hitched to Christ, they have now announced the school’s impending closure. All the while though, a thriving business emerges entertaining visitors with tours of the castle and Victorian walled garden and, maybe most importantly, allowing them to end their tours at a craft shop housing both some of Ireland’s nicest and schlockiest souvenirs, proving once and for all that it is not the Protestants who have sole claim on being Christianity’s capitalists.

The craft shop is where I work. The job, as was expected, is a little draining and boring. I have spent entire eight-hour days putting price stickers on things. The only upside to this is that, as someone on the way to his third degree in English, the position makes almost full use of my multifarious employable skills.

And though I do make fun of the tacky souvenirs, I can’t wait to take advantage of my staff discount. Despite the shop’s necessary stock of shamrocks, leprechauns that sing and products showcasing the world-famous Irish skill in producing stuffed toy sheep, it is nonetheless chock full of cool stuff: hand-made pottery created on-site, elegant but still with fingerprints on it; marble mined from quarries you’ve driven by; and preserves handmade by the nuns using fruit they grow right here in the garden.

But I also think my own uneasy relationship with modern consumerism is paralleled in my views on the abbey’s means of survival: this place of beauty, contemplation and altruism is sustained by a fascination with goods, ownership and authenticity, an unholy trio if ever there was one. But perhaps I’m being naïve. Perhaps, the sort of ‘uneasy taste’ such an idea leaves is a relic, the sort of thing that sounds great in a lefty newspaper sound-bite but has little real relevance. Who knows, maybe ‘hypocrisy’ is a dualist anachronism whose power is spent in the pluralist present.

Anyway, why did I come here? Well first, go here (go to the set labelled ‘Aran Islands’ etc). A lot of that is my route to work. I know: it sounds like I’m being smug. But I think that keeping things in perspective is important. The nuns own a shop to keep up their way of life. The reason I agreed to such an unexciting job – other than the total lack of rent – is the fact that my walk to work and back consists of walking by a castle and a lake surrounded by mountains. Yes you’re right – sometimes, the eight or nine hours between these two short walk blows harder than an experienced hooker – but man is it ever worth it. Those sunsets you see? They happen a couple of times a week.

Watching them, I can finally feel a lot lift. A few years back when I was in Nova Scotia, I said I felt the roar of Toronto lifting from my ears. Now I’m starting to feel the roar of all the cities I know slowly dissipating. I am constantly surrounded by a silence, an emptiness, a chalice of deep nothing into which I can empty the contents of my mind and let it swish around. And one by one, the concrete and steel clamps around my head are starting to loosen.

Yeah. I guess I can work a crappy job for that.

I was having trouble making the leap: that where I stood, three-thousand years ago, some Celtic warriors might have joked with each other, drinking mead as they stared out over the ocean, guarding the land they called their own. As I looked around all I could see were scads of French schoolchildren, loud and boisterous. There were tourists with cameras, old fellows sporting enormous lenses who obviously took their photography very seriously. And we sat there as well, me having a picnic of bread and cheese and apple. But surely this wasn’t a fort, not the sort you might see in a movie about Celtic battles – the type with scenes of hard, battering rain and the sky ominous and grey, where men in armour swagger around holding axes and, I dunno’, goblets and chalices, .. This couldn’t actually be one of those could it?

Well, yes it was one of those. But I never did manage to make the jump of imagination required. Not that I didn’t enjoy my time at Dun Aengus, a Celtic fort whose oldest areas are from three millennia ago. Its high stone walls (the ‘new’ part – only about 1500 years old) are perched on the edge of a cliff on the west side of Inishmore that literally looks out over the Atlantic, so it’s pretty damn impressive. But somehow I just couldn’t picture what it had been like, even though I was standing right there.

I don’t know for sure, but I’m gonna’ guess that part of the reason for my lack of imagination was a uniquely modern phenomenon: that we have seen copies so many times – in films, documentaries, in digital photos, computer games etc. – that it is hard to envision history as anything but fantasy or static document. I don’t mean this literally, but I found it hard to make the leap because the real thing wasn’t a movie. Know what I mean?

Walter Benjamin (link) wrote about an analogous situation in art, but found it quite positive. In “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, he suggested that the ability to make perfect, indistinguishable copies of art destroyed the idea of the ‘pure and sacred’ original. This he says, rather than being the travesty purists say it is, leads to the democratisation of Art – since there’s no longer an original, access to which is controlled by ‘those in charge’, we are all free to make our own political interpretations of Art, unbounded by the aesthetic and moral constraints of those who once determined what was ‘Art’. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the idea.

I like his argument. But in terms of history and its place in our lives, I still think it’s sad how hard it is for me and others to get all the pictures we’ve seen out of our heads – that I walk around an ancient Celtic structure and all I can think is “man, the weather sure is nice out today”. I’m not sure quite how to get out of the habit and I feel I would have gotten a lot more out of my trip to Dun Aengus had I been able to.

But we also, quite literally, took the road less travelled to a site called the Black Fort. It was a similar place: an ancient fort made of stone walls, perched on a cliff face looking out over the enormity of the Atlantic. But, with not a soul around, the bright sky turned dark just as we reached the cliff’s edge and, peering out over the unguarded three-hundred foot drop, I suddenly caught a glimpse of life two or three thousand years back.

Hm. A little solitude and, for a sec, allowing yourself be swallowed up by sky and time – and suddenly, history comes alive.

Photos posted when I can.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to upload the photos of the Aran Islands. But, as a substitute, here are some snaps of Edinburgh, the Isle of Skye, and some of Western Ireland (including Kylemore Abbey!)

Enjoy and comment away…

Link to Photos – Click Here

The incessant hard rain; the never-ending canopy of grey, oppressive clouds that weigh on one’s mind and soul; the isolation upon the rough, stony landscape, endless fields and rock, the aching, barren solitude… Holy Crap! I’m home!

I am of course being a little silly. While it’s true that on stepping off the ferry onto Inishmore, we were met by strong winds and hard rain, only to arrive wet and tired at the hostel to find out the only place serving food was a twenty-five minute walk back into town, things quickly took a turn for the better. The next morning, the rain had disappeared and one could even see patches of blue in the sky, something one imagines is quite rare here. In fact, even a case of mild food poisoning – from the aforementioned dinner that, yes, did require a twenty-five minute walk back to the hostel in the incomprehensibly pitch black and resulted in a night of having a stomach strangely akin to a witches’ cauldron – couldn’t put a damper on things. Nope. Things are just that cool here. And what I said about being home? Well, there might be a little bit of truth to that.

But perhaps a little background is in order. Inishmore is the largest of the three Aran Islands, a small but oft-visited trio off the west coast of Ireland. They are famous for a few reasons which, in no particular order are: their spectacular landscapes, with amazing, expansive views of the ocean; their criss-crossing patterns of ancient stone walls that make the island look like a patchwork quilt from the air, each one a testament to literally centuries of hard work removing rock from the ground to create farmland; the fact that they are an area in which Irish is the first language spoken and that the locals fiercely protect their culture and heritage; and that this hardy population of under a thousand lives side-by-side with Celtic forts that date back as far as four-thousand years, the whole place just steeped in continuous history at every corner.

So, you can see the appeal. Imagine passing a four-thousand year old stone structure as you biked to school every morning. Think about being able to stand in a stone circle built by hand millennia ago, you having your little picnic where people lived and fought and died thousands of years ago. Or being able to clamber up a cliff to listen to the Atlantic below you, its vista spread out in front of you like a visual buffet, the sky impossibly huge above you.

But the thing I like most about Inishmore so far? Its particular brand of deafening, desolate quiet. You can literally stop at any second and, casting your ear to the wind, hear almost nothing but it and your breathing, the macro and the micro hovering together in harmony for the most fleeting and intimate of moments. While the Atlantic breaths its enormous gusts of breath, you hold yours, puzzled and elated, and suddenly remember: there are ever so many reasons to smile.

This, my friends, is a holiday.