It was late one night, a week or so ago, when the truth sank in. A storm from the Atlantic had swept across the harbour and the encircling hills to whistle and dance around my cottage. Inside, a fire glowed comfortingly in the stove. On the music player Bruce Springsteen was singing Shenandoah.
"Away, bound away
'Cross the wide Missouri. . ."
Yes, it was time for my heart to take account of what my head had decided. Soon, very soon, for reasons that I knew made sense both professionally and personally, I would be leaving the Beara peninsula in West Cork, my home for the past five years. I would be moving on.
Somehow it seemed fitting that the decision, after months of dithering, should have coincided with the onset of Lent. Lately I have come to value this season in a way I never used to. For too long it was all about vowing to give things up - sweets, alcohol, whatever - and then feeling depressed when the vow was weakened by furtive cheating until, sooner or later, it evaporated. I didn't doubt that occasional self-denial was a creditable practice - but could it really be true, as had been dinned into me in childhood by teachers of religion, that the goodwill of an all-loving God must be earned through deprivation?
What has transformed my view of Lent was discovering, late in life, that the word repentance is not what I had taken it to be. As the Greek text of the gospels makes clear, it is not about hair shirts, self-flagellation or renouncing booze. What Jesus calls for - translated into English as "repentance" - is metanoia, which in fact means "a change of mind and heart". While such a process is likely to be less excruciating, in a physical sense, than the penitential examples I have given, it is in its way more challenging, but more profound and more worthwhile. A break from routine attitudes, a different way of seeing things, an attempt to take an overview of where I'm headed, a questioning of what matters most in my heart of hearts.
It's a process that goes well, I think, with moving home. There are items in the cottage which had become so familiar as to be scarcely noticed. In present circumstances, however, they seem to be offering clues not just about where I've come from but about who I am. Paintings and chairs, books, CDs and coffee mugs. Photographs, some faded, some fresh. All of them have been part of the story but not all will continue to be. Some - which ones? - will be jettisoned and some retained. And into this mood, matching and augmenting it, comes Springsteen and the song's nostalgia.
"Shenandoah, I long to
see you.
Away, you rolling river."
Although its origins are uncertain, as with many folk songs, Shenandoah had become a national favourite in the United States by the 1840s. The title, like the name of the river in Virginia, is linked with a tribe of native Americans. Despite variations in the lyrics, a recurring theme is the forlorn love of a white Missouri river trader for the daughter of tribal chief Shenandoah. Year after year the trader courts the girl - in one version offering her father money for her - but to no avail.
It seems likely that the song began as a river-based ballad and then made its way, through its popularity with sailors working the Mississippi and Missouri, down to the ocean. Or perhaps, as the American folklorist Alan Lomax suggested, it was created by French-Canadian seafarers. Either way, the melody, the words, the rhythm, fuse into a perfect sea shanty, to be sung in chorus while the ship's anchor was being raised or ropes were hauled.
"Seven years I've
been a rover.
Away, you rolling
river."
And at the heart of Shenandoah, no matter which set of words you happen to hear, is a longing for home. That was, and is, its appeal for deep-sea sailors, journeying far from whoever or wherever fill the longing, but not
for them only.
As the storm continued to play its wild games around the cottage I felt increasingly aware that my own imminent journey, the leaving of this home and the attempt to set up another somewhere else, was linked with the song and the season. The metanoia that Lent invites, the change of mind and heart, might encourage, as I filled boxes and emptied cupboards, some kind of self-discovery.
Meanwhile, Springsteen's voice, within a tapestry of fiddle, guitar, accordion, banjo, seemed to be suggesting what the discovery might be. Perhaps the home we most yearn for is hidden deep within us: a contentment of spirit which, if we could find it, would not just root itself where we settle but stay with us wherever we go.
"I'll take her across the water.
Away, bound away.
'Cross the wide Missouri."