Halcyon Days

In the early 1920s, Ella Young, a fifty-something Irish poet, is living in newly independent Ireland. Her publication of ancient Celtic myths inspired the cultural revival necessary to ignite Ireland’s separation from Great Britain. While Ella took an active part in rebellion and war, the new country offers little to a woman like herself, indifferent to husbands and priests. 

Seeking solace and direction, Ella enlists the help of friends and embarks on a speaking tour of America, where she will recount Irish folk tales to children. Her tour is popular, but it is not children who sit at her feet and listen, it’s their parents: Irish immigrants hungering for connection to their culture and ancestors. Ella restores to them stories of struggling heroes, half-forgotten place names and ancestral landscapes. Irish Americans have never lost their thirst for these sources of connection.

When her speaking tour ends, Ella takes the train as far west as she can. In Taos and the Bay Area she experiences the deserts and redwood forests. She finds kinship with the indigenous people of this new continent, as she also experienced with the people of the west of Ireland.

Ella never returns to Ireland. Instead, she lives a wandering life among artists and poets, beatniks, and weirdos of California. Through the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, she adapts her Irish mystical tradition, teaching that the world contains creatures wiser than ourselves, and that nature is sacred and deserves our protection. These are familiar notions now, but not so then.

Dressed in purple robes, rings on every finger, Ella Young delivered lectures and told Irish stories at UC Berkeley for many years. By the end of her long life, she had partied with bishops, chanted rituals at Shasta, debated with vegans, rode horses with millionaires, picnicked with laureates, and encountered fairies at Point Lobos. The most famous photograph of herself was taken by her friend Ansel Adams, an artist she recognised and promoted.

Ella left us one recording, a radio interview about how to talk to a mountain. No one on the radio had ever claimed that the earth was a living goddess. Ella Young is the ancestor of every passionate tree-sitter, neopagan witch, and grubby permaculturalist. No one who met her ever forgot her. She restored their connection with the sacred in nature, everyone’s rightful inheritance.

You’ve never heard of her. Once you hear her story, you’ll never forget Ella Young.

Tulsk Productions is creating Halcyon Days, a limited-series podcast about Ella Young, with the eventual goal of making a film. You can support Halcyon Days by sharing this website and making a tax-deductible contribution.