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A short time ago my friend and Elon University colleague, Janet Warman, asked me to paint her niece and nephew, a delightful experience I named Janet’s Loved Ones. Since that time another nephew has arrived. Getting three children in one photo was a challenge, but Aunt Janet managed with one overlooking Linville Falls. The challenge for me was to create the illusion of proximity, sunlit “brights” to catch the eye, and distance, bluing and softening the greens and waterfall. Thanks, Laine, for the ongoing lessons on value, warms, cools, and composition. The portrait is a surprise gift for Janet’s sister who celebrates 65 years in May. During the painting process I allowed myself to reminisce about the earlier January terms we spent in Ireland with Elon students.

Janet shares a passion for travel. She recently completed a teaching semester in Florence and plans other excursions when safe travel returns. It was the Emerald Isle with her seventeen shades of green, however, that captured our hearts and souls, and bonded us as friends. A gifted and published poet, Dr. Warman was the course’s lead professor. I assisted with logistics and health emergencies but with a BA in English literature, I related to readings and the tromping grounds of James Joyce, William Butler Yeats and Sheamus Heaney. As I painted, the memories whispered in with scent, color and image…crusty brown bread and stout stew, Irish coffee and Bailey’s, the County Galway region of Connemara and the beautiful marble of  Kylemore Abbey, Galway Bay and the Aran Island excursion, the majestic Cliffs of Moher in County Clair, and Blarney’s kissing stone. We enjoyed walking tours through Trinity College and St. Patrick’s Church, literary pub crawls, and sale shopping in Dublin. History’s shadow sharpened with an excursion into Northern Ireland. The experience was magical and the students (mostly) behaved.

In a previous blog I referenced the Irish author and poet, John O’Donohue, who sadly died in 2008. I am currently reading an earlier book, anam cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World (Bantam Books, 1997). O'Donohue explains the Celtic understanding of friendship in the book title: anam is the Gaelic word for soul; cara is the word for friend. Anam cara means soul friend. Celtic spirituality viewed this friendship as interpersonal connection and also an awareness of one’s internal and invisible world of thoughts and being. Within each of us is a “forgotten or neglected inner wealth” that is our soul, or sense of the divine (p. 17). The Celts also held great reverence for nature and the ancient world. I believe I felt this connection when I gazed over the Connemara landscape, the flat-topped “mountains” of the Cliffs of Moher, and the scattered dolman tombs. Even the smallest stone is a million years older than we.

In the blog, Thresholds, I wrote of my own spiritual journey of integration of past, present and future, of the visible and invisible. Maybe I will find my anam cara. I do hope to gain understanding of the complexity and mystery that is my life. 

Anam cara is God’s gift to each of us. My heart is full and expectant.