It’s happening, everyone! Tomorrow I will be on a plane to Anonymous Desert and will be defending my dissertation this Friday. Basically I will be spending 2.5 hours in a room with four committee members who will ask me all sorts of questions, and then decide, based on my responses as well as the over 200 page document I’ve handed in, whether I qualify to graduate with a PH.D. It’s been an incredible amount of work and I am still preparing! This is why I haven’t written much new content on the blog. To say it’s been all-consuming for a while now is an understatement. 🙂

My goal is to be Dr. Éilis on my return.
Meanwhile, I leave you with the poem that first began this blog back on December 3, 2013.

Being Complete

There is not one word to name
Shallow tidepools
Or rocky crags,
Wind blustering by

Or blue, deep flowing,
Growing blue
A whirrlpool of color
In the vastness of this sky

There my self of many faces passes by
The red beneath blood deep within
And blue around me reaches
Out across the thresholds of my skin

There but for her shaping hands go I
Molding new ground for my wearry feet
There but for their ancient eyes
And strong, tall forms,

Long streaming hair,
Glinting shields
And for me finding all of me,
I might never have been whole

I duck inside
The shelter of my own light house
As vast as sunrise,
As wide as mountains

As old as time
Home at last
I sweep the floor
I’ve left my golden shiny things outside

The only thing that matters now:
Unconditioned joy of living
Poured out from their hands
I once asked why,

Fragmented my soul
Against stone to understand
But now newly formed and unknowing
I am content to stand,

Belonging to myself
Beside them hand and hand.
Where haunting melodies of Lír’s children linger in the silence of the night
Where the Fianna’s hunting horn lies buried,

Where I can still follow the footsteps
That lead inside earthy knolls
Where landscapes reawaken
The absences of dreams leave holes

Along the path less taken
I discovered who I was
Fragile and bony, easily torn
Eternal and holy a spirit now born

When the rains came and washed fear away
Into the seven seas
I opened my eyes from a long sleep
Of seven years

And with a gratitude more full
Than the universe has stars
I jumped off securities jagged ledge
And soared into the trees.

Now I do not try
To name what refuses to be a certainty
Better it remain wild and unruly,
In the history of landscape

Better to welcome those you dance with wordlessly
So you do not waltz
Into the four sided space
Of a definition

With no way to return
As inexplicably
As you have come
Slide me into the glaring light

Of your microscopic gaze
Try to holler at the silence
Murmuring along
Edges of my life

I will sift like mist between
Your fingers and nothing will linger
But the emptiness you made of me
For I am, at heart, a mystery

With no word to capture the unfathomable totality
Who I am
When all is said and done, even then,
I will be.