So we had The Grand Finale on Saturday 28th September….
We were blessed with that gentle late September sunshine – Picnicking with Ordinary gifts we were a small gathering on the ground and ghost of the Engineer’s House. Elinor had laid out a cloth with cake and we had a table with flowers and I threw down a green blanket with this year’s apples on it. Gerard O’Brien stretched out on his old lawn, Siobhán sitting beside him as he reminisced about the old place and embraced the way that nature has had its way, covering over old activities and healing old wounds, some of the old trees remained, the tall cypresses and the laurels, there are gaps where memories dwell and new growth is everywhere. Richard the Mayfield librarian arrives wheeling his bike as Lisa walks alongside – Lisa is a new face for me, and yet she is an old Glen soul, growing up in the flats and attending to the community her whole life, she fills me up with her love for the place and her stories of shifting grounds, colours, textures and activities, I wish I’d met her years ago, we are now friends. Brenda and Éilis are chatting with Elinor, they are two Glen stalwarts who share a love for the wildlife here, both bird lovers and gardeners. Two young women with small children arrive and circle as the children play restlessly engrossed with stones and water and plants , inventing games and instructing us on how to play. I am inspired to gambol like an awkward pony jumping over acorns set up by a fairy child in certain alignment. We talk about the faieries, in our adult tones as we enjoy the children’s direct engagement. Another young women joins us for cake saying she has come because she was searching for activities to get involved with nature, the dancers and musician arrive and practice for their evening session adding poetry to all the gestures about us. We take it all in, we enjoy our time here, we feel blessed. We agree that picnics are the best.
When I met Richard and Lisa on their way to the picnic I had been polishing the bronze plaques for FuaimMná these need attention as the codes cannot be read by our phones while they are effervescing verdigris, a beautiful green copper oozing from the bronze – this material action is a reminder that there is always so much more at play in this place than human being.
Ann Dalton performed her Fuaim Mná Poetry Trail between four bridges of the park for a captive audience who came to hear the stories and Ann’s poetry about four women of the Glen. Family members arrived including a man of 91 years and his children, all related to the women from Dillon’s Cross and the Glen. We heard about their brave acts of resistance during war of `Independence and Ann’s imagining and conjurings of their their ordinary and extraordinary lives.
Ann delivered her final poem as the dancers and musician gathered gain for this time for the public performance of Through the Valley She Runs, a new audience assembles at the Yin yang and are brought to the lake by the engineers place.
We follow as the insects come alive from the trees and dancers Helga and Rosa weave patterns in the air, encouraged by a soft drone with vocals from Susan. We see their careful cupping of hands, a gesture that holds water, we see the forms of their echoing bodies, fluid in beiges, suggesting nakedness before the lush green of the park, a feisty gaggle of seagulls squabble behind them lifting on and off the water as the mosquitos fill the air around us.
I miss the leaving as I need to be up in the reception area, we have refreshments arriving warm savoury pastries and wine, teas and cordials. Welcoming in a new audience for the screenings as the dancers and their entourage step in to join us carrying paper lanterns.
Elinor recounts her Ordinary Gifts engagements with the park, describing the connection with our watery natures through divining, the listening to the pucaí, the importance of ritual and play. She forgot to include her experience of embodying a river deity in the pageant where she blessed the invertebrates in human form on their return to the source of the Lee, but we remembered this later.
AnnieMar and Aaron Ross presented their animation Glen Folk, a collection of stores from the Spoon & Bloom encounters in the park.
Dervla Baker presented her short film River rising to the challenge of presenting the voice of the Glen river through film, collaborating with sound artist Neil Quigley they created an evocative and mesmerising 10 minute experience for us – we were brought through passages of light and life and darkness and depth, giving voice to the flow as well as the burdens of the river.
and I tried to sum it all up:
“Botanical Odyssey is a collaborative drawing remembering and imagining plantlife in the Glen. It was created by the participants in a workshop with artist, Julie Forrester and took place at the outset of Gleann a Phúca on 22 September – the day the Púca is said to ride into winter, spitting on the Blackberries, turning the fruit.
Since then we have had a year of odyssey and excursions into the park with projects Ordinary Gifts and Spoon & Bloom. We have been spellbound by a host of storytellers about ecology: naturalist Éanna Ní Lamhna, botanist Jo Goodyear, folklorist Jenny Butler, herbalist Eoin Marshall, each in turn has led us through the hidden valley. Birdwatch Ireland Cork introduced us to the particular concert of Glen Birdsong in the valley, The Friends of the Dripsey River brought us monsters magnified from the shallows, those tiny creatures that we examined with Water Officer, Catherine Seale and Scientist Trisha O’Brien are invertebrates that tell us and warn us about our water quality. Historian Gerard O’Brien brought us back to a time, growing up in the Glen, about the Gouldings Fertiliser and industry that supported livelihoods and left residues and about corncrakes and thorneens, now sadly missing from our waters. Elinor Rivers tuned us into the water showing we can all feel the pulse with hazel twitch or metal rod. In our culminating event
Annie Mar and Aaron Ross have brought the stories together in their animation “Glen Folk” and Dervla Baker and Neil Quigley have created their short film River in homage to the Glen River. Ann Dalton brings forth the voices of women from the Glen and Helga Deasy performs with the river in a dance that celebrates the river as a source of life, healing and regeneration.
We have gained much from our river and it is time now to take more care of the waters that have brought us life and living, the Glen needs our help to ensure its future health, we urgently need to pay attention to what we put into our water from washing, flushing, cleaning: the water carries it all. The river is suffering and can no longer support the bio-diversity it once harboured. The river needs to run a course with healthy banks, we find that we have sealed the surface of its edges with cement and asphalt, encroaching on the river’s safe passage and causing floods when the rains come as they do more heavily now with climate change. We can build rain gardens to work with the flow of water, becoming part of the flow, becoming river – our rain gardens will absorb excess water from our homes and support biodiversity. We can stop using harmful chemicals in our cleaning fluids we can think before we wash and flush – where does it all go? We can pay attention to our drains become more curious about how they work and who cares for them we can own our place in the Water cycle. Our actions make a difference for better of for worse.
Let’s make it better “
With thanks to all who participated in Gleann a’ Phúca
julforrester 