Wayfaring Guides
Frankie Kelly & Susan Reed
Susan grew up in Southern Appalachia, in the world’s oldest mountains. Her ancestral roots extend to Ireland and Scotland from the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as from 16th century England. As the terrain, ecology, and Scots-Irish inflected culture of Appalachia formed her early years, the bridge to Ireland and Scotland was short and familiar. / Her formal education includes: B.A., interdisciplinary studies (cross-cultural studies & ethno-musicology), Appalachian State University; M.A. in culture and spirituality from Holy Names Univ.; a graduate certificate in expressive arts, & doctorate in educational leadership, both from ASU. / Susan’s work has often placed her at the margins of formal institutions, as a cultural worker, and social, political and environmental activist–educator and researcher. Peace and social justice, and environmental and economic justice movements have shaped her worldview, and work and lifestyle choices. The Arts have both informed her under-standing of the world, and served as an important avenue for expressing her work in the world. Susan is a writer and researcher, and intermittently teaches in the Department of Sustainable Development at ASU. / She lived in Ireland for a year and a half from 1993-1995.
We began Celtic Wayfaring in 1997, when our son, Oisín ("usheen") was almost two years old. With our familial, ancestral, and psychic roots in Frankie's home turf, our modest venture was conceived as a practical way to help us get our family back & forth across The Pond. Our "tiny business" was to serve our commitment to a bicultural marriage and connections to Frankie's large extended family and many friends. We especially wanted Oisín and Rhiannon to be able to build and maintain enduring connections with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and numerous cousins––as well as to the landscape and rich heritage that is also theirs. We quickly learned that sharing Ireland with others is also deeply fulfilling, and so, our little project, Celtic Wayfarers, became a labor of love.
Rhiannon & Oisín at Newgrange, Celtic Wayfarers' tour, 1999
We first met in 1992 in Oakland, CA where we were both studying culture and spirituality. We were married at Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation (photo below) in Co. Wicklow, Ireland, around the feast of Imbolc, 1995. A few months later, we moved to North Carolina to care for Susan's mother.
Our shared interests include re/search into new language, concepts, symbols and embodied practices with which to understand, reimagine, express, and transpose the human and more-than-human conditions in our rapidly, dramatically changing world. This search inspires our interests, studies, and practices in philosophy, cosmology, mythology, dreams, ritual, feminism, politics and social justice, psychology, nature and ecology, poetry and the Arts, and the radical imagination.
Here we are in 1997...
We employ local people in several places along the journey who serve as specialist guides and interpreters of local
culture, and contribute to reflection and/or ritual.
Frankie grew up on a farm in the northwest of Ireland (County Leitrim), where his grandmother taught him the names of flowers and birds, and he was put on night-watch during lambing season. His love of nature and cosmology was fostered by the night sky, the weather, and turn of the seasons. / He received his undergraduate education at Maynooth, a constituent college of National University of Ireland (with a B.Sc. in physics, chemistry & mathematics, and a B.D. in theology). Following his ordination to the Catholic priesthood in 1974, he completed a Higher Diploma in Education, also at Maynooth. He has an M.A. in culture & spirituality from Holy Names University, Oakland, CA; and a graduate certificate in expressive arts from Appalachian State. / He was in ministry for nineteen years, during which time he worked in secondary education, and parish and youth ministries. His most recent work in Ireland was with the homeless in Dublin. Frankie retired in June 2021 after 21 years at Caldwell Community College, where he taught philosophy, religion, ethics, mythology, and cosmology & consciousness
Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.
~ W.B. Yeats
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When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not.
~ John McGahern