The Irish magazine Comhar features an article about Ella Young this month, and the cover is a gorgeous illustration of Ella, based on one of Ansel Adam’s photographs.

The article is written by Gael Linn CEO Réamonn Ó Cieran. Gael Linn, founded in the 1950s, has been instrumental is preserving and promoting the Irish language and heritage through school resources, language courses, funding Irish film and music.

Ella would be proud.

Halcyon Days is the second in a series of media projects bringing the life and legacy of Ella Young to modern audiences.

The Morrigan is a drama of Young’s life in the cultural and political movement that led to the 1916 Rising and foundation of the Irish Free State. You can listen to “The Morrigan,” as broadcast on Dublin City Radio in 2020.

The Morrigan and Halcyon Days are from Tulsk Productions, a group of Irish and US producers and scholars fascinated with twentieth century poet and mystic Ella Young. Team leader, Dorothea MacDowell, is the author of Ella Young’s biography, Ella Young and Her World.

The Morrigan was funded by private and public donations, mainly from Ireland. In 2023, the Government of Ireland’s Emigrant Support Programme funded the writing of a script for Halcyon Days, Ella Young in California, by former KCBX radio producer Ben Purper.

Now that the script is finished, Tulsk is raising funds to produce the play as a dramatic podcast which will tell the story of how Ella Young left post-revolutionary Ireland and inspired a cultural revolution that continues today. Eventually, we would like to make a film.

There are three biographies of Ella Young.

Ella Young and Her World: Celtic Mythology, The Irish Revival And The Californian Avant-Garde (Irish Research), Dorothea McDowell

Ella Young: Irish Mystic and Rebel, Rose Murphy

At the Gates of Dawn: A Collection of Writings by Ella Young, edited by John Matthews and Denise Sallee

Berkeley Fell for Irish Druid

Young fell in love with Berkeley and Berkeley loved her back. She adored the college town, especially its exotic flora, breathtaking views, and student culture. Ella quickly inspired a cult-like following in California. A striking woman, she cut a dramatic figure with a noble forehead and face that seemed to shine with an inner light. She lectured in what she considered the traditional purple robes of a Druid bard, which she called her “reciting robes,” to visually portray an authentic Irish identity. She let her shoulder-length silver hair hang free and instead of shaking hands when introduced, she raised her hands high in the ancient druid greeting. Poet Padraic Colum compared her to the ancient “women who knew the sacred places and their traditions, who knew the incantations and the cycles of stories about the Divine Powers, and who could relate them with authority and interpret them wisely. . . She speaks of Celtic times as if she were recalling them.” A gifted speaker, Ella held her listeners spellbound with the heroic myths and sagas told in her lilting Irish voice – the voice of the bard, a keeper of the ancient teachings of her ancestors.

Irish Echo: ”Berkeley Fell for Irish Druid”

Forgotten Chapters of Department History: #1 Ella Young’s Lectureship

by Kamila Kaminska-Palarczyk The first woman to hold an endowed lectureship in the English Department was a celebrity. She entered the department through the Celtic Studies program, the first degree-granting program of its kind in the country, created in 1911. Two decades later the program appointed Irish writer Ella Young as the Phelan Memorial Lecturer in Celtic Mythology and Literature. … Continue reading

The Shasta Fellowship is an early influence on modern pagan practices in California.
Anyone who has visited Mount Shasta might be inspired to found a religion, and
Ella Young and her friends were no different. She adapted the rituals and regalia from
The Fellowship of the Four Jewels, founded on May 1, 1916, in memory of their friends who had died in The Rising only a few weeks before.

Subsequent scholars on the origins of modern pagan religions have traced
well-known practices in many pagan traditions in California to the Shasta Fellowship.
In particular, the adoption of a calendar with eight holidays, four solar observances of
solstice and equinox, and four “quarter days” celebrated between those solar events.

As historian Roland Hutton writes:

Thus, the quarter days, which have always been celebrated as important feasts in Gaelic areas of Britain and Ireland, were brought to California as the key festivals of an Irish mystical society founded in the early twentieth century. This was the Fellowship of Shasta, imported into America by one member whose followers remained active—although hardly noticed—until the 1960s.

Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of Tradition by Ronald Hutton

Early pagan liturgist Aidan Kelly wrote that it was Ella Young’s Irish occult traditions that were one of the many academic sources for neopagan practices in the Bay Area. He writes in Pathos:

The Fellowship of the Four Jewels was founded on May 1, 1916, by Ella Young, William Butler Yeats and his beloved Maeve (Maude Gonne), A.E., and others of the spiritual leaders of the movement for Irish freedom, in memory of those who had died in the Easter Sunday uprising only a few weeks before. The leaders had been summarily executed by the British; one of them was Major John McBride, Maude’s husband. …

I knew some about Ella Young; I had listened to her commentaries on the radical radio station KPFA when I was in high school. Now I learned that when she came to America, she brought the Fellowship of the Four Jewels with her, and here transmuted it into the Fellowship of Shasta, with the same four feasts to represent the Four Jewels of Irish myth: the Spear of Lugh, which ensured victory (Feb. 1); the Stone of Fal, which shrieked under the lawful king (May 1); the Sword of Nuada, from which none could escape (Aug. 1); and the Cauldron of the Dagda, from which none would come away unsatisfied.

Among these papers was a testament written by Gavin Arthur on the Feast of Brighid 1970. It said:

In a night-long conversation I had with Ella Young in her cottage in Oceano where she died a few weeks later, she asked me to carry on this Fellowship. . . She and I and others celebrated all four feasts in the dunes of Oceano, 1931 through 1935, and off and on thereafter until she died, July 23, 1956, in Oceano. Her ashes were scattered in the Lyman Canyon behind the Old Bail Mill between St. Helena and Calistoga, and there I started celebrations of the four Feasts from 1960 on.

Pathos, (October 2021) Before the Gardnerians: The Fellowship of the Four Jewels and the Church of Aphrodite.

The scattering of Ella Young’s ashes is described in an interview with her friend and executor, Jane Thompson. You can listen to her tell the story of that early occasion of California neo-pagan ritual in the interview by James Cain preserved on the Internet Archive. A transcript of this interview, and many others, is available in eBook and paperback in Ella Young Remembered.

Ella Young recognized Ansel Adams talent early, and was instrumental in funding the publication of his first collection; photographs of Taos, illustrating a book by Mary Austin. In 1966 Independent researcher James D. Cain recorded interviews with Adams and other friends of Ella Young. His son has made these recordings available on the Internet Archive. He talks about ,eeting Ella Young at parties in San Francisco 1929, traveling with Georgia O’Keefe in Taos, Ella Young’s Visual Transference, and Ella’s legacy.

In the interview Adams mentions “The Shasta Fellowship” but stops himself from saying more because Cain, the interviewer, hadn’t already been told about it by another interviewee, Gavin Arthur. Adam’s tone is a half in jest, but apparently he was a man to keep an occult secret. A transcript of this interview, and many others, is available in eBook and paperback in Ella Young Remembered.

Druid Heights is one of many counter-culture experiments in California. These idiosyncratic communities of outcasts now fascinate their spiritual descendants with the scraps of writing and art that survived. The houseboat village of Salsalito was a similar community of moneyless artists. Ella Young herself eventually settled in Oceano, near the Theosophist settlement of Halcyon in San Luis Obispo county.

Ella Young was respected and valued by her neighbors; you can listen to a radio programme from KPCC here: How the Dunites Created a Secret Utopia Among the Oceano Dunes . Halcyon remains a Theosophical community to this day, with its own influences in California. For example, two brothers (boys in Ella’s day) grew up to found the early Silicon Valley electronics company Varian Associates. This is only one example of the large story of how bohemian and counter-cultural movements are the foundation of California’s innovative prominence.

Ella Young’s whole appearance was of a high spirituality, something bright and translucent shone outward from her. As Colum said, she had the air of an initiate. But there was also earthiness and a quiet strength. No puritanism. She appreciated good wine, well-prepared simple food, the enhancements of life by art and artistry. She not only wrote poetry, poetry singing also through her prose, she lived poetry. It was her conviction that there must be leisure not alone for great thought, noble deeds, but for the aesthetics of daily living—no unnecessary luxury, but a living close to the heart of things. She was not for a moment unaware of our dependence upon all life, the aliveness even of stones, of a pervasive consciousness.

All of this is beautifully expressed in a taped interview which I arranged toward the end of her life. As she grew more frail, her heart weakening, though never her indomitable spirit, I felt there should be recordings of her speaking in her own voice, the most beautiful voice I have ever heard. At the time, KPFA, a remarkable radio station (listener-sponsored) had been founded in Berkeley. I was so impressed with its quality and absence of commercials that I did volunteer work for it, getting to know some of the activists there. I suggested to them that they send someone to record Ella young. As usual, they were lacking in staff, money, or equipment for such an enterprise. If I could bring her to their studio…

She balked at that, travel having become too exhausting. But finally I was able to persuade her to accompany me to my home. KPFA’s excellent commentator, Wallace Hamilton, came to my house with massive equipment and we spent several hours before the fire in my study while she read her poetry.

With the tape on, and myself at the controls in an anteroom, Wally prompted her to talk with a few sensitive questions, seeking an expression of her philosophy. He had read her books and knew what to ask.

Ella was led into a discourse on communicating with trees, mountains, wild animals, and coming into harmony with the spirit of sacred places. With a smile, Wally played it back for her. She was amazed. She had not known that their talk was being recorded. Later, she said to me, “He was such a nice young man, I thought he just wanted to know.” But she was delighted that it was on tape. And so was I, having played it for any number of enchanted listeners. Friends at KPFA later told me it was for years one of their most asked-for programs. As much as anything in her writings, that interview reveals what she simply calls “the kinship with the Earth.” She had that kinship in a profound sense. I have known her, feeling tired or less well, to lie down on the Earth, put herself in touch with its vibrations and rise feeling renewed. —

Elsa Gidlow, I Come with My Songs

Elsa Gidlow bought a property in Marin County in 1954 where she established an “unintentional community.” She named it Druid Heights, perhaps in homage to Ella Young and the people drawn to it. After her death, she intended for her land to become a retreat for women writers, but the property was added to the national park system via eminent domain.

“Ella Young was a fantastic being.… She had an indescribable force or magic about her.”

Rosalind Sharpe Wall, UC Berkeley student in the 1930s

Few people confirmed my sense of life as a heroic adventure calling for qualities of fierce strength and noble endurance, gentleness toward the weak, and passionate reverence for beauty, in particular the beauty of the living earth—until I met Ella Young.”

Elsa Gidlow, poet, Druid Heights, Mill Valley

Born in 1867, Co. Antrim, and educated in Dublin, Young joined the Celtic Revival, a political and cultural movement opposing British colonialism (1880s-1920s). Irish political organizer “Æ” (George Russell), published her poems. In her memoir, she describes bittersweet conversations with revolutionary leader Patrick Pearse, and her bemused impressions of poet W. B. Yeats long before his Nobel prize. Her friend Maud Gonne created the illustrations for Young’s first books, stories of Irish mythology. The idealism of the Celtic Revival fueled a rebellion and independence, but an ensuing civil war killed or exiled many of Young’s friends. In 1925, she emigrated to the US. She would have been considered an old woman—fifty-eight—without husband or fortune.

The people and landscape of America revitalized her; she found new spirits in the natural beauty of California. For seven years she lectured at UC Berkeley. She was a welcomed guest in the counter-cultural gathering places of Carmel and Big Sur, the “Dunes” of San Luis Obispo County, and The Cats in Los Gatos. She is the likely inspiration behind the name “Druid Heights,” the Marin art colony. In her final home of Oceano, near the Theosophist settlement of Halcyon, she is remembered as the “Godmother of the Dunites.”

She brought from Ireland a concept, cóir, found in Irish stories, sometimes translated as “natural balance.” She taught that the land holds spirits, that you can talk to a mountain, and that humans are part of the planet, not here to dominate it. This connection of ecological consciousness to “cosmic consciousness” was Ella’s message for her time and ours. Her strikingly contemporary message is one that California needs today.

No one who met Ella Young ever forgot her. Young’s contemporaries were deeply moved by her passionate reverence for the “beauty of the living earth.” Her influence can be glimpsed in her memoir, Flowering Dusk, in its anecdotes featuring Californian artists, writers, composers, and art patrons: Ansel Adams, Mary Austin, Robinson Jeffers, Elsa Gidlow, John O’Shea, Upton Sinclair, Noel Sullivan, Albert Bender, Edward Weston, Henry Cowell, Gavin Arthur, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O’Keefe, Dorothy Brett, John Varian, Kenneth Morris, W.W. Lyman, Helen Lyman Hoyt, Sara Bard Field, and C. E. S Wood.

About ten years after her death in 1956, historian James Cain interviewed several of Young’s friends, recording first-hand memories.

Among Cain’s interviewees is photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams. Young recognized Adams’s genius in the 1920s, and he created Young’s most famous portrait. Adams ended his autobiography with the “mantra” she gave him:

I know that I am one with beauty
And that my comrades are one
Let our souls be mountains
Let our spirits be stars
Let our hearts be worlds

You can order the print from Jonathan’s store.

Celtic Wonder-Tales was Ella Young’s first collection of Irish myths. Most of her stories were retellings of traditional stories. You can read the entire book on the Sacred Texts Archive. The Earth Shapers was Ella Young’s own original story.

Shortly before she left Ireland, she gave a public lecture at the National Literary Society. The Freeman’s Journal, February 26, 1924, describes the evening.

The Celtic Myth of Creation was the title of a lecture given by Miss Ella Young, B.A., at the National Literary Society, Dawson Street, Dublin, last evening.

She said perhaps it might be asked how do we know that the Celts ever had a myth of creation. But as to whether the Celts had a myth of creation she thought there could be only one opinion. Every race of people had a myth of creation.

The Celtic story of how the world was made had to be picked up in fragments from the remains of their Celtic mythology. Anything that they had with regard to Celtic mythology was in fragments, and for a long time no work was done amongst those fragments. In fact, it was not at all known whether we had any fragments of mythology, and it was not until a great deal of work had been done by Dr Douglas Hyde and others that they began to really have some idea of what a magnificent edifice must once have stood where these fragments only remained.

All historians agreed that there had been five invasions of Ireland, and that the Milesian invasion was the fifth. Four invasions were undoubtedly fragments of mythology.

It was curious that every race liked to begin with stories of the beginning of the world, and every story of the end of the world was interesting. There must have been a tremendous battle at one time along the West coast and great tribes must have perished.

At the end of the world, according to the Celtic idea, the gods of Light and the gods of Darkness fight together. At the end the gods of Darkness are vanquished.

A cordial vote of thanks was passed to the lecturer. Dr Douglas Hyde presided, and there was a large attendance.

Holythorn Press has released a fine collectible edition of Ella Young’s Flowering Dusk in a limited run of 300 copies. Buy your copy here.

Holythorn has donated the manuscript of Flowering Dusk to the Ella Young society in the hope that we can find a traditional publisher with US distribution who would bring out a trade edition that is less expensive and will stay in print. Please contact us if you can help.

We were delighted to learn that the Oceano Railroad Depot museum in Oceano will be hosting an event celebrating Ella Young Remembered, our transcripts of 1966 interviews with Ella Young’s friends.

The Oceano Depot Association will be hosting local historian, James D. Cain, for a book signing of Ella Young Remembered. This event will be held at the Oceano Railroad Depot at 1650 Front Street on Saturday, June 15, 2024, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Jim Cain, while a school teacher in Santa Maria, had become interested in Ella and her involvement in the 1916 Irish Rising in Ireland. He was also interested in her later years of teaching Irish Folklore at UC Berkeley in California after she had emigrated to America; her books and writings about Irish folklore; and her connections with nature spirits. Jim began researching Ella by interviewing many of her close friends.

Among those friends were Gavin Arthur, grandson of past president of the United States Chester Alan Arthur, photographer Ansel Adams, and people living in and around Oceano. Jim’s recordings of these interviews have been transcribed and presented for the first time in this new book to provide more insight into Ella and her work.

Ella made her final home on Paso Robles Street in Oceano, California, and in 1931, Gavin Arthur established his utopian colony “Moy Mell” in the nearby sand dunes of Oceano. Gavin had known Ella in Ireland, and had also known her in a previous life, and she quickly assumed the title of “Godmother of Moy Mell.”

The Weedon family occupied Ella’s home after she passed away in 1956. They knew about Ella and left many of her personal possessions in place in their home until 2023, when many of those items were donated to the Oceano Depot by family member Mark Weedon. Many of these items will be on display during this event, including Ella’s own ornate writing desk which Jim will use for signing books.

The Depot and Gavin’s Cabin will be open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Refreshments will be provided, along with sales of Ella Young Remembered; other books written about Oceano, and books written by (or about) the Dunites who lived in the sand dunes of Oceano.

For further information contact Linda Austin at hguiton@aol.com

Remembering Ella Young, Interviews by James D. Cain, is now available as an eBook or paperback, published by Tulsk Productions.

• Buy eBook here.

• Buy paperback here.

Despite her influence and timely message, very little documentary evidence of Young’s life exists. Ten years after her death in 1956, historian James Cain interviewed six of Young’s friends, recording first-hand memories. Ella Young Remembered makes the transcripts of these interviews available for the first time.

Photographer Ansel Adams recounts her spiritual mentorship. Sexologist Gavin Arthur reveals her early contributions to secret neo-pagan traditions. Her neighbors John and Gudrun Grell remember philosophical conversations and UFO sightings. Educator W. W. Lyman recounts her friendships with literary and bohemian celebrities. Her friend Jane Thompson paints a picture of her “strange feyness,” and her final hours.

The actual recordings of the Cain interviews have sometimes been difficult to find online, but last year the Cain family uploaded them to the Internet Archive, where they will be preserved.

Ansel Adams

Gavin Arthur

W.W. Lyman

John and Gudrun Grell

Jane Thompson

Support the Internet Archive with a tax-deductible donation here.

A leading Irish-American media outlet has featured Halcyon Days. “The unknown poet who brought Irish mythology to the United States,” features interviews with Tulsk Producers Tony Phillips and Linda Rosewood. The story focuses on Ella Young’s legacy in the US.

“Ella published a variety of literature over her lifespan and her work was a crucial part of the Irish cultural revival of the late 19th century. Her folk tales were of particular significance and she is often credited with bringing Irish mythology to the US. She was also part of California’s famous counterculture movement. However, Ella’s legacy has lived in the shadow of her more famous peers. A dedicated team of Irish and American producers and scholars are hoping to change that.”

Read the rest here.

The Emigrant Support Program (ESP) supports the Irish diaspora worldwide with programs that support the vulnerable, as well as nurture Ireland’s cultural heritage abroad.

Since 2004, the Emigrant Support Programme (ESP) has assisted more than 850 organizations in 51 countries. Grants total over €237 million. Individual grants have ranged from small amounts for grass-roots groups to major allocations awarded to voluntary and community organizations operating on a large scale.

The award was featured in the Ireland House Quarterly, the newsletter of the Consulate General of Ireland, San Francisco.

The grant to Tulsk Productions is possible through the fiscal sponsorship of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society and is the second grant from the ESP to the GLBT Historical Society.

The first grant funded “Out in the World: Ireland’s LBGTQ+ Diaspora” an exhibit at the Historical Society’s museum in the Castro. EPIC, the immigration museum in Dublin was a partner. Out in the World explored six themes and twelve stories, including the life of Gavin Arthur, a close friend of Ella Young.

Cluan Ard, Ella Young’s cabin in Oceano

I’m Linda Rosewood, a producer at Tulsk Productions. In November 2022 I traveled to California with Ella Young’s biographer, Dorothea McDowell to visit places Ella Young knew well.

We were met at the airport by my friend Hilary Hamm. The next day Heather Cline, a friend familiar with the North Bay and funding independent media projects, joined us. The late afternoon found us tramping around the sparse oak forest in St. Helena looking for a legendary redwood grove.

We had been told California pagans had gathered at a grove in St. Helena since the 1930s.

We were on a pilgrimage, I suppose, visiting the places Ella loved, making memories, taking photographs, and collecting relics. We began the pilgrimage where her loved ones returned her immortal atoms to the earth. Like people do with saints.

I know Ella was no saint, but as a former Catholic I recognize this compulsion. We had been told the location of the grove by a man who had last been there in the 1980s. He said look for redwoods, fire scared.

And a clearing.

No one had been there for quite a while; there’s no path from the road. It’s not a place a person would go if they didn’t know it was there.

About ten years after Ella died, her friends recorded their memory of her final ritual. Over her ashes, they spoke words she had written for the occasion.

O earth mother and goddess

To thee we give back this body purified by fire.

May the wind be comrades to it.

May the rain be a benediction,

May the stars look on it with kindness.

May the sun evoke blossoms from this dust.

Be mindful oh Shasta of the spirit,

Blue turquoise mountain first welcomer,

Be mindful of the spirit

May Taos mountain guardian of the sacred lake

Be mindful

May air first nourisher be mindful

May this American hillside be mindful

Never the spirit began

The spirit shall cease to be never.

We said goodbye to Heather after a huge barbecue meal at the Rutherford, and the next day we drove to the top of Mt. Tamalpais. On that clear winter’s day we could see that other sacred mountain, Diablo. Ella spoke of these mountains in her interview on KPFA.

Mount Tamalpais. You can easily make contact with Tamalpais. When I came in ’26, I lived in the Casa Madrone near Tamalpais and greeted that mountain. Mount Diablo is another. And between the two there is a path. And there is also what is called a path from Tamalpais because when I was there I used to hear the fairy music. There is a great and marvelous music that many Americans hear and that many Irish hear. It’s orchestral.

Later that day, we had a meeting at the Irish Consulate in San Francisco and learned about a grant program that might support our work on Halcyon Days, so I spent a good part of January writing a proposal. We will hear if we’re funded in May. Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know.

We spent a few days in Santa Cruz, then drove down the coast. We stopped at Pt. Lobos because Ella loved Pt. Lobos, and met up with our friend Irene, who joined our band of pilgrims.

Point Lobos, that strange promontory, heavy with memories of heathen ceremonies and potent incantations! Lobos is a Dragon with keen mouth unpropitiated. Lobos is to be approached with caution.. I have myself approached it with caution, not to say reverence, and found it gracious. (Ella Young, Flowering Dusk)

The next day we had a date with Norm Hammond at the Oceano museum near Pismo Beach.

Norm loves Ella too, and has done everything he can to keep her memory alive in the local area. He calls her “Godmother of the Dunites.”

The Dunites are legendary, and Norm wrote a book about them.

Meanwhile, a new kind of community was coming into being in the dunes -- a ramshackle cluster of cabins populated by artists, hermits, mystics, nature lovers and Lemurians. (The latter believed the long-lost continent of Lemuria would one day resurface from the depths of the Ocean.)

According to Hammond’s 1992 book “The Dunites,” Spanish-American War veteran, adventurer and poet Edward St. Claire was among the earliest Dunites -- also known as “Sandduners” or “Duners” -- along with such colorful characters such as Slim the Aussie, “Strongman” Paul Henning and George Blais, a reformed alcoholic who preached nudism, vegetarianism and sleeping under the stars. Subsisting primarily on fish and large, plentiful Pismo clams, they saw the dunes as a place of solitude and spiritual enlightenment.

According to [Jan] Scott, the Dunites fell into two main groups: “the artists who wanted the freedom to live as and be who they chose to be, creating as they went, and the castoffs of the Depression, who had little or no choice about where to live. The beach was it.”

Perhaps the highest-profile Dunite was Gavin Arthur, born Chester Alan Arthur III. At times an actor, author, astrologer and sexologist. …

Rejecting his aristocratic roots, Arthur moved to Ireland in the early 1920s to aid the Irish Republican Army in its battle for independence. “He connected with Ella Young and she became one of the most influential people in his life,” Reid explained, renewing that relationship when the Irish poet emigrated to the United States.

“The Dunites: Building a Utopia in the Oceano Dunes” (KCET)

The cabin of Ella’s friend Gavin is part of the museum, with an exhibit (shrine?) to Ella in the corner.

Norm had arranged for us to visit Ella’s garden.

The current owner, Mark Weedon, would be our guide. His family have been the only residents since Ella died there. He said his mother welcomed people like us, seeking a connection with Ella, for many years.

We had heard all about The Dunites, but it was a mystery to us how anyone could live in the barren dunes of Pismo, now overrun with vehicles. Irene suggested we visit Oso Flaco nearby, where the natural dunes are preserved.

When we got there, the Dunites made sense. The dunes are a thriving, wild, lively scrub forest, full of birds and shade, and hidden lakes.

They are a treasure and a wonder.

It’s more than a mile from the parking lot to the shore. By the time you get there, you’ve been on a journey for sure.

The sun was beginning to set.

Irene’s pictures are breathtaking, and she’s going to publish them.

As I looked to the north and the south, I was reminded of an Irish beach described by Ella in Flowering Dusk. Ella wrote:

I am staying with Maud Lloyd, the artist, in her house at Inch, County Kerry. It is a strong two-story house built of stone and stands on a hill—the only house on the hill, with no other house in sight. Far below stretches the whole country-side; the great strand of Inch, the Atlantic a-wash on its border; the sand dunes; the deep inlet of the sea beyond and behind the sand dunes; the range of Macgillycuddy’s Reeks sharp-pointed against the sky. Maud Lloyd is at home here, for she loves to paint the whole ranges of mountains, river-inlets, and meadows.

It is early Spring—the loveliest time of year in this part of Ireland. … The strand, colored like pale ivory, stretches for miles—only sea-birds there and ourselves! The full moon edges the long, incoming waves with silver flame—the new moon is silver and rose. But the strand is the most wonderful thing. It is very slightly inclined to the sea, and when the waves make an onset they run up very far, leaving their comrades as it were bunched in wonderment a long way out.

I journeyed to the beach of Oso Flaco like a good pilgrim. I sat down like Ella would have and watched a sunset. Just like at Inch, Ella found a home here among the artists and revolutionaries. Just like at Inch, she found the wild ocean to the west, dunes to the east, and a dark promontory cradling the northern horizon. Just like at Inch, a wide ivory beach runs north to south with its small waves reaching duneward leaving their comrades behind.

Perhaps Ella never returned to Ireland because she never left it.

The beach at Oso Flaco, San Luis Obispo County, California

The beach at Inch, Dingle, Co. Kerry.

Give this interview on KCBX a listen (4 minutes). Besides hearing more about our Halcyon Days project, you will hear an excerpt of Ella’s radio interview from the 1950s, and an excerpt from our play, The Morrigan.

The Dunites remain legend in California Central Coast communities.

Ella Young described the Dunites like this:

I remember the Dunes—all sun-slant, sea-going pelicans, and perturbed sea-swallows and sand-pipers—on a day when the folk of the Halcyon Temple gave a picnic. John and Agnes Varian took me in their car to the beach. Gavin Arthur was there and Ellen Janson, the poet, with her husband, Maurice Browne, and their small boy-child, Praxy. They had a car, and soon we all piled into it, and raced southward to where Point Sal showed purple-blue against a sparkling sea and a sun-filled sky. Ellen and Maurice told us (Gavin and myself) of hermits who lived in that sky- devastated wilderness. Lived year in and year out, for they had found hidden oases where willow trees grew and water could be had for the digging. Every hermit had an oasis all to himself. It was his territory. He needed to be about two miles away from his nearest neighbour. His little tent or cavelike shack must be securely hidden: it must not afront any eye, even his own. He must feel that he discovered it, stumbled upon it by accident so to speak, when he returned from a foray, seaward with net and clamfork, or landward to a lettuce field or carrot pleasaunce. The hermits, nurtured by Providence, could meditate on eternity, write verses, or in beneficent mood ray out blessings to the Universe.

(Flowering Dusk)