Showing posts with label the lee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the lee. Show all posts
30 May 2009
17 May 2009
Feet
Walking to the gym this morning in the early afternoon, before the inevitable afternoon downpour and after the mid-morning chill, I felt as if I could walk forever. It is not a new feeling, but it seems more poignant now that I have faith in my own two feet.
I have always been slightly self-conscious about my feet, and on the whole I do not trust them much. I like the way they look, with their high arches, proportioned toes and pink nail polish, but they tend to flop when I walk like silly appendages, the left ankle rolling grossly as I trudge down the street. I am only truly comfortable when walking in bare feet, and that is a rare thing here.
But in the last five months I have learned to walk like I have never walked before. I have taken the walk to school as a normality, down damp paths in the morning or to the café in the afternoon. The walk back from the pub has become a mere trifle, tapping the stone in heels. I have gotten used to carrying my weekly groceries back from Tesco and the Market, familiar brass plaques lying under my Converse. But more than this, I learned that I can walk. That when all else fails, I am never stuck anywhere. Distance is relative, (and the distances I have walked have been long indeed) but I have learned to walk the kilometers without fail, to continue with no thought to how far, simply knowing that I will get there. I can walk. My mobility is never compromised.
In the states I am reliant on a car, my feet placed safely on the gas and brake, never forced to move much in order to go far, but to walk is a whole new discovery. This movement is a whole body experience, a sense of complete self, independent and integrated. No frame separates you from the world and no machine leaves you to be let down. Most mornings I feel I could walk forever, around the country and back to this wonderful city, and that I need nothing but my feet and my legs going on at my own pace; an off-centered gait that may not be economical, but it gets me there all the same.
The night outside Kerry airport I took to my feet in the same way I found my way through the streets of Dublin and Edinburgh and Rome. To walk, to walk to the bus station with a pack of all your possessions on your back, or simply to the gym with a towel, it is a state of perfect independence. You are walking on your own two feet! The world cannot stop you!
And I have come to love it. The days I do not walk are marked by restlessness, a supreme feeling of waste and dissatisfaction. I have even come to love my trod; slow, but more observant. There is more time to take in the birds on the Lee or the purple flowers that cling to stone fences along College Avenue. I see the world when I walk, I see it in its own time, coming and going as it does, as I do. To walk is a feeling of freedom nothing can match. I can walk the world if I wish.
I have always been slightly self-conscious about my feet, and on the whole I do not trust them much. I like the way they look, with their high arches, proportioned toes and pink nail polish, but they tend to flop when I walk like silly appendages, the left ankle rolling grossly as I trudge down the street. I am only truly comfortable when walking in bare feet, and that is a rare thing here.
But in the last five months I have learned to walk like I have never walked before. I have taken the walk to school as a normality, down damp paths in the morning or to the café in the afternoon. The walk back from the pub has become a mere trifle, tapping the stone in heels. I have gotten used to carrying my weekly groceries back from Tesco and the Market, familiar brass plaques lying under my Converse. But more than this, I learned that I can walk. That when all else fails, I am never stuck anywhere. Distance is relative, (and the distances I have walked have been long indeed) but I have learned to walk the kilometers without fail, to continue with no thought to how far, simply knowing that I will get there. I can walk. My mobility is never compromised.
In the states I am reliant on a car, my feet placed safely on the gas and brake, never forced to move much in order to go far, but to walk is a whole new discovery. This movement is a whole body experience, a sense of complete self, independent and integrated. No frame separates you from the world and no machine leaves you to be let down. Most mornings I feel I could walk forever, around the country and back to this wonderful city, and that I need nothing but my feet and my legs going on at my own pace; an off-centered gait that may not be economical, but it gets me there all the same.
The night outside Kerry airport I took to my feet in the same way I found my way through the streets of Dublin and Edinburgh and Rome. To walk, to walk to the bus station with a pack of all your possessions on your back, or simply to the gym with a towel, it is a state of perfect independence. You are walking on your own two feet! The world cannot stop you!
And I have come to love it. The days I do not walk are marked by restlessness, a supreme feeling of waste and dissatisfaction. I have even come to love my trod; slow, but more observant. There is more time to take in the birds on the Lee or the purple flowers that cling to stone fences along College Avenue. I see the world when I walk, I see it in its own time, coming and going as it does, as I do. To walk is a feeling of freedom nothing can match. I can walk the world if I wish.
06 May 2009
Early Examination
It is May already. I wonder when that happened. The days here are rather nice right now, a bit chill, with always the threat of a shower, but of late I’ve found it easy to walk myself to the gym at 10 each morning without becoming hypothermic.
Along the Lee small, white flowers bloom and the leaves give a beautiful green canopy and at low tide I can smell the ocean in the dredges of the riverbed. Two white swans have taken up residence in a length of the river between my apartment and the Mardyke Bridge, their white plumage standing out against the swampy brown of the water.
There are no classes anymore, just exams. A month of stressed students and packed study areas. I have never seen such a collective body of silence as I find crammed into the Q+3 of the library on the rare days when I can grab myself a window seat there. The exams are fairly straightforward; only two essays, 90-minuets, and with a choice of topics so varied I cannot imagine what it would take to fail. My own exams are spaced rather nicely; one tomorrow, one the 20th and one the 27th. After that, well, I don’t like to think about after that. After that I will be leaving this place, but I’m not ready to think about that yet.
Most afternoons are spent in the O’Rahlly Building café with a crowd of now all-too-familiar faces; Maria and Melina, (the Spanish girls), Shane, Niall and Martin (the English lit boys), Debbie and Anne, Heather, Alba, Frank, Ian, and many people who I greet, but with names I can’t remember. Pub crawls still happen at regular intervals, and sometimes just old-fashioned house parties. My free evenings are mostly occupied with reading literary criticisms and tapping away at my keyboard.
For now my only worry is enjoying this last month on the emerald isle without prematurely mourning it. There is time to sit in the warming sun still and hear Shane quip some latin quote, or listen to Melina and Maria chatting away in quick Spanish. To hear more and more about old Irish men in local pubs, jokes about potatoes, or ridicule Joyce.
Or to just listen to the rain.
Along the Lee small, white flowers bloom and the leaves give a beautiful green canopy and at low tide I can smell the ocean in the dredges of the riverbed. Two white swans have taken up residence in a length of the river between my apartment and the Mardyke Bridge, their white plumage standing out against the swampy brown of the water.
There are no classes anymore, just exams. A month of stressed students and packed study areas. I have never seen such a collective body of silence as I find crammed into the Q+3 of the library on the rare days when I can grab myself a window seat there. The exams are fairly straightforward; only two essays, 90-minuets, and with a choice of topics so varied I cannot imagine what it would take to fail. My own exams are spaced rather nicely; one tomorrow, one the 20th and one the 27th. After that, well, I don’t like to think about after that. After that I will be leaving this place, but I’m not ready to think about that yet.
Most afternoons are spent in the O’Rahlly Building café with a crowd of now all-too-familiar faces; Maria and Melina, (the Spanish girls), Shane, Niall and Martin (the English lit boys), Debbie and Anne, Heather, Alba, Frank, Ian, and many people who I greet, but with names I can’t remember. Pub crawls still happen at regular intervals, and sometimes just old-fashioned house parties. My free evenings are mostly occupied with reading literary criticisms and tapping away at my keyboard.
For now my only worry is enjoying this last month on the emerald isle without prematurely mourning it. There is time to sit in the warming sun still and hear Shane quip some latin quote, or listen to Melina and Maria chatting away in quick Spanish. To hear more and more about old Irish men in local pubs, jokes about potatoes, or ridicule Joyce.
Or to just listen to the rain.
04 February 2009
Rivers
I have only seen four Irish rivers, and they have all been in cities, something strange and violent in their aspect as they rush brutally through inflicted channels of stone, confined to single-file paths as the people mill on their banks, completely ignorant of the vicious force turning in hard pulls and whorls just a few feet from their vantage.
It’s especially exhilarating when standing on a bridge. I walk the Banks of the Lee each morning in part because I get to cross the river three times, once seeing it pushed into the straight canal that takes it through the city, again as it flows in its own natural mud banks, and a third time as the other fork is taken along the edge of campus and channeled between the stone- but somehow still pitifully weak looking- arches of the campus bridges.
There are tides to it, and when the tide is high and it is raining it always appears to me that surely, this time, those stone arches will fail and the water will pour over the walkway in a torrent and then the incautious walkers will remember the dragon they live with, this River.
How do you confine a river to such deep paths? I wonder as I examine the brick-laid walls that plunge into the muddy churn. Near certain bridges, older ones wide enough for cars to cross, there are sets of stairs that dip into the water and disappear beneath it, ending where? What or who would walk into that water? It is not a pleasantly weaving body, it has no beaches or sandy banks. Maybe at one time it did, before it was made to work like an ox here on its way to the sea.
The Shannon and the Abbey are like it, and even the Corrib in Galway as it flows into the bay. The first time I crossed the Corrib it was late at night and you could see the harbor lights reflecting in the distance, little orange orbs on a mat of dark, and it was noise and white caps churning to be free from the strains of Galway city before settling into the calm, dark, wide bay.
We stood on the edge of it and watched it foam under the bridges, becoming filled with deep, rough eddies from the arches, and we tossed in a paper airplane that caught up in the shrubs climbing up the stone before falling into a whirlpool and being devoured.
Have I seen an American river in this way? I have seen them in the forest as they lap their flat banks. I have seen them plunge and thrash through gorges. Have I seen them thus run into channels? I have never lived around one long enough to know. I am getting to know the Lee a little better.
It’s especially exhilarating when standing on a bridge. I walk the Banks of the Lee each morning in part because I get to cross the river three times, once seeing it pushed into the straight canal that takes it through the city, again as it flows in its own natural mud banks, and a third time as the other fork is taken along the edge of campus and channeled between the stone- but somehow still pitifully weak looking- arches of the campus bridges.
There are tides to it, and when the tide is high and it is raining it always appears to me that surely, this time, those stone arches will fail and the water will pour over the walkway in a torrent and then the incautious walkers will remember the dragon they live with, this River.
How do you confine a river to such deep paths? I wonder as I examine the brick-laid walls that plunge into the muddy churn. Near certain bridges, older ones wide enough for cars to cross, there are sets of stairs that dip into the water and disappear beneath it, ending where? What or who would walk into that water? It is not a pleasantly weaving body, it has no beaches or sandy banks. Maybe at one time it did, before it was made to work like an ox here on its way to the sea.
The Shannon and the Abbey are like it, and even the Corrib in Galway as it flows into the bay. The first time I crossed the Corrib it was late at night and you could see the harbor lights reflecting in the distance, little orange orbs on a mat of dark, and it was noise and white caps churning to be free from the strains of Galway city before settling into the calm, dark, wide bay.
We stood on the edge of it and watched it foam under the bridges, becoming filled with deep, rough eddies from the arches, and we tossed in a paper airplane that caught up in the shrubs climbing up the stone before falling into a whirlpool and being devoured.
Have I seen an American river in this way? I have seen them in the forest as they lap their flat banks. I have seen them plunge and thrash through gorges. Have I seen them thus run into channels? I have never lived around one long enough to know. I am getting to know the Lee a little better.
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