Flowering Dusk – Ella Young (Holythorn Press)

Description

Ella Young wrote Flowering Dusk, Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately when she was 76 years old, living alone in a cottage near the beach, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Though she had published books of stories for children and poetry for adults, she had never written about herself.

 

Flowering Dusk is both episodic and beautiful. At first glance, Book One, Eire, is a source for unique anecdotes about her more famous Irish friends including W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, Standish and Margaret O’Grady, Pádraic Pearse (an educator like herself), Maud Joynt, Æ George Russell, Helen Laird, and Mia Cranwill.

 

Book Two, America, recounts Ella Young’s life after an unexpected emigration. Many people, especially women, of Ella’s generation saw their feminist and mystical ideals crushed in an independent Ireland. In 1925, a 58-year-old Ella Young left Ireland for a US speaking tour and never returned. In her new home she found a revitalizing natural beauty and a wide circle of friends among the artists and bohemians of the mid-century. Her circle included Ansel Adams, Chester “Gavin” Arthur, Elsa Gidlow, Robinson and Una Jeffers, John O’Shea, Henry Cowell, and John and Agnes Varian. She initiated friends into an occult order of her own invention, first called The Fellowship of the Four Jewels, and later The Fellowship of Shasta. The group existed from the 1930s until long after her death, at least until the 1980s. It is in this second half of her life where we find the deeper importance of this memoir noticeably unconcerned with the contextual details of her legendary friends.

 

Ella Young brought an ethos of Irish mythology – it can be  called “Kinship with the Earth” – to everyone she met. Through her stories, beliefs, and poetry, she restored people’s connection with the sacred in nature. She taught that the land holds spirits, that you can talk to a mountain, and that humans are part of the planet, not here to dominate it. This connection of ecological consciousness to daily life was Ella’s wisdom for her friends, students, and ourselves.

[Introduction by Linda Rosewood]