How My Trip To Ireland Unlocked My Mystical Outlook
If time travel were possible, grab any skeptic from the early 1900s and bring them to 2024. There, you'd make a believer of some higher magical power. Cars, internet, planes, touchless payment options and cell phones would absolutely blow anyone's mind. A few weeks ago, I did a little time traveling of my own with my enchanting wife Kristy for our honeymoon. Except we time traveled time zones, and even felt like we went a little back in time to Europe's emerald, the island of Ireland.
While it’s common to reserve a little room in my luggage for souvenirs, my most precious didn’t take up an ounce of space or need to clear customs, though I doubt any American would have even thought to ask. I brought home the belief in magic. Honest, real magic.
The best way to describe Ireland in October is 50 shades of green. My wife and I had the pleasure of joining a travel group called The Medicine Collective, and we were treated to castles, hikes, morning yoga, phenomenal food, and exposure to ancient ruins and other sites on the tourist road less traveled. It was on our second day staying near The Burren in County Clare, when Dave, the owner of The Burren Yoga Retreat Center, suggested we meet up with an enchanted man, Harry, and his fantastical farm, that magic became real for me for the first time.
It’s important to note that I’m predisposed to mystical skepticism. Try as I might, there may always be a part of me that shuts down in discussions of astrology, gene keys, star charts, and pulling cards. A secret wish of mine is to have even one dream that is themed in magic and mysticism. I’d love to turn into a bird and sail through the wind or visit another planet or realm just once. I might never fully accept that there’s a code written on the Lumarian crystal given to me by a Native American, but I came to believe in magic all the same.
To the best of my memory, Harry is a 70-something-year-old man who grew up Dutch and moved to Ireland to buy a working farm, fashioned in the old way of farming, with his German wife. His accent still heavily carries his Dutch roots, but is faintly accented with an Irish tune. My wife said it best when she remarked that he resembles a full-grown leprechaun, and his farm covers well over 300 acres of magic that can be circumnavigated by a hike that is neither overly strenuous nor overly dangerous, except that the pitted limestone floor is covered with enough plant matter that it makes planning one’s steps a high priority through the majority of the tour.
Within the farm and near the beginning of the adventure rests a holy well, which is where my magical skepticism began—and ironically ended. Harry showed us how people living in medieval times would gather near this well like a forest kitchen and use the particularly situated trees and streams to soothe their bare feet in primitive saunas achieved by heating limestone and plunging it into the frigid streams to create steam. He noted that many streams flowed from the holy well, and that even today his cows visit the well. But instead of simply drinking from the many pools and streams throughout the area, the cows queue behind one another to drink from one particular spot where the water first bubbles through the surface of the limestone and becomes heavily infused with oxygen.
Man-made treasures ranging from necklaces and other jewelry to coins, knife blades, and trinkets, adorn the trees, rocks, and streams throughout the area as if it were the world’s most well-visited wishing well. The magic, however, lies below the hawthorn trees.
Irish lore suggests that the faerie realm is imperceptible to human eyes, but the faeries can see us. They reside in portals beneath the hawthorn (or May) trees, especially the lone hawthorn, which carries exceptional significance. Though their wood is exceptionally hard and would theoretically be ideal fuel for burning, hawthorn trees go untouched in Ireland. As our wonderful coach driver Paddy put it, “Even the Irish folk that are not overly superstitious will leave a hawthorn tree alone because, ‘just in case.’”
One of the more famous examples of this respect for the magic of a hawthorn tree is the story of the lone hawthorn that stood in the path of road construction between Limerick and Galway in the late 1990s. Construction workers found a lone hawthorn near the town of Newmarket-on-Fergus in County Clare. The tree held particular significance as a fairy tree or “lone bush.” Local Irish folklore expert and storyteller Eddie Lenihan became especially vocal about the issue surrounding the lone hawthorn, which blossoms in May and is typically celebrated in conjunction with Beltane (May Day) festivals. The locals, even the not-so-superstitious ones, decided “just in case,” and the N18 motorway path was altered in reverence to the tree.
Not only does Harry’s farm have a lone hawthorn looming over the holy well, but the nearby medieval kitchen is guarded by a cluster of three hawthorn trees, making it an ideal place to gather a community as they did as late as the 1200s. Harry’s farm has one other hawthorn tree of significance, which is surrounded by a now-low wall of stone and is thought to be a place of worship and remembrance for the first human inhabitants of Ireland’s western coast.
The magical charm was evident in everything. Harry suggested we drink from the Holy Well and "let the water walk" into our vessels and he highly recommended drinking straight from the source with no intermediary. He showed us how the rock had energy, and how those people over 700 years ago knew that energy, used that energy. The splendor was all throughout his reclaimed farm, in the boy John who was using his "skip year" of secondary school to volunteer on Harry's farm. The wonder was in his ability to remember each and every name of all who visited. There was even some mysticism in the home made apple pie and freshly harvested cream that he freely offered to all of his guests. There was fairy dust in the way he talked and enchantment in the way he made each of us feel when he talked.
I’m sure that skeptics will argue, or at least have reservations about, accepting faeries and “otherworld” portals living under hawthorn trees. Here’s where the magical part comes in for me:
Ireland is a land and a nation of people who honor their traditions and the possibility of magic. Perhaps even more magical is the unassuming effort to stay connected to the land, to the animals, and to observe these things with the heart. It’s a radical difference from my experience at home in Utah. It immediately reminded me of an initiative to build a gondola up Little Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Foothills of Salt Lake City. It’s a project that will undoubtedly bring jobs, money, and other little “pots” of gold to the eyes of its advocates. Yet it will undeniably change the landscape, the ecosystem, and even the topography of canyon. It even directly impacts the climbing community that is near and dear to my heart, a community that acts as stewards of the land, instead of a community that looks at the land as a hindrance and a challenge standing in the way of profit.
Perhaps the second-biggest magic I witnessed in Ireland was that a “just in case” attitude actually won the day. The “just in case” attitude allowed natural beauty and an honoring of the land as a home that will always provide for us as long as we maintain a good relationship with it. To me, there was true, undeniable magic in honoring an old way and putting that ahead of dollars.
Which leads me to the last and biggest magic of all: Mother Earth always gently reclaims, whether it’s an ancient forest kitchen, an abbey Oliver Cromwell burned down trying to push the Church of England on the whole of Ireland through bloodshed, or even the biggest environmental crises we face today. The Earth is going to be fine. It’s just a matter of how long we as a human species get to be in a relationship with it.
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