44: Wired up and ready to go.

Blogged on Friday, April 27th, 2007 by Rachael. Filed in Emo.

If you can believe it, I’m still on somewhat of a high from Penguicon last weekend. That was honestly the most fun I have had since going to camp when I was a kid and making a jillion new friends and staying up and laughing and being ridiculous and hilarious and making insane new memories that will never make sense to anyone who wasn’t there.

In fact, I’m so wired up from it, I can think of nearly nothing else to blog about.

However, in an attempt to blog something besides caffeinated insanity, I’m going to talk about a book I was reading today that I’ve had for a long time: The Celtic Way of Prayer, by Esther De Waal. It’s not necessarily a very smoothly put together book, but its subject matter is what makes it something I’ve been wanting to read more of. Here’s a selection from the introduction that I absolutely loved:

“The Celtic journey that I am describing in this book is unlike any other journey I know… I have been brough into contact with the visual and the nonverbal, confronted by the power of image and symbol. I have found myself thinking about God as a poet, an artist, drawing us all into his great work of art. I have been taken beyond the rational and intellectual and cerebral, for this world touches the springs of my imagination…”

And a little further on as well:

“So I have been brought face-to-face with a world at once very familiar and very mysterious, for I have found in the Celtic worldview that touches on much that is common, shared, perhaps archetypal, in all human experience…I have also become more aware of the riches of many other traditional peoples. I have found that much in the African or Native American experience speaks the same language as the Celtic, has a shared and common resonance…

“…Here, instead, everyone sees themselves in relation to one another, and that extends beyond human beings to the wild creatures, the birds and the animals, the earth itself. This has brought a sense of being a part of the whole web of being. There is something here of the ‘breathing together of all things’…”

See, okay. This. THIS is part of what I have been attempting for years to understand, to take in and explain, and to live within. This sense of unity and coinherence (a nifty word that’s later in this chapter) between us and each other, and us and the world, and the world and us. The stars, the trees, the children and puppies and the homeless, each other, the grass and the drops of rain and the fog and the mountains and deserts. All of us and all of things, connected in a living, breathing pattern.

And I’m going to get a tattoo soon, something for the small of my back, in a celtic pattern, most likely with a triskele or a trinity knot at the center. Because there is a part of me that wants to draw the pattern on my own skin so that I remember it is there; and part of me wants to do something painfully fun, haha. This is what I get for being (among other things) Irish and Apache.