New Pathways
Finding Comfort and Creative Strength in a Cruel and an Ugly World.
To celebrate summer 2025, I am offering a paid support special. Until Labor Day, all paid support is 50% off forever. You can sign up for paid support or upgrade your current free subscription below. All paid support goes toward my teenage daughter’s future higher education.
I want to welcome and thank my newest paid subscriber . Diamond-Michael writes the Substacks The Daily Chocolate Taoist ™, Great Books + Great Minds and Black Books + Black Minds, Great Books + Great Cities and Great Books + Great Brands.
Until I take my last breath. I will still be learning new things. Lifelong learning has given me comfort, creativity, faith and community.
Most of all, it has made me centered. Time and humanity in 2025 feel agitated and spinning apart toward nothingness. Cruelty appears to serve as the only adhesive keeping life together.
But that is a lie nourished by exhaustion and terror.
The Nobel-prize winning Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote in his poem “The Second Coming,”
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Activists tell us self-care and self-love are vitals so we can nourish and rejuvenate. We need to find revelation and second coming in our own ways to stay sane and survive.
Soon I will registe for not only a beginning photography class but also a beginning class in learning the Irish language also known as Gaeilge.
My husband asks, “Don't you think you should become fluent in Italian before learning another language?” Yes. Most likely he’s right.
I cannot ignore the pull though to dive deeper into my Irish roots. Since visiting the Republic of Ireland for the first time last year, I’ve wanted to better understand my ancestors and their native language. My cousin is doing a deeper dive into our family tree that my great aunt completed in the mid-twentieth century; we already knew our earliest relatives emigrated from County Donegal in the 19th century. Donegal mostly speaks Irish.
Years ago when I was being treated for my multiple sclerosis, I had started studying Italian. One of the neurology nurses told me that learning a new language or anything new opens neural pathways. Neuroplasticity is so important.
The Irish language will definitely open new neural pathways. For those of us who have English as our first language, the combination of Irish vowels and Irish consonants seem unpronounceable.
My daughter’s first name is Irish and only two Americans have ever recognized her name is Irish and pronounced it correctly. They are already familiar with languages. The majority of Americans still pronounce it phonetically even after I tell them her name is Irish and pronounce it correctly for them.
Registration for beginning Irish at Chicago’s Irish American Heritage Center begins in August Until then I have been watching credible YouTube videos explaining the Irish alphabet, broad and slender vowels, aspiration and lenition and how to pronounce two consonants together.
I have also done some Duolingo Irish and reading about Irish’s grammatical structure that is verb-subject-object. As my MS progresses and the United States sinks deeper into a fascist autocracy, I know I need to carve out new neuropathways. Learning Italian, Irish and photography will continue to do that.
They will be my sanctuary and balancing machines when it seems “the centre cannot hold.” My main hope is that they will further tear down the veil of lies working to block truth and demoralize us.
You are an inspiration, Laura.