Story Shepherd Updates

My trips to Ireland and Northern Ireland these past years, and the coming years, have deepened my life. They provide the ground for the Story Shepherds, and since it is ground of story, you may know of it as well.

I did not frame the first trip–an amazing birthday trip with my bestie from middle school–as ancestral healing. It was, though. It was an unintentional gathering, a return to a place both in the world and in me. A place torn away by the forces that tear any of us from homelands–power, violence, politics, these things that do not belong to the earth, whereas we still do. I was always aware of my grandmother’s (Nanny’s) place of birth, Belfast. I never connected to this, not in a conscious way. It wasn’t until I was there. There were degrees of “there.” There’s the there of this sweet cliffside lunch place with outstanding soup on the Ring of Dingle. There’s the there of the Fairy Fort from 1500 BCE. There’s the there of this deeper there. There’s the there of the heart.

At the Dark Hedges, Donegal.

I felt this late in the game. I’d already listened to the Derry Peace Builders tell their stories and the stories of how their stories healed them. I’d listened as hard as I could. I felt something shifting in me, but it still wasn’t there. Thinking of myself before and after the there, I see a very different me. It happened as I was writing about the trip. I needed to be reflecting in order to catch it. Writing it, like telling it out loud, is an act of witness. Without it I can miss entire sections of my life, entire meanings. Writing about the driving tour or Belfast by our friend Lee, the British Soldier who wouldn’t fire on the Irish so spent his time in military prison, completed the thought that had been hovering the entire time. The thought was, “I am a part of this story, too.” The gates, the walls, the murals, the grief and tragedy, the violence–these were mine from the vantage of the ones who left.

Me in front of the once-family home in Belfast, now an Ibis Hotel.

My great-grandparents’ decision to take an ocean voyage during the First World War spared me the struggle and terror and tragedy. Listening to the Peace Builders–Robin Young, Anne Walker, Lee Lavis, James Greer, Kathleen Gillespie, friends I now hold in my heart–had lived through it all. The closest any of it came to my debutante days on Siesta Key was a song by U2. In Narrative Medicine we speak of metabolizing stories. We don’t metabolize every story. The ones that we do urge us to take down the barrier inside of us and live into this experience. The Northern Ireland Peace Builders showed me the Conflict through their stories of its actors and bystanders. I let the stories in. A year later I returned to film a documentary with them with Centreity (We need funds to finish it, by the way). That’ when it went even deeper. I sat for hours as they told. I’d heard aspects of the stories before, This was different.

After we finished filming the Peace Builders (whom I call the orginal Story Shepherds), the videographer invited me to sit down where the others had sat and told. And they asked the same questions they had asked the others.

“What is your relationship with the Conflict?”

That was when I named it. Completely not expecting to be asked, I replied that we never talked about it. The family crossed to Canada, finding that the solution–having torpedoes vibrate the entire shift as they missed. Nanny never talked about it, with the exception of saying Donegal, a place she loved.

“I’m the descendant of the ones who left.”

That’s my story. I carry it now. It’s my home.

In the Fairy Fort on Dingle.