Seamus Heaney tells me why I must go to Ireland

Below’s his poem, Postscript, describing a part of the country I believe my family comes from. I hear it’s beautiful, and know it must be so. God forbid I turn 30 without having been, anyone on this earth is allowed to hit me with a shovel. Or, more appropriately, a shillelagh. I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes obsessed with these things, and there will be more on them soon.

The thing about moments is that they present themselves for only as long as it takes to do so, before they turn into a different moment. Time may seem to drag sometimes, but it’s not the moments that do. They can’t, any more than we can prepare ourselves for them. What they can do, though, is accumulate. The effect they have is necessarily instantaneous, though we may not always realize it at the time. And what they add up to, it seems to me, is our impression of a person, or a place, or thing (that would be a noun, i guess). Jorie Graham has written that there are “moments in our lives, which, threaded, give us heaven.” And I understand better than ever what she means. Threaded, yes, but the power of one fully realized can do what Heaney describes below. And that’s pretty fucking incredible.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.