Heaney's Parting Invitation

Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's gravestone epitaph challenges and invites us to exist beyond what we have experienced and what we currently see:

The Irish Central website takes up the story:

'The lines are taken from his Nobel Prize speech in 1995. Responding to what the lines meant Heaney told the Harvard Crimson publication the following:

“A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. You grew up vigilant because it’s a divided society. My poetry on the whole was earth-hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down. I think it had to do with a sense that the marvelous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry. That line is from a poem called “The Gravel Walks,” which is about heavy work—wheeling barrows of gravel—but also the paradoxical sense of lightness when you’re lifting heavy things. I like the in-betweenness of up and down, of being on the earth and of the heavens. I think that’s where poetry should dwell, between the dream world and the given world, because you don’t just want photography, and you don’t want fantasy either.” '

I love that - the invitation to look up because the "marvelous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact". For me Heaney's epitaph is like the step of faith that Indiana Jones takes in pursuit of the Holy Grail in The Last Crusade. The way forward looks like air, but he sticks his hand on his heart and against his better judgement, steps out over the valley. Behold! A way is made where there was no way.

Photo taken at the National Geographic Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology Exhibit 

 

 

 

I want people to write that about me when I'm called Home - "She walked on air against her better judgement". So whose judgement is stopping you from walking on air?