On wings and angels.
Where I see coloured wings and wonder if all living things are really just angels in disguise.
Hello dear readers, writers, friends and curious passers-by.
I welcome you as always with open arms, hair tangled by the mistral wind and cool September air — I hope your week has begun gently, with a kindness or an unanticipated smile maybe. Or even sunbeams shining down, catching bird wing glints in the sky as mine did.
They looked like a company of angels… and their glorious light touched tiny wings flitting through sunbeams reawakened a memory I haven’t had the pleasure of revisiting since I left Ireland.
At the time, we had no internet at our fingertips for research, or mobile phones to instantly capture the moment, having a camera to hand was reserved for professionals and day trips and holidays and birthdays and weddings and christenings, not, generally, for an early morning hike on a turf bog, Instagram and Facebook or any other social network didn’t exist, hence the moment was never recorded anywhere other than inside my own heart.
I want to share with you those two ethereally angelic moments and one other, just as angelic, just as beautiful, that happened in class this week.
Three beautiful things…
Many years ago, long before I lived on Le Paradis, in a different rambling farmhouse under an Irish sky, on a morning much like any other at that time of year in the heartlands of Co Westmeath, I witnessed a phenomenon I had never seen before and have never again seen since.
Early on a November morning, I dropped my sobbing daughter at school, fought tiny hands from my clothes with a heavy heart, tears of my own joining hers as I prised them gently away and left her in the equally gentle hands of her teacher at the tiny school in Rosemount1.
The morning was calm, I barely noticed autumn colours crowding on the branches of trees or leaves gathering on the lane. In the gloaming I could just make out the line of far hills striped with thin wisps of mist in ethereal, silvery layers as I drove across bogland. The earthy scent of millions of years of decay heady and potent in the crisp fresh air of an almost frost.
As I waited in the warmth of my car for daylight to devour the residue of night, I watched the mist, stubborn in its departure, leaving haphazard strata hanging in the brightening, pristine sky, it seemed almost hesitant as if wondering where to go next when there’s nowhere to hide…
The vast expanse of Irish peat, of which we owned the rights to cut our own on a small bank, was a place I had grown to love over the years we spent in Ireland, I walked there often, especially in the early hours of morning light, I don’t think I ever saw another human being at that time in thirteen years. When I spoke of my walks to any one of the local residents, I was given a barrage of warnings; ghosts and ghouls, evil spirits, poisonous black frogs hidden in the deep dark, peaty ditches — everyone knows St Patrick banished all poisonous animals from Ireland, even me! All apparently out there waiting for me, regardless of their cautionary tales I continued my walks.
The turf bogs are all, by nature, liminal, eerie spaces no matter the time of day and yes, dangerous if you don’t know the trails — n’er a soul would set foot on wet peat until a high sun dried its sodden softness — its silence is a tangible, wanton veil that beckons with sensuous arms. If caught up in the mystery and magic one could be engulfed whole both physically and emotionally, many were and yet more have a will o’the wisp story2 of disappearances and strange sightings of lights to tell.
As I left the car, the first rays of sunshine sent out beams of light from behind a sparse stand of pine trees flanking the east, shards of tentative light glanced across the turf banks and hummocks. I watched for a while as the hares — of which there could be a dozen or more, with their ears pricked as they stood on their hind legs surveying the morning, alert and aware of every movement — only the hare holds the secret to the location of the entrance to the Otherworld where the gods and heroes dwell.
I walked along the edge of the pines, through the incandescence of sunbeams and mist, caring to stay on only well trodden paths and stopping often to watch the playful, morning antics of both hare and dew caught within the many lambent pools of light. As I reached the very last of the pines I was halted entirely. I felt intoxicated by pine and turf scent, dizzied by crisp air, by the tiny droplets of dew now caught in my hair, drugged by the sheer perfection of that instant in time within which I stood, perhaps I was…
At that very same heady moment, ahead of me by not further than twenty meters, a shimmering, multicoloured apparition rose from the filigree fingers of mist, it floated, circling over the vast flat bogland and returned. It seemed to glide on ghostly wings and then hover like a bird of prey over one specific spot of the ancient black turf. It looked like an angel, an opalescent precious pearl, agitated by the perilous black earth. I was certain it wanted to guide me to something or somewhere; a door to another world, the world it inhabited perhaps, the Otherworld.
I felt no trepidation, only a mesmerised awe and curiosity, I was being drawn to follow, the thought of not doing so didn’t even present itself. Many times it turned and shimmered right through my body as we, I and the gossamer winged, glimmering angel, circumnavigated the the bog.
I felt as though hours passed in a few short minutes, light-headed, I don’t recall walking, one foot in front of the other, only that I was carried away from the pines by soft iridescent arms and what I thought to be the safety of the path.
It wasn’t until it’s luminosity dissipated into crystal clear blue sky with the last of the mist that I realised it had guided me back onto the road and my car, and, not until the following week when I returned that I found my original path was no gone, subsided into a deep and potentially lethal gulley where turf had been cut out earlier in the year. Had I continued as I’d planned, it is quite possible I may have slipped and fallen. It is quite possible I would never have climbed out. It is quite possible, I thought, after this day, that I may have been shanghaied by ghosts and ghouls, or even devoured by poisonous black frogs!
In recollection I question what I saw that morning, the possibility of a trick of the eye through the medium of earlier tears, maybe, even just the morning light conjuring imaginations but I like to think not, preferring the belief of a compensation, a life saving gift granted me for knowing and feeling the grief of causing someone I loved beyond the sky and all its hidden stars and luminous multicoloured angels, such a sadness in leaving her in a place she didn’t want to be when I had no choice but to do so. The angel understood.
Sometimes my heart feels like bursting, not as often as I would like but when it does a warmth radiates from inside permeating every doubt of self and human nature buried within. I have carried this warmth close this week…
“Is there anything more important than love?” the question I am asked by my seven year old autistic angel in class on Monday. I am taken aback by the gravity of seriousness in his little voice. I tell him I think that possibly there isn’t, that without love there are countless other emotions we cannot witness and that without it our lives risk becoming terribly sad. He replies almost immediately, looking into my old eyes with his bespectacled, bright and intelligent blues, “I love you very much Susie” he says in English, adding in French, “j’avais envie de te le dire depuis très longtemps’. I had no words to reply, my heart needed no further conversation as I hugged him to hide my tears.
For three evenings of this week hundreds of tiny angels3 with shimmering wings, danced and flitted in sunbeams over the meadows on Le Paradis, there was no question of verity, no question of an apparition. The magic simply was — it speaks for itself more eloquently than I ever could4.
“I couldn’t have dreamed you into existence because I didn’t even know I needed you. You must have been sent to me.”
― Kamand Kojourià!à
With love
P.S. Please, do tell me about your angels and apparitions in the comments below and if you enjoyed my writing a little tap on the heart at the bottom of the page helps immensely in letting others know — thank you, as always, for spending precious free moments of your time here with me. You are each so very appreciated.
What I have loved this week, apart from angels!
Dr Sharon Blackie and David Knowles are writing Riverwitch, together! Every week they will post alternately their sometimes joyous, sometimes harrowing, always emotional accounts of leaving a beloved home they purchased almost on a whim, on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.
I did this for two years, every school day until we arrived in France where suddenly clinging hands loosened and tears were halted. The reason for her tears, she explained many years after, there were no windows in the class she could look out from, she couldn’t think, felt claustrophobic and bored, she was not inspired — from the mouths of babes — I understood — I understand.
Hundreds of legends and tales originate from these Delphian places, Irish bogland is a veritable minefield of apparitions and treasures, perhaps one day, mine will join them?
House Martens gather in the evening light to catch the millions of tiny insects, easier to spot because their wings too, catch the low light.
I had no intentions of adding music to this video, the House Martens squealing and the sunlight were music enough, except, when I played it back the overriding noise was of Wolfie, sat patiently at my feet, crunching up walnuts!
Oh, Susie, that moment at school...an angel indeed.
By the way, is that a new logo you have? Did you sketch it yourself? Maybe I just haven't zoomed in and paid attention yet...
Lovely story! I think your angel was Étain, leading you to safety though she couldn't find her own way.