When I originally started this blog, as you can tell in the reading, I was setting out to make it kind of a wedding website, to prepare for my June 24th wedding to one very special guy. The wedding is still happening, of course, but I think I'll just use an already prepared wedding website template due to my severe lack of html code knowledge.....making this little piece of blog-space my personal work of contemplation. I'm basing the overall idea of it off of my old livejournal, which still exists for those who dare find it and for my own reasons of keeping around a good five years of my life in text. Don't worry, it's mostly all locked up. I've more than a few thoughts on the whole ordeal anyway, meditations if you were, on this transition that I'll be embarking on from single college gal to married woman and military wife; not to mention contemplations into a certain someone's homecoming from a deployment overseas. So, where does one put their thoughts when they are just bubbling to come out? Well, as I've blogged since the year 2000, off and on for a decade now, the blog format only makes sense, as print can often declare what images cannot (and vice versa).
So what exactly is an Immram anyway?
Anyone who comes to know me will eventually pick up on my love of Celtic Legend and Myth, and my easy identification and admiration of the Christian Church as it was first brought to and adapted culturally by the Celts of the now British and Irish Isles. These people's learned to tell the powerful Christ-Tale in their own words, in their own language for quite some time, defining Heaven as the Tir na nOg (their land of youth), and more famously, Saint Patrick's identification and metaphorical use of explaining the Holy Trinity through a clover.It would be the Christians who brought writing to these people, through their love of the Gospel and the Gospel arts, and then these peoples which brought Gospel writing into an art form unique to their place and time. Just look at The Book of Kells and The Lindisfarne Gospels to see just how far little monks for centuries made the writing of those Holy Books an art.
Many Celtic deities were rewritten and re-imagined to tell the Christ-story, including the tale of The Voyage of Saint Brendon who takes a sea-faring pilgrimage. The story uses the storytelling format called the Immram, or 'tale on a boat,' often to an other world of paradise or including a 'vision'. Interestingly, even though this storytelling format was used to preserve Irish mythology, more often than not they contain Christian teachings. The tale of Saint Brendon's Voyage, for example, detailing one man's journey of unbelief of Truth toward true belief of the Truth because of his journey, which often starts because of an Angel. This sailor has been considered a patron saint of sailors, has been compared to the stories Sinbad and Odysseus in the style of tale, and is thought to be the ancient inspiration for C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader from his ever famous Chronicles of Narnia. While I can't tell you how true these comparisons are, I would not be the least bit surprised at Lewis, a student of mythology, if he did reach back to St. Brendon's Voyage as healthy inspiration for his children's tales.
I am a creature who takes everyday kinds of journeys. As an artist, I tend to reach into my own heavily symbolic subconsciousness in contemplative prayer for the answer as to what shall wind up on the paper to be drawn, or even as my way of listening to God, my own creator. And the language of ancient symbols connects with me, somehow, as it may have with Lewis. I process very often by writing, even if I never intend to share that writing, it's how I put idea into brain, message into heart. It's my favored medium for exploring those ideas which bubble beneath the surface during this, my own life's journey. But unlike Saint Brendon, my journey doesn't need to travel to new exotic islands to be relevant in trying to catch my own glimpses of Christ. It takes place here at home, in my own city, in my own everyday kind of life. You are still welcome to join me, should you desire that. I know I'd love the company.
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