journey
Weekly newsletter 3.16.2021
Friends,
To celebrate their 50th anniversary, my parents brought the family (not the whole family, but a large portion...we’re an expansive brood) to Ireland. They’d visited for their 25th, and both trips constituted more than a vacation for my mother. It was pilgrimage. She was a proud descendant of Irish immigrants (and Germans and possibly one English, too, but we didn’t talk about that), and from the stories and details of her grandparents’ lives she spun a portrait of the homeland that was a colorful blend of The Quiet Man and Angela’s Ashes.
Our visit definitely skewed toward The Quiet Man: we stayed in a lovely little town and, like other pilgrim-tourists who swarm Ireland every summer, visited other lovely towns separated by stretches of green fields and thatched roofs; we drank pints in lovely little pubs and purchased wool sweaters and took photos of ruins; at the big anniversary dinner, my nieces joined the step dancers for a jig and a reel (or something, I don’t really understand Irish step dancing) and I sang “Danny Boy” with an accordion accompaniment (or was it a tin whistle? or a fiddle?). We even had a sighting of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers during lunch in his hometown. Oh, and we saw a life-size diorama that replicated the lower-deck journey to the new world by famine-starved Irish (it was the sounds of retching and vomiting coming from the speakers that really brought the scene to life). Our itinerary checked every box on nostalgic cliches that the American descendents of Irish immigrants embrace, guilt-inducing suffering and all.
It was a lovely trip, but for me it didn’t reinforce a connection to Ireland. If anything, it eroded any sense of connection that I’d previously felt. Except for the fact that I looked like I could be related to everybody we encountered, I felt as foreign as I’d felt walking around Budapest or Taipei, and I started to reevaluate the “Irish identity” that I’d claimed for so many years. Where did I feel it most? Well, there’s a close association in my bones between identity and food. When St. Patrick’s Day came around, my siblings and I knew an overboiled corned beef and cabbage was coming, accompanied by a reminder from our mother that her people wouldn’t have eaten beef. Beef was for the landowners (which was code word for “the English”). Lamb stew, she explained, would be a real Irish meal (and yet, she never made lamb stew for St. Patrick’s Day…).
But when St. Patrick’s Day came around, we also knew that soda bread was on the horizon. My mom’s soda bread is divisive among my siblings - she liked it dry and crumbly and always included raisins and caraway seeds. Yes, caraway seeds. I liked watching her make soda bread - she didn’t usually enjoy baking, but she loved to get her fingers into the flour to fold Crisco into the flour. With each lump of dough, a story would emerge about her father, or her sisters, or the whole lot of sisters and cousins and aunts who lived in a three-flat where the only man in the building was her father.
Now, when St. Patrick’s Day comes around, it’s soda bread season in my kitchen. When I shifted to a hardcore vegan diet for a few years, I started experimenting with the recipe my mom passed on to me. I played with almond, cashew, and soy milks before discovering that coconut was the key to vegan buttermilk. I eliminated caraway seeds to avoid picking them out of my teeth later and upped the amount of baking soda to make it a little fluffier. I swapped out raisins for dried cranberries or cherries and mixed in different nuts. The base recipe, like any quick bread, could absorb just about any combination of mixings (pistachios and dried cherries is my current favorite). I quickly discovered that making soda bread wasn’t just a way to engage the traditions my mom passed down; it was the key to using up everything in my pantry.
Now, when I’m mixing ingredients in and straying from the soda bread of my childhood, I catch myself arguing with my mother, trying to convince her that the vegan variety is just as good. Or I catch myself walking through an old conversation with her. Or I catch myself making peace with an old wound or grudge that I’d carried against her. Or I catch myself reconstructing a story about her family crowded into the three-flat on Deming Place. Or I catch myself laughing at the way she wrote our initials on the bottom of things around the house “so you kids won’t fight over stuff when I die.” Or I catch myself remembering the March after her death when I couldn’t call her and ask her, again, for the thousandth time, exactly how much shortening she used.
No, my soda bread isn’t “authentic Irish,” but then again, neither am I. Baking soda bread doesn’t take me back to Cork. It brings me back to my mother’s kitchen. Isn’t that what traditions are for? Passing on meaningful practices can remind us where we came from and equip us for whatever direction we’re going, but practices, echoing the people who do them, evolve. More specifically, we adapt them, and their survival rests not on our perfect replication of a distant time and place but on our agency to adapt them, to apply them as a lens for understanding our experiences, and to pass on what’s useful, what’s viable, what’s relevant for our here-and-now.
UPCOMING
Guided Meditations | Mondays, 4:00pm PST, via Zoom
Good Stuff III | 4-week symposium on Mondays at 5:00pm PST begins on April 5. Sign up here!
Good habits: understanding nuns through film | 6-week symposium on Tuesdays at 5:00pm PST begins on April 6. Sign up here!
Madonna: a case study in religion & pop culture | 5-week symposium on Thursdays at 7:00pm PST begins on April 15.
UPDATES
Registration is open for the Good Stuff III (Mondays beginning April 5) and Good habits: understanding nuns through film (Tuesdays beginning April 6) symposia. Check out my website for more information and to sign up. In addition to the Good Stuff and Good habits symposia next month, I’ll be facilitating a symposium on Madonna as part of Tacoma Arts Live’s Adult Conservatory. This symposium will meet on Thursdays for five weeks beginning April 15. Interested? More info and registration are here. Symposia are limited to 10 participants and need 4 to run - if you’ve thought about participating, please sign up!
If you’ve got 47 seconds (give or take a few), please complete this brief form: Guided Meditation: quick survey.
Guided meditations via Zoom continue! Mondays at 4:00pm PST. The aim is to practice being present - to ourselves, to others, and to the world. If you or someone you know could use a 20-30 minute dose of peace and quiet on Mondays,visit the meditation page on my site to sign up.
GOOD STUFF
Read
Speaking of the difference between “Irish” and “Irish-American,” in 2013, Smithsonian Magazine published this fantastic article pulling back the layers of St. Patrick’s Day observances. “Is Corned Beef Really Irish?” both confirms my mother’s anecdotal evidence of her ancestors’ diet and highlights how observance of St. Patrick’s Day is more distinctly American than it is Irish.
Listen
Looking for something different to listen to? How about gypsy punk. Specifically, Gogol Bordello. The music is pure emotion (each song is an explosion of, well, something, whether it’s joy or pain or fury) but the lyrics, jumping in and out of different languages, including Romani, are poignant, philosophical, and politically charged. “Wonderlust King” is one of my favorites - for the music and the message.
I traveled the world looking for understanding
of the times that we live in
Hunting and gathering first hand information
Challenging definitions of sin
I traveled the world looking for lovers
of the ultimate beauty but never settled in
If you stream music on Spotify, I’ve started a playlist called “Bill’s Good Stuff,” including music I’ve loved for a long time as well as things I’ve come across more recently. Feel free to add the playlist to your favorites! Bill’s Good Stuff Spotify Playlist
Explore
These days, I find myself itching to travel, but I know it’ll be a minute before I’m able to get on a plane and explore the world again. It’s not quite a substitute, but the National Geographic Travel account on Instagram is a great account to fantasize...or to start updating your bucket list. I didn’t even know I wanted to see Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul until I saw Jun Michael Park’s photo of the guards in Joseon-style uniforms updated with facemasks.
Read
In this week’s meditation, I used an excerpt from Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.
A pair of wings, a different mode of breathing,
which would enable us to traverse infinite space,
would in no way help us,
for, if we visited Mars or Venus keeping the same senses,
they would clothe in the same aspect as the things of the earth
everything that we should be capable of seeing.The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth,
would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes,
to behold the universe through the eyes of another,
of a hundred others,
to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds,
that each of them is…
