“If self is a location, so is love.
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points.
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance.
Here and there and now and then, a stance.”

(Seamus Heaney, from “The Aerodrome”)

The Irish Poet Seamus Heaney has died today. I am sad but also grateful for the many good times and thoughts I’ve had while reading his poetry.

The above poem is one of my favourites. “If self is a location, so is love“. How would that be? Now and then I have thought about the image of love as a location. If love was like the sea, a place you can go to and feel calmed by the waves and the freshness of the air and the endless horizon and the grey-blue nothingness of the sea – if love was like that, that would be so comforting. I suppose what was meant actually is that love is a location inside you, like your self. Anyway, …

I’ve been introduced to Seamus Heaney by a friend who gave me a copy of “The Haw Lantern” for Christmas in 1995, the year Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Later, while studying English Literature I read more of his books and ever since I loved his amazingly clear defined language and the metaphors he used for everything that is life and always will be – timeless, like his poetry.