BLACKTHORN Chapter 1

Dedication


I dedicate this book to my comparatively normal and happy childhood, my loving parents and family in Nashville, my high school writing teachers, all the wonderful musicians I listened to in order to keep a steady dedication to what I love most, music; the people of Dingle, County Kerry; my friends in Pittsburgh, and the persons and organizations who helped me keep my spiritual head above water by any means possible during the most painful and intense times in my life: The Church of the SubGenius, Ananda Marga, Landmark Education, Wallace Black Elk, Alan Watts, and the Anglican Communion.

And that last paragraph is about as normal as this book will get.  The rest is a roller coaster of complete and utter madness.


BLACKTHORN

by Rebecca Duquet


“Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?”
-George Moore

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Chapter 1:
Transcending Hell

There are two ways of getting home, and one of them is to stay there.  The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.
-G.K. Chesterton

I have a far bigger and more interesting life than the strangeness and jaw-dropping dysfunction contained in these pages.  The positives outweigh the negatives by far.  But it shows a few of my motives and visions that have been kept hidden in my head for a long time.  Aside from the good, caring, visionary things I like about myself, like music, and Ireland, and parenthood, I do have a dark side, and it’s the side that taught me how good the good things really are.

First of all, I have survived some serious strangeness encompassing my own full edition of “News of the Weird”, and that includes both the intervention of angels and higher powers, and witnessing human stupidity, evil and tragedy to its worst degree.
 
I also discovered (with a lot of attendant nonsense I could have done without,) that I somehow got some egotistical neo-pagans and occultists to wring their own necks very flagrantly and with lots of silly drama.  I also discovered that their interpretation of reality, like that of most Christians, is only partially correct.  I thought that doing it in Pittsburgh was something that happened just once, but then I accidentally did it again here in Ireland, and the common factors are the same: an astonishing selfishness and sense of cultural rebellion in the participants, a profound lack of both common sense and compassion, and the annihilating presence of the Egyptian god Set.  It can’t be a coincidence, happening twice; this has to be a recurring theme.

What all of this did was enable me to spit into the Abyss.  It showed me how great it is to have my lovely, musical life in the face of all that stupidity, and how lucky I am to journey through it and see what was on the other side.  It starts with hell and meanders gently up to heaven.

It is an attempt to clarify my spiritual ordeals and rewards, which to the rest of the world, may appear as being utter madness.  To some it may be helpful, and to others, in their success and opulence, they might laugh and tell me that only my accomplishments in the outer world are a barometer for inner success.  There are 6 billion others, nobody really cares about one, and if I am not in the spotlight then I am not all that important.  When I turn on the news and see mass human tragedy and war, I feel my journey as being so small, so self-absorbed, so insignificant in the face of the real things that matter.  There are so many others, who are trying to accomplish something good in the world. 

Every human being, like myself, until I die and become part of it, is a little mirror of the cosmos.  Every human being is on a personal journey, which is easily eclipsed by tragedy and suffering, but no matter where we are, we all turn our selfish little thoughts onto where we ourselves are going in the end.  With more age and worldly accomplishment under my belt, I can relax and see how selfish I really am.  But when I was at my poorest, working security in a shelter for five dollars an hour, barely able to pay rent and often not, and going to the food bank to help keep my bills paid, I was a single-minded flame of determination to get myself up and out and higher.  It didn’t help that there was a demon at my heels, which sought to smash me down into the dirt, while I gripped with my life to hold onto the first rungs of a ladder which would deliver me elsewhere. 

Yet my world is a cushy, self-absorbed, theoretical world of a privileged middle-class woman who had the resources of education and morality in youth, to make those right choices.  Mine is a laugh compared to what others have been through, the life of any person living on the street, the life of those whose trust and faith has been shattered by abuse, the life of any underemployed black woman in urban America trying to feed her kids and who sees her neighbors being shot, the journey of illegal immigrants who live a hell of poverty, sell everything they have, and endure hell on a fishing boat in Atlantic storms for a month, to get to Europe and work as a fry cook.  My struggles are nothing.  The only point they have in the end is to prove to you that I, as an objective, educated, skeptical person, discovered something real peeking from behind that darkness.  It is saying, have a little hope, there’s more here than just what you see.

Objectively, compared to many with big businesses, big cars and big houses, I haven’t accomplished much.  I am a well-rounded musician, yet I haven’t recorded any albums.  I am a good artist, but I haven’t had any shows.  I am a good writer, but as of yet, only have 350 pages of blog, various navel-gazing essays, a collection of unpublished poetry, and this book, which I have spent two weeks at this point pulling together.

The beginning of this book starts with Hell.  Why?  Because when I found Heaven, which consisted of sitting in a pub playing traditional music on a lazy Sunday in Dingle, I knew exactly where I was and how much bullshit I had gone through to get there.  Few people can say the same. 

In essence, Dingle is just a place like anywhere else.  Aside from claiming a lot of drunks, a lot of sheep, and a dolphin who is co-dependent on humans, it’s a small town like a million other picturesque small towns here or anywhere; southern France, northern Italy, upstate New York, anywhere.  The magic isn’t here.  The magic is in what I overcame to get here.  And this place, like anywhere else, has plenty of people who think that someplace else may be heaven.  Heaven is a state of being, a momentary zone where everything works perfectly for you, and in this life you can only get a few moments of that, as a doorway to understanding what you work for and live for.  I consider myself lucky that I have been stubborn enough to believe in them to the point where those moments finally began to appear.

Ireland is as utterly an imperfect place as anywhere else on this world.  It is soaking wet two-thirds of the time, people eat deep-fried battered hamburgers, a normal looking suburban house costs nearly a million dollars, and finding a boyfriend who doesn’t drink ten times more than your average American, requires going to an AA meeting.  If you have arthritis, keep away.  If lack of sunlight in winter gets you down, go to California.  But if you like moments of pure joy and passion that this country can suddenly thrust forth without warning, then you’ll love it here.  This place can annoy the hell out of me.  But in its best moments, it gives me bits of Heaven.

It’s also full of history, and the Neolithic sacred spots of ancient Ireland bear the strongest historic European analogue to the spiritual traditions of the Native Americans, a faith and system to which I am close through bloodline and practice.  It has remained nearly unchanged for thousands of years while avatars and dogma were creeping into European spirituality.  While the grandfathers and grandmothers of Black Elk were going strong, on the other side we lost our connection to the Mother Earth in a haze of technological, bureaucratic, imperial patriarchy.  But I felt a strong spirituality coming from this place through music and history, and it called to me.  (And I have engineered my life, for better or worse, to end up here in Ireland at the moment, preferably for a very long time).

Which is why, in essence, I searched for an ancestral blood music, which gave me far more connection to deep reality and a sense of power and capability as a woman.

I dedicated myself to Wicca at an early age, and then evolved myself from there to eventually bring myself here.  But my personal evolution came at a price, and that price was to watch many others around me, in the same process of seeking discovery, lose their grip on having any sense of relatedness to, and responsibility for, the freedom and well-being of the people surrounding them. 

It’s the price of choosing for yourself what is good and holy and healthy in the midst of youth, self-indulgence, and destruction.  It made me wake up every day thankful for the life and vision I could hold onto while others lost their grip.  You watch people go down a hole, and worse, take their children, family, friends, and neighbors with them.  It doesn’t matter a damn what religion I embraced in the end.  I had to continue to choose to be a human being, which in retrospect, is comparatively easy for those raised amidst stability and goodness as I was.  Things only got very difficult when I entered into the mix and watched what the world around me became in the folly of myopic self-worship. 

Even now, it is difficult to keep myself fully in this world having seen such demons.  There is an intense and jarring look I have, of having been up and down a spiritual Hamburger Hill, which sets many naïve persons on edge, without fully understanding that I may have been through Hell, but I came out making the right choices.  Sometimes I put my foot in my mouth without knowing and enter my world while talking to others, and without a résumé of worldly accomplishments behind me, I just get a strange look.  Perhaps this book is an attempt to rectify that journey and have a story to tell which doesn’t set me in a madhouse, while at the same time insisting that fairies are real and vampires walk amongst us every day.


By no means am I focusing on a life that is full of failures.  For every thing that has gone wrong, five more things have gone right.  My enemies have long destroyed themselves and my begrudgers have only my compassion and pity.  I have far many more friends now than enemies and good people surround me at every turn.  I have a legacy already, which I can pass on to my daughter, and a positive and active reputation, which in the end, has stood triumphant above the mutters and questioning of the crowd. 

If there has to be a funeral for me before my time, before all my good friends and peers have themselves died of old age, then the main point people will make at my wake, is that I never stood still for long.  I was always full of ideas, always full of excitement at new things in life, and always willing to listen and give my friendship when nobody else would.  I always strove to give others what I wanted the most: trust and benefit of the doubt, a chance to prove yourself more than what the cold world sees.  And it is not an act of ego to say that, when I have simply turned the mirror round to see in myself what other people see.  If there is talent or vision added to that requiem, many people may see that as present, but I have yet to prove to myself that it is wanted by the rest of the world, so I will remain quiet on what others may say.


If you’re over 30, be glad you survived your twenties.  If you’re under 25, don’t worry if it isn’t making any sense, it will start doing that soon enough.  You’re here with the will and force of character to experience the joy in life.  Kurt Cobain failed to do just that; we are all surrounded by people who can’t see beyond the legacy of their own lives into the generations beyond.  Now they're in the history books for the last 15 years, play on the oldies stations, and still postdate my arrival in Pittsburgh 17 years ago. 

I don’t regret the passage of time since then at all; it leaves a greater and greater gulf between me and all the insulting bourgeoisie and insane freaks I allowed to have a say in my life back in the Dark Ages.  To a twenty-four year old when all this nonsense was happening, seventeen years is an eternity; and to me now at thirty-five, it was yesterday that I was a wide-eyed college kid pulling into the Burgh full of dreams, with a U-Haul trailer, a cat, and a boyfriend who had not yet turned into an American Psycho. 

You have to laugh, not because of his tragedy itself but because he became a victim of time and culture.  Just like all those who die young by suicide, if they had just waited for a little while, they would learn that time heals all and teaches a few lessons about what comes back round.  But for him, who suffered from a bizarre combined palette of MS, schizophrenia, depression, and OCD, time was merely a medium for the slow rot of the brain like cancer on an organ. 

I suppose he did what he did, and there is little else to add.  The only thing I can say is that in a welfare state like Western Europe where I am now living, people would have noticed something going wrong a lot sooner, as well as taken my warnings seriously.  But I was in the US, I was a low-income woman, and I had been conned out of my resources by someone who felt entitled to my college money and had emotionally blackmailed me.  I am no man’s keeper, and when nobody listened to me, my only job was to go find secure night work, lie low, and keep my mouth shut. 
I suppose what is left for me is simply to walk in the wake of the tornado, and finally admit to myself that it all happened to me not because I was an innocent victim of anything, but because it felt mean to step forth and condemn fools, making me fair game for vampires and social parasites.  I also liked chasing the storm, whether that storm was oddball friends, artists, musicians or the occult. 

Actually, I will omit the artists and musicians from being anything near chaos, because creativity provides a lifeline to real sanity.  Spiritual sanity.  And it takes me getting over the fear of insanity to grip what is really sane in this world; namely, making something that is bigger than myself, a legacy of any kind, and for me it was my dream of Ireland. 

Mine is a good life.  It’s an interesting life.  I would not trade it for the world.  And, unfortunately, there are monsters in it as well as angels.  I would not wish these monsters I have seen and witnessed upon anyone.  People are not as naïve as some may think; it only takes a good hard look at the six o clock news to see the capability of human evil, and the commitment to healthy existence that is required for any of us to transcend it- even in the best or worst of circumstances.  But if good and evil are an illusion, then it is a functional illusion that mirrors reality to a specific degree, not amidst light and darkness or even order and chaos, but between healthy and unhealthy. 


I was raised with a healthy sense of knowing the difference between right and wrong, and why.  But dogma angered me as an intelligent woman.  Truth seemed to be mixed with outright outdated superstitions and lies in a world of reason, science and technology, and I broke away in my teenage rebellion in order to answer my own questions. 

In modern church culture, the definition of healthy spirituality and life often becomes so mired by bureaucracy, dogma, superstition, the fear of death and religious oppression, that the nature of goodness becomes oppressive and the nature of evil becomes tempting and delicious.  To the blind acceptance of flat-earth fundamentalism, trying to grip on to a smaller world that makes sense, thinking for yourself becomes an act of evil.  So does the questioning of dogma, rejection of superstition, and questioning authority.  All of these things are neither ‘good’ nor ‘evil’; they are healthy common sense and the exercise of a free mind.  It is the human exercise of free will that brings a true understanding of spirituality.  But unfortunately, the monsters reach out to hunt among questioners, and snatch up followers who answer religious oppression with rage and frustration.  And, like the Salem Witch trials, eventually create a body count of occult self-indulgence as evil as Puritan religious fervor.

The old and simplistic illusion that has been in place is powerful; it is the war of two sides, one order, one chaos.  One seeks to serve the greater universe and the other seeks its own ends.  Three thousand years ago the Hebrews locked Chaos, known as Set, away and took him with them out of Egypt as the perfect anathema to the concept of JHVH, to become the only Egyptian god kept alive as Satan.  The rest of the pantheon was covered by desert, and five thousand years of ritual transformed into the Coptic Church.


But let’s play pretend, just pretend for a moment that there is no God and nothing watchdogging our lives, no heaven, no hell, etcetera, just like John Lennon said we should imagine.  If that were so, then those persons who not only reject morality, but reject religion, by deliberately choosing the acquisition of power and the satisfaction of lust at others expense, would be rebelling against nothing and have no reason for their actions…other than sheer self-indulgence.  In light of that, they become a pack of angry, demanding children trying to stuff themselves with candy because a parent has forbidden it.  And just like that, in an instant, all the Satanists, dark occultists, rapists and molesters, drug pushers, dioxin-dumping corporations, murdering dictators, and serial killers become screaming, angry, violent monkeys jerking their puds like a tribe of cannibal chimps.  (Which, suddenly, we all realize that’s essentially what they are, when you strip away all personal interpretation and the frightening masks of demonic evil we place on them.)

But so do the hypocrites, the Pharisees, the fake miracle preachers, the Armageddon pushers, the chickenhawk politicians, the parents who burn their children’s books, and those idiots who force educators to call science a theory and religion a fact. 

For a few minutes, let’s pretend something else entirely; let’s say that instead of there being no God, as skeptics assert, or one jealous God in common religion, that the precise opposite is true: not that there is just a god per se, but that there is a universe of possibility where all gods exist and are aspect emanations of the Universal whole, for better or worse.  It begins to resemble Vedic and Judaic mysticism.  Jewish mysticism goes on to assert that evil was created by God, is part of the universe, cannot be defeated, and exists in order for us to learn about what is good. Vedic mysticism says that hell is simply separating oneself from God, which in the Vedic mind, is Universal Consciousness. 

Both seem to make a lot of sense to me.  In essence, reality seems to be a lot closer to reality if there is both no God like the scientific skeptics and atheists say, and yet, every God, as the mystics say.  Suddenly the setup begins to resemble Alan Watts’ famous ‘prickles and goo’ lecture; where those who insist the universe is all particles (prickles; being science, skepticism, reason and logic), and those who asset that it’s all waves (goo; being spirituality, possibility, magic and miracles), have to recognize that it’s both at the same time.  Therefore there is no God and yet every God, both at the same time.  The definition of quantum relationships from cosmic deity all the way down to quarks and bosons.  God and ourselves live literally within the space inside a paradox.


I am still trying to get my head round the spiritual can of worms this has opened.  I can no longer call Black Elk a shaman in the back of my mind, and have that bit of skepticism rattling round.  There is, somehow, something going on with that pipe of his.  And when, for me, experience began to replace skepticism, I couldn’t deny that goo holds all the prickles in this universe together.  Or, maybe you can call it love.


I have learned in my travels that the more power you give a fictional entity, the less they become fiction and the more they become sentient.  With all those thoughts and beliefs focused on them, then if those thoughts became their own, they become in their own right, sentient beings.  The gods create themselves, in essence.
And the spirit world itself is another dimension as well; the gods are essentially the same, emanations of power mirroring aspects of the Earth and Cosmos. But, let’s consider the possibility that there are actually sentient wills NOT just generated by mental power, but existing on their own, in another plane of reality parallel with, and functioning alongside, this one.  In Lakota tradition they are called the Taku Wakan, in Ireland the Sídhe Óg (pronounced Shee Ogue).  These are the ones I have been in contact with on my own.

What does it take to come to this sort of discovery?  Observation, a sceptical mind that is somehow also open to infinite quantum possibility, and tightrope-walking the very brink of madness, only because it has taken a special sort of madness to put myself in a spiritual place where others have feared to tread.


I would not wish the loneliness it took to become a white witch on anyone. I don’t even make a particularly good one; I’m not willing to get dirty with ghosts, and the Sídhe Óg maintain a warm but fairly shy distance (except between 2 AM and 5 AM when they like to drop things in the living room, clink the tableware and shift the pots and pans about.)  I can read your cards and interpret your dreams, and even come up with some fairly simple herbal remedies, but in the end I would make a far better counsellor than witch.

The lie that we tell ourselves as young rebels, is that when we have power, nobody tells us what to do.  The truth is, the more power we acquire, the more responsibility we have to keep humanity wise and keep this world healthy.  If nobody is telling us what to do, this means we have to tell ourselves what to do, and in doing so, make sure that the best possible choice is being made at all times.           

It seems an immense responsibility, which to the young appears to be a great vast desert of party-pooping personal accountability, but it really isn’t.  All I have to do is make sure that I am fully responsible for myself.  The first requirement is a free mind, the second a free spirit, and the third, a free heart.  Each step is a thousand times more difficult to take than the last.  And having freedom only means that I choose fully to whom and what I dedicate my passion and integrity.  But outside the realm of difficulty, lies a joy and freedom difficult to understand except to those who are old and wise.

This is a story about what happened between being an angry, intelligent, skeptical young woman in the United States embracing a fad alternative religion, up to the ordeals and tribulations I endured to become a woman tested and accepted by the highest spirit authorities in Ireland.  And at the end of it, I still am a woman, struggling with my weight and my self-esteem, sitting quietly on Dublin bus, looking over the soft green fields and wild rocky hills of County Kerry, and remembering the city sounds over three shimmering rivers gliding silently below Mount Washington, remembering the smells of hickory smoke and honeysuckle in Tennessee, and remembering the hot taste of tobacco in the pipe of my Lakota initiator at my first inipi lodge.


The path of my self-initiation was Wicca at the age of 18.  But there was a higher purpose for me; the outside initiator for me was not a religion that was a British pastiche attempt to regain the very tradition I embraced.  It was not the religion of Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders, nudist English scholar and theatrical bozo, respectively.  They understood the potential for the true depth of the divine they desired, but not the immense reality of the dimensions beyond this one. 

I was reintroduced to the Old Faith through Lakota tradition, and after fighting my battles in America, I came here to Ireland and found the underlying spirit traditions.  I also discovered that there is a battle raging in this world as well, between those who are reverting to old pagan ways that culminate in greed, power plays and darkness, and those desperate not to lose the greatest gift given in 2,000 years: the compassion of Christ, free from definitions of dogma and fear.  The Lakota themselves call it “healing the sacred hoop”, a great battle with which they are more than familiar, for which they were punished by the dark gods at Wounded Knee. 

And the old gods themselves here in Ireland are split in faction as well; Danna, the Earth mother weeping for her bruised, polluted and ravaged body, pleading for recognition; the lonely horned gods full of humor, strength, love and compassion and rejected by the Church for their unyielding sexuality; the warriors and heroes forgotten in the face of compromise and the breakdown of decency and strength; and the dark battlefield gods and goddesses of animal intelligence, chaos and rage who are having their day wreaking havoc in the minds of seekers.  They’re spreading the rampant hatred of patriarchy and Christianity, effectively throwing the Christian baby out with the Church’s foul patriarchal bathwater.  Its twisted minions of power-seeking and sorcery spread themselves with all the power they can muster. 


Between these battles on the physical plane lie a huge group of neophyte souls, Neo-Pagans, who are seeking something greater, wilder, and more powerful than the obedient and impotent cultural nonsense they were fed in church at the heels of the Technological Revolution.  Many of them are looking to Great Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia, Italy, all the homes of their colonial ancestors, to grasp onto a simple definition that gives all of us peace: what it means to be a human being, belonging to the earth, belonging to a community, and living a full and satisfied life.

And, for so many women sick and tired of their roles being dictated by patriarchy, we are seeking what it means to be free women, thinking, loving, sexual, equal, respected, with our aspect fully restored to the halls of divinity as the Goddess.

Yes, of course there’s a conflict with the cultural and dogmatic conventions surrounding modern Christianity when speaking of a Goddess.  But no, I assert that it is not what Christ intended.  Most of his message has been lost in dogmatic interpretation handed down by pundits with their own agendas.  Some of them even demonic in nature, like John Calvin, a murderer, whose dogma served only to lose much of the soul of Great Britain and Ireland in darkness, and gave birth to soulless cultural concepts like ‘Manifest Destiny’.  It also gave birth to great occult manifesters of stark brute intelligence, free from compassion, like Aleister Crowley. 


There is an intention far deeper and more encompassing in the essence of Christ’s message, than arguing the gender of deity and interpretation of dogma.  It is more encompassing than these physical bodies, this earth, and this dimension. 

There is a deep dogma asserted by Colum Cille in the 5th Century AD that states that only humans can be redeemed by compassion and obey the commandments of Christ.  When faced with an angry contingent of the Sídhe, who confronted him with the question of whether they would be able to join heaven at the end of time, he told them that any one of them who had a drop of human blood could do so.  None of them, of course, did, which relegated them among demons and beasts.  In legend, this effectively shut out the Sídhe from taking communion, which in the tales told, angered and saddened them immensely. 

Renegade Catholic priests would reportedly still hold secret Mass inside the raths (Iron Age ringforts found all over Ireland, left unexcavated and growing wild for fear of retribution) for the benefit of the fairies from time to time, until the later centuries when science and industry infiltrated the Church with equal skepticism.  If this is true, then in the bloodthirst and lack of love for humanity we see in today’s news, the rampant crime and lust for land and money we see today, many are slipping back to their old survivalist Pagan natures, more insidious in the Old Ways without redemption, and without compassion.  But some have not turned.  And there are channels in this world who are serving as mouthpieces of the kingdoms of the Sídhe and beyond, asserting one simple fact: No, humans are not the only souls in this universe who need to embrace compassion and forgiveness.  They are not the only entities in this universe who have souls. 

Heresy?  Of course, up until the likes of C.S. Lewis who decided in his fiction that this was not so.  Lewis was from Northern Ireland, and with his passionate love for folklore and the human mysteries of his world, he felt the old ways of the Ulster heroes and ancient gods bearing down on him in contradiction to his Protestant faith.  The only option he had, was to ask the world, why shouldn’t the gods, legends, and heroes themselves, in all their nature, also serve God?  Why not?  His friend J.R.R. Tolkien was asking the same question; why should the defeat of evil belong only to the human race, why shouldn’t the world of Faery who serve the gods who serve the Universal Maker, also be admitted among the ranks of redemption, regardless of race or mortality?

This heresy has implications that reach far beyond this earth.  It states, simply, that the message of Christ was not just for humanity alone. 

But we need to save ourselves first, and save this earth and acknowledge the non-human sentient spiritual beings who also inhabit it.  The neo-pagan movement is a partial and incomplete reaching toward that possibility.  The message is simple.  First, bring back the Goddess of our world with equal footing to her partner, return the Shekinah to the definition of God, and learn the ways of respect for Grandmother Earth.  And then, in openly re-admitting the old gods as angels, and the Taku Wakan, or the Daoine Sídhe spirits to our hearts and minds, in giving them acknowledgment and feeding them as welcome guests, and taking their advice, equals in spiritual presence, then we grow along with humanity outward toward the stars.  And in doing so, most importantly: never forgetting the message of Christ to all of us, human and non-human alike.

The problem is, the likes of Set are not pleased with this development at all.  And I think he is especially annoyed that I have survived this long to finally open up the Book of Shadows and say it out loud.  There are many who have their retirement portfolios invested in humanity remaining in darkness, to fight amongst themselves.


Invitation to the Sídhe

Brothers and sisters, hearken and hear,
I salute my relations as friends, without fear,
I open the door to the soul’s Second World,
And ask for your wisdom in council revealed,
May your time and mine flow together as one,
I hold forth your banners till all’s said and done.

Yellow for sharp Leinster, light of the mind,
Primrose for Munster, of bards and the arts,
Silver for great Connacht, of stone, story and thorn,
Red for proud Ulster, passionate minister,
and Lilac for the High Kin of Tír na nÓg.
White are the angels who watch over us all,
blue is the kingdom of Manannan Mac Lír,
and green for our Mother, our Lover, our Friend,
who embraces our bones at the time of all ends.