To dream …

Posted on December 26, 2013 by AlianaAlani

As we begin to crest the wave of the holiday season and move closer to the end of a year, many of us start, once again, to ponder dreams and desires, both new and old. Forget the resolutions. This is more about the questions that help us sculpt a new world for ourselves. Questions like: what is a our heart’s desire, what do we truly love to do and are we doing it, how would we like to spend each day of the next year of our lives, and for some, with whom? Are we daring to love? And then there’s the larger question – what do we want for our world?

Dreams (and desires) are like stories waiting to be told. Sometimes we dare to look in their direction, feel a flutter in our hearts, and act. Sometimes they filter through the night space rather than the day, hovering.

As I ponder the power such dreams can hold and what waits in those proverbial wings, a wonderful Irish poet comes to mind. Someone whose work I have a fondness for – William Butler Yeats.

Below is a poem in which resides a segment many have come to know. I offer it to you as food for thought. I sense that Yeats would have liked that.

AEDH WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN –

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Me & the writing of BETWEEN WORLDS …

Posted on November 19, 2013 by AlianaAlani

Awhile ago in what is beginning to feel like another life, I wrote a book called, BETWEEN WORLDS. Sculpted from within the mist and memory of Ireland, it tells a tale of a man many later came to call a saint, and a woman remembered, if she was remembered at all, as a sinner. It is an archetypal story. It is also true.

Like many stories locked within the mists of time, it comes laden with baggage and hidden agendas. Agendas, as other writers might tell you, have a nasty habit of not liking their stories to be told. That is, quite obviously, why they have been plopped usually unceremoniously into the depths of that deep dark place sometimes called (at least in Ireland) – the bog.

It is from the bog that they must be retrieved and that, as you may have guessed, is the beginning of what Joseph Campbell would lovingly call – the hero’s journey.

Thus began my quest.

Did I want it? Not consciously. Did I ask for it? Again, not to my immediate awareness. Did I take it on? You betcha.

You see, there was this woman, like an often fleeting apparition, walking around Glendalough – that’s in County Wicklow – think old monastic city, ancient times, power, and yes sometimes light. She was hard to ignore. As was the energy of the place and the sense of whispers and messages slipping forth from the very fabric of the land – the ‘tell the tale – you must you must’ kind. Perhaps you could have walked away from that. Clearly I didn’t.

Frontcoveronly - half size - for internet

I’m mentioning it now because, though I have shared the how-I-got-to-it story to friends, I have very seldom spoken of it to others. The book is not yet well known. It’s self-published, it’s in eBook, it’s on the blog, you have to find it.

I could quite simply let it stay that way. It did after all take many years of my life and I could be forgiven for being tired. But it is a story that begged to be told, and told for a reason most honourable, and I, the storyteller, would be remiss if I didn’t give you a glimpse of why.

… stay tuned please

– book cover by Tannice Goddard – Glendalough photo by Kevin O’Kelly (Ireland)