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WEEK of September 27, 2004
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A “Spiritual Experience” in Ireland

by Jeffrey Stanley

Upper School religion teacher Monica-Lisa Mills visited one of her ancestral homelands, Ireland, in the summer after being accepted into an artists’ residency program in County Clare on the west coast. The program provided her with studio space and a home for a very low fee. In addition to traveling, her goal was to study traditional Irish music and to spend time working on her writing and visual artwork.

“I went to Ireland for the first time in March,” said Mills, whose father is from Ireland. “I always spend my vacations in Mexico with my mother’s family, so I thought I would explore the other half of my DNA.” She fell so much in love with the country, especially the west coast, that upon her return to Brooklyn she immediately set out to find a way to go back for six weeks over the summer— hence her application to an artists’ residency.

Her skylit studio was situated in Burren—“a limestone covered area in the middle of Galway that looks like a moonscape,” she says. “The soil runoff has eroded the rock so that there are cracks up to several feet deep filled with warm-weather plant life, while the surface sprouts alpine flowers. Ecologists and geologists come from all over the world to study this area. Frankly, it made me cry.”

Mills says the landscape provided plenty of instant inspiration for her artwork, much of which was done on hillsides in the pouring rain. “I used ink and gouache on panoramic-size rolls of paper, letting the rain wash over the lines.”

Her music research began in the evenings, and, like the visual inspiration, was easy to find. “There is top-notch music at every pub every night of the week,” she explained. Pubs are the center of the social universe in Ireland, she says, “even if you don’t drink.”

The town of Doolin became a home base while Mills traveled, and she returned there frequently, becoming very involved with the life of the community. She also trekked north to Achill Island in County Mayo, where she stayed in a hostel with a pub attached, and where music sessions regularly went into the wee hours. “During the day, I was going to classes for traditional singing and then performing at night in the sessions,” she says. The island itself is “a desolate, gorgeous place with can’t-believe-it’s-real emerald green, sheep-filled hillsides that end abruptly at sheer cliffs dropping down to the ocean.”

Mills visited Connemara, just north of Galway. “There are endless beaches surrounded by a mountain range called the Twelve Bens, which is, in turn, ringed by stretches of peat bogs,” she says. “I took some of the most inspiring walks of my life in this area along tiny roads curving past tiny flower covered cottages, currachs (traditional boats), white connemara ponies, and crazy sunset views out to the islands off of the coast—ideal spots to sketch or practice songs at the top of my lungs.”

While in Connemara she made her way to Carna, a harsh and rocky land where the buses do not go. This magical hamlet, she explained, is the point of origination for very traditional, sung music from the Connacht region.

Mills was particularly interested in the musical style known as Sean-Nos, or old style. “It’s usually mostly or entirely in Irish or Gaelic, and sung without accompaniment in a very raw, unadorned style with vocal ornamentations that sound very much like Native American chants or Middle Eastern music,” she says. Whenever she encountered it, she whipped out her iPod and started recording. “The really old men sing in a way that will never be able to be replicated—very haunting and moving.” She also recorded and learned plenty of “pub songs,” which, she explained, are usually in English with traditional instrumental accompaniment.

Thanks to her iPod and her laptop, she occasionally made CDs for the singers on the spot and gave them “a rare gift”—explaining that in remote areas not many people think to record the sessions or have the proper equipment to do so.

The laptop, it should be mentioned, is a BFS loaner that Mills obtained earlier in the summer as part of the new faculty laptop program. “I used it almost every single day,” she says. “I took photos with my phone and emailed them to the laptop to edit and upload to my weblog.” Mills used her blog to keep in touch with family members back in the States and to stay in contact with those she met during her trip, “exchanging photos and travel advice.” Mills’ blog, which includes photos, can be read at she.blogs.com/blog.

Mills returned to Brooklyn with “a tiny piece of Ireland” in her apartment, including recordings and more than 30 paintings and drawings. But her most tangible reward from this trip, which was part artist’s retreat, part music research, and part exploration of her ancestry? “People could not believe that I could sing in Irish,” she says. Nor, she added, could they believe she was interested enough to learn the old songs that have verses numbering “about five million.” Once the cat was out of the bag, “doors would open all over the place. I met the most wonderful, genuine people.”

Less tangible were the difficult-to-describe spiritual rewards, which Mills says affected her even at a “cellular” level. She hopes that feeling will remain and that it will impact her teaching of religion this year and beyond. “The experience I had was ultimately at the heart of what I teach, what I try so hard to convey to my students. It was a kind of spiritual experience. And I was reminded both how powerful, and how elusive, these kinds of experiences are.”

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