Overview: Reconnecting with the strengths and struggles within the ancestral homelands of settler colonialists is a critical step in healing the systems of violence and power over we have adopted and used to cause great destruction in America. But can you go home again? This non-fiction essay explores my quest to return home to Ireland, to the motherland. I explore some of the challenges and gifts I discovered in going home, including a transformational visit to the Cailleach, a goddess who bears witness to the living power of Ireland’s ancient but ever potent matrifocal traditions.

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Can you go home again? Some can. It took Odysseus years, but eventually he got home. Dorothy and Toto were tested mightily, but with the help of friends, they made it back from Oz. Two sisters and their descendants in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing struggled for eight generations until they returned to Fanteland. But what happens later, after the protagonists have been home for more than a day, or a week, or a year? That is a story less often told. Did Odysseus and Penelope stay married? Does Dorothy give Aunt Em hell during her adolescence? Will the connections found at the Cape Coast Castle lead to reparations for African slavery? Don’t know. Perhaps we lose interest once the perilous journey is over. Still, this is exactly what I wanted to find out.

What would happen if I returned to my ancestral homelands? Not just for a visit, but to stay. This quest has been stranger, and literally rockier, than I ever imagined.

My search for homeland began a few decades ago when I recognized that even after five generations in Minnesota (six if you include my two sons), we can’t really call America our home. Not equitably anyway. Settlers and settler descendants, we are still squatters on unceded and stolen land. Below the politics, there’s a spiritual truth. As Native friends and colleagues have taught me, there is a unique relationship between ancestral lands and the indigenous people who steward them. In America, my family is on someone else’s ancestral lands. This land is not in our bones. So if we don’t belong in Minnesota, where is our homeland?

Like many European Americans, I’m a mix, a mongrel. Two-thirds Irish, a quarter Swedish, and a tiny bit French. I can’t point to only one nation and declare it my homeland. I’m suspended half-way across the Atlantic Ocean, with no obvious place to land. Even so, I’ve taken my sons to all three ancestral lands to make contact and begin rekindling relationship.

When my boys were very young we went to France. In Dinan, a town in eastern Brittany where distant French ancestors emigrated from to Canada in the 1700s, we explored the medieval city. In a photograph, my oldest son stands on a stone barricade with his arms raised into the air. His hands are open as his child-like spirit intuitively gathers ancestral energy. When they were young adults, we visited the city of Malmö in southern Sweden. We didn’t love Sweden; we were hungry and got exceedingly lost on rental bikes, but thanks to a sweet moment eating fresh strawberries at a market stand out of a scene in an Ingmar Bergman film, we didn’t hate Sweden either. Neutral, like the country, I suppose.

Then there’s Ireland, the country I both love and hate. Maybe that’s too strong. Better to say this: there’s nothing neutral about Ireland for me. Of all my ancestral lines, Ireland calls to me even though I’m uncertain if there’s a place for me there.

“Have you been?” That’s how people in the Irish-Catholic community in my birth city of St. Paul, Minnesota ask one another if they had traveled back to Ireland. In that community you introduce yourself by name and by parish. My father was, “John Murphy, St. Luke’s.” My mother, “Sandra Murphy, Holy Spirit.” In that context, I was “Nora Murphy, Nativity,” at least until we left Minnesota for a few years. By identifying your name and your parish, the questioner automatically knows you, your school, your family, your friends. If they didn’t, their siblings or parents definitely would. They’d also know, more or less, your class. If you went to St. Bernard’s, for example, your family likely earned much less than if you went to St. Mark’s. By the time my family returned to Minnesota, the parish boundaries of my parents’ generation had begun to disintegrate. But the question, ‘Have you been?’ remained relevant.

Even though three of my four grandparents were Irish American, my parents ‘hadn’t been’ until they were in their late fifties. In part that was because since the Famine, we had lost contact with our people. We didn’t know their origin points in the homeland. This was a bit like having someone’s name, but not their parish in St. Paul. Unless you have a townland, you are unlikely to find an ancestor in Ireland. After several years of research, I discovered a living relative on my father’s mother’s mother’s line, a great-great grandmother. My parents set off for a visit to Ireland soon after. When they returned, they were different.

Alcoholism had brought my father great challenges. For much of his life, he walked with a tightness to his step; he was always ready to turn around to make sure no one was trying to catch him from behind. But after that first, and for him only, trip to Ireland, my father had a slightly softer step. It was as if he was able to trust the earth to hold him just a little more than he had before he’d been. Why not? He had finally met family in the homeland. In retrospect, it wasn’t just the embrace of his distant cousin, the one with whom he shared great grandparents and an ancestral cottage. In Irish there’s a complex word meaning land and belonging rolled into one. Dúchas. The change in my father came about because of the embrace of the remote and reserved mountain where his cousin lived. The land recognized my father as kin. 

Although my father had abstained, my mother had gladly accepted shots of Powers Irish whiskey from my father’s cousin. She eagerly swallowed his stories about Michael Collins and Gerry Adams, too. My father’s cousin was so taken by my mom’s independent spirit he gave her his only photograph of Adams. She packed it secretly between layers of wool sweaters and underwear because the peace negotiations over the North of Ireland were still underway. She hadn’t experienced dúchas, the embrace of the land, like my father. She had walked right into living Irish history.  

My own first visit to the feisty, lion-shaped island came not long after my parents’ visit. Of course, I brought my sons. We went sometime between our trips to France and Sweden. I wanted to discover how and why my ancestors could leave as victims of colonial rule and end up participating in it as tyrants in America. I wanted my sons to know that we had relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, on the other side of settler colonization. Secretly, I also wanted the soft magic of belonging and connection my parents had found.

But I did not feel connection to homeland on my first trip to Ireland. Far from it. Instead, a constant, eerie screeching and crying followed me around the island. These silent cries seemed to erupt from the stones, and rocks, and boulders we passed saturating mile after mile after mile of the green but rugged Irish landscape. “Can you hear that?” I asked my sons, but no they couldn’t hear a thing beyond the car radio or my swearing as I navigated driving on the other side of the road. But for me, this constant cacophony sounded so loud it was as if every single inch of this rock-covered island wept with hardship and loss.

To make this song of sorrow worse, the stones lament had been neglected, not out of malice, but because it was simply too hard to open to the terror buried in the land after centuries of colonization. Without anyone to cradle, hold, and heal it, the cacophony sounded louder. Part of me wanted to sing a peaceful tune, a lullaby, and call back to the mournful rocks and soothe the land. But more of me wanted to run away far from the wailing. 

So yes, finally I ‘had been.’ But after that first visit, I realized that going home and staying home were two different things. The first wasn’t so hard to do; the second, the staying, required a courage I didn’t have. Instead, I had wanted to return to America where at least I had some inkling of the sorrows laden into the earth. Known sins. Known wrongs. These seemed preferable to the unknown stories I’d felt but didn’t understand in Ireland.

After a few years went by, time softened the screeching sorrows laced into the rock pores that had haunted me. I thought about returning to Ireland again. How could I not try to lean in and listen? After all, if I didn’t go back, I wouldn’t ever be able to answer my larger question. Would I be able to return to my ancestral homelands in Ireland? Would the motherland embrace me, a lost child of the diaspora?

Then the year after my father passed away, my uncle organized a Murphy family gathering near the River Blackwater that divides Counties Cork and Waterford where he and several local historians had located the homesite of a great-great grandfather, a stonecutter named Patrick Murphy. My mother insisted, “Your father would have wanted us to go.” I agreed so long as we went a week early so I could attend an arts residency on Irish needle lace on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork.

I had come across the largely unknown but powerful art of Irish lacemaking during research for my book on colonization. On the heels of the Famine, Catholic nuns and wealthy Protestant do-gooders opened lacemaking schools for indigent Irish girls that prospered until World War I when machine-made lace replaced their laborious and lucrative craft. Until then, thousands of young women sold fine lace to the royal houses and clergy around Europe, earning not only their own keep but more than enough to feed and house their families for decades. Their work was made of minute, hand-stitched canvases of thread that balance form and emptiness with exquisite grace. But unlike painters or sculptors or poets, the names of these artists have largely passed into silence. I felt a call to understand the lives of these young women, perhaps as part of my finding a way home. My intuition did not let me down. 

Today, Irish lace is gaining some recognition, in part through the work of contemporary artists like Fiona Harrington. Fiona was already a trained visual artist before she took up lacemaking. She has a gift for translating lace into portraitures of her native West Cork. Fiona doesn’t lace rose garlands and shamrocks to edge Victorian dresses or tables. She laces islands in the sea, sheep on the mountains, foxglove in the hedges. She laces everyday objects like spoons, and onions, and eggs. When I read about her lacemaking residency on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, I knew I had to go. While I tried my hand at needle lace for five days, my mom painted in a room overlooking a bay facing west toward the Atlantic and America. Coulagh Bay, named after an ancient Irish goddess, the most ancient of them all. The Cailleach.

After our needles and watercolors were put away each evening, Fiona kindly showed us around the Beara Peninsula. She took us into the village of Eyeries for a glass of white wine overlooking Coulagh Bay. She took us over the spiny tip of the peninsula into the rugged fishing port of Castletownbeare for crisps and a pint. Fiona drove us into the town of Kenmare to visit the lace museum where she first learned Irish needle lace from an elder culture bearer there.

Then she took us down a remote windy rocky road toward a farm on the other side of Coulagh Bay where her father was raised. Near the northwestern tip of the bay, we stopped to visit two ancient stone sites. First a standing stone, the tallest in all of Ireland, which rose erect over a small fishing harbor. Then to a short, squat pock-marked stone perched on a narrow cliff edge overlooking Coulagh Bay. The Cailleach.

This humble stone changed everything for me about Ireland.

The Cailleach is an ancient Irish goddess. She goes by many names. The Hag, The Old Woman of Beara, the Veiled One, Buí, to name a few. There are stones dedicated to her all around Ireland—from the tip of the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare to the Hag’s Chair in the Boyne Valley. But the Cailleach stone in Coulagh Bay is the most well-known because of two famous poems. One was written by a Christian monk around 800 AD and the other by a nationalist poet over one thousand years later at the cusp of Irish independence. In both, the Old Woman of Beare, the Cailleach, stands as a testament to the strength, endurance, and power of the land.  

The Cailleach is the mother of Ireland.

Myths older than the ninth century poem tell us that the Cailleach emerged out of the sea wearing a vast apron. She flew across the sky, dropping stones and rocks from her apron to form the land below. A land that according to geological time spans back at least three hundred million years ago when she stitched together two ancient continents to form the island of Ireland. Just as she holds the land together with her stone, the goddess controls the weather. She brings the winds and storms and harsh rains of winter, then changes places with her sister in early spring to bring the days of light and warmth. It is said that the Cailleach also holds all the potential of everything that was, that is, and that is yet to be.

For millennia, the goddess survived by foraging seaweed, salmon, wild garlic, cereal crops, and cow’s milk. After people arrived on the land, she pressed her thumbs into a child’s back so that ever after humans have had to learn to walk slowly. Then again, she taught humans how to harvest and winnow wheat. She is so old that none, not even she, can count her years. Later Christianity and patriarchal doctrine transmuted her story, until finally as one tale goes, Saint Caitiairn turned the Cailleach into stone as revenge for stealing his magic wand while he was napping. That, they say, put an end to her roaming the lands. But I’m not so sure.

When I walked down the narrow pebbly path lancing the middle of the spiny cliff where the Cailleach of Beara stone perched above Coulagh Bay, I knew none of this back story. Fiona had simply said, ‘Here she is, then.’ Even though I could barely hear my lace teacher over the high winds coming off the sea and raindrops soaking my jacket, I smiled. There she was. 

Standing about four feet high and six feet wide, an Chailleach Bheara appears humble at first. She is no Stonehenge or Pyramid, no Newgrange or Poulnabourne Dolmen in stature. But even in the wind and intermittent rain, you can’t help but pause to exhale in wonder the moment you reach this ancient gray rock covered with flat white moss and pockmarks. Her stone radiates the energy of containment, of gathering, of safety. No matter the weather, the time of year, the conditions in the world or at home, the Cailleach’s rocky arms open wide as if to invite you in.

To mark their respect, visitors leave gifts all about her stone. The concave nubs and grooves about her entire body are filled with every imaginable treasure, shining like trinkets in a bird’s nest. Silver necklaces and golden charms, coins from nearly every continent, seashells and pebbles, miniature dolls and shiny crystals adorn her like a tree at Christmas. A modest rock that holds all of eternity in her simple form.

When I met the Cailleach above the sea in Coulagh Bay I sensed she might hold the sweet tune I’d been looking for the first time I came to Ireland. A lullaby that could ease the pain and suffering in this land. Even perhaps in my own heart with its yearning for home.

As I stood before her small form, she opened her ancient sandstone heart and sang, ‘Come here to me. Come in where you belong.’ 

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