Legacy

St. John's bookplate, Book of Kells

In Dublin
Seeing the past, we see our future.

Books and illuminations by authors and monks long gone
Whisper through the aged pages and hallways
     Here are our stories   
     This is what we know
Legacies of scholars
Life preserved in words and images
Of thoughts and ideas, dreams and visions
Beauty



Tanned bog bodies lie in glass enclosures
Frozen in time having been marked by violence and tossed in peat beds
     Here is our flesh
     See how we die
Legacies of cruelty
Death preserved, evidence of human dis-ease
Fear and torture, hate and madness
Horror

(click on photos below for larger view)

St. Patrick's Cathedral

St.Patrick's Cathedral

Tiled floor, St. Patrick's Cathedral

The Long Room, Trinity College

Bookshelves in the Long Room, Trinity College

Bog body named Gallagh Man (400-200 BC)

Bog body named Clonycavan Man (392-201 BC)

 



 

Triskele

The Mound of Hostages

The Stone of Destiny

Words get in the way

When attempting to describe mystery.

Hill of Tara

Where ancient peoples buried their own,

Where a rock screamed when the rightful king touched it,
Where the High Kings were crowned,

Where perhaps St. Patrick made Christianity known

Or not

("Read and listen to the stories then determine for yourself what you believe is true.")

View from Royal Seat 

Mounds surrounded by ditches

Like ripples from a stone cast into a pond

And a view to the horizon, 

A sea of green and lines of blossoming Hawthorn trees -

St. Patrick's forbidding church sits at the edge

And crows eerily caw

So many stories in this place

Unknown and imagined

St. Patrick's Church

Hawthorn Trees

Newgrange entrance, roofbox and Neolithic art

Newgrange

Its narrow cruciform passageway

Where large stone bowls sit in its three alcoves

Once having held human bones and cremains

Some primordial ritual,

Its corbel arch built in such a way that it never leaks

And Neolithic knowledge of astronomy

That made it possible

For a shaft of light to break into the darkness

Of the chamber at the exact moment of winter's solstice.

Wisdom of the ancients that I do not have,

I am in awe

I wonder about my connection to these ancestors

When I see triskele and spiral-like features carved into stone,

Like my own mindless (are they?) doodles

And Van Gogh's starry night.

Chevrons and lozenges too are here

Yet to be decoded

I am in a holy and mysterious place

Woven into this matrix somehow,

Drawn into the Center.

Hill of Tara