Here’s something I put together to convey why.
While I was in Santa Cruz in November, I sent away to Pacifica Radio for a CD of that recording. Elsa Gidlow tells the story of how this recording was made in her autobiography, I Come With My Songs. (I don’t have that book with me, so I can’t share it here.)
When I got back to Ireland, I realized that we don’t have CD players anymore! Then I remembered our twelve-year-old car does. I recorded the half-hour interview off the car speakers with my phone. Here is a link to a poor quality mp3 of “Kinship with the Earth.”If you want to order the real thing, or other historic recordings from KPFA, they have a huge catalog.
In the interview, she talks about her relationship to mountains, and introduces the incredulous interviewer to the practice of engaging in conversation with mountains. Living in Santa Cruz as long as I did, I’m familiar with living with a mountain on the horizon, Loma Prieta. Donegal is blessed with a chain of mountains, including the one I’m looking at right this minute, Muckish.
In the 1920s, Ella Young, a fifty-something Irish poet, folklorist, and revolutionary, is living in newly independent Ireland. The new republic offers little to women like herself, indifferent to husbands and priests. Seeking solace and direction, Ella visits a holy well in Kildare. There she recalls her girlhood dream of California: deserts and giant trees. She vows to visit them someday. The next week she receives a letter from America inviting her on a speaking tour, telling Irish folk tales to children.
Her tour is popular, but it is not children who sit at her feet and listen, it’s their parents: Irish immigrants hungering for connection to their culture and ancestors. Ella restores to them stories of struggling heroes, half-forgotten place names, and ancestral landscapes.
When her speaking tour ends, Ella takes the train west, as far west as she can. There she meets the deserts and the redwoods. She never returns to Ireland. Instead, she lives a peripatetic life among the artists and poets, beatniks and weirdos of California.
Through the thirties, forties, and fifties, she adapts her Irish mystical tradition, teaching that the world contains creatures wiser than ourselves, and that nature is sacred and deserves our protection. These are familiar notions now, but not so then.
By the end of her long life, she had partied with bishops, chanted rituals at Shasta, debated with vegans, rode horses with millionaires, picnicked with laureates, and hunted fairies at Lobos. Dressed in purple robes, she delivered lectures at Berkeley. For years.
No one who met her ever forgot her. She restored their connection with the sacred nature, everyone’s rightful inheritance. Ella left us one recording, a conversation on KPFA about how to talk to a mountain. No one on the radio had ever claimed that the earth was a living goddess. Ella Young is the ancestor of every passionate tree-sitter, neopagan witch, and grubby permaculturalist.
You’ve never heard of her. But once you hear her story, you’ll never forget her.
When I got back to Ireland, I realized that we don’t have CD players anymore! Then I remembered our twelve-year-old car does. I recorded the half-hour interview off the car speakers with my phone. Here is a link to a poor quality mp3 of “Kinship with the Earth.”If you want to order the real thing, or other historic recordings from KPFA, they have a huge catalog.
In the interview, she talks about her relationship to mountains, and introduces the incredulous interviewer to the practice of engaging in conversation with mountains. Living in Santa Cruz as long as I did, I’m familiar with living with a mountain on the horizon, Loma Prieta. Donegal is blessed with a chain of mountains, including the one I’m looking at right this minute, Muckish.
Muckish, image and substance.
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