Becoming your best
For 14 years Noreen Walshe made her living as a teacher, standing before students in places like St Patrick's Classical School in Navan, outlining to them the intricacies of Irish, music and French.
Then she gave it up. She was drawn in another direction by a compulsion she found she was unwilling - and perhaps unable - to resist. She wanted to become an painter, an artist.
Regrets? No, she has none, not even a few. If given the chance she would do it all again; give up the permanent, pensionable job, to follow her instincts, to be true to herself.
Over the past 40 years, Noreen Walshe has worked as an artist. She has found those years extremely fulfilling, happy - and if she was to once more stand before a group of young - or perhaps not-so-young people - she would tell them to also follow their instincts; to discover their "life's purpose" and go for it.
"You have to find your soul, you have to find that inner core and for me it resides in my gut, in the solar plexus. When I know something is right for me I will go with it. If I feel it is not I will forget it, wild horses wouldn't take me there.
"My gut feeling around painting was like a radiant sun, 'come follow me you will be ok' it seemed to be saying and it has been ok, much more than ok."
When you enter the bright house Noreen shares with her husband Gerry Harte near Lismullen National School, it's like entering a spacious art gallery, a cornucopia of colour. There are paintings all around, of polar bears, a fox, a hare, a field of blue; images of nature conveyed through oils, acrylics and watercolours; superb works that demonstrate her talents.
Her paintings have been bought by people like Michael D Higgins and Brendan Gleeson. She has had exhibitions in places such as her native Limerick and New York. She is constantly creating; seeking to turn ideas into something tangible yet intrinsically artistic. Expressions.
She has just published a book - 'The Christmas Parcel' - a collection of paintings and recollections - or "distillations" as she calls them - from her youth, particularly of her parents and the life they lived at Yuletide in Limerick. The book is self-published but brilliantly produced, the end product of years of painstaking work. When she does something she seeks to do it well.
In one of the distillations based on her memories of dinner on Christmas Day, Noreen recounts how: "Invoked by many father's stories, long departed friends would saunter in, straight from the world of spirit and sit casually among us."
In another passage the atmosphere of Christmas morning in Limerick for a small child is also powerfully conjured up. "The fire is blazing in the grate and Gorman's chimney is sending plumes of white smoke into the early morning sky. A delicious sense of happiness fills my shivering body. Christmas has come."
FAMILY
When she was born, Noreen Walshe's father, Thomas Walshe (who worked with the Limerick Leader) was 52, her mother Mary was 45. Noreen was an only child and that fact, she says, was a big factor in shaping what she became.
"If you are an only child the world is different, it's very, very different. You become the maker of an inner world of imagination because that's what you have to draw on. If I had siblings I don't think I would have developed my creative side as deeply as I have done and, of course, that's an ongoing process.
"I live very happily in my inner world, very content, ok there are lots of moments when I need my friends, when I need to go out, but the two things I do, painting and writing, are by nature solitary pursuits when you can't have anyone in your headspace." She fondly remember how her dad had a favourite saying: "The best is yet to come." She still uses it now herself.
Noreen says that since bringing out the book a number of people have contacted her about their own recollections and memories of their childhood. The night before she spoke to the Meath Chronicle she had just received a call from a childhood friend in Limerick who told her that her granddaughter was going to base a school project on Noreen's paintings in 'The Christmas Parcel.'
"That really knocked me sideways and I thought 'oh my God that is so lovely.' This is something precious because it is a way of touching and reaching people and I suppose it's the fulfillment of an ultimate desire, that desire to write a book. It shows that there can be an impulse inside us all that is too strong to curb. Certainly when I want to create, I'm going to create."
'The Christmas Parcel' is her second book. The first was 'Moving Carpet' a collection of her paintings she published in 2001 - a year she will never forget for all sorts of reasons.
NEW YORK
In the August of that fateful year Noreen Walshe had an exhibition of her paintings in the Irish Arts Centre in New York. She was delighted to get the chance to show off her work in the Big Apple and it went well. After the exhibition had opened she went back to her home in Meath but the time came for her to return to New York and take back the paintings that remained once the exhibition was over.
In early September, the day before she was to fly from Ireland to New York, she was introduced to a man in a friend's house in Longford. The man turned out to be a psychic. In the course of the conversation Noreen said to him she was planning to travel to New York but he warned her not to go alone. "He said to me there was 'trauma and aggression' around where you are going, on no account to travel alone."
Her husband Gerry (who she met in University College Galway in the 1970s, and who she describes as "my rock for 40 years") quickly changed his plans to ensure he would accompany her across the Atlantic.
They moved into a hotel in Manhattan. They spent a few days preparing the paintings to be returned to Ireland but she also received an invitation to showcase some of her work in a well-known, upmarket men's clothes shop near Wall Street. Everything was running smoothly. Everything was looking just fine.
The next morning it seemed like the world had gone mad when two planes crashed into the nearby Twin Towers. "We could see on TV how the planes went into the buildings. It scared the living daylights out of us. Within about half-an-hour of it all happening we went out to Central Park, we just wanted to get out of the hotel, and there were people all around, mass hysteria. We could see the smoke, the horizon all blackening up and everybody was running for shelter.
"There were rumours at that stage that there might be some kind of chemical warfare attack happening as well. We went back into the hotel and stayed there for the day, it was very scary. Once we saw on TV the planes crashing into the buildings we knew we were in trouble. We didn't get out of New York for two weeks. I haven't been back there since."
That, however, is not the case when it comes to Canada, a country she loves and hopes to return to in the not-too-distant future. It was there, while photographing polar bears, she got the idea for 'The Christmas Parcel.'
When she gets an idea and feels in her gut that it's the right thing to do Noreen Walshe will go at it full on. In February she came up with the idea of creating a series of homewear products based on some of her paintings. She was undaunted by the lockdown that arrived soon after. She pushed ahead determined to see the concept come to fruition.
She now offers a range of art and homeware products which can be accessed on noreenwalshe.com. "I was working on my book and around the 10th February I said to myself: 'Oh my God I think I'll have some lamps and cushions handmade, just a few. I went to Donegal, where my suppliers and manufacturers are, and 10 days later I had set up a business. Yes, I set up a business in lockdown absolutely that's what you do, isn't it!!"
Some might have advised her against doing such a thing but Noreen Walshe doesn't do regrets. She's had "a wonderful life" so far, she says, and there's many other projects in the pipeline. That advice to any young, or not-so-young people who might ask, still holds.
Follow your gut feelings. "Find your soul," as she puts it.