Prologue | carolynbrigitflynn

The Light of Ordinary Days

An Irish American Journey

of Healing and Homeland

by Carolyn Brigit Flynn

Prologue

At lunch one summer day in Navan, Ireland, my Irish cousin Peggy pointed to the large mocha-brown birthmark on my left hand and asked if it had made me lucky.

“Lucky?” I replied, squinting. In America, my too-visible birthmark had always seemed potentially negative or, at best, neutral.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “The Irish believe that a large mark on the face or hands makes a person lucky.”

In all my life, I’d never heard such a thing. I considered it for a moment. It was 1996, I was in my late thirties, and it seemed that despite everything, it could be true. After all, I was actually in Ireland. I was sitting with my cousin in the ancient Boyne Valley, and I had just seen the most astonishing sight I had ever seen in my life: the five-thousand-year-old passage mound at Newgrange, one of the most remarkable instances of Irish brilliance anywhere.

“Yes, I do think I’ve been lucky,” I replied. Perhaps I’d been born under a twinned star, one that carried great loss and layers of trauma, and also great love and forward-moving energy. I had both.

It seems the Irish island itself was born under a similar twinned star. My ancestral homeland has a long, ancient, heart-stopping story with great epochs of world-renowned innovation and stability, as well as centuries of wrenching colonization, poverty, and famine. As a writer who almost became a professional historian, for the last decade I have immersed myself in Ireland’s epic history. And I slowly found that what my cousin said was true. I am lucky in an Irish kind of way, with great and heartbreaking fortune mixed in.

What brought me to lunch with my cousin Peggy that day in Navan was a journey to address an emptiness within. After several years of healing work to confront childhood traumas, I’d discovered what was essential and authentic at my core. In my early thirties, I had begun to write seriously and make my own life. But I came to see that I would not be able to build a real future until I addressed the Irish ghosts I felt coursing through my blood. When I put pen to paper, it seemed they were always there, calling out with ever deeper clarity, like the low, ringing sirens of a mythical island. Except these people were quite real; they’d lived, bled, fought, died, loved, and hated. Who were they, at essence—the actual people who had given me and my parents our Irish blood? What great forces had shaped us all?

It had been a fun, bruising, clannish Irish Catholic childhood in 1960s Washington, DC , with threads pulling in a thousand directions. Surrounded by my boisterous family of eight, our household was loudly devoted to our Irish homeland. My father, born just after his parents emigrated from the west of Ireland in 1914, and my mother, who loved to sing and had been trained by her Irish tenor father, made sure of it. There was blarney and traditional music all around, and when we children were older, even visits to Ireland to see our relatives. Over the years, our home filled with woolen sweaters, Waterford crystal, and all manner of Irish linens and keepsakes. But in my thirties, I came to see how little I knew of my grandparents’ actual lives growing up in the rural west of Ireland. My grandmother Annie rarely spoke of her life in the before-times, and my grandfather John was a kind of empty shadow, and had simply disappeared when my father was a young man. Despite all the Irishness my family proclaimed was proudly mine, I understood not only very little of the people from whom we came, but also close to nothing of Ireland’s long history.

To find the deeper story I was born into, in 1996 at the age of thirty-eight I traveled to Ireland in what turned out to be a portal summer, the kind so thoroughly drenched in one’s essential destiny that my life up to that moment seemed, in some ways, in black and white. I discovered I felt deeply at home in Ireland, often more than I ever had in America. That visit culminated in a month on an isolated Irish island, where I sought to meet the living spirits of my ancestors. After that, I began to return to Ireland regularly, each visit richer and more vast than before, as both Ireland and I were evolving in tandem in some uncanny ways. Something of my essence belonged there, and my ancestral homeland’s spirit would hold and ground me throughout the rest of my life. Ultimately, it saved me when I was profoundly fragmented by the aspect of my twinned star that held trauma and sorrow.

In 2013, seventeen years after that lunch with my cousin in Navan, I returned to Ireland with my wife, Jean. I had just recovered from a nervous breakdown after losing my sister Kathy to suicide the year before. Her death had triggered severe PTSD, and my healing had been slow, difficult, and ultimately rewarding. As Jean and I traveled, I felt newly open and humbled, and I experienced strands and whiffs of Ireland I hadn’t noticed before. That 2013 journey became the genesis of this book, and is threaded within Parts One and Three. In the end, the writing and research held in these pages helped me understand what had traveled through DNA and lived history down to me. My PTSD and breakdown also provided a small bridge into what my Irish ancestors had endured through centuries of colonization and famine.

How does a nation, like a self, put itself back together? By carefully and devotedly gathering up one’s stories and myths. The Irish have, again and again, reconstituted their national identity. As a granddaughter of that land, after layers of life had torn me apart, I found myself following their example. Slowly putting myself back together after my nervous breakdown, I looked ever more deeply into the eternal faces of my ancestors, singing from a small green island with an ancient name and mythic stories across the sea. Over time, I braided personal, ancestral, and historical threads in this book, setting my American life beside Ireland’s story.

Growing up Irish Catholic and having been exiled for loving someone of my own sex, I understand some of what my ancestors endured when they were dispossessed, considered outliers and outsiders, reviled, and silenced. I also know what it is to find one’s way back into recognition—of a self, of a country—within the light of the world. Reading the work of Ireland’s poets, chroniclers, storytellers, historians, and folklorists, I have been spellbound by the epic story of the tiny island at the western edge of the European continent. Here, I add my diaspora voice to our collective song, telling my own part of the never-ending tale, passing it on, keeping it alive.