Tuesday, October 3, 2017




Last Tuesday, I hiked the Ballycotton Cliff Walk. To be more accurate, I hiked the Ballycotton Cliff Walk and half of the Ballycotton bird walk too. I didn’t intend to walk nearly 5 miles one way with the necessity to turn around at some point and walk all the way back. But. It was a little hard to tell where one walk ended and the other began. And at the time, it seemed imperative to FINISH the Cliff Walk. 

And the beauty was extraordinary. I grew up in Northern California. The Coastal Highway and Big Sur were beloved next door neighbors. Nearly every summer, my dad would drive the family up the coast to Oregon with plenty of picture stops along the way. It never, ever got old.

Still the beauty of what the Irish call the Wild Atlantic Way is extraordinary. Partly I think because it is so up close, personal, and unspoiled. Miles of glorious cliffs topped by emerald green fields (yes, a cliché but a cliché because it’s true.) Jagged fingers of red sandstone rising out of a sea the exact color of my granddaughter’s eyes. Foaming water below, glorious windswept skies above.

And not a house in sight. Not a luxury apartment. Not a $10 million condo. Not a gated community. Not a golf course, or tennis court, or swimming pool. Not even a handicapped accessible bike/jogging path. In fact, bikes and horses are expressly forbidden. ATV’s are unthinkable. As my mother used to say, it’s shank’s mare, baby, all the way. 

Extraordinary. Otherworldly, really. A land out of time.

And quite unremarked by the residents of this beautiful little village. It is the backdrop of their lives. They are as much a part of the landscape as the gorse on the cliffs. And the landscape is part of them, the crashing waves a heartbeat as real as their own. Not something to be admired and photographed and ooh-ed and ahh-ed over. Simply there.

It’s different for me. Here, far from home, my senses are on high alert. In a land where a rainbow lies around every corner, I don’t want to miss a thing. I smell the peat smoke in the air. I taste the salt on the wind. I feel the ground under my feet, the mist and the sun on my face. 

And I wonder how much of my own life goes unnoticed, unremarked. I wonder how much of the world around me I miss for lack of focus and attention. After one particularly long night in the desert, Jacob exclaimed: God was in this place and I didn’t even know it. How often do I see and not perceive, or hear and not listen or understand? 

Last Tuesday, I hiked the Ballycotton Cliff Walk. It didn’t take much to see there the fingerprints of a loving God. The work is to keep my eyes open when I get home.







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