Janet Hyland's Paintings : Scribbles on Wood: SKELLIG MICHAEL

They were filming the new Star Wars movie at Skellig Michael,off west coast of Ireland, this summer.Its a 6th Century Celtic Christian community of beehive huts with links to the first monastic/anchorite communities in the Egyptian Desert.The production crew must have seen its futuristic qualities! In fact it is timeless, and that would have been the intention of the monks, to be out of time and out of this world. They lived an austere existence,like those forest isolates who created The Upanishads.

Celtic Christianity had links with Egypt by sea, not land.Theirs was a different landscape,inside and outside.Evidence of that is on the Romanesque arch at Dysert O'Dea where Chinese and African faces are carved next to exotic animals representing the whole world as they knew it, well travelled in their vessels that took them far and deep.Celtic christianity was not part of the Dark Ages,but full of light. Dysert means desert, a concept brought with the monks from their origins.So they resourced their psyches on Skellig Michael in the nothingness of sea and sky and light. How to be in peace with nothing.Very few succeed in that.They lived the big adventure.

They also lived in vibrant communities, monks with wives and children and tonsures that resembled long haired druids shaved back from the forehead to the ears. See Dysert O'dea or Kilmacduagh for ruins of these early celtic communities.They are all stunning places to visit.