Back home after two weeks in
Ireland and still recuperating from a bad flu I caught over there. I suspect I
got it on one of the buses we took to get across the country. We opted not to
drive; the steering wheel is on the opposite side and we weren’t sure we should
risk an accident on vacation, although now I regret that decision since a car
is faster and less expensive way to get around the country that is so small.
To my knowledge I am the first
in my entire family to return there since my relatives left there for America
just over one hundred years ago. And the
roots in Ireland are deep. We are four generation in America and several
hundred in Ireland.
Overall the trip was a cathartic
experience for me.
Cathartic. Do you know the word? It comes to us from the
Greek word kathartikos, the combination of two other words meaning cleansing
and a purification process that has now come to mean the intellectual
clarification of a concept brought into
consciousness.
I strive to make the cathartic
experience a normal and reoccurring part
of my evolutionary transformation because the cathartic experience heals
us, it purifies us by getting rid of all of the harmful specks from our hearts
and minds and brings us back to a previous status before we were sidetracked by
whatever experience we needed to purge from ourselves, from those things that
center us and bring us to a better understanding, a fuller understanding, of
who we are.
The cathartic experience is an ancient practice
in most of the world’s religions where the act of purification is fulfilled
with the help of water, blood, fire, change of clothes, and sacrifice. Those
rituals, in fact the entire cathartic experience itself are intended to be a healing
practice. So when the cathartic experience comes,
whether I like what it delivers or not I embrace it and then carry on.
In Ireland I realized how
courageous and how much grit and self-respect my ancestors who left for America
truly had. I also realized I really have
nothing in common with the Irish or with Ireland itself and decided to distance
myself from all things Irish and to embrace my American roots.
It’s no small thing for me to
distance myself from my Celtic roots. Growing up poor without any family, my American- Irish roots gave me an anchor to
clutch, a way to kept from becoming lost in vast world of rootlessness. And
that sense of detachment from anything solid, anything good and permanent is
one major reason why so many orphans fail in life. So for me, letting go of this small part of me
isn’t a loss rather I take it as a sign that I am betting and sound footing in
my life.
