My friend leaves, and once more I am alone by the fire. Leaving the ashes from last night where they are, I build on top: crisscrossing the sticks, leaving space for the bones I will place into the hollow later.
My ancestors were well aware of the effects of fire. Mastering this element had changed their lives, although they knew it was a thing fraught with danger. Homes then were temporary dwellings, and could be burned to the ground in the time it took to return from the well. The sun was considered to bring great healing energy. Walking three times ‘sun-wise’, or cor deiseil, around a fire represented the circling of the sun, and was a potent ritual invocation of the sun’s healing power. I walk around the fire – one that I myself lit – three times, on St John’s Day this year, and I think of the circles we all walk, over and over. I think of what it means to really let go of something. Of what it means to fall back into the curve of a place, and to let it hold you. The Irish word for fire, tine, is closely linked with tinfeadh, the Irish word for inspiration, and for breathing. I think of what these two things need, of what kindles them. I think of what it might mean to leave a place through choice, rather than through force, or through fire.
Bone fires have been lit in this place for centuries, and the ashes and embers have been used to purify the space for just as long. Bones of our ancestors, keeping us safe in the hollow of their hands. This year it was confirmed that bones washed up on a beach in Canada are those of Irish famine victims. They are the human remains of twenty-one individuals, unearthed over a five-year period, from the 1847 Carricks ship-wreck. The ship left Sligo carrying 180 passengers fleeing the Famine, but it sank, drowning at least 150 of those on board. Fragile skeletal remains of three boys – two aged seven and one eleven-year-old – suggest rural Irish origins based on severe malnutrition shown in the salt-wearied bones.
My St John’s fire this year could be seen from most points of Glencrow, a signal of a form. I have been thinking so much, since then, of beacons. Classically, beacons were fires lit at well-known locations on hills or high places, used either as lighthouses to lead folk to safety or for signalling over land that enemies were approaching. Systems of this kind have existed for centuries over much of the world. Beacons have also allegedly been abused by ship-wreckers. A fire placed where it should not be placed would be used to direct a ship against shoals or beaches so that its cargo could be looted after the ship sank or ran aground. The fall of Troy was signalled by a chain of eight beacons burning on the shore to send the news across to Clytemnestra in Argos.
From where my friend and I stand that June day on the shore, Ballykelly – that village where I spent my teens, the place where I lost my friend to an act of devastating violence – can be seen across the water. The fires we lit many moons ago to fuel our nights of teenage angst would have been a beacon visible on the other side of the shore in Donegal.
Beacons, fires, lighthouses: what message, what signal are our ancestors sending us across the waters between us and them, then and now? What signal are we sending to those in front of us on the other shore?
The first time I became aware of fire being used for something other than comfort, I was battling my way through its inky, thick smoke – an eleven-year-old girl – whose home had just been bombed. For decades that coal-black crow I met there followed me around like the smell of smoke on young, not yet woken-up, skin.
I think about it all; I take every single shard of it and I hold it all in my shaky, sooty hands. I think of how I taught myself, just this year – alone, in a different, equally cold Derry house – how to light my first fire.
How even after enduring a history in which fire brought terror and destruction – a flame-red thread that burned through my crimson bloodline – I found the way back to the flames across a different threshold.
I think about how – even though my story is laced with fear, the kind that maybe only fire can instill – I found a way to jump the embers of the past, to teach my willing hands the way to tend to a hearth.
I think about the fact that the first fire I ever lit outside was on St John’s Eve – a night when the veil between worlds is lifted – in a delicate and echoing thin place. The first fire I lit outdoors, in that raw, boundless world, was tended by my own self alone.
There are places in this luminous, aching world that are glassy, like the lakes of a hundred years. They are both the mirror and they are the light that you seek with which to find them. There are places that I know – in the exterior and hardened parts of my bones – are in fact the fire itself. There are places that are both hollowed and hallowed all in one. These places are like snowfall in darkness – sensed without being seen – we swim through their veil like fireflies on the solstice.
They are not ours but we are theirs. We are of, not in, them. We are – for the most celestial and ancient moment – a part of those places ourselves.
I think about my grandfather, and the abandonment I feel he experienced. I think of mine, too, of all those things I am only now beginning to give voice to. I think of my grandfather’s mother, and of my own. Of how sometimes walking away from someone, cutting the roots, finally makes the space for healing. I think of how even a mother can abandon her child, and how even a child can learn a way through that. I think of all the words that, in this echoing moment, are still flightless birds. All those things that still sit, patiently, quietly, at my feet. I think of them stretching out their wings, testing the air closest to us. I think of them waiting for the wind to settle down upon the land. I think of the sky – patient, too – waiting for these unspoken things to be sent up, out of silence, into the space where they will fly.
These thin and sacred places wait for us to remember.
I think about the bones of my ancestors, on whichever shore they may or may not wash up.
I think about my own bones – pieces of me – that still hold the imprint of generations before me, folk that saw such sorrow.
I think about my family, about the way it has been broken up like a china cup. I think about the fragments of us – embedded in mud-coated fields, on forgotten windowsills of places we do not wish to return to, and in the silted bed of the sea. I think about the way that some of these parts have been glued back together, then smashed apart again, repeated fractures creating lines both visible and invisible – making a border of the red of my bloodline. I think about how some of these shattered parts might be lost to me for ever, buried beneath the weight of all that we have gone through, under all of the pain that has never been acknowledged – beside all of those things that must be carried out of silence, if they hope to ever be put right.
I think about how, if one of those bones of mine was found on a shoreline, I would want it to be burned on St John’s. I think about the fact that I have let go of so much, that I may never again see my own mother. I think about the fact that I likely will never be a mother, either. I see my body then for what it is – blood and bone. White pieces of porcelain on a shoreline, light as feather, sculpted as stone. I would want my bones to become ash in the belly of a fire, to be placed back into the earth from which I had been formed. To be scattered over field and threshold, to bring protection, healing and nourishment, to be a beacon for all those still left on the shore, a flicker of dancing light for all of those who stayed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Éin Bhána – White Birds
Here is now.
Here is then.
Here is everything, and everywhere, that stands between.
DECEMBER HAS ARRIVED, FILLING THE land with red berries that dot the hedgerows; the night skies are dark, full of frost and stars. The winter solstice that is on the way – close enough to nearly make out through the morning mist – will bring the year to a close, a year of deep and unimaginable change for this island, for me and for the path that lies ahead for us all. Through the window, as dawn breaks like a newly born creature, I watch wee drops of rain, collected on the pane during the night, begin to make their way back down to the
soil beneath. There is no real light in the garden so far to speak of; the sun is nowhere to be found down here, yet. When I woke up this morning, long before the sun came up, the first frost had settled in onto the grey of the ground. The winter sky was still as black as a freshly fallen night; no real sounds could be heard above the morning’s stillness.
I have woken up in a place that I have only slept in a handful of times: an old stone railway cottage in the very heart of Ireland, many miles from Derry. It is so much more than a border that I have crossed to move here, to simply be here, in this wild, silent and ancient place. This place is a world away from Derry, from the part of the North where I was born, and it is somewhere I intend to stay; it is the first place that has ever felt like home. I have spent so little time here, since I left that city that I first ran from – then ran to. So little time has passed since I left the city that both birthed my suffering and held the space for me to start to heal.
The Derry I have only just left is not the same Derry I moved back to three and a half years ago, which was almost unrecognisable from the Derry I fled from many years before. I try to think about the future for that shape-shifting city on the banks of the River Foyle. I try to imagine the curves and bends, the growth and the change, the meandering journey that I know must lie ahead. It will not be an easy journey for the city; it never has, nor could be. But I trust that all will be well, I feel it in a part of me I cannot quite locate. Those oaks along the banks of that beautiful city have witnessed so much; they have stood tall, firmly rooted; the people their canopies guard are a kind unlike any I have met elsewhere, in any other place I have wandered. I don’t know what it is that makes Derry people how they are, in all their layers and strata – a palimpsest of ache and deep resilience. Is it something in our soil, born in the ancient roots beneath our feet? Is it something carried in the flow of that fiercely hungry, incomparably beautiful river? Is it something that seeped into those sacred stones, rock that held fast against raging, burning winds, and against the blood, against the tears? The places we are from do not define us, they do not make us, they do not root us, they cannot hold this earth from its inescapable turning. The places that we run to, where we try to find the means to simply stay alive, to stay here on this hard, gorgeous earth, those places that hold us tight and that let us see a way out – a way back in – are much the same as the places that we came from. They are much the same as any place, in any corner of this tender, glorious, astonishing world.
Places do not heal us; they do not take the suffering we have known and bury it in their bellies. Places do not gather the broken parts of us up and stitch them back together. Places do not make the light shine on crow-black nights. Places do not take away our sorrow; they do not unearth the words buried under frozen bog-land; they do not call the birds back when they have been long gone from our sky.
Places do not heal us.
Places only hold us; they only let us in.
Places only hold us close enough that we can finally see ourselves reflected back.
Last night the sky here at midnight was almost unreal. The frost moon shone down from the folklore-blue body of sky above this place, constant and as white as snow. I have never before seen a sky as full of everything both known and unknown. I have never before known a path as brightly lit by only the night sky, by the full white moon alone. No darkness fell on the fields, or on me as I walked them – mud underfoot, nothing at all held within my cupped hands. Earlier yesterday, under a sun that was bleeding out into the soft, still fields – purple and grey haze painting themselves onto a cold amber sky – I watched starlings for longer than I ever have before. Their bodies – like the tall, quiet trees – made silhouettes in the early evening sky, dancing together in perfect harmony, grace dripping off wings that – if I had been closer – would have glistened and shone, gifts of muscle and feather.
There are no starlings on this frost-grey morning, and I wonder where they are now, where they spent the lunar-bright night. I spent it in this new home, a tiny stone railway cottage built – like the border I have crossed to get to it – almost a century ago, in the year 1921. The cottage, this laneway – all of this beating, wild life that I am so completely surrounded by now – feels like a gift, too. They feel like something I will be grateful for, always; something that anyone in this sad, confusing, lonely world, in this world that gives us so much beauty it makes us ache, would be grateful for. There are few words that I can form in these early days in this new place that can even try to do any of it justice. It is wet – so wet that muck takes on shades and textures I have never before known. This laneway – no more ‘mine’ than the folk of the other four houses I now share it with – is so out of the way (‘of where?’ I hear so many folk I admire whisper in my young ear; ‘outta the way o’ where exactly?’) that there is no WiFi signal, no post-code and hardly a phone signal of which to speak. It is, quite literally, in the heart of Ireland. It is, this place I have found myself in, like most of the midlands, so flat that you can see for miles on top of country miles. I still catch myself looking out for curves, and for rough, craggy lines. It is, of course, the farthest-most place in this whole wave-sculpted island from the sea. When M inherited the cottage, two summers back, I knew precisely what I was talking of when I whispered of it being ‘out of the way’. That raw, ancient Atlantic Ocean – the liquid backdrop to some of the thinnest places I have ever encountered – will never be further from my reach at any place on this island than when I am here, in this cottage. I will never be further from my favourite body of water – the one that held me over the last three years, like I was a thing worth saving – than when I am on this small, quiet stretch of land.
When M first found out the cottage was being left to him, his initial reaction was that we would likely try to clear it, fix it up, and sell it. That first summer, we drove there as many weekends as we could, leaving Derry after work and arriving as the sun set over brambles and abandoned workhouses, barns full of old machinery and swallows, surrounded by insects that caught the light and stayed with us as we slept in our van beside the house. We’d waken to the fields full of gold and silence, the hedgerows steeped in birdsong and colour, our own selves full of deep, undeniable gratitude. The more time we spent there, exploring the area, walking the laneway and the fields around it, assessing the damage that had been done to the house over the decade it had lain empty, the more difficult we found it to take ourselves back up the road – across the border – to our rented house in the urban heart of Derry. Life in the city was the best we could make of it with little money after paying our bills each month, only two friends living close enough to spend any time with, and never having enough time to do the things we so much wanted to do. We were working long hours in our café, constantly struggling to make ends meet, and finding that all we wanted to do on our day off was go back to the cottage. It wasn’t about running away from the problems in the North, my desire to be at the cottage, nor was it about attempting to forget the ghosts of my past in the town where I was born. It wasn’t worry, or fear, or hurt, that ache I experienced when I was away from Correaly. Even before this house had a ceiling, a kitchen or any form of heating, it felt like the safest place I’d ever known. Neither of us really remembers the moment we decided we would leave Derry and move to this place, or which of us it was who first shared how tied we felt to it. This place that, somehow, in some way, makes me feel like putting down roots.
The past is a place not dissimilar to many others on this island, the veil between that distant place and this present one can be as thin as ice on a lake. The veil may be thin, but it is still there, nonetheless. The past is exactly that, and we can never bring it back up from under any surface it dwells beneath. We live in these days that we have – these days that we still have left – and we live these days with those things we still have left, too. No matter what we try to do, any actions that we take, any way in which we choose to speak of things – the past remains in another place:
that other world, in which its roots are firmly planted. After winter the spring will come, and a whole different world will be there outside this window, a view I have yet to see. I know the horses will be gone, and with them the seven Connemara ponies that have woken me through these long, howling nights of December. They will leave, and in their place there will be other things – other creatures – maybe there will be some that I have never seen before.
In the summer, a handful of months ago, this whole laneway was full of things in flight: butterflies, moths, dragonflies and damselflies. And I still cannot quite believe I am really remembering it all right, when I think about the swallows, of how they lifted up from all the parts of the house, from all the parts of the lane, how it felt like they had come from all the edges of the land, just to be there on that bright, still afternoon. I will never forget how many swallows dipped and dived above us that day, as we started to clear away all the broken things and overgrown thorn bushes to make a path through the garden. That was almost half a year ago, a handful of days after I camped in Donegal at St John’s as the full summer sun bled out from a northerly sky. Just last month, in this icy cold winter, I returned to Shroove to have my last swim there, for how long I am not quite sure. It was the last swim I would have there while living in my hometown, the last of this year of such vast change – the last before I moved across the border.
It was a swim to mark a full year sober in this the year that held the most change I have ever known, a year that threw more onto my path than any of the other years of this life so far. There was no one else there when I arrived, and I spent the whole time completely alone. The winds were soft, like bog-cotton, and the whole sky above me was tinged with coppery pink. I made ready for the water, and waited for the tallest wave to drag me under; I was making the most of the Atlantic’s raw, healing energy. I was just about to become much less able to make my way there, into its tender, salty grip.
Thin Places Page 19
