ann-mar.ie
Wise Women
The women I interviewed for the book are listed here….
We have plans to make short Documentary films about each of them over the coming months. Initial filming has begun thanks to the wonderful Markus… eventually these wil be on You-tube with links to the site….
For now we have tasty tid-bits from the book…
Eily Buckley
(excerpt from the book p26)
Eily: …I was born Eily Corkery, into a farm in Liscahane Millstreet, Co. Cork, 70 years ago… I was the youngest of 7 children: 5 boys and 2 girls…. I left school at age 17… I courted Dan Buckley for 4 years and then married him at age 23…we were married 47 years…. Dan died last October…
Ann-Marie: Eily, when you look back over your lifetime, what are you most grateful for?
Eily: For meeting Dan Buckley, he was my saving grace. We were a courting couple for 50 years… right up to 12 hours before he died when I told him that he was beautiful and I kissed him goodbye. He was 10 years older than me: a very quiet and a very strong man. He was the strongest man in Millstreet at one time! He was my greatest teacher in life.
When I was in 4th class, the teacher said “Who is the best in this class,” and they all pointed to a girl who was lovely and very good in school – music, sums, everything. “Now,” she said, “who is the worst in the class?” And that was me. Me! A class of 24 and I was the worst. I’d oceans of intelligence, but I couldn’t apply myself to books. I knew how to put a pig – a sow, a full-grown sow that was as big as a donkey- into a trailer on my own. I could look after cows and calves, hens and chickens. I could do all the practical things but I couldn’t apply myself to books. So, for that reason, I was the worst in the class. I suppose when you’d be as bad as all that you’d break the teacher’s heart, I needn’t tell you…
I was totally without confidence because I always figured out that the teacher was right in everything and if the teacher said that I was the worst in the class, then that was right. I never looked into myself and said, “Well, you can do that!” It never dawned on me to look on driving horses and looking after pigs as achievements.
Then I got married to Dan and we were building up our place. ‘Twas very primitive at that time 1957. There was no milking parlours, no modern cow houses or piggeries or concrete yards or anything. But we were at the beginning of the ‘build-up era’, so there was a lot of planning to be done: a cow house, a milking parlour, silos, and all these things. And Dan and myself did it together. The only foolish thing we did was that we bought two shovels and then, when we had all the work done, we bought a concrete mixer, ‘twas too bad we didn’t buy the mixer first and spare the shovels!
I gained great confidence there. Dan would come in when I’d be doing the dinner and he’d say “Come out and plan this with me.” He never once said, “Come here fool till I teach you something.” No, he coaxed me along and by asking my opinion on things and then with these things working, it built up my confidence as time went on. That applied to everything that went on, he included me in everything. And he always wanted me to be doing things. He was a shy man, but would love to get things achieved. Rather than do it himself, he would push me to the fore, especially in public things.
I’ll tell you… one beautiful day, I can still feel the warm sun on my face, Dan and myself were coming away down the road, linking arms after putting the cows away. We met a school bus going up the byroad. The inspector stopped and asked us something about route or roads or something. As it sailed away down the road from us, Dan said, “That is something you could do. You could drive a bus.” I said, “I could never do that.” “You could,” he said. “You have plenty of experience driving the tractor around the land and driving the car and all the rest of it.” So, I applied for the job and got it. I trained for three or four weeks then took my test and passed it. I was driving a bus the following Monday morning. That opened another big life for me. But that was Dan the whole time, coaxing and pushing me.
Eily also speaks about family and her family values, her faith, love, death, romance…..
Mary Jordan
(Excerpt from p53)
Mary: Well, obviously the children were the major part of my life at that time. But, what I found with weaving was, I could do it at home. I had the loom in the living room and as the kids got older they helped me set up warps, or whatever…
This was all part of a philosophy of being as self-sufficient and sustainable as possible. At that time you could not get organic food and I wanted the children to get the best of food. So, we grew our own vegetables.
Ann-Marie: Your philosophy of being as sustainable as possible, how did that come about?
Mary: I think that I have always been very conscious of what was happening in the planet. And that became stronger when my children were born. I became very conscious of what kind of a world I was bringing them into. And, I determined to make it a bit better for them. I suppose, from their point, that backfired a bit because they grew up listening to stories about nuclear pollution, climate change and ozone depletion. These are very scary things for children to hear about and I certainly wasn’t conscious enough of that. And it certainly wasn’t all good for them
Ann-Marie: What do they say about it now?
Mary: Well they took it very seriously and it didn’t make them very secure. Actually it had the opposite effect to what I thought, and to what my intentions were. You just have to be very careful about what you speak about with children. You have to make sure that if you are talking about some of the really threatening issues on the planet that you balance it by being terribly positive and saying that this can be changed.
Ann-Marie: But at the time you were living in a sustainable environment with your children, was this not adequate reassurance that things could be different?
Mary: Probably not. Because we just took that for granted. We were just living that way. We didn’t talk enough about it.
Ann-Marie: From your experience of raising children to understand ‘sustainability’ and ‘environmental protection’, you seem to have learned a lot about how this can best be achieved. Do you see yourself as having a role to play in helping society to understand and implement these ideas?
Mary: I’m too old for that. I‘d love to but my energy is not as great as it was. And I live very far away from the centre of power, which is in Dublin. It’s hard to be active outside of the centre of power.
The Native American leaders and people will tell you that the real way for change is through individual consciousness and I think that individual consciousness about sustainability needs to be our starting point. But, to be conscious we have to be aware of what has gone wrong. I think that one of the fundamental things that has gone wrong is the role of women, women being eliminated from any position of decision making. You can see this particularly in agriculture. There are so many women who have worked hard on the farms of Ireland, particularly the old family farms; they work just as hard as the men. A woman could be single-handedly looking after the sheep on a farm and she would have to get any headage payments or ewe subsidies through her husband: there weren’t even the forms for the wives!
Mary also speaks of the experience of raising her children outside of the Catholic churce in rural Ireland in the 70’s. her work as an activist, a craftswoman, artist, mother, she encourages us to do our little bit!
Judith Hoad
(excerpt from page 92)
Judith: To me the earth is our mother. Every single thing that we eat, that we drink, we breathe, we wear, we live in…every single thing surrounding us has come out of Mother Earth. She has to be our mother because of all of this. And we are all interrelated, for example the oxygen we breathe has very largely come from all the green things on the earth: the grass, the plants and the trees. But it’s also been in and out of every living thing on the earth like the microbes and all the things that inhale and exhale using oxygen or carbon dioxide. And it’s been through all of us. So we are incredibly interrelated, just simply by what we breathe. Jerry and I would have felt similarly about those things, although the more intimate manifestation of our worship would be different. His worship would be painting. His greeting of creation was in his recreation of it. He was what is known as a realist painter: not a photographic realist but very real and recognisable, not abstract in any way; but painterly paintings, the illusion of something rather than the minute detail that recreates something in a precise photographic way.
For myself, being a loner in every aspect, finding my own path had always been necessary for me. Some time ago, I woke up and said to myself, “You don’t have to do this alone, you could actually get a teacher.” At the time I was renting a room at Jampa Ling, the Tibetan Buddhist centre in County Cavan, one day a fortnight to see clients. So I was learning more about Buddhism at an intimate level. And I had already discovered that some of the things I had worked out for myself, Buddhists also believed. I came to the conclusion that I could do no worse and no better than to ask Panchen Ötrul Rinpoche if he would be my teacher, which I did one day. We had a one-to-one conversation and I said, “Please, Rinpoche, would you be my teacher?” and he roared with laughter and he said, “If it makes you com-fa-ble.” So he is my teacher. And he doesn’t teach: you have to learn. This is what is so interesting about the Tibetan ways. While they teach in formal teaching, they don’t teach you one-to-one, except that you go to them and ask questions and that is when you start the learning process. So I am not on my own anymore… But I’m still a maverick Buddhist, you know!
Judith also speaks to us of her relationship with her husband, his death, her experience of growing older, the changing male of today… and much more
Sr. Mary Minehan
(excerpt from page 122)
Sr. Mary: Then I was changed to Dundrum, Dublin. Up until that time I had lived in big convents and when I moved to Dublin I lived in a small house. Oh, I just loved it! I remember writing to my parents and saying, “It’s like being at home”. The house was so ordinary and small and just like being at home. Oh, I loved that! I taught boys and girls while I was there. I was the only sister on the staff and that was a very enriching experience.
It was amazing to me that the memory of moving to a small house still brought so much pleasure to Sr. Mary. That, combined with her telling of what it had been like to go back in home to her parent’s house, made me wonder about her experience of being part of a tightly controlled system with lots of rules and firm boundaries. I decided to look for clues…
Ann-Marie: What did you most love about that move?
Sr. Mary: Being out among the people. I loved being with them. The teachers in the school were full of life and full of beans and they were always celebrating. They would celebrate each other’s birthdays and we used go out to birthday parties and we would go away and have a few days off together. We went to the Shannon one year, near my own place. My uncle had a house there that he lent us for a weekend. They were a wonderful staff at that time. I loved every bit of it.
Then I was asked to promote vocations for the Brigidines and given my little car, which I loved. And I travelled the length and breath of Ireland. I loved that too, meeting so many people, staying in different places, working on a team. I focused on our Baptismal Call – Which life is for you… Is it single life? Is it married life? Is it religions life? Is it priesthood? So it was a big broad picture of vocation in life. This was also a very enriching experience.
From vocation promotion work I was sent back again to teach in Goresbridge. I was there then for 5 years. During that time we had a discernment process as Brigidines as regards our future. Following the discernment Sr. Phil and I were asked to go to Kildare. As an order, we hadn’t been in Kildare, and that was where Brigid had her first monastery in the 5th Century. We felt drawn to Kildare to try to reconnect with our Celtic roots and reclaim Brigid in a new way for the new millennium.
Brigid, of course, embodies the spirit of pre-Christian and Christian Ireland. She was at the meeting of two worlds, the pre-Christian Celtic and the advent of Christianity in Ireland. Brigid, Bridge-it! So Phil and I initiated a Christian centre for Celtic spirituality, in the spirit of Brigid of Kildare.
By this point of the interview it seemed as if Sr. Mary had drifted into a familiar telling of the story of her journey, recounting sequences of events, places and people. I was keen to probe beneath this layer of telling and uncover some of her experience of the journey and her learnings along the way.
Ann-Marie: Moving to a new place with the hope of reconnecting with your celtic roots – just yourself and Sr. Phil – that must have prompted a huge personal transition for you; from a place of lesser to greater freedom in determining and following your own path as a Brigidine. What was that like for you?
Sr. Mary: This has been an extraordinary experience. There has been agony and ecstasy. It was all very new. The path hadn’t been walked before. And this path was made by walking. I was asked to come out of teaching but Phil was asked to continue her teaching. So while she taught in Monasterevin I was here. I didn’t know what I should be doing. I had to initiate something that I wasn’t too sure about. I knew that ‘twas something about hope for the future and something about Brigid, a woman for today… bringing her into the 21st Century. But there were no maps so ‘twas very difficult.
Ann-Marie: Was this to be a new direction for the Brigidine Order as a whole?
Sr. Mary: Yes. Our leaders have been wonderful in supporting our ideas. We have been left very free. The leader of our congregation Mary Teresa Cullen and Sr. Francis Teresa, who is our provincial, knew that we were Christ centred and open to the spirit. The journey has been like a spiral and it’s still unfolding. Here we respect all religions and none. People come here and say, “I am Pagan”. But sure what is Pagan, only country people that love the earth: love God’s creation.
Sr Mary also speaks about her journey to becoming a nun, her experience of being a nun in modern Ireland, love, commmunity, her dreams of future directions and our place on this earth.
Baroness May Blood
(excerpt from p168)
Ann-Marie: You mentioned Integrated Education – why is this important?
May: I was born into what by today’s terminology would be known as a mixed area. My next door neighbours were Catholics. The people I chummed with when I was a child were Catholics. They came to Sunday school with us because it was a free outing in the summer and a free Christmas party. We went with them to the chapel if there was anything free being given out. That’s the way life was in those days and I grew up never seeing a dividing line. When The Troubles broke out, and we had to move home – we were actually burned out of our home – we had to move into what would now be known as a Loyalist ghetto, and I found that extremely strange. Because now you were working and living among people all of the same religion as yourself, and so there was no dissent in that sense. I found that very hard to get used to believe it or not. I worked in the mill of 450 workers, of which 70 per cent would have been Catholics. So integration has always been part of my life. I don’t look on people as being protestant or catholic, I look upon people as people.
In the 80’s we, a group of women, tried to work across the Peace Line[1]. At the time the myth from the Protestant side was that the Catholics got everything. And they believed that we got everything. And none of those two things was true. When we began to work across the Peace Line and work with older women – who had a good deal of knowledge – we found that we had common problems. We weren’t each other’s enemies, we had common enemies like poverty, poor housing, health. So we began to work on those things.
So for me the next stage now is Integrated Education. We have a schooling population here that is ninety-five percent segregated! I feel that that is a huge part of our problem. If we don’t mix children up from a very early age, by the time they get to ten, eleven and twelve years of age they have preconceived ideas about what the other community is: right or wrong. In some cases you can’t change that. I was speaking to one of the young men in one of our integrated schools and I said, “What do you best think about this?” He said, “Well the way I look at it is May, being at this school teaches me to celebrate someone else’s culture, not fear it.” I suppose that is integrated education in a nutshell.
Ann-Marie: That’s lovely.
You mentioned working with a group of women. Has the role of women in the Peace Process been different to the role of men?
May: Oh yes, I have gone on record as saying that if the true story of The Troubles ever comes to be written, women have got to figure very prominently in it. When The Troubles broke out, basically Northern Ireland was a very male dominated world: it was and is and still is unfortunately. But over the years I think there has been some really good work done by women in Northern Ireland.
In the nineties, a lot of women, myself included, were involved in The Peace Process. I was one of the founder members of the Women’s Coalition[2]. Now it wasn’t that I thought we needed another political party in Northern Ireland, God knows we do not! And let me say here that I don’t believe in all-women’s parties, I don’t go down that road. But I became a founding member of the Women’s Coalition, because I wanted women to be at the talks table. There were women in the political parties doing sterling work but they were never going to be where the decisions were made. That was the way Northern Ireland was. So we formed the Women’s Coalition to make sure there were going to be women there to present women’s issues. Now, what are women’s issues? I struggle with that! But, we wanted community development and children to be put on the agenda. We wanted for instance a civic forum, where the leadership in this part of the world would be looked at. We wanted human rights, we wanted equality, they were all issues that the men were saying “Yeah we’ll add them on later”. We wanted them as an integral part of it and that was the reason the Women’s Coalition was set up.
May Blood also speaks about family, community, political activism, friends, young people, hope, love, peace and much much more…
Dolores Whelan
(excerpt from page 223)
Ann-Marie: So what steps can we take to help younger people to have a greater chance of achieving harmony and wholeness?
Dolores: The essence of being young is wanting to explore and be adventurous. And that is a very good thing.
I would love to hear Bob Dylan’s song Forever Young being played in every school at the beginning of every year – or once a month. “May you grow up to be righteous, may you grow up to be true. May you always know the truth and see the light surround you… and may you stay forever young.” I think that ‘young’ there refers to being open because I think that what makes people old is not chronological age, what makes people old is fear and stepping into caution as a way of living based on fear. We need to bring young people out to do things together, we need to listen to them… Create forums where they can speak their ideas, where we don’t tell them what to think. Recently there was a young people’s Parliament or Dáil, and they had a lot of wonderful ideas. So we need to listen. And to young people I’d say: value your ideas. Think outside the box and find other people to share those ideas with. Do things that stretch you. Go out and have adventures that stretch you, not stretch you on the ground with alcohol. Go to adventure camps. Go hillwalking. Climb mountains. Do things that expand your spirit. And have fun. It’s not about being po-faced, it’s about being alive!
Ann-Marie: Are young people able to make the right choices for themselves?
Dolores: Well this is the problem. It is hard for them to make these choices. They often don’t even know that they have options. This is why we need elders in our society. That is a hugely important thing and this is why the work you are doing is so important. We have no elders…. We have the government: most of whom don’t think past the next year or certainly past the next election. We have the churches: all of the different denominations. Many of them are very, very out of touch with what is essentially needed in our culture and seemingly unable to relate to young people. We have the elders of the business community who constantly preach the gospel of profit-profit-profit, growth-growth-growth. So young people are growing up with the worst set of values that have ever been in place for creating a sustainable and happy community.
Now I am not remotely interested in harking back to some ‘magical’ day that existed when everything was perfect. There was no such a day. But there were sets of values, which held people in relationship. To go back to Celtic culture, one of the most important things that defined a person was their relationships. So, another core value for me is “how are my relationships”: my relationship with myself, with other people, with my community, with my environment? At the moment I have just moved back to this place, Ravensdale. I am aware that, so far, I have made very little inroads into integrating into the community here. So, this Spring, a group of us are getting together to create a community garden here. Doing the garden with seven or eight people works at many levels, it means that we share the work, we share the food… and we create community.
There is a lovely Irish expression, Ar scath na céile a maireann na daoine. We live in each other’s shadow: we need each other. This tradition was still alive until thirty or forty years ago with the Meitheals that happened in rural areas. This was where people would come together to work. So, for example, if we were all saving hay, I would go to your house one day and you’d have a Meitheal. And then you’d come to my farm the next day and we’d work with each other. Certainly in my father’s day that was very active: maybe until thirty years ago. The whole advent of agribusiness has taken that away. There were also the patterns at wells and the house masses: these things all built community.
I also believe that community doesn’t necessarily have to be geographical. We often build our community with like-minded people who may not live right beside us. This has become even easier with the internet. But we also need the physical connection with the people who we live with day to day. We all need to bloom where we are planted.
I think that community and the structures that support them now have to be of a different model than the old model where we built empires involving big buildings and big administration. Quantum science provides a helpful perspective on creating these structures … we discovered from science that things are not solid and forever: they come in and out of being. Things gather and they create something and when the energy flows out of it the structure dissipates. The energy becomes something else. In the last while, in our patriarchal hierarchical culture, there has been this huge need to hold things in place as they were. A lot of energy goes into maintaining structures just for their own sake. I believe, and again this comes out of quantum science, that structure is a reflection of function, so, if you know what the function of this is, then you can create a structure that will enhance the function.
Dolores also speaks about not having had Children in todays culture, about her spiritual path and the importance of gratitude and awe in her life, she shares links with her most influentioal teachers such as Brian Swimme and Mathew Berry.