I’m all packed up and tomorrow morning I fly home to the U.S. This has been a great trip. We had a fantastic group of students who (I hope) learned alot about international intellectual property law. It was wonderful to have my family visit, and I’m excited to get back home to them. After they left a couple of weeks ago, I felt as lonely as I’ve ever felt for a spell. But that’s for another post.
Here I want to talk a bit about the Ireland I’m coming to love. It’s not so much the Ireland many U.S. tourists see, that of Killkenny and the South. It’s more the Ireland of Connemara and the West.
I wish I’d had a quality SLR camera on my hike in the Connemara mountains yesterday. The pictures I took with my little digicam don’t come close to doing justice to where I was. When I walked the Western Way into the Mamturk Mountains, with the deep emerald hills and broken limestone and marble rising up on both sides, the broad valley below, the stone walls and black faced sheep high up on the crags, and the clouds spilling over the summit, all alone without another person in sight, I felt that I was in the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. There’s an evocative quality to the very air here in the West, never still, tinged with sea salt, rich with peat smoke. I hope I get back here some day.
Perhaps the best I can do is offer these lines from William Butler Yeats, who also was inspired by Ireland’s West. They seem to invoke the soul of those who make places like Connemara their home:
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.