Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  Every February I have dreams of the February I have just recounted. This February, during a fierce Atlantic storm, I took my own van from Derry along the coastline, across that border of increasingly tumultuous clamour, to Sligo. When I awoke from a night of dreaming in a van, I had not dreamed of a van. I only remember one dream from that stormy night, and it was both surreal and deeply moving in equal measure.

  In the dream I was living in a previous home and I had a shelf full of found objects from wild places. There were seed pods, mermaid purses and a row of the roundest pebbles imaginable. There were shells the shapes of which were so daedal it was as if they had been sculpted in another world. There were fragile, hollow bones, bleached white over centuries. But the most beautiful object of all, that shelved article which I have not yet shaken out from my mind, months later, was a dead butterfly.

  It had been laid atop the wood exactly as it had been found, its wings folded over on themselves, like the painted versions we used to make at school. Do you remember? The teacher would hand you a perfectly symmetrical paper creature and let you place little dots of paint all over one wing only. Next you would fold the other wing over upon the first, gently massaging the liquid paint. And next, the waiting game: would yours be as beautiful as the real-life ones? Never, of course, could this have been the case. The dream butterfly, like the painted, mirror ones from our childhoods, had folded in upon itself but its exquisite markings could still be made out on those fragile wings. It was the most understated shade of brown – full of autumn, with splashes of furry burnt orange, like leaves on top of drying mulch. On the underside of the hind wing, there was a curve of small spots that looked like eyes. Right at the point I saw the eyes, the creature unfolded itself, slowly and with such delicacy, and flew off the shelf, encircling me, leaving me in no doubt whatsoever of its real state of existence. She was a beautiful – and very much living – Large Heath butterfly.

  I awoke to the sound of apocalyptic rain battering the van roof, as if the land were in battle. I drove further along the Wild Atlantic Way as the storm threw horizontal sheets of rain down onto the grey, swollen world. In the early evening, when a phone signal could be had, I logged into Instagram to find my feed full of insects of every type – a collective response to a devastating article the Guardian had just published about rapid insect decline, full of heart-wrenching, panicking truths. A handful of hours after a dream in which an insect thought dead proved to be alive, I read the news that within a century they could ALL be gone. How are we meant to go on from here? The only thought I had was: I have no words. Not in the way that the teenagers around me ‘literally can’t even’ but in the way of: I am living on my home island, on the soil of my ancestors, and I don’t even have the word for butterfly in my native language. It began to seep in then. The loss of the ability to name both the landscape and the creatures we share it with in Irish began to sink in. An incomparable loss has been touching the wider world, growing with each news report we hear, during my lifetime. Somehow I had always viewed that loss of wild things as being unrelated to the loss in my homeland, as though they could not really be spoken of in the same breath. But I started to feel an ache, a deep sorrow, when I began to see it all in the clear light of day. How interconnected, how finely woven every single part of it all was. In Ireland, the loss we experienced has had a rippling impact on our sense of self and our place in the world, which has its impact on our ability to speak out, to protect, to name. Our history, our culture, our land, our identity: we have had so much taken away from us – we were never given any of it back.

  For the first time properly in a long time, I felt the loss of things, of precious things – the loss of things I realised I could not even name.

  Moths and butterflies hold more than unrivalled beauty on their wings, though; they act as indicators of so much within our world. Almost everything can be looked at more deeply through the study of moths and butterflies: birth, genetics, death and more. The words ‘fragile’ and ‘delicate’ are often used when we talk about these graceful, beauteous insects but when I think of them I am taken by their inherent ability to endure, by the strength that a creature so small must hold within itself in order to traverse such distances across time and place. I hold them in my mind as creatures bathed in resilience, brimming with wonder.

  In old Irish folklore, butterflies were the souls of the dead and it was unlucky to harm one. The Red Admiral butterfly, however, was thought to be the devil and was persecuted. The idea of the butterfly as the embodiment of the soul implies their ability to cross into the Otherworld. My ancestors often saw no boundary at all between wild places and that Otherworld which we cannot see.

  •

  After university, I left Ireland at the very first chance I got and moved ‘across the water’ – first to Edinburgh, then Bristol –

  desperate to strip away all the layers of trauma that a childhood of devastating violence had left in its wake. I was drawn to the wildest parts of that neighbouring island – highlands and islands, forests and woods, bodies of water of every shape and form. Those parts of the land and water became a form of refuge for me, a way of getting through.

  I’m not really sure if it was a conscious thing exactly, this seeking out of special places, like the ones my grandfather spoke of. Out of all my broken-up, aching family, he was the one who offered me constancy and guidance. When he called me on the landline every Sunday evening, the first thing he asked me was if I’d gone anywhere over the weekend. If I’d got outside the flat – outside Dublin, Cork or Edinburgh – what he was really asking was if I’d found somewhere I could feel outside the past. There could be no doubt about it whatsoever: the Sunday evenings when I had managed to drag myself out into the natural world – to beaches and rivers, loughs and canals, fields and islands – everything felt different. I don’t know if I could honestly say that things felt better but I think that maybe I felt a little more at ease with the sorrow and anxiety that I was struggling to throw off. Slowly, and with very little consciousness of what I was doing, I began to take myself into places where vast but quiet shifts took place in me.

  I don’t know if such places as Grianan of Aileach, Treshnish on the Isle of Mull, Mwnt cove on the Ceredigion coast or the Cornish Merry Maidens have a name in any other language. I don’t know if anyone else refers to these places as being ‘skull places’, or ‘places of shade’. I don’t know if my grandfather ever spoke of them to anyone else; he never did once in my company. I have never, and never will, google the term gifted to me by my grandfather. Some things are best left as they are. In Ireland, these places are often referred to as áiteanna tanaí, caol áit – thin places.

  Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience. After years of visiting such places away from Ireland, I heard a voice calling me back, a soft but insistent cry: a call back to my own áiteanna tanaí.

  A call back to the land that made me, that wounded and broke me, the land that turned out to be the only place that held the power for me to heal. A call back to places that I know my grandfather sought out, and maybe his grandfather before him, too.

  Some places are ports in what can be – for many people – a life both unsettled and stormy, spaces in which you can leave that which is familiar, all that you hold to be true, and move closer to all that is unknown. Closer to what some may view as the divine, the otherworldly: that which is rooted in something both constant, yet continuously ebbing and flowing. They are in many ways a form of stopping place, liminal space that feels like it has been set aside for silence and deep, raw solitude. To carve out room within ourselves – unintentionally, even – to imagine what lies beyond the here and the now. Places where the veil is thin allow for pauses in the flow of what we know – or think we know – of time. A place to imagine what it all might
mean, how we have been, how we maybe could be – a space to more clearly see a way through.

  The lives each of us has lived is ours alone. Our trauma and suffering, our joys and hopes are ours alone, no matter who we may have shared them with. The things that we need to help us get by are, of course, just as individual. There are as many ways to try to heal a wound as there are paths through a housing estate, forest, coastline or corridor. For some of us, place is one of those lines in the tarmac – a clearing in the brambles, a lighthouse, safe harbour. Places that anchor, nurture and hold us do not have to be beautiful, cut-off, or even what might be described as wild. I’m not just talking about forests, mountains and wild coves. I am also thinking about supermarket car parks with even just one tree, the back of housing estates where life has been left to exist, dump-piles in burnt-out factories where insects glisten, dirty streams at the edges of things – full of waste but still brimming with something like renewal. Places can be abandoned, dangerous, rugged or broken – haunted by the ghosts of dark memories – but still they might help us find a way through, a sense of safety – even just for a little while. There is so much life in the places around us and, sometimes, for some of us, somehow, this helps us to value our own life. Maybe even at times when the act of staying alive is a daily struggle.

  Battles, governments, laws, leaders – borders – come and go, but the land and its sacred places remain unmoved and unchanged in their core. There are some places in this broken, burning and bleeding world in which I have experienced moments – fleeting but clear as winter light – where I feel hope like the beat of moth-wings on my skin. There are still places on this earth that sing of all that came and left, of all that is still here and of all that is yet to come. Places that have been touched, warmed, by the presence of something. By its heat, by its breath, by the beat of its heart. Places that hold on their surface a shadow-trace left behind by something we can still sense but no longer see.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Bridge of Sorrows

  EVEN AS A CHILD, I could see no way of staying in my hometown. The edges of the broken and breaking city never quite held themselves in place, and my own family life mirrored those fractures. There was just so much loss all around me. Everywhere I turned seemed stabbed right through, constantly punctured by the outside world. The past, present and future all seemed to blend into one, and every single part of the story held sorrow that I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how deep I tried to bury it. So many different things – situations, times of year, people – made the bad things rise up from inside to bite me again. Triggers, I know that now. It left me feeling scared, hollowed out and with no control over any of it, not really knowing how to make it – any of it – stop.

  I grew up, to start with, in a terraced house on a rough grey council estate. Rather, I started my growing up in the garden of that house, spending as much time knee-deep in the mud that never really dried out due to the unstoppable rain that swept in from the Atlantic. Ours is a past steeped in rust, a history bathed in thick black squelch, mudlarking, always, for our sense of self.

  If I had to describe that first house I would struggle. I remember a yellow teapot on the top shelf of a chipped red dresser in the kitchen, which looked out onto the garden. If on the other hand you asked me to describe that small space enclosed by tall grey concrete walls, filled with the sounds of the next-door neighbours fighting through windows that wouldn’t close properly, I could outline that garden for you in perfect and minute detail. I spent most of my early childhood, no matter the season, in that man-made jungle of a garden. I was outside every chance I got. I was outside because it simply made no sense to me to be indoors. My parents would find me, utterly transfixed and bogging dirty, hands holding all sorts of treasure. I’d beg them to close their eyes and open their grown-up hands so I could fill them with the wonder of the living, breathing, dying world. Broken bricks in the corner of the back yard filled up with ladybirds in descending size order, each limb and wing compared and contrasted against its brother or sister. Frogs would come to our garden from the stream at the bottom of our housing estate to die and I buried each one with a handwritten poem. I grieved for them so deeply, so fully; I remember feeling their loss like a wounded knee. During those early days in our housing estate’s concrete, impoverished world I learned so much about just getting through. I didn’t realise this for many decades though, and it took me many more years of growth to understand that sometimes, out of concrete cracks, hardy, bright poppies appear in places where no seed has been planted.

  Back then, the city of Derry had seen twenty years of civil war in its public spaces – our sacred and safe places – which had resulted in a deep-rooted fear, the ripples of which could be felt in more than just the devastating human loss that was visible. When whole streets are burned down, and the face of a city changed beyond recognition, very few folk notice their disconnect with the natural world. When you’ve no home to go to because it’s been petrol bombed, seeking the wonder of the wild world is not a priority. Derry was a dark city to be in for my childhood and I was scared. That first housing estate was completely Protestant. As a child I knew the disgusting words being thrown around my street as loosely as lemonade-bottle petrol bombs were about Catholics just like my mum. I knew everything could go up in smoke at any moment, as you were walking to buy credit to feed the ‘poverty bells’ – the squealing electricity meter.

  The worse things got in our council estate – children being suffocated with flags for being from the wrong street, punishment beatings, cats being burned within inches of their lives as a warning to their unwelcome owners – the more I retreated into myself. I stopped talking and would sit at the bottom of our garden alone, facing the grey plaster wall for hours. I grew wordless – trapped under the weight of the violence, silently screaming out from under the frozen river.

  Loss and violence swallowed the verges of things and I watched from the corner as my childhood was eaten up. The shadow that my hometown made of itself – and of all those still held within – left no space for anything else, there was too much darkness to even try to grow. The Troubles have left scars that run too deep to see. I left at the earliest point I could, but none of those new places gave me the feeling of home I was so desperately searching for. I wore loss and sorrow on the surface of my weathered young skin. I ran from place to place, rootless, lonely, and never quite knowing how to ask anyone to help me back up from underneath the hard black ice.

  Time, as we know, like the sea, is a force and a creature all of its own. We can stop neither of them. We stand on the sand, watching as the days become years, as the line made by the tide disappears, as the hungry waves devour the borderline that once defined the land. People, places, experiences and the act of living a life, our days come together and we find we have grown; we are being carried in time’s salty course. I found myself, a third of the way through the year that was 2016, at the age of thirty-one, returning to my hometown of Derry, doing the one thing I’d promised myself I would never, ever do.

  I had spent my teens and all of my twenties absolutely desperate to get away, to pretend I was the same as other people my age, who hadn’t lived through what I had, who weren’t carrying things the like of which I was still carrying and feeling like I had to pretend weren’t there. When I look back now I see that it was much more about embarrassment and an inexplicable sense of shame than it was about the past itself. We all became – many of us did, anyhow – so set on trying to gloss over it all, those violent, terrifying memories, so keen to try to make sure none of it ever came back. It felt a wee bit like being a child again and again and again. Did you ever spend days obsessed with the idea of your loved ones dying, your house burning down, your favourite toy or book being stolen, and the only way to stop any of it, to make sure it didn’t happen, was not to step on the cracks on the pavement? To hold your breath until you reached the bottom stair. If it was only red cars that passed your window then everything would be okay,
nothing bad would happen that day at all. If I played it all down, just gave one or two small, inconsequential details of my childhood – if I kept enough of it back that it was at least slightly believable – it’d all be fine. If I didn’t have to keep saying how fine I was – how it was grand, sure; so many people had been through so much worse; and sure, hadn’t I got so lucky – then I would fade into the background. I wouldn’t risk feeling that I was being pitied, doubted, viewed as a damaged and broken thing.

  Every time something new happened to fill my life with worry and pain, or an old wound was forcibly reopened, it felt too ridiculous to even try to share it with those I had built a new life around. It wasn’t that my friends and colleagues were not caring and supportive people; they very much were, and still are. It was just that sometimes even the explanations are too much to bear. So I tried to deal with it all myself, not in any selfless way, but because I had no coping skills that would allow me to let those around me step in close, close enough that they could try to understand the way it all fitted together, the way my present was weighed down by a past that wouldn’t go away.

  I’d been struggling silently for well over a decade to find the courage to resurface from under the frozen river, to let the light flood into the parts that scared – and scarred – me to my core. At the time I told no one how badly I was feeling. That I felt sick when I thought of myself, when I thought of my past. I told no one that – grateful though I was for so much in my life – most days the overriding feeling was still helplessness, and paralysing hopelessness, too. That almost every single day I felt like the only way out was really out, out of the life I was in . . . and I could see only one way to do that. Suicidal thoughts are incredibly hard to bury, no matter how you might try. Back then, most days, in the early morning light, the only thing stopping me from taking my own life was guilt. Even now I tell very few people the whole truth of how my mental health has looked over the last two decades. Depression is still something many of us suffer in deepest silence.