bloodline, pt. 3

(I wrote my second essay this semester on my trip to Ireland over the summer. There's no better way to fully review the meaning of that journey than to write blog posts about it. So buckle up. Click photos for better view!)

All the towns in Ireland have names that might sound funny to us: Killarney, Doolin, Dingle. Partway through the week we stop to hike more cliff paths near Kilkee, a tiny village on the western coast, where the sheer height of the cliffs is perhaps not as impressive as others we'd seen but in some ways far more picturesque.

The water is bluer than anything I've ever seen. The sunlight seems to bend as it approaches the base of the cliffs, turning the ocean green and reflective and deceptively shallow-looking.

The mothers hem and haw and hold us away from the edge, but we venture as close as we dare when their attention is elsewhere. When all I can see is rock and water and clouds stretching beyond the horizon, I feel oddly isolated, like I could float away in that moment.

Doubtless the subject of many tourist-y photos.

But even these cliffs, although more spectacular than those at Ardmore, can't compare to our adventure of the next day. Early in the morning we embark on an ambitious eight-kilometer hike along the Cliffs of Moher near our headquarters in Doolin. The day starts off windy and chilly, but as my brother and cousin and I pull ahead of the group, we strip off our jackets and shove them into our backpacks. The sun beats down, the paths are often steep, and before I know it I'm sweating despite my tank top and shorts.

We're mostly quiet on the hike, the three of us. Sometimes all that separates us from a heartstopping drop is a narrow wire fence. Sometimes we have to cross narrow creeks with suspicious-looking bridges made of wood or slabs of rock or even stepping stones and nothing exists to block us from falling at all. My brother swears at the top of his lungs, stops in the middle of a bridge, and pulls out his camera. He's incorrigible. We all take selfies and meander onwards.

The last stretch of the hike is a steep uphill climb, sometimes tilted so far against us that I fear a single misstep will send me tumbling all the way back down to the bottom. But we finally make it to the top, huffing and puffing, only to find that there's no point in trying to regain our breath.

The drop is three hundred meters. Doesn't sound like a lot, yeah? That's about a thousand feet. It would take mere seconds to fall from the top of the cliff face to the surface of the water below. But lying on your stomach, peering over the edge of a rock that juts out into empty space... I think all of our parents left those cliffs with some new gray hairs.

Yikes.

bloodline, pt. 2

(I wrote my second essay this semester on my trip to Ireland over the summer. There's no better way to fully review the meaning of that journey than to write blog posts about it. So buckle up.)

"This is my favorite place on Earth," says my mom.

We're spending the day on the cliff paths of Ardmore, a village on the southern coast of Ireland. "The hike will take us all the way out onto the peninsula and back again," my grandmother explains. "It's only a couple of miles, but it's mostly uphill."

Yesterday we walked for miles on beaches and roads after our bus broke down in the middle of the Irish countryside. I feel like in any other place I would be too exhausted to even think about a cliff hike, but the country has filled me with so much energy that I am one of the first to charge out onto the path. A few hundred meters away is the ruin of an ancient church, crumbling and bedecked with wildflowers. Once we reach it we pause to wander for a little while, admiring the chipped stone monuments and stooping to slip through archways so small that the child in me calls them "fairy gates."

Not far into our journey we spot a gap in the fence large enough for us to squeeze through, leading down onto a steep—but traversable—hill that breaks off into a flat, stony section before the sudden drop of a cliff. I hesitate only briefly before I scramble down the narrow path after my brother, who has already pulled away from the group in order to take daredevil photos without our mother breathing down his neck.

Our parents follow us down. Everyone's having too much fun to really be angry at us for taking the plunge. We take family photos sitting at the very edge of the cliff, a steep and rocky drop that makes my stomach jolt. But here in the heat of the moment I am surefooted and unafraid, all windswept hair and deep breaths of salt spray.

My brother didn't have the "windswept hair" problem. Photo by my mother, I think.

The tiny peninsula's tip is completely separated from what we stand on, a tantalizing few yards away. "We could make the jump if we didn't have any plans to get back," my dad says. It's a joke, but oddly tempting as well, the idea of standing where few other people have before. Luckily, before any of us do anything impulsive, the group calls us back to the well-trodden path. We have to move on.

Not that it's much of a problem for us.

The cliffs are an incredible sight no matter where we are.

We stop for a picnic lunch at the tip of the peninsula before heading back around to our final destination: an old cathedral with a single round tower that soars high into the air above our heads.

The church and tower are ringed by weatherbeaten gravestones covered with illegible script. The main building has lost its doors and most of its roof over the years, so we walk in freely. Inside the solid stone walls there is no sign that we are still in the modern world and not in the thirteenth century, which is the date my mother reads off a plaque at the entrance. "It says there are two Ogham stones here," she tells me.

I light up. "Let's find them!" I've been fascinated by Ogham stones since first reading about them, in books of Celtic myth and works of fiction like Madeleine L'Engle's An Acceptable Time. When the rest of our group is ready to move out, I am still kneeling on the ground in front of one of the small pillars of rock, restraining myself from tracing the centuries-old etchings on their surface, taking photos of them instead.

We drive past the cliffs again as we leave, heading back to our temporary headquarters in Killarney. I watch them until they disappear around the curve of the road.

bloodline, pt. 1

(I wrote my second essay this semester on my trip to Ireland over the summer. Now, as I'm revising that same essay, I realized that there's really no better way to fully review the meaning of that journey than to write some blog posts about it. So buckle up.)

We arrive at the Dublin airport before the country wakes up. There are eleven of us, an entire family trundling out of the baggage claim laden with duffel bags and backpacks, from grandparents to my youngest cousin. I didn't sleep much on the plane, but as we leave the airport on our chartered bus I am too busy drinking in the scenery and the sunrise to feel weary.

A couple of hours on the bus and our first stop is Newgrange. "It's an ancient portal tomb dating back thousands of years," explains my grandmother, handing her iPhone around to show us pictures of the monument. The time difference is beginning to catch up to me, but I put on a brave face while we wander through the visitor center and out to the bus stop where we'll catch a ride through the park to the tomb. The monument is clearly visible, probably a couple of miles away; we could hike there but for a few obstacles. The land between us is mostly rolling fields and hills, easy to traverse, but we are cut off from the rest of the park by a thick grove of trees and a steep gorge. A creek at the bottom of the ravine glints in the sunlight.

"Welcome to Newgrange," says our guide as we approach. She speaks with a thick accent, pronouncing her "th-" sounds with a silent "h," as she details dates and facts and myths about the prehistoric monument. She explains that we will all be able to go inside the tomb itself after splitting into a few small groups. "While you wait, feel free to explore the area around the mound," she says.

The stones that the mound rests on are broad, flat slabs, many of them sporting etchings of spirals and geometric shapes.

I am fascinated. "Is it just me, or is that a perfect double helix?" I demand of my mother, gesturing to a particular carving. I walk the full circumference of the mound to examine all of the engravings I can find. Before long, however, our guide calls us back. "We'll be going inside the chamber now," she says. "Watch your heads."

The entrance is small and the winding passage within narrow enough that we all have to turn sideways to slip between towering stones. I am one of the first inside and so I am relegated to the back of the chamber, hemmed in on all sides by thousands of tons of stone. The guide begins to explain more of the mythology of Newgrange, but I am only half listening, instead gazing around the cavern with a sense of peace I don't normally associate with small places.

Newgrange is older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids of Giza. It is believed to be a religious monument, a passage tomb (or burial ground), and perhaps the centerpoint of some astronomy-based faith. This much is clear when the guide warns us that she's going to turn off the lights and suddenly we are plunged into total darkness.

... Almost total. Through that narrow, winding passage, twenty meters in the dark, a single ray of light wriggles through and strikes the back wall of the cave.

"Once a year, on the winter solstice, the sun shines into this chamber and completely illuminates it," says our guide. "You can see all of the carvings inside unaided. It lasts almost twenty minutes."

I do not feel spooked by this ghost story of age-old science and faith. My blood is heavy in my veins and I feel present, here in the near-darkness, surrounded by something more ancient than I have ever imagined. I don't speak until I am once again squinting into bright sunlight as I duck out of the exit passageway.

"What did you think?" says my mom.

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. "I wish we could come back for the solstice." It's just the first day. Gotta play it cool.

Soundtracks of our Lives

Life gets busy.

When there's too much to do, between tests to study for and papers to write and tournaments that keep me out of the house all weekend, I have a nasty habit of sequestering myself in my room in order to avoid all my responsibilities. Or, sometimes, I do end up tackling them, but only after making a promise to myself: "I'll do it, but not until after I make a playlist for it."

For someone whose music knowledge and appreciation isn't all that broad in the grand scheme of things, I make a lot of mixes. I seek out catchy melodies for cleaning my room, quiet acoustic covers for reading in bed, basslines and beats per minute for running in the mornings. My Spotify sidebar is a mess of constantly rotating playlists titled with album names and dates of creation and cryptic, one-word descriptions. I even made a playlist before I started writing this blog post (it's called "settle down," but I couldn't explain why). It's a method of procrastination that has an end in sight. Once I am satisfied, I hit "play" on the first song and get to work.

I spend the most time making playlists that I intend to have meaning. I mean, I can put together eight songs that have been stuck in my head lately in all of two minutes without having to think too much...

Planes Fly — Angel Haze

Fireside — Arctic Monkeys

Drop the Game — Flume ft. Chet Faker

Take Me to Church — Hozier

This Is Gospel — Panic! At The Disco

Second of Love — Sebastien Grainger

Shades — Tales In Space

My Cup Runneth Over — Vanity Theft

... but when I'm making a playlist that has a point or one that I'll send to someone else, I don't just take into account how catchy a song is, how well I know it, how much I like it. I look up lyrics and keys. I think about the mood of the song, the colors and ideas it suggests. One of my favorite things to do is imagine what scene of a movie the song would be the the soundtrack to.

I used to play violin in the school orchestra, but eventually dropped the class—and my practice of the instrument—in order to focus on academics. Two years later, I still miss making music. That much is clear by the way I neglect to hum the melodies of my favorite songs in favor of the harmonies, from my ongoing interest in remixes and mash-ups. I know the tune, if not the lyrics, to well over a thousand songs in my Spotify and iTunes libraries. Perhaps I'm no longer much of a musician; I don't have the voice or the time to dedicate to the art. But my appreciation for music is boundless. My next favorite song is always just over the horizon.

Recap

I am a goal-oriented person. By that, I mean I score them. Nothing compares to watching the soccer ball hit the back of the net. It’s why I am a forward, it’s what I’ve spent hours upon hours training to do, whether I put it there myself or get it to a teammate who can. I contributed a few goals while playing for Uni last spring, resulting in one or two satisfying wins, and this fall I had hoped for a repeat performance clad in Illinois FC orange.

From the beginning of this season—my first time playing with a traveling club—it was clear that was not the case. My coach couldn’t believe it when I told him my typical position. In fact, our first conversation on the topic, after only our second practice, went something like this:

Coach: What position do you normally play?

Me: Forward or outside mid.

Coach: Outside mid?!

Needless to say, he believed my natural talents were being “wasted” at the position I had played for years. A couple of weeks later we scrimmaged against an older girls’ team and he started me at center back—the last line of defense before the goalkeeper, the pivoting point of the back line, the complete opposite of what I normally play. I wrote elsewhere that “telling me to play center back is like telling a trumpeter to play the tuba,” and it still holds true. In that practice game I was practically tripping over myself trying to keep up with each play, relying on raw speed to cover up for my mistakes.

It’s taken almost a month to finally settle into my new place on the field. I still make mistakes. I still have to outsprint oncoming forwards when they slip past myself or one of my teammates. I still catch myself reviewing each of my actions after the event: “Should I have been talking more?” “Why didn’t I tackle there?” “I can’t believe I didn’t step to that ball.”

But it’s easier. My coach is gleeful that he has a center back who will run into space and take shots in the front lines but still return to her rightful place. I’ve developed a fondness for the position myself, comforted by the knowledge that I have a well-defined spot to recover to every time. It will never stop being a challenge, but I feel less lost than I did at the beginning of the season. For this team, this is where I belong.

Versus

Going to a school like Uni can wreak havoc on my perfectionist side. Every day, I’m surrounded by scores of people who all seem to be able to juggle all of their interests, activities, and passions, and top it all off with decent grades and a social life. I suppose that in some ways I do the same without realizing it, but it honestly feels like I never devote enough time to one thing or another. I feel unfinished, always thrown back on my heels.

If you ask any of my friends what my one true passion is, you’d probably get one of two answers: either “soccer” or “science.” To some people that may make me sound like your average well-rounded student, but the truth is that those two sides of myself are at near-constant war with each other. One day I’ll rearrange my homework schedule around soccer practice and the next I’ll stay home to read astronomy books rather than venture outside. Neither passion feels like I’ve allowed it to begin developing fully.

I think that the real battle is being fought between my realistic side and my passionate side. I’m decent enough at math that I could try to go into physics or another field for a later career, and I do love learning and experimenting with the sciences. On the other hand, I’ve always said that if I had the time to train for a professional soccer career, if I could be paid to play the sport that I love, then I would. As important as academic subjects are to me, the idea of leaving competitive play forever after high school is almost unthinkable.

So what do I focus my attentions on now, in this very moment? The realistic future of the scientist or the relentless dream of the athlete? That’s something I have yet to fully figure out. I know that I don’t have an imminent career in soccer—so do I let myself try to excel now while I can? Or do I look firmly to the future and work towards an education and later a job in a field that I love?

I guess these are the questions on every high schooler’s mind as we hurtle towards senior year, or college applications, or whatever the next hurdle to clear may be.

Good luck to us all.