From a distance I know it must be the ice cave.  The upper lip of its limestone maw is encrusted in frost, the result of the cave puffing its warm breath into the valley. The snow is too deep for skiing through Jones County’s Lost Canyon, so I’ve donned snow shoes and plunged down into the woods to find the annual drip-ice shapes.
            I am fascinated by water in its frozen form.  Etched into frost, swirled into snowdrifts, clinging like garland to trees, or polished into ice formations, winter’s frozen water is like time stopped. It may be months before last week’s snowfall will melt from the hillsides.
            When I reach the cave opening, about three feet tall and six feet wide, I drop to my knees to peer inside. Before me stand dozens of crystal clear, haunting shapes encased in ice.  On the left must be a miniature Merlin captured in a spell. In the back, a see-through hound sits on its haunches.  I could start a pilgrimage rush, as the drip figures right in front of me are none other than the Holy Family in a manger. 
            And from the dark corners of the cave I hear water plinking, plinking, plinking in the warmer recesses of the earth’s lungs.
            Iced-over waterfalls offer another wonder, and for that I take a quick drive to Wisconsin’s Governor Dodge State Park to view Stephens Falls.  In summer its plunge-mist cools the valley.  Here in winter the waterfall is preserved mid-tumble, a moment of flow hardened and stilled like a photograph.  Water still trickles behind the thinner panes, catching and dispersing slight shards of light, reminding me that stopped time is just an illusion.
            At the Mines of Spain I’m headed off-trail on snow shoes again.  Just beyond the cliff face the slope softens slightly into a steep wooded hillside.  Even with my snow shoe crampons I’ll still need to latch onto tree trunks to hoist myself up the bluff.  The payoff is a few more ravine climbs ahead: a pockmarked field of hundreds of lead mine pits on a river cliff.  The unbroken snow proves that no one has been in this thick forest for some time, here where miners labored in the 1830s.  When they left, the forest regenerated, but otherwise time has stood still amid the abandoned mines.  The oldest oaks date to the end of lead mining.
            Cross-country skiing across the farthermost bridge at the Swiss Valley Nature Preserve, I stop to watch the tussle between time frozen and time flowing as rounded snow mounds hold out against the quick-running trout stream.  I wonder how clear water can look so dark against the snow.  Higher up in a hillside woods, a recent wet snow still laces the burr oak limbs stretched laterally across the forest. Heavy white clumps weigh down bushes and brambles in the understory.  Slight breezes puff away the accumulations until, in a day or two, the woods will be just another sea of brown in a weary, rotting snow.
            I’m not an ice-fisherman, but if it’s not too cold I’ll tip my cap to those whiling away the hours in shanties splayed out across the river.  Me, I’ll wander down to the Mississippi on the lookout for bald eagles with their snow-capped heads perched as still as branches in the upper reaches of the river forest.  They, too, have fishing on their minds.  Instead of poles they’ll use their talons to snare a reckless bass come lumbering up to sip the air from an ice-free pool.
            From above the river, at Eagle Point Park, I’ll contemplate the jammed ice floes interlocked and solid across the wide expanse above the dam.  I’m reminded of a sleepless night on a jet across the North Atlantic.  While everyone else slept, I gazed down across a sweep of icebergs backlit by a dusky orange hint of sunrise and thought, this is the loneliest place in the world.  Sometimes a winter’s glimpse of the Mississippi River can feel the same.
            To ski or snowshoe at night is more enchanted than lonely.  Once I skied among some blue spruces on the hillside near my home under a moon-lit sky.  It was warm inside the clump of trees, so warm that I thought about kicking off my skis, molding the snow into a back rest, and stretching out to watch the moon-clouds pass.  I didn’t, though.  The spruces on the outer edges were buffeted by an increasing wind, and their branches, heavy with snow, pawed and bobbed like nervous steads.  They were warning me of a changing weather.
*                      *                      *
            Snow and ice are water held in place, a stymied flow, like stilled time.  Maybe this is why some people think that winter is long. 
            I’m writing today from the warmth of my kitchen. The evergreens along the driveway are heaped in powder, and the snow-piles between them are deep and still fresh-looking.  I leave the dried-out husks of flower heads on the hydrangeas all winter long to trap the snow and bow in the wind. Sunny winter days like this are rare, but usually crisp and cold. 
            I am writing a few days before the winter solstice when the sunrise halts its winterly southward trek.  For five days the sunrise will hold still against the horizon, and then begin inching northward again. 
            The shadows across the snowy lawn are lengthening.  The snow’s not going anywhere, for now, in the deep freeze.  But the sun will dip, the weeks will pass, the season will warm, and the frozen water will let loose and flow again, all in due time.
            It’s happened before and before and before.  I know it.  Maybe as I grow older that is why I marvel that for a short while each year, water freezes in place, time stops, and even the sun comes to a momentary halt.

--Published in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, 1 January 2017

          So what, then, is a spiritual landscape?  Quite often when I use the term, whether in Ireland or in the Driftless, people look at me quizzically and try to send me to the nearest outdoor shrine.  And while I have been moved by many such a place—such as the Mass Rock located a half-hour’s uphill hike from the nearest road in the Maumturk Mountains to provide safe worship in the penal times—such places only scratch the surface of what I mean, or think I mean, by a spiritual landscape. 
          The following principles have been guiding my thinking about sacred place—in Ireland, the Driftless, anywhere.  They are related to Ireland’s Celtic past, although they are not exclusively Celtic.  Nonetheless, they give me a new lens through which to view my own landscape.

1. The landscape is spiritual.  I speak with a woman who has witnessed the winter solstice sunrise as it lit up the interior of Newgrange, a Neolithic tomb near Dublin.  A no-nonsense historian who had previously viewed the structure simply as an astronomical site, she says, “But when you get in there and it actually happens…you begin to see the power of the sun and your connection to it.  You realize this is your moment with the sun, individual and personal.”  -  In the Driftless I walk about the Effigy Mounds near Marquette, IA, with bear and bird-shaped ceremonial and burial mounds above the Mississippi, and I feel the earth nearly bursting with meaning, even if the precise intent of the mound builders has been lost to time.
   
2. The Creation is good.  While many a theologian has tried to drive a wedge between the spiritual and the physical universe, the Judeo-Christian tradition begins, unequivocally, with the Genesis story of God acknowledging each day that the creation is “good.”  So in the River Shannon the salmon bring both knowledge and sustenance.  -  The Mississippi River knows no salmon, but it is the most important migratory flyway of North America.  We have polluted and strapped down both rivers, but they retain a wildness despite our vain attempts at controlling them.  (But if the creation is “good,” how then to explain natural disasters?  While the creation is often good to us and for us, it is nonetheless a good unto itself and to its creator.  The good of creation is not defined solely in human terms.)
3. The Holy may be found in ordinary, bountiful places.  The most peaceful place on earth (I have decided) is the monastic ruin of Glendalough, set in a lush, beautiful valley in the Wicklow mountains, whose twin lakes no doubt presented the 6th century monks with plenty of fish and whose mountain flanks offered deer and wild boars.  -  Sticking with religious houses for the moment, the Driftless offers similarly peaceful and holy sites at Sinsinawa, Mississippi Abbey, and New Melleray Abbey, each set amid land of plenty and ordinary beauty.  But other landscapes are holy as well.  The prairie, too, is an ordinary place of holiness, where beauty and the sacred is found in a tiny patch of ground as opposed to the grand and overwhelming.
4. The Holy may be found in austere, remote places.  But sometimes one must go to the ends of the earth and to the rocky outpost to encounter the Holy.  The Aran Islands combine the rocky barrenness of the Burren with the remoteness of islands just visible from the mainland.  To these islands flocked Ireland’s early Christian monastics, particularly as they began their spiritual journeys.  They needed to find themselves before they could found monasteries.  The remote places include the personal interior encountered in stark silence.  -  Trempealeau, Wisconsin, with its deep summer green along the Upper Mississippi may seem neither austere nor remote, but imagine it in winter as an outpost colony of the Cahokian civilization near present-day St. Louis in 1100 A.D.  What compelled these people to travel 500 miles upstream and establish a village, and to build huge ceremonial platform mounds on the river bluffs? What austerity did these people find in their first Driftless winters?
5. Animals are Fellow Companions.  In the Celtic tradition, animals were messengers from the gods and even from the Christian God.  People could shape-shift into animals and then return to human form.  Even a St. Patrick legend tells of the missionary and his band appearing as a herd of deer as they pass by the army of a local king opposed to Patrick’s Christian evangelizing.  Pope Francis in Laudato Sí, writes, “Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness. Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things.”  And so I wander about Connemara, Ireland, in the National Park that is plentiful with living things—butterflies, birds, sheep, cattle, rabbits, foxes—no snakes! But there are carnivorous plants!—even in places like the bog that at first glance appear lifeless.  -  In the Driftless I accompany ornithologist Jon Stravers as he studies red-shouldered hawks and cerulean warblers, and builds his own stone effigy of a hawk on a Yellow River State Forest cliff overlook.
6. Time is elastic and cyclical in the Thin Places.  “Thin Places” is the name for those places in Celtic mythology where the veil between our world and the otherworld is thin and transparent, and may even be crossed.  In such places our usual sense of time is distorted.  In the Thin Places we may see time from nature’s viewpoint, not from the human’s.  So in the rocky Burren time stretches out across the stony limestone pavements, and lakes (turloughs) disappear overnight like magic when the water table drops.  In between the barren limestone blocks grow a vast assortment of wildflowers.  Everything seems “off” and timeless—abundant life amid the barren rocks; marine fossils exposed to the present-day sun; Neolithic tombs amid this April’s most tender wildflowers. – At the Kickapoo Valley Reserve in the Driftless another kind of timelessness prevails in a bluff-surrounded valley of rare plant and animal species and Native American artifacts that were intended to be flooded by an ill-fated plan to dam the valley.  The past and present continue simultaneously, having dodged the dam construction that would have reduced all to no-time.
7. The landscape is storied.  In certain places, one can’t help but feel the story of what has transpired at that location.  In the Wicklow Mountains on a solitary bike ride I encounter—at some distance from the road—a memorial to a civil war victim murdered at that place, and I likewise think of the long tradition of Irish rebels hiding from the British in the Wicklow Mountains.  At the Doo Lough Pass in Connemara, the story of famine victims dying alongside the beautiful Doo Lough (Lake) haunts the path if you get out of your car long enough to feel its presence.  -  In the Driftless the concluding massacre of the Black Hawk War hangs in the air at the battle site between Prairie du Chien and La Crosse.  From the battle bluff and the river shore and even from a steamboat, the U.S. Army and militia mowed down Sauk warrior and civilian alike, with accounts of women with children on their backs being shot as they attempted to swim the Mississippi to safety.  You cannot visit this place without feeling the weight of its past.
8. Poets summon the stories from the land.  The land may be storied, but it requires humans to give shape to its tales.  At the top of Knocknarea sits a Neolithic passage tomb that Celtic tradition transformed into the legendary Queen Maeve’s grave, giving a home in the landscape to the colorful if problematic queen of the Tain, Celtic Ireland’s key epic story.  Poets occupied one of the key positions of respect in Celtic Ireland, and writers are still held in high esteem there.  – At the edge of the Driftless (just beyond its technical boundaries) lies the Leopold Shack, the humble summer and weekend dwelling of America’s most influential nature writer, Aldo Leopold, and his family.  Leopold interpreted the earth’s story, sounded warning against the abuse of the landscape, and called upon us to develop a “land ethic.”

 
          These principles no doubt raise the question of just what kind of spirituality am I engaging in here. My Christian friends may see me as consorting a little too closely with indigenous and New Age beliefs.  New Agers may find my fascination with Christian monks hopelessly dated and irrelevant to the current times. Non-believers may not get much beyond my discussions of geology and the glacial periods.
          But I tend to see more similarity than difference among all of these.
          Understand, I am not saying they are all the same.  I am a Christian, an active Catholic.  My personal beliefs are more idiosyncratic than dogmatic, but I’m not important enough for anyone to have held my feet to the fire (so to speak, in the modern era at least). But the knowledge and curiosity about  pre-, non-, and-post Christians hasn’t made me any less fond of the Jesus who told his followers that if his Father so loved the lilies and the sparrows, is not his love for us even greater.
          But spirituality is not dogma.  Spirituality of the landscape across all of these traditions invokes a sense of awe, wonder, and sense of something both deeper and greater than the physical universe (itself a marvel and a great, good thing). 
          Neolithic man marking the solstices and equinoxes for practicality’s sake but most likely with something grander in mind—otherwise why not just line up two rocks with the sunrise and call it a day?  Pre-Christian Celts—and their indigenous brothers and sisters everywhere—assigning the powers of nature to the gods and goddesses.  The early Christian Celts interpreting these beliefs in ways consistent with Christianity (rather than denouncing, forbidding, and denigrating indigenous beliefs, as has been all too often the custom of Christian evangelizers).  The geologist, who looks at a landscape and imagines (and theorizes) what succession of natural forces created it.  The New Ager, who splices an eclectic contemporary belief out of ribbons of ancient and world-wide faiths.  The nonbeliever standing in awe and wonder at the forces of nature and the deep tradition of humans who have walked upon the earth.
          Awe and wonder.  That’s the spirituality that links all of these.  Just how was this world—no, this particular hilltop on which I stand—shaped?  What is the nature of nature? Who are our forebears who stood on this plot of land and perhaps died here, and what does it mean that I can almost feel their story in the rocks and trees and bog?
           The rest is dogma: polytheism, monotheism, atheism. You go your way and I’ll go mine.
           Perhaps it’s best to remember the etymological roots of three words related to spirituality: 1) Regardless of how the word is commonly used today, “agnostic” originally meant “not knowing.”  May we all remain a little agnostic within our beliefs, so that we don’t lose our sense of awe and wonder due to our unfailing certainty. Saying this is nothing more (or less) radical than what the Christian mystics have told us all along.  2) “Religion” etymologically means to “bind together again.” Let this be a bonding that unites us rather than enslaves us or others.  “Religion” is also related to the word “ligament,” which allows movement even as it binds bone to bone.  And 3) speaking of bone, the word “sacred” is linked to the word “sacrum,” the bone at the base of the spinal cord.  The sacred arises amid the earthy physicality of the earth.  If you don’t also seek the sacred in the earth you will find only its shadow in the heavens.
 
           Just prior to Christianization, the Irish Celts developed their own version of the Roman alphabet, called Ogham, in response to their interaction with the Romans entrenched in Britain (the Romans never attempted to enter Ireland, but traded with the Irish).  Each letter of the Ogham alphabet was named for a particular tree: A was called Ailm, or Fir; B, Beithe, or Birch; C, Coll, or Hazel; D, Dair, or Oak.  And so forth, with Alder, Hawthorn, Yew, Ash, and Willow standing as names for Ogham alphabet letters.
          Christianization of the Celts soon followed, and the Ogham alphabet remained in use for yet a few centuries.  “In the beginning was the Word,” the Christian evangelists surely told the Irish Celts, “and the Word was God.” 
          But for the ancient Celts, the alphabet was the trees. 

​Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
-- Seamus Heaney, “Bogland”
 
            A shovel slicing into the bog is luscious to hear and feel, like biting into an overripe pear.   A shovel-slice into the bog that strikes a buried stone, however, end-caps with a muted ‘thunk.’
            The ‘thunk’ is both heard and felt, travelling up the shovel’s spine and disseminating through the bog itself.  Ears, hands, and feet all register this first strike upon a Bronze-Age stone wall fence buried beneath the Achill Island bog.  Each turn of the spade exposes a section of wall to daylight for the first time in 3000 years.
 
            Achill Island quickly called out to me during my two-month stay in western Ireland.  Located in the thinly-populated westerly reaches of County Mayo, the island—accessible by bridge across the narrow Achill Sound—offers stunning Atlantic cliff-face views, a landscape with a layered, ancient past, and bog, plenty of bog.
            My first Achill hike was at the Minaun Cliffs on the southwest flank of the island overlooking the long, sandy Keel Strand with surfboarders braving the icy Atlantic waves.  Up through a cut in the lower cliff face, through the bog and among the scattered sheep, we ascended to the Coffin Trail, along which islanders in the more remote villages in earlier centuries carried their dead to the Catholic cemetery seven miles away, occasionally resting the caskets on leachtai, or stone cairns, still present on the landscape.  Not so the dead unbaptized infants, banned in earlier times from consecrated ground and buried in unmarked graves on the lower reaches of the cliff.  Today a memorial at the site offers belated recognition of their presence.
            The Deserted Village digs another layer into the past.  Eighty stone cottage ruins stretch out over a mile in one- or two-lane rows.  Their roofs gone, many of their walls tumbled in, the cottages offer no explanation for their en mass abandonment. Perhaps many of the inhabitants died off in the Famine and the survivors emigrated in the following decades.  Flowing down from the cottages are furrowed rows, the remains of the residents’ potato lazy beds, un-tilled since the mid-1800s and now reverting to bog.  Perhaps a landlord evicted everyone, with plans for the land that never materialized.  No actual records remain to tell the story, just the stone walls.
            Stones and other artifacts, that is.  An archaeological study of three cottage sites suggests happier times as well.  Shards of cheap but colorful imported dinnerware—plates and saucers and tea cups—suggest some gaiety to everyday life as well as contact with the outside world. The sheer number of cottages suggests an active and lively village.  And the small size of the one- or two-room cabins offered a cozy warmth against winter rain squalls. 
            Achill Island and all of Ireland once enjoyed a warmer, dryer climate.  About 4000 years ago the region underwent a climate change, leading to today’s cool, wet weather. Neolitihic farming practices had already felled much of Ireland’s forests, and the combination of climate change and deforestation led to the widespread formation of bog—reeds and sedges and mosses that could survive in the wet landscape and which acidified the soil and water so that other plants could not re-establish.  Bog plants layer upon their prior years’ partial decay, and in doing so literally swallowed up the stone remnants of ancient people’s lives after they moved to more hospitable grounds.  Bog covers 87% of the modern Achill landscape.
           
            Today I am tagging along with the Achill Archaeology Field School as we attempt to unearth part of that ancient layer from the bog.
            Field Director Stuart Rathbone is explaining to the students and me why he thinks there may be a 3000-year-old stone wall buried beneath the bog where we stood.  To the right as we face up the mountainside lies a Neolithic court tomb dating to 3500 B.C., its support stones collapsed but its capstone clearly intact.  About 80 meters to the left sits the stone foundations of Bronze Age huts, the dwelling places of ordinary folks from 1000 B.C.  In between, Stuart reads the landscape.  A slight leveling of the mountain slope runs in a straight line between the two sites, with the slope resuming below the line.  Clumps of grasses amid the prevailing bog mosses likewise run along this line.  “Stones beneath the bog can change the chemical composition,” Stuart says, resulting in vegetation differences.
            So we haul our equipment up the mountainside and stake out a rectangle for digging.
If we find something, we’ll prove Stuart’s hypothesis.  If all we find is bog, then Stuart’s prediction is false.
            We commence digging.  The two younger students work uphill from me, struggling to breach the tangled surface of the bog with their shovels.
            With a sharp step onto the edge of the shovel I slice down into the bog.  After a few more slices and twists with the shovel, the first wet, matted layer of bog works free, and I carry the black prism to the spoil mat.  Then a second matted chunk.
            The next slice ends in a dull ‘thunk.’  Stuart brightens, but realizes it could be a random buried stone.  Till the next ‘thunk,’ and the next and the next.
            Soon I have unearthed a three-foot section of wall hidden away beneath two feet of bog. 
            Later, Stuart instructs me to begin cleaning off the buried stone wall, sweeping and removing bits of bog to expose the stonework to the sun.
            Bog and glittery flakes of schist stone are under my fingernails.  Cleaning the site, I scrape my knuckles on stones that have gone untouched for 3000 years.
 
             We are about to call it a day in the late afternoon.  In one tiny rectangle hidden away on the mountainside, the bog has offered up a small slice of the Achill story, layered upon and swallowed by successive years’ growth of bog, and sunning itself for the first time in 3000 years.
            Other lives have passed over this ground before, lives replete with tragedy and joy.  As for me, I am grinning ear to ear, kneeling in the bog as if it were a sandbox, scraping the years off the stones and nursing them back among the living. 

            Not enough water to drown a man, not enough wood to hang him, and not enough soil to bury him.  So claimed a henchman of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, describing the Burren region of western Ireland as British troops scoured the land searching for rebels to the Crown.
           Lesser known is the rest of the Cromwellian’s observation:  “And yet their cattle are very fat; for the grass growing in turfs of earth…that lie between the rocks, which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing."
           Barren and bleak, bustling with life, the Burren is a place of contradictions.
           The Burren is a 150 square mile region in County Clare, Ireland, famous for endless stretches of flat, rectangular limestone surface bedrock reaching to the horizon in all directions, tumbling into draws and scaling the low-lying mountains.  Its name, appropriately, derives from an Irish word, "Boíreann," meaning “a rocky place.”
           But from the crevices (called grykes) between the slabs (called glints) grow a wealth of spring and summer wildflowers.  The flora includes arctic species hearty enough to withstand the cool, wet, wind-beaten winters as well as Mediterranean varieties that flourish in the rarely freezing Gulf-Stream-tempered climate.  In mid-April the yellow primrose and cobalt-blue spring gentium were beginning to make their appearance alongside the endless gray slabs.
           Bleak and treeless, the Burren holds an austere beauty.  A rain-soaked region, its water disappears quickly underground, channeled through the porous limestone, so that the surface itself is dry (in contrast to the bogs), except for seasonal valley pools called turloughs that disappear back into the ground in summer when the water table drops.  
           The Burren began to take its present shape during the last ice age, ending 12,000 years ago, when glacial sheets stripped away much of the overlying soil. Stone-age farmers further depleted the topsoil with erosional farming practices, clearing forests from marginal lands.  The limestone bedrock, now exposed at the surface, began to weather and crack in rectangular patterns. Since limestone is soluble over time, the cracks grew into crevices, and the remaining topsoil filtered into the spaces between the limestone blocks. 
           Remnants of stone-age (Neolithic) civilization still abound.  Nearly a hundred portal tombs dot the Burren landscape.  These tombs typically consist of two or three 6-8 foot tall limestone slab-walls set vertically, supporting a roof slab, giving the appearance of a tottering house of cards, although they have remained stable through 5,000 years of weathering.
           Likewise, the ruins of medieval Celtic Christian monasteries abound, both in the Burren proper and in its topographical extension onto the nearby Aran Islands.  While many Celtic monasteries found the Holy in bountiful surroundings like Glendalough beside a mountain lake or Clonmacnoise along the River Shannon, other monasteries—or monks at the start of their journeys—sought the Holy in remote, austere places.  As modern-day self-proclaimed Celtic monk Dara Molloy explains, monks would often wander before they settled down, “looking for their ‘place of resurrection’.”  They were inspired by the desert monks of ancient Egypt and gave place names like Disert and Dysart to the most austere localities. In the Burren and Aran Islands, there was little to distract them from their inward journeys.
           While Neolithic tombs and monastic ruins are tucked away in corners of the wandering back roads, the Burren owes its modern look to grazing cattle. If early farmers had destroyed their own nest, the lush grasses that grew in pockets and clumps among the stony slabs nourished the cattle that Celtic kings—and later Norman and British landowners—boasted as the essence of Irish wealth.  In turn, cattle kept the underbrush trimmed back which, left unchecked, might in time have covered the rocky expanse and perhaps built up a new soil.
           Even so, farmers didn’t give up the fight against the expanse of rock. Where the Burren meets the coast and on the nearby islands, Irish peasants scooped up handfuls of soil that had built up in the crevices, blended it with sand and seaweed, and carted the mixture to their small parcels of land amid the British landlords’ grazing estates.  Here, from the rocky, barren place, they built, inch by inch, the garden parcels that sustained them through centuries of indentured poverty. 
           But when the potato blight hit in the 1840s, disease destroyed away their main crop.  The British continued exporting the cattle while starvation and immigration carried away the population.  Today, the Burren’s population is still less than 60% of its pre-Famine level.
            The Burren is popular with tourists, although much of its traffic is en route to the Cliffs of Moher, one of Ireland’s most famous attractions.  The curious will stop to examine the Poulnabrone portal tomb. For a taste and smell of the old ways, many will stop in the peat-warmed pubs of nearby Doolin and Listoovarna for a pint and a bowl of Irish stew, staking out a nook amid meandering rooms. The evenings are filled with traditional music.
           But driving on the one-lane back roads in the off-season, you will encounter the day’s only traffic, a local tractor that will require you to back up 100 feet before one or the other of you can pull slightly off the road to let the other pass.  A guided hike across the stony uplands will reveal the first of the season’s wildflowers taking hold against the limestone pavement.  Your eye will sweep toward the turloughs that will disappear in summer like so much mist. Away from the touring buses, sheep and cattle guard the less-visited stony ruins of the ages.          
           The Burren is a study in contrasts.  Barren yet bustling with life, ancient and depopulated yet alive with Irish heritage, it doesn’t quickly reveal the full depth of its contradictions.  For that, you must look between the rocks.
 

           My first time through the Doo Lough Pass was by car, as I was still exploring the winding, ill-marked Irish roads.  The scenery was heavy.  An olive-colored bog draped off the twisted cliffs of the Mweelrea Mountains, whose peaks were obscured by mist. Patches of scree marked the steepest faces, or corries. 
          Doo Lough itself, by contrast, was lovely, a clear, cold glacial lake nesting between the mountains. [Lough, roughly pronounced as ‘lock,’ is the Irish word for ‘lake.’]
          And when I emerged past the southern end of the lake, a sign at the Delphi Lodge announced, innocently enough, “Fresh salmon for sale.”
          Which was somewhat ironic, given that the Delphi Lodge and Doo Lough Pass were the setting of one of the most horrific incidents of the Irish Famine.
 
          Nineteenth-century Irish rural life was precarious even before the Famine.  Absentee British landlords exacted a “pig for the rent” from Irish tenants who tended the landowners’ cattle and sheep.  In return, Irish families coaxed potatoes from small plots for their own subsistence.  The potato was the staple diet for 90% of rural Irish tenant farmers.
          The land required coaxing.  Naturally bogland, certain fields could be converted to small-scale farmland by digging deep drainage furrows and applying a fertilizing mixture of lime, seaweed, and manure to the raised soil mounds between the furrows.  Called lazy beds, these potato fields required back-breaking care.
          In 1845, a potato blight swept quickly through the Irish countryside, turning potatoes to mush in the fields overnight.  It was followed by another blight in 1846, and several more through 1851. 
          A million people in Ireland died of starvation and another million emigrated.  Western Ireland—the province of Connacht—was hardest hit with a 28% population loss during the Famine years.   
          (Heavy emigration continued through the following decades until the population of pre-Famine Ireland was nearly halved. Most of the potato beds since then have reverted to bog. You can tell which fields once nursed potatoes, though, where faint outlines of the lazy beds still run through the bog.)
          In March 1849, a crowd of 600 starving men, women, and children descended upon the new relief station at the town of Louisburgh, hoping for food or admission to the Westport Workhouse.  The officer in command said he could provide neither, and instructed them to walk instead the 11 miles through the Doo Lough Pass to the Delphi Lodge in hopes of relief. 
          As the time was late, the crowd slept on the streets of Louisburgh, and when a wintry night set in, 200 were dead by morning.  The rest began their walk to the Delphi Lodge.  No road existed yet, just sheep paths through the bog.
          When they arrived at Delphi the next day, the relief officers couldn’t be bothered from their lunch, and the crowd was told to wait.  Lunch completed, the officers then told them that no food was available, and they should return to Louisburgh.  Desperate, some turned to eating grasses from the bog, and died because human stomachs can’t eat what sheep do.
           The weather worsened again overnight as the people hunkered down in the Doo Lough Pass.  Sleet and heavy winds entailed, and 200 more of the ill-clad, starving people perished on the second night.
          The relief officer from Louisburgh could now feed some of the survivors, as there was work to hire out: the dead needed to be buried.  But there were so many dead and so little soil that most were buried in unmarked mass graves in the glens of the Doo Lough Pass.
 
          When I returned to Doo Lough, my plan was to walk a portion of the road from Louisbourgh to Delphi. I had considered fasting before I walked, but I didn’t. 
          In this second day’s light the Mweelrea peaks didn’t seem quite so threatening.  Sheep on the road, at the side of the road, off in the bog made the day feel lighter.
          I went off the road a couple of times myself, sluicing through the bog in my thoroughly water-proof boots, watching the water squelch with each step.  I wandered down to the pebble-shored lough.  So clear, slightly tannin-tinted.  When I stuck my hand into the lake I found it shockingly cold, and imagined a winter rain pelting down on the physically weakened.
          Two memorials mark either end of the Doo Lough Pass, one dedicated to victims of the Irish famine, and one to famine victims everywhere.
          The story of the Doo Lough Pass tragedy reached American ears, but especially those of the Choctaw tribe, who raised funds for Irish Famine relief in 1849, as the incident reminded them of their own Trail of Tears two decades earlier. In 1992, the Irish returned the favor, with a group walking the 500-mile Trail of Tears and raising $750 million for world-wide famine relief.  Each May a famine walk winds its way through the Doo Lough Pass.
 
          The first road through the pass was laid down in 1896, and today the road is handsomely black-topped.
There’s no news here that the roads we walk on were built by the labors and even the starvation of our forebears.  The least we owe the past is to get out of our cars.
          I don’t know whether today’s Delphi Lodge has any direct connection to the one of the same name from 1847.  Today’s lodge is part of the Delphi Adventure Resort, with bicycling, kayaking, and zip-wire opportunities.  It sounds like a lot of fun, and why shouldn’t it be?  We can’t live forever in yesterday’s tragedies. 
          But an odd observation stuck with me as re-entered my car and drove away.  When I was walking, the sheep hooves clattering on the road and the nearby rock outcrops sounded curiously like taps on my keyboard.  All those silent faces, munching on bog grasses, tapping, tapping out a story not their own but somehow written into their bodies.

            So what am I doing in Ireland anyway? 
            I have been writing about nature—really more about “place,” which is the intersection of the human story with the landscape—in the Driftless region of the Upper Mississippi Valley for quite a few years now.  I have lived nearly all of my 50-some-ish years in Dubuque, except for a few years not far down the road in graduate school at the University of Iowa and a semester teaching abroad in Dublin.
            So what brings me to Ireland again, for nine weeks of nature writing?  With a semester abroad, nine weeks now, and a few other vacations and school-related visits, I will have “lived” in Ireland for about seven months, total.  Not enough to make me an expert about the land, but more than a vacationer, I hope.
            Even so, my goal is not to feign an expertise about Ireland, but to bring back fresh eyes with which to view my own home landscape.  And to sharpen my sense that all land is spiritual, all land is sacred.
            Now, Ireland does not look like the Midwest Driftless region.  Once in a while you hear non-native Americans say that their European ancestors—Irish, German, Swedes, you name it—“chose” to settle in this or that landscape because it reminded them of home.  For the most part, that’s wishful thinking. 
            Ireland, while sharing the Driftless’ summer green, is a land of immense stretches of water-soaked bog and stony sea-side mountains.  In the interior plains you’ll find, perhaps the closest visual similarities, but the farms support more sheep and cattle grazing rather than grain production, at least by way of comparison. 
            The similarities, for me, lie in what the landscapes evoke.  I’ll give you one such example.  Spiritual landscape, it seems to me, retains the story of those who have lived on the land and sometimes died there.  In Ireland I once bicycled out into the Wicklow Mountains well before “tourist season.”  I had the mountain roads all to myself.  I was a little spooked by the isolation—I had tire-changing gear with me, but the process isn’t fool-proof, and I’d have a long walk back to Dublin if anything went wrong.
            As I cycled the Military Road—so-named because the British built the road to patrol for Irish rebels through the centuries—I spied from the corner of my eye a small monument partway up a mountain side with a walkway leading to it.  Out of curiosity I dropped my bike and walked up the monument, only to find that it was a memorial to a republican IRA member whose murdered body had been found on that spot in 1923.  A victim of the Irish Civil War.  (I later found out that he had been present in the GPO in the 1916 Easter Rising.)
            His story was steeped in that place.  Yet his story was named and memorialized.  No less present were the stories of all those unnamed rebels, high-mountain sheep farmers, pilgrimaging Celts, and ancient Neolithic farmers who inhabited, traversed, or entered the land before him.
            I feel much the same in many places in the Driftless Land.  About two hours north of Dubuque on the Mississippi River, halfway between Prairie du Chien and La Crosse, is the site of the Black Hawk War massacre.   In 1832 Black Hawk had unsuccessfully led a band of Sauk men, women, children, and elderly to re-occupy their old home in Saukenuk (presently Rock Island) from which they’d been forcibly removed.  When “promised” reinforcements from other tribes had not materialized, Black Hawk tried to surrender, but that too went afoul when the military mistook the surrender for an ambush. Several battles and skirmishes ensued, but for the most part the Black Hawk “war” was a chase, with the military nearly always a day behind.  Now on the run from for over 500 miles and four months, the Sauk were starving and far north of their home.  They tried to return across the Mississippi River to where they’d been “removed,” but the military caught up with them at the river.  Army personnel and militia fired at the Sauk from shore and from a steamboat as they attempted to swim the river.  Some women had children on their backs, and they too were shot and killed.
            Out of 1500 Sauk who began the journey, only 150 survived.
            You cannot visit that place without feeling the story of what transpired there.
           
            But this brings me back to the original question: Why Ireland and why the Driftless?  This could be said of anywhere, right, that the land retains the stories of the people who lived and died there.  It could be said of Alabama and Spain for that matter.  And that is actually my point.  The Driftless is my home landscape, and Ireland my “adopted” one.  I won’t claim expertise about the Irish landscape, but by learning about it at more than at just a vacationer’s level I can bring home fresh eyes with which to know my own landscape.
            And when we stitch together landscape to landscape, place to place, and story to story, when we begin to understand that the land is spiritual, is sacred, then all of our landscapes become stitched together, and it becomes harder for us to tear them apart.
            So that is why I am here.
           
As I finish this “background” blog entry, I want to thank several individuals and groups: The anonymous Loras College alum and donor who has made the O’Connor Chair for Catholic Thought available to me and my colleagues before me; Loras College President Jim Collins and the rest of the administration who have been supportive in this quest of mine; my colleagues in the Language & Literature Division at Loras who have willingly picked up my duties while I’m away; and mostly to my family and especially my wife Dianne who lovingly embraced my project even as it sent me to Ireland, again, without her.
            Oh, and thank you to Skype and email, too!

On Easter morning the sky was just beginning to lighten over Clew Bay just outside of Westport as I ducked through the doorway and entered the ruins of Murrisk Abbey to attend Dawn Mass.  The jagged walls of the ruins were silhouetted against the purple sky.
            Storms were on the horizon, with thunder and lightning having been reported in nearby Galway, so the priest began by saying he “would not test the Lord” but would move the service along quickly.  Indeed, the sky first lightened a bit with the dawn but then darkened, and as a pelting rain let loose the abbey sprang a new and colorful ceiling, with umbrellas plentiful enough to keep the congregation dry.
            Outdoor Easter dawn Masses are common in Ireland, especially in the west. The tradition reminded me of the continuity of nature spirituality that linked early Celtic Christian beliefs to pre-Christian Celtic forbears. 
            The Celts, of course, were not the first peoples of Ireland.  People began arriving in Ireland at the end of the last Ice Age, much the same as in our own Driftless Region.  As with most indigenous peoples, nature was central to their spirituality.  Neolithic Irishmen built temples cum tombs cum observatories to mark the solstices and equinoxes, possibly linking the practical knowledge of the skies (important to agriculture) to rituals for the dead.
            When Celtic culture arrived around 500 B.C.—likely by migration and osmosis, not by invasion as the Celtic mythologies would claim—the landscape continued to be viewed as spiritual.  Amergin, the first Celtic poet according legend, chants the words of the creator-god:
 
      I am the wind which breathes upon the sea
     I am the ocean wave,…
     I am a sunbeam,
     I am the fairest of plants,
     I am a wild boar in valour,
     I am a salmon in the water,
     I am a lake in the plain,…
     I am the God who lights fire in the brain.
     Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?
     Who announces the ages of the moon?
     Who teaches the place where the sun makes his bed?
 
            Water, special stones, certain animals, and oak trees were just a few of nature’s key spiritual elements for pre-Christian Celts.  This is not surprising for a rural culture that did not develop cities, as did continental Europe, especially as the latter came under the influence of the Roman Empire.
            But the Romans never conquered Ireland, never attempted to, and even as Christianity came to Ireland (shortly after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from Britain), the Celtic Christian church retained the rural reverence for nature held by the pre-Christian Celts in ways that the continental Christian Church did not.  Indeed, for the continental Church, even the word for a non-Christian belied the Church’s bias toward the city: the word “pagan” derives from a word meaning a “country person.”
            Holy wells of the pre-Christians continued as holy wells dedicated to saints. Sacred stones of the pre-Christian Celts were incorporated into medieval monastic abbeys.  Animals reverenced by the pre-Christian Celts retained their importance to the Christian Celts. (One need only to hear the legend of St. Kevin, nursing in his outstretched hand a bird’s egg laid there as he prayed.)  The oak retained its importance for the Celtic Christians: the name Killdare, for example, means simply the “church [cill] by the oak [dara].”  Even certain saints like Brigit demonstrated a continuity with the past:  Brigit the goddess had been a patron of poets, St. Brigit a patron of the arts.   
            This Celtic Christian Church was notably different from the Romanized Church, but was not consciously in rebellion—the Reformation was still more than a millennium away.  Rather, the world was a large place in the fourth century, and communication slow and difficult.  Local differences among Christian communities were to be expected.  But the lack of cities in Ireland reduced the influence of city-loving and uniformity-inducing bishops.  Instead, local monastery abbots held more influence than bishops, and the Irish church went on its merry individual way.
            This would change in steps and stages over the centuries.  The Irish church finally gave in on such matters as recognizing Rome’s date for Easter, how to wear monastic tonsures (Irish monks shaved the front half of their heads bald instead of the more iconic continental monk’s top bald spot!).  The Anglo-Norman invasion/osmosis brought the ascendancy of bishops and continental monastic orders.  The English Protestant Reformation and Penal Laws drove the Irish Catholic Church underground—and in some ways back to nature by necessity, with outdoor Masses at Mass Rocks.  But at the same time, religious oppression drove the Irish to embrace the Romanized Church as an act of resistance against the British.  Slowly the Celtic belief in the goodness of nature was replaced by Roman denigration of the body, denigration of the physical universe.
            But an indigenous spirituality always operated alongside the traditional church in Ireland—walking in pilgrimages, circling in bonfire walks, worshipping at holy wells, tying trinkets to prayer trees.  All of these had their roots in pre-Christianity, and the institutional church gave a nervous, begrudging approval or looked the other way.
            The spirituality of nature has been continuous in Ireland through migrations and intermingling of different peoples, through introduction of new religions such as Celtic Druidism and Celtic Christianity, and through invasions and external threats in ways that did not happen in our own country.  ]In contrast, American culture lacks this continuous, ongoing link to the landscape due to a self-inflicted disconnect dating to Native Americans being forced from the land.  As a result, their stories and spiritualties are largely lost to the rest of us.  (The British, it might be said, attempted to the do the same in Ireland, but didn’t fully succeed.)
            Connections, or disconnections, to the present are more complicated? As Ireland becomes increasingly urbanized, modernized, and globalized, the link of people to place is wearing thin, especially among the younger generations. 
            But the implosion of institutional religion—the Catholic Church’s abuse scandals in Ireland, for example, were even more egregious than in our own, and the Church has paid a heavy price as a result—has left an opening for nature spirituality to re-emerge.  A revival of interest in Celtic sensibilities infused with strands of Hinduism, Buddhism, and various personal flavorings is helping to re-establish the link of people to landscape. 
            Perhaps Laudato Si will put the institutional Church back into the conversation as well.
 
            The rain let up as the Easter Dawn Mass came to end, and we all closed our umbrellas, gave our thank-you’s to the priest who had served us through the downpour, and ducked down to exit the ruins.  Clew Bay was at high tide, and several of us paused at the shore to watch small waves gather in the breeze.  To the west, Croagh Patrick loomed, its peak just barely visible in the squall still emptying on the mountain.
            This is an old, old land, I realized, but no older than my own in the Driftless region.  Earth land has stories.  That’s what makes it spiritual to believers and nonbelievers alike.  The deeper the stories—geological, religious, historical, personal—the more spiritual it is.
            But people can lose connection with the land.  It may happen through genocide, through which an indigenous people’s stories are lost.  It may happen through modernization, which offers a false impression that we can with impunity trade physical places for virtual ones..  Even modern ecology can ironically dissociate us from spiritual landscapes if there is no room to consider the stories of the land.
            Even so, about a hundred people had gathered in the dark at Morrisk Abbey even with the threat of immanent rain on Easter morning. They could have slept in, gone to church some place with a roof and heat, or ignored the ancient feast altogether. 
            Somehow I think those gathered did so to keep alive the stories of that place.
            That is a spiritual event. 

Bog Blog #3:  Glendalough
 
          Stone-slabbed tombstones and weather-beaten Celtic crosses lean askew like jumbled toothpicks among the ruins of the monastic city.  The tumbled walls at Glendalough proclaim the rise and fall of Ireland’s Golden Age of Saints and Scholars.  But I have not met anyone who hasn’t felt this place curiously alive today.
Glendalough, located 30 miles southwest of Dublin, means Valley of the Two Lakes in Gaelic.   The ruins rest at the end of a narrow, glacially sculpted U-shaped valley flanked by 500-foot tall semi-forested ridges, an oasis of green in the rocky and bog-strewn Wicklow Mountains.  Just beyond the edge of the monastic city lie the lake shores of the Upper and Lower Lakes with their clear mountain waters reflecting the sharp slopes of the cliff walls.
           St. Kevin, or Coemgen (pronounced Cave-Yin), chose this valley for his monastery in the sixth century.  A lover of nature and solitude, Kevin himself frequently retreated to a cave high above the Upper Lake, known today as St. Kevin’s Bed, where he lived as a hermit for long periods before returning to the monastery proper.  Still, even in his solitary retreat he welcomed guests and friends, provided they could reach him in his steep, cliff-faced dwelling.
           But the monastery he founded was anything but hermetic, and in the centuries following his death Glendalough grew to become a major center of religion and learning, a “monastic city” of monks, lay peasants, and surrounding landed patrons.  
          Just a few generations removed from St. Patrick’s Christianization of Ireland, monasteries were popping up across the island like mushrooms.  Some, like Skellig Michael off the southwest coast, were built on wind-battered rocks where monks subjected themselves to nature’s harshest tunes.  Others, like Glendalough, drew their energy from nature’s lavish abundance.
          This was Ireland’s Golden Age, from the fifth to the ninth century.  After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 400’s, continental Europe found itself in a state of chaos amid the power vacuum.   Since the Romans had never set out to conquer Ireland—having peered at its shores from England and writing it off as Hibernia, the Land of Winter—Ireland didn’t experience Rome’s sudden withdrawal. 
          From such monasteries came learned men and women of the Golden Age.  They were the secretaries and printing presses of the day, writing histories of the pre-Christian Celts and copying Christian holy books with exquisitely scrolled artwork.  Over the next few centuries they effectively re-Christianized the continent, re-establishing monasteries, churches, and places of learning where ruins had been left in the wake of the Roman departure.
           But changes lurked on the horizon.  Vikings sacked the monastic city for gold vessels and other treasure several times between 900 and 1100 A.D..  Glendalough survived these plundering expeditions, but finally met its end at the hands of the Anglo-Normans.  The armies of King Richard II destroyed the monastery in 1398, fearing the potential power of an Irish center of learning amid the spreading and thickening Anglo-Norman seats of power.
           Then Glendalough entered its long sleep.  Locals buried their dead among and within the decaying walls.  Today the Round Tower, St. Kevin’s Church, the Gateway, the Cathedral, and several other structures serve as reminders of the Golden Age.  Some are mere sections of remaining walls, while others have been reconstructed.
But the forested hills and the clear lakes keep Glendalough alive.  An off-shoot of the 80-mile Wicklow Way hillwalking trail traverses the mountainside, and a three-hour ridge trail encircles the lakes on boardwalk spanning rock, bog, and forest.  A mountain stream cascades through Poulnass Falls.  
          One such side-trail in the upper hills leads to St. Kevin’s Cell, another removed but less severely hermetic site than his cave bed.  Here the story is told how Kevin cradled a nesting blackbird in the palm of his outstretched hand for weeks until her young hatched and flew away.  The apocryphal story no doubt points to his love of nature.
          But the poet Seamus Heaney imagines Kevin dissolving into the landscape itself throughout the ordeal:  “For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird / And on the river bank forgotten the river’s name.” 
Ireland’s medieval monastic Golden Age long ago fell into ruins alongside the weathered stones.  But at Glendalough it still feels present and alive.  Like St. Kevin nursing his blackbird’s nest, the stone walls of the monastic city dissolve into the lush forest and clear mountain lakes, and go on living. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
             
 

           On Sunday I took a second guided hike in the Wicklow Mountains, led again by mountaineering expert Russ Mills (Mountaintrails.com).  This time we were joined by Dr. Tom Davis (Loras Biology professor who is faculty director for this year’s group of Loras students studying in Dublin), his wife Barb, a twenty-something American couple stationed apart from each other in Texas and Germany, and a young French midwife. With younger blood to spur us on and two experts on mountaineering, plants, and wildlife, I hit the jackpot for learning about the bog.
          Hike #2 also began from Glendalough), but this time went south of the monastic ruins (I’ll talk about the Glendalough monastery next time).  We hiked for about 9 miles in 5 hours, climbing through the bogs of Derrybaun Mountain to Mullacor and descended to the Spinc, a bluff trail that edges the bluff high above Glendalough’s mountain lakes. 
          I’m slowly learning about bog plants and Wicklow Mountain wildlife.  Only sphagnum mosses grow in the actual bog pools.  Not only are they one of the few plants that can survive the wet environment, but they also turn the water acidic so that no other competitor plants could grow there.  As these mosses die off each season, they only partly decay in the anaerobic water, and the partially decayed plant matter builds up season after season forming peat, which when cut, dried, and burned, is called turf, which used to be burned like firewood.  Indeed, any organic matter tossed into the bog—including ancient “bog bodies”—never fully decays.
But there’s lots of life as well! Frogs like the bog. Tom scooped handfuls of frog eggs for us and commented on their developmental stages.
          Sedges and rushes are two other kinds of bog and upland plants.  Tom taught me the difference between the two:  Rushes are Round and Sedges have Edges! The tubular rushes—used in making thatched roofs—remind me of horsetail plants without the segmentation.  Sedges are grasses that grow in small clumps.
         Wildlife in the bog and wet uplands includes foxes and mountain hares and peregrine falcons.  The Irish mountain hare was thought to be a subspecies of the continental mountain hare, because the Irish version did not turn white in winter.  Until a few years ago, that is, when a succession of hard winters brought more snow than usual to the mountains and turned the Irish hares white for the first time since biologists had recorded them.  Scientists were amazed and had to reclassify the hare as being the same as the continental version.  But if scientists were surprised, what about the hares?!  They must’ve thought they’d all gone prematurely grey!
          In the end, though, it is the history of the Wicklows that most amazes me.  One quick story:  In 1592, Irish rebels Art O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell escaped from a British prison in Dublin Castle on Christmas Eve, made their way through town, and then, under cover of darkness fled up into the Wicklow Mountains toward the stronghold of the rebellious O’Neill clan.  But Art had been more severely weakened by imprisonment than the younger Hugh, and he died during the night on a mountainside in view of our hike.  
Dubliners still commemorate his escape with a 53-kilometer charity hike from Dublin Castle to the Wicklow Mountains every January!
          The Wicklow Mountains were both bane and refuge for Irish rebels over the years.  In the end, the British resorted to building military roads and barracks in the mountains, and deforesting the landscape (no hiding in the trees) to try to scout them out. 
          Even during the Civil War that followed independence, the Wicklows became a hideout for republicans who wanted to fight on to include Northern Ireland in the Republic.  In 2012 I went bicycling by myself in the Wicklow Mountains, and off in the distance along a mountain road I noticed a monument halfway up the mountainside and a pathway leading to it.  Curious, I dropped my bike and walked up the pathway, only to discover a monument to a republican fighter, a member of the IRA, who had been murdered at that site by his own countrymen who had undoubtedly fought at his side for independence. 
Ireland isn’t my home country, but I couldn’t help feeling the loneliness of that place, far from any human companions. 
          Nothing fully disappears in the bog.  Memory always lingers on.