When you have been pursuing your passion for a long time – decades, perhaps – the present moment becomes more and more like a piece of intricate music. The more you keep going, the more colors, motifs, layers, associations, allusions, echoes, and harmonies get woven into the song. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
Last week, I was invited to take away a great number of Irish-interest books collected by a friend and former student of mine who is currently in hospice. It was a substantial, impressive library, built over years of collecting and reading. Everywhere could be seen the marks of her deep engagement and investment. Many volumes were inscribed by authors grateful for my friend’s support and encouragement. Clippings and notes fluttered out of where they’d been tucked away. Scattered among the books were a few photographs that showed my friend smiling in earlier days with the great poet, Seamus Heaney. To see those two dear faces together elicited a pang of simultaneous sorrow and joy.
Even the names on the books, the places written about within them, the topics and genres, the Irish language (and some of the books I’d assigned to her when she was my student) – all spoke right into my heart. I felt the huge wheel of time turning as I stood before the now empty bookshelf, and it was awe-inspiring and strange and holy. I felt like kneeling.
That night, I taught a class about traditional Irish song and music in the Harvard Summer School. My wonderful students sang and danced, spoke Irish, and took my gift to them – a fresh tin-whistle! – and began to participate in that tradition themselves. My dear friend, Joann Keesey, visited us as a guest to speak about her own love for traditional music and her experience hosting the beloved “Celtic Dawn” radio program on WMFO. I am so grateful for the feast she shared.
To illustrate the breadth of what fits under the capacious umbrella of “Irish tradition,” I played recordings of two fiddlers: a slow-air by James Byrne of Donegal and a newly-composed and elaborately-arranged tune by Colm Mac Con Iomaire of Dublin. Both of these fiddlers are so wildly gifted and so connected with the well-spring of Irish music, even as each has a very different orientation to it. They both belong.
James meant a lot to me personally for he was the great fiddle-master who invited me to sing in the sessions in Glencolmcille all those years in my 20’s and 30’s when I visited Oideas Gael, the Irish-language school in Donegal. Listening to him play “An Londubh,” the slow-air he’d played many nights precisely at the peak of the session, I felt knocked over by how lucky I was to know him and to shelter under his wing for a time.
The class that night was a jewel. There was so much laughter and light-heartedness. My students learned and opened. I learned and opened, too, even as I perceived counter-melodies and aching harmonies. Even as I knew in my bones that it all belongs – the bright and the shadow.
When Tomohiro, a young Japanese student, stood up with his fiddle in the last moments of class and played the “Hobbit” theme from “The Lord of the Rings,” I had to sternly admonish myself not to cry. They weren’t sorrowful tears, but a kind of brimming over at the end of a long day that began with my friend in hospice and finished with this young fiddler. A day that so kindly held endings and beginnings and middles.
This September marks the 25th anniversary of my arrival at Harvard. I was 24 turning 25 when I enrolled as a graduate student; I had no idea of what lay ahead but faced it all with huge excitement and eagerness. Now at 49 turning 50 I have been granted a bird’s eye view of how kind that quarter-century has been to me and how much it has bestowed: friends, learning, art, books, experiences, love, vocation, a way of life. I wonder what the next quarter will bring, and on the basis of this one, I trust it will be beautiful.
A day like yesterday with its woven memories and emotions offers a glimpse of wholeness that extends beyond the single, individual life. In that richly-woven music there is my friend and Seamus Heaney, Tomohiro and James Byrne, generations of Irish scholars and musicians and singers and poets. I’m there, too.
It’s the best music I ever heard.
