Where I live, in one of the counties in the Republic of Ireland bordering Northern Ireland, we have been put on Covid19 Level 4. Basically, we can move freely, so long as we stay in our own county, but only essential businesses remain open. No one is meant to visit our home. Restaurants are takeaway only and pubs are shut. Worship is back online, though churches remain open for private prayer. Third level, further education is online, too, though primary and secondary schools, as well as creches, remain open. For the time being. Unless things get worse.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given home developments and the fright shows in the motherland, my usually very well-controlled asthma has flaired up in the past fortnight. The past week has seen me getting a flu jab for the first time in years and mailing my Federal Backup Ballot vote, tracking its progress by registered post. (The Federal Backup vote is available to voters abroad; my ballot, requested last August and marked as issued on the Board of Elections system, still has not arrived.) It also involved a trip to my GP to see the practice nurse, Audrey, who assessed the asthma, tinkered with my medication and listened sympathetically to my underlying anxiety.
While we can still venture beyond five kilometres of home, we took advantage of the sunshiney Sunday to visit the Cavan Burren, one of the UNESCO Marble Arch Caves Global Geopark sites close to home. We walked into the woods, away from the established trails, to my favourite megalith. It is signposted as the Cairn Dolmen, but I call it the Fairy Cairn. Cairns, essentially a high pile of stones, were the first kind of spiritual or burial sites built eons ago. Dolmens were the next technological advance. In the Cavan Burren woods you can see how they plopped a dolmen on top of an established cairn. It is probably fair to say that it is a unique example of megalithic building, at least in Ireland.
I stood before my favourite megalith in the whole world and sang to it. Choir singing used to help regulate my asthma, but regular choir practice fell away in the past couple of years for a variety of reasons. But that deep diaphragmatic breathing was the best medicine. Deep in the wood’s green lung I sang to the stones and the trees.
Breathing Standing with the trees before the piled stones, I lift my voice in tones of AH -EE-OH over and over. I-EE, I-EE sung sharply, is yipped into the crack in the sky, straight through the dappled light. Spruce megaliths surround the dolmen slouching into the ground, resting on the greened cairn, and just for that moment in their embrace I was uncorked, uncontained, breathing. Copyright ©Bee Smith, 2020. All rights reserved
Walking back along the path I stopped to notice the mushrooms forest critters had been nibbling. Mushrooms grow in the dark, underground. They create enormous mycelium fields that stretch and connect over great distances, out of our sight.
Humans have their own version of mycelium fields. We are all connected. We all want to breathe freely. If this virus teaches us nothing else, as its pathogen robs its host of oxygen, it is that we all need to breathe, that we must allow everyone breathing space.
I am writing this post on Monday because I have plans for Tuesday. Tomorrow I will be participating in a free Zoom Art Therapy Play Day for artists, sponsored by Cavan Arts Office. Self-care is essential these days. Grab it with both hands whenever and wherever it is safely offered. It is another kind of breathing space.
Sojourning Smith 