Heather Shayne Blakeslee: Music

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The wind relates how the Lonan Parish, on the Isle of Mann in the Irish Sea, came to have its name.

The Naming of Lonan Parish: A Legend Back to the Isle of Man. A favorite place of mine as I've been welcome here for a very long time. People describe it as "wind-swept" and it is. I keep the hills and coasts and valleys as clean as just about anyplace, and because it's clean, the people here are free to see the land as it was meant to be seen, just as a clean house lets you smile a little easier, satisfied that life is in its place. The island sits in middle of the Irish Sea and from the top of Sneafell mountain, the island's highest point, you can see Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, and, as its residents have long said, and rightly so, the kingdom of the sea and that of heaven. Manannan mac Lir, the Irish Sea God, is said to draw his misty cloak around the island to protect it from invaders, but if that's true I'd say he's an inconstant watchman; The Manxx tides in the north wash over the crushed glacial moraine, which has been subject to the heavy boots of colonizing Scots, Irishman, Norse Vikings, and the English, of course. The symbol of the island has always been the three-legged star: three spurred boots attached to bent knees and finally joined at the thigh in the center: it was meant to express the idea that no matter where to whom she was thrown, to the rough Scots or rougher Vikings, to famine or to rough seas, that Mann would stand, and in fact she has. In the end, it's the herring that have had the most consistent run in holding sway over the island and feeding its people. The sea has such strange beasts and kinds of breath. For more than 6,500 years before Christ presented himself and gave a reason for the eventual Church of England to stake its claim on the world and on Mann, the people listened to their place, and saw no reason why fairies did not live under bridges (they do), or why mermaids should not beg apples from the shores of certain lakes (untrue…they've not much appetite for apples.) And the angry Buggane that tore the roof of of St. Trinian's church? Not an ogre, but me in a moment of rage, I'm afraid. I couldn't tell you what or who had set me off that time, but honestly, sometimes there's no reason at all. All stories are always a mix of true and untrue anyway, and no more so than on the Isle of Man. That three-legged star has always reminded me of her tales---a leg that bears fact, another fiction, and the strongest one a bit of both. The story of Lhoondoo the blackbird, is one of the island's many offerings. A long time ago, in the early spring, a time of great beauty in Mann, the green shoots were opening up the eyes of every creature that relies on them for telling time and knowing when hope will come more often than will doubt. A little red bird sang her song among the branches of an Elder tree in a glen, looking out on the grasses and hills that were about to flower into the blue hues of Dog's Bane and Heather, Sheep's Bit and Harebell. This was her third spring, and she had come to love it more than anything that came even in the midst of summer, when berries and beetles were so abundant that, sitting already full on a branch, her feathers spread in the afternoon sun, she would watch them passing by her and laugh at their bumbling gait rather than lash out to tear apart their limbs and peck at their heads as birds do. Do not be fooled that they are always about a song---they've got to eat just as everything must. This was a time when there were no months, no counting years from some arbitrary point that marked a great man's birth or death, but looking at the state of the flowers, let's say it was probably a May. Three years in a tree in a glen in Mann, and this is May, the third one for our red bird, and the ten thousandth times three for the mountain. A memory of the winter snow drifts into her head but melts as she spies a single fern unfurling in a shaft of sun, its fronds fragile and translucent as a fairy's wings or the tip of mermaid's tail. She doesn't know of course that what she's looking at is called a Maidenhead Fern, or that the talkative little ones with the lovely wings, which she's never thought to eat for some reason, are called Fairies, but she knows that this delicate plant in the glen means longer days, and warmer nights. The nights and days go on, a little louder and a little warmer each day, and she listens to more fronds unfurling, hears the trees shifting their weight as new leaves push through into the air and begin, when they number ten thousand times three, to bend the sturdy boughs that bear them, and then all at once the bees have begun to sound like a woozy, drunken lullaby, and flowers have bloomed all over the hills so that now they pulsing with purple Heather on the mountain, and the white leaves of Stellaria in the grasses ring like the high notes of an aria, and the scarlet of Wild Mignonette is singing by the sea. The creek bed is wet, the vines are festooned with yellow trumpets. You might say late June. In this midsummer riot, the few people of the island would gather the grasses and flowers in bundles to offer to Manannan mac Lir, to protect them for another year. The red bird always thought that this was a little strange, but who was she to judge? Just now, as the red bird is most at peace, she comes upon Lhonndoo, the blackbird, who has come down from the mountain. He is sitting on the ground in the sun, somehow unafraid of snakes or snares, and he watches the sky as she watches him. It's many moments until she decides to speak to this stranger, but she does, and he speaks, and when he does the little red bird finds herself hearing all about the mountain where he's from, his words falling around her reminding her of the leaves of fall, and despite the beauty all around, she begins to wish that she could visit there. There is a cool stream, he says, and a bramble with the sweetest berries you will ever taste. It's now that I begin to speak as well, letting a breeze blow against cheek, where her softest and smallest feathers call home, and with it the smell of fresh warm earth and the berries ripening right there beside her. I whisper to her not to go. She doesn't listen. He has convinced her to trade places for a short time, he in the plains and she in the mountains, to watch each other's roosts and see a different part of the world for once. He will come and get her when it's time to come back home. This is their covenant, a simple trade, to learn something new and then return home to the place you've always known. The berries do sound very sweet, and so she flies away to Lhondoo's land, leaving the blackbird in her beloved glen. She flies to the mountain, which at this time of year is very nice indeed, and she finds the berries, which are sweet, but not as sweet as hers, and she finds the stream he told her would be there, which is colder than she imagined. The Heather is lovely, but it isn't home, and after a few days, she begins to wonder when he may come back to tell her their trade is over and that she can return to the plains and to the warm shade of her glen. She waits, another morning, then another. Waits until nightfall, thinking the whole day that it is the day that he will come for her. Waits patiently through another nightfall, and another. When the autumn rain begins to fall, and she shudders a bit thinking of her home, she begins to realize, finally, that he may not come for her. In truth, in the warmth and abundance of the glen, he has simply forgotten his promise, forgotten all about the little red bird, and she, since so much time has passed, has forgotten how to get home. The next story is much shorter: back in the glen, a man is hunting with his dogs, and thinking also of what to name this new place that he has traveled across the sea to find, and tamed and called his own. He spies a lone blackbird high in a tree, and takes this as sign. He calls the place Lhoondoo for the blackbird, and many, many years later, mountain years later, when the church finally arrives to demand an archive of births and deaths, to tell them that mid-summer is now July (though they will never, bless them, stop their offerings to Manannan) it comes to be known as Lonan Parish, the people in the pews of St. Adamnam in a place named for a forgetful blackbird and a too-trusting plover whose folly left her shivering on the mountain. She could see Ireland. She could see Scotland and Wales. She could see England, and the strange kingdom of the sea. But she could not see her way home, which until her death was only a memory of warmth. And if she could have waited as long as a mountain can wait, she may have looked to the sky and I may have come to her in an unlikely wind that swept for once from the valley and up to the mountain, a wind that would carry the faint sound of parishioners to her ears, the faithful on their beautiful island singing with all their might about finally making their way into the still more glorious kingdom of heaven.