How Green Was My Ireland? [Paperback]

Eilish (Connolly) Hiebert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 6, 2006

Celtic designs come alive on pottery to carry this charming story through the mists and myths of time. As life moves from ancient Ireland, through an idyllic childhood in a fictitious village, to modern-day Canada, these stories and characters come together with insight and humour that will warm your heart and strike a human chord - wherever you're from.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Author Éilish (Connolly) Hiebert, raised in Ireland, has had a checkered career, from teaching, to music, to international development, to cross-cultural work to writing and editing. Éilish lives with her husband Murray in Calgary, Canada and edits the business books Murray writes. Éilish and Murray have two grown sons, Paul and Quinn.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In Celtic Knots

The woman sat painstakingly carving Celtic knotting designs into the surface of a freshly made clay pot:

        over-under,

        inside-outside,

        turn left-turn right,

        up-over,

        down-under ... She usually found contentment and peace working with clay, carving into the not-yet-firm elliptical surfaces, transforming them from smooth to decorative, imagining how they'd look fired and glazed. But she felt the old, familiar frustration beginning to mount inside her as her eyes, hands, even her very soul, began to be drawn into this design she was carving. As a moth to a flame, she was drawn to these ancient designs, exquisite from a distance, looking so incredibly beautiful and straightforward, illustrated in the various books scattered around her studio.

"But just try getting inside them," she said aloud drily. "No wonder it was a bunch of celibate monks working in silent monasteries who had time to design these," she thought "working in the middle of nowhere in the Middle Ages, with no telephones nor computers, no kids roaring in and out, no getting ready for work."

Ails had lovingly shaped on the wheel the sturdy, squat, three-legged pot, drying it under plastic to optimum carving condition. But she hadn't planned out the design andmeasured it, the way she'd learned to do it on paper in a design class. This was a curved surface. This was clay. This should work, shouldn't it? Copying the design from the paper beside the pot, Ails carved carefully. It worked for a little while. But she could feel it going wrong before she could even see it. If she concentrated on the overall proportions, she inevitably lost the interior of the design; conversely, if she concentrated on the interior details, the overall design got lost. She jabbed the carving tool into the clay in frustration as she watched the proportions of her planned design go hopelessly haywire - yet again.

"What's the matter with me?" she thought. "If drawing these designs drives me crazy, how come I keep doing them?"

Deep down somewhere, though, she knew.

Looking out of her studio window at the huge expanse of blue Canadian prairie sky, Ails breathed deeply, content to be where she was, able to do what she was doing with such freedom, yet inexplicably drawn like a magnet to these infuriating designs, indelibly carved in her mind's eye, flowing and meandering in and out, over and under. She had begun to think of these designs as a metaphor for her emigrant relationship with her former birth country, Ireland Ñ a country so beautiful as a whole, at a distance Ñ so ancient and complex. When she had been there in its mantle of safety, humour, music and ancient beliefs, it had indeed been such a wondrous place that she wondered how anyone could ever leave it. Yet, once she left, it was like stepping out from a postage-stamp view to a bird's eye view of a larger world, of which this little island was only a part. Like these frustrating designs, once she tried to re-enter its beauty and charm, she ran into a maze of almost geometrically controlled, complex, contained systems, requiring acute attention to detail, precision and cultural cues. At one time, Ails instinctively knew how it all worked, knotted together perfectly, where each behaviour was contingent upon the next one, or the last one. Just like growing up in her skin from babyhood, she had absorbed how to read cues and behave correspondingly. But that was while she was still enfolded. That was a long time ago.

"Am I screwed up, or what?" she asked herself, throwing the three-legged pot aside, nearly damaging it in her frustration. How many times had she done this on different pots, different shapes, with different clay?

But she'd go back to it. She knew she would.

As she got up and walked over to her studio window, her eyes were drawn again to the sky she loved outside, almost frighteningly huge, free, and untrammeled. As her eye muscles relaxed, unfocused and gazed deeper into that sky, she saw another sky, in another place, what seemed like eons ago.

Product Details

• Paperback: 260 pages
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing (July 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1552129675
• ISBN-13: 978-1552129678
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,345,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)