Ireland

I was ten years old when I awoke. Standing at the raised verge of a caravan park in County Cork, watching gentle hilltops float like pristine green islands on an otherworldly lake of morning mist, my careless heart came home. My father was next to me, both of us awed and hushed. In the heavy space between breaths he joked about leprechauns. I stood moved and unmoving, called from an ancient past I couldn't have known, yet recognised.

Months earlier I had stood on Culloden Moor and listened to the whispered cries of fallen chiefs drifting like snowflakes around weather worn stones marking where they fell, cut down by cruel English swords. With Scottish blood on both sides of my family, I thought to feel more than just the bitter cold of Highland winter stinging my fingers and toes. I waited long in the icy wind, but left the forlorn cairns and rugged heather unresolved.

Years later when called by Another, I would understand kinship deeper than that drawn through the turbulent blood of Celtic passion, poetry, and pathos. But gazing upon that purest of Irish mornings my young soul, used only to the sunburned emptiness of broad Australian towns, felt an inexplicable homecoming. Cold sky and air, dark peat and damp earth, dank moss and root were all suddenly intimate. This is where you come from. This is how you came. This is who you are.