by Susan Mangan
At times I feel both blessed and cursed, charmed and deluded, foolishly optimistic and gut wrenchingly cynical. I am a walking caricature of the harlequin masks: comic and tragic, prone to over dramatization and embellishment. Creative souls tend to be a bit too sensitive, too introspective. The pot is neither black nor white, but a myriad blend of slate, steel, or dove grey. The answer is not yes or no, but perhaps.
I cast blame on my family tree for my indecisive nature. Born and reared on the streets of Chicago, I have roots that stretch to the foothills of the Missouri Ozarks. I am a city girl with a country heart. Italian, yet not, I am olive skinned and light-eyed. Depending upon my mood, I have an appetite for butter beans with bacon or squid braised with tomato sauce.
Married to a first-generation Irishman, I have experienced real Ireland. I am enthralled with the sea and the changing tides. On farm or mountainside, I love to breathe in the acrid smell of sheep and cattle, the linen-fresh scent of field and hay. I inhale so deeply that my lungs begin to hurt with the power and purity of it all. This new year, I resolve to continue my love affair with nature and humanity, to remain open to new experience, and to relish every oddity that makes me, Me.
I am not alone in my search for self. Each New Year’s Eve, people universally usher in new hopes and dreams, not forgetting the challenges of the year that passed, but choosing to forge onward and hopefully upward. Poet William Butler Yeats spent his lifetime searching self. At once a revolutionary and artist, mystic and naturalist, Yeats sought company with men and women of letters and with the commonest of men. He found beauty in the peasant and truth in the waterfall:
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand
And hooked a berry to a thread…
Though I am old and wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where [the glimmering girl] has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands…
(Song of the Wandering Aegus, W.B. Yeats)
Despite civil war and personal unrest, Yeats never stopped seeking how to best articulate a world laced with dichotomy, a world where “a terrible beauty is born.”
This past spring when my son and I had the opportunity to visit Dublin, I enjoyed the treat of a lifetime. Dublin’s National Library was hosting a Yeats exhibit. Dark and mystical, the room was filled with full-size black and white photos of Yeats and his people. Glass cases burst with original manuscripts and first editions of Yeats’ collections of poetry.
I admired the yellowed parchments and lined texts replete with cross outs and personal musings of my favorite poet. A recorded voice, thick with an Irish brogue, repeatedly recited verse from the many stages and moods of Yeats’ career, “the last stroke of midnight dies. All day in the one chair/From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged in rambling talk with an image of air…” That day, I left the old grey–pillared National Library floating on a magic carpet of Yeats’ own device, a world in which his Celtic Twilight came to life.
One never knows how life’s road will turn. Were we gifted with the second sight, fey, visionaries who could prepare for moments of fear or delight, would we face the coming year unafraid? In the silence of the night, my mind has played tricks on me. Caught between the haze of dreams and the light of reality, we see loved ones who have passed on, heard voices from the past urging us on the correct path to follow. Why is it that our troubles seem greater at the midnight hour whereas the dawn brings recognition and illumination?
When the world appears overwhelming and the ghosts of my past come knocking, I seek the comfort of a good story. One of my favorite authors, Patrick Taylor, writes an enchanting series of books about the fictitious Ballybucklebo, Ireland. His characters are engaging and larger than life. Easily, the reader falls into the adventure and camaraderie of Taylor’s world. In An Irish Country Girl, Taylor delves into the myths and superstitions of old Ireland. His heroine is Maureen O’Hanlon, a girl on the brink of womanhood. Maureen discovers, like the women before her, that she is fey, gifted with the second sight. Her young maidenhood is marked with great joy and tragedy. She fears, but comes to welcome her gift. Like many of us, she is exhausted trying to fit into the neat puzzle of life, but finds she cannot, because she is different and beautifully unique.
This year I resolve to embrace life’s uncertainty with equal measures of gusto and poise. I resolve to pray more and welcome life’s challenges without so much fear. I resolve to keep one eye open to new experience and one eye secured by the past. I resolve to continue to find beauty in humankind. In the words of Scottish poet Robert Burns, I resolve “to take a cup o’ kindness yet to the days of auld lang syne.”
*Source consulted: Kiely, Benedict. “Yeats’ Ireland.” New York: Potter . 1989.
Susan holds a Master’s Degree in English from John Carroll University and a Master’s Degree in Education from Baldwin-Wallace College. She may be contacted at
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