River Boyne

And, you know, Newgrange representing this womb.

It's thought that it's the womb of Bowen, this beautiful goddess, the goddess of the River Boyne.

And, you know, when the sun rises or the solar masculine energy rises on the morning of December 31st, this light penetrates this womb and kind of illuminates the chamber.

And Laura was saying that in a kind of Irish mythology, you know, Dagda, who is the god of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, he like awakens and, you know, this kind of shaft of light is his phallic body essentially penetrating the womb of Bowen.

His birth came about in the way that births in mythology often do, through a story that requires a certain tolerance for divine behaviour.

The Dagda loved the river goddess Bowen, whose name lives on in the river Boyne, because he wanted time alone with her that would not draw attention.

He sent her husband Elkmer away on what seemed like an ordinary errand, and then held the sun still in the sky so that nine months passed as a single day.

Oengus was conceived and born within that stopped morning.

His name was Oenga Smacog, the young son.

He was the god of love and youth and poetry in the way that those three things in the Irish tradition were understood to belong together.

He lived at Brunneboine, the great mound on the bend of the Boyne that today we call Newgrange, a place built thousands of years before the stories that were later told about it.

A place where at midwinter the rising sun reaches in through the roof box and fills the inner chamber with light for a few minutes before the angle changes and the darkness returns.

Wahiyahiyahiyahiyahiyah Umma Wahiyahiyahiyahiyahiyah Umma Wahiyahiyahiyahiyahiyah Umma Wahiyahiyahiyahiyahiyah Umma When Rumi met Shams, when Rumi met Shams, when spark met dry leaves,

when spark met dry leaves, when fire met branches, when ocean met shore, when star met darkness, when Romeo met Juliet, when sea met river and river met sea, when bow met violin string, when fingers meet drum, when my body is no longer numb when we add up the sum of all the days of all the nights of all the years of all the midnights we've lived without keys without lights all the millions of years living in us when we lived only around fires crackling those fires going up when fire met page when page met voice when voice met the beating drum that is in your thumb that is all that is to come and all it was in the buzz of the bees, in the million-year seething trees that sing in their leaves down out of the earth.

When Rumi met Shams, Rumi had a book he was reading.

This was in a time when books were particularly valuable, when they were not so easily made as they are made now.

Uma.

Uma.

and his voice was mirror and in that mirror there were stars and there were lovers meeting in a forest in secret where no one knew where they were and his voice was root and branch and berry also And Finn said to him, Why are you here in this particular place? Why are you fishing in this river, the river Boyne? And Finnegas the Bard said, There is a prophecy which says that one day a man named Finn shall catch a salmon, a salmon of wisdom, who is fed on the hazelnuts from the trees in the other world.

Fish know the way, you know.

Now,

it was also said that they found a golden bracelet which they threw away into the river Boyne simply because it was not the Ark of the Covenant.

They did not find the Ark of the Covenant.

Nobody knows where that is.

But Oliver Plunkett is our inspiration for peace.

His head is revered, not in the church I was working in St. Mary's with St. Peter's Church across the River Boyne in Armagh Archdiocese.

But I have a little relic of Oliver Blunkett taken from the head of Oliver in St. Peter's.

I treasure that deeply, as indeed I treasure other relics of saints.

We live in the Boyne Valley.

I mean, the River Boyne itself is a special area of conservation.

That's a European designation.

This power station's planned to be within 300 metres of the UNESCO World Heritage Buffer Zone.

But no, it's fine, honestly.

Richard Moore, who many people, particularly in Drogheda and the Boyne Valley, will know very well, is an artist who's been painting the landscapes of the Boyne for decades.

It was Richard who opened my eyes to something all the way back in 1999.

That's 27 years ago.

Yes.

But in the storylines of Lower Gawalla and other manuscripts, there are, I believe... echoes of, you know, older stuff and origin or creation myths.

One of those, two of them, I talk about in relation to the Boyne.

And the Boyne might not be Ireland's biggest river geographically, but mythologically, it is the most important river.

The Well.

Bowen, the white cow goddess of the River Boyne, may have come into being after the well maidens retreated from the human realm.

By the time we meet her, men own the wells and the cups.

Only Bowen's husband and his three male cupbearers can approach the otherworldly well of Shegish.

The well erupts, overcoming Bowen.

Three tremendous waves take her eye, her hand, and her foot as she merges with the waters that rush toward the sea.

Now the well and the goddess are one again, as Bowen becomes the life-giving river Boyne, whose milk nourishes the entire valley.

At night we see her celestial river, the Milky Way, sparkling on the mirror of the river Boyne.

It's a distillery we built in 2015.

We called it Bowen after the goddess of the Bowen River.

And legend has it that she walked around the Well of Wisdom with her shins, which is backwards.

And the Bowen River violently erupted and flowed to the sea.

And in doing so, it took Bowen with her.

And I personally believe that Bowen is now the river.