Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  I thought of all that had gone before, of a life lived, the paths taken, as best I could. I cried and I didn’t wipe the tears away; I wondered where the sea would carry them to, when I left. I thought of the future – of mine, of yours, of all of ours. Of all that it holds. Of all that will be gained, and lost. I lay back onto the winter water’s surface, and I floated, waiting for the cormorants to pass over me one by one – waning, like the moon – like how we are watching the ice melt away, helpless and terrified. I thought about the way that loss in our world is multiplying, magnifying, about how we need to learn how to hold it all close, closer than we ever have before, close enough that we can see, again. I knew then what it was that had changed, what it is that these places have somehow done to me.

  It was icy cold in the sea’s belly, and so I left when I knew the time had come, and returned back out to the grip of the land, the hold of solid ground. As I made to leave the beach, I cast my eyes down onto the shelf that the storm waves had made in the sand. There, right in the dip – where the curve made a mountain-top out of a few centimetres of wet sand – a hag stone lay in waiting. I knew that that gift of sea and stone – of here and there, then and now, and all that lies between – was meant, was sent for me.

  Hag stones, with their perfect hole, are held to be highly sacred objects. They have been called by many names over the centuries: witch stones, adder stones, snake eggs, hex stones, fairy stones, holy stones, holeys and eye stones. The stone has been created by the water – birthed and moulded by it – and as such is an extension of it, retaining the healing power of the sea within its form. In effect, a hag stone is an amulet of protection, and so much more. People often find hag stones at turning points in their lives, as the circle turns, as people, periods or places ebb away from them, leaving the gap that holds the promise of something new.

  We are called back to places that, in times of difficulty, hold the power to give us what we need to get through. This story began at a wild cove in Donegal, forty miles across a hard border from Derry, two and a half decades ago. A wild red fox followed a little girl whose father had just moved out of her house from the top of a hill full of wild hedgerows and butterflies to an uninsured, beat-up car on the Atlantic shoreline.

  That day, for the first time, the little girl filled her hands with unidentifiable bones, sticks stripped bare of their bark and a single sea-rounded stone: found things from an echoing place to bring home with her, in the place of all that had been lost.

  The summer is past, and the autumn that followed has been, and has gone, too. Winter has most definitely reached this laneway, as it had reached Shroove that day as I swam, and it is leaving the traces of itself all around. Mornings have arrived here, in this isolated corner of the land, that have been full of pink and red light, orange and gold swimming through the clouds like soft lines, winter’s delicate sky veins. Not today, though; this morning is all grey and heavy, all full of the need to draw in close to the hearth, a raw reminder of the strength of this, the year’s last season. The railway track just in front of the cottage – the reason the cottage was built at all – is looking more like the ghost line that it is, on this dark December morning, than it ever could in the glow of summer.

  Yesterday, beneath a morning moon, low and white, hanging in a winter-blue sky, I stood under an old, gnarly thorn tree as a solo robin hopped about my feet in a sodden field. I followed the line he made on the muddy surface with my eyes, from here to there, and back again, then up, then off, now – away. When he had gone, I followed his line with my feet as well as my eyes, with my legs dragging my body through thick bog-muck, full of the past, full of things we may never quite understand. At the point in the field where he had left me to tread this new stretch of land alone, there was something black and solid, something other than winter grass and peat-brown bog-water. I placed my hands over it, tracing the curved lines that ran across its form like waves – an ebb and flow the kind of which I had never before set eyes on. Bog-oak, sculpted over thousands of years by the weight of what it has known, in the place where it has lain.

  I left it there, and quickly made my way back to the gate at the top of the field, just as sleet began to turn the field pewter grey, thrown across by a wind that had been hidden in the trees. As quickly as the sleet had come, the sky was full to bursting above my head with armfuls of mistle-thrushes, calling and dragging storm-light in their wings. They landed, chaotic, cinematic, all at once, despite the howling winds. I ran back into the wind that bit and barged, to the earth beneath the thorn tree, and lifted the ancient black wood from the part of the field where it had been spat out. I lifted it and I brought it back with me – across the field, up the laneway, into my home. I am still that wee girl, with her eyes open to this turning, aching earth. I still feel it all, every single part of it, deeper than my bones. Wing-beats above a concrete council estate, snow-light on blossom after violence, moth-light on a red fox after loss – I am still that wee girl seeking beauty in the murk.

  Three years after moving back to my hometown of Derry on the Irish border that grew and grew in fame and importance, I was given the chance to leave the place behind in an entirely different way from how leaving had always looked before. In the past I had felt as if there were no options at all, that the only way through it all – through the sorrow, confused identity and the worried anger – was to leave. Coming from a city so permeated by division, a place so defined by violence and loss, having your roots in a place that made you feel scared and lonely most of the time made leaving feel like the path of least resistance. Every single time I left any other place – Dublin, Cork, Edinburgh, Bristol – it always felt just the same as leaving Derry, as though the decision was never really one to be made; the leaving had been writ in stone long before. Sadness, trauma and unquantifiable loss had shaped me into a person who never really allowed themselves to become rooted anywhere at all. I carried the memory of my roots being severed (so often, too many times by far) around with me like a heavy weight I thought I deserved to have been burdened with. I never really saw the things I experienced as things that I might have needed some help with, as things that maybe I could actually unload, and never pick back up again. As things that maybe had never really been mine to carry in the first place.

  I spent most of my life feeling – harrowing as it is to admit, now – that I somehow must have deserved these things: they were mine, and to shed them would be to shed me, in turn. As though the thing that best defined me was the suffering and the sorrow, the things I had seen, and the things I had lost. I could not, for decades, even try to imagine that there might be something in underneath it all, that there might be a self that would remain no matter how many layers I might slowly learn to undo. I had never before really accepted that I was a person who fled from place to place, thing to thing, person to person, without ever staying long enough to settle. When people accused me of running away, of being emotionally cold, of so many things that I now see were absolutely right, I placed the blame on anything and everything else around me. I never took responsibility for my own part in it all; I accepted the role of victim and I was happy to play it the best I could. I understand now that there are things that burrow inside of us and take years to unearth, to free ourselves from. That, in time, trust and hope might take the place of other things: things that we never, ever deserved to have to carry.

  Light finds its own places, the spaces for it to take as its own; the black crow of sorrow can not, will not, keep the light under its sooty wing for ever. Change comes, and growth follows in its wake. You awake one morning, and the fog has lifted, entirely, as though it had been a thin and delicate veil. One moment you were held by the dark, thick mud of the past, unable to see any way through, and the next you were floating on a glassy, echoing lake. You see yourself now, reflected in the water, and you see strength along with softness; you see someone who is ready, now – so ready – to see.

  Time, on the delicate, dusty wing of a white moth, mus
t and will fly on. Memories dance and move like silken ghosts; sometimes we can see them and only them, and at others we are left alone to be fully and firmly in the present. To choose paths based on feelings other than sorrow and fear. To allow ourselves to find the way through.

  The farmer’s voice, when it comes, is soft and kind; he wears gentleness in his words, somehow. I am back in this cold December morning, looking at the old railway tracks that we had both heard the owl fly over just last night, looking at the track-marked field with the farmer, really looking. Cows fed, field observed, words shared – he leaves, and it is just me in the laneway once more. The tall trees – ivy and finch-covered – line the bottom part of the laneway, towering down over the wee grey cottage like they are protecting it from something unseen, held up there in the sky. The grey of the house’s stone, set in its firm place between those trees and the wild hedgerow, red rosehips popping out like sparks – makes a countryside Christmas card out of the scene. No one has spent a Christmas – a winter at all – in that cottage for over a decade. All around it, blackthorn and whitethorn, nettles and sprawling rosebushes, red berry and brambles compete with one another for light that isn’t quite here, yet, on this grey December morning. To the left of the cottage – right outside the original front door – is the rotted, broken remains of what was once wooden decking. The first time I visited the cottage this year, when walking through the garden to follow the path of a peacock butterfly (the first I’d set eyes on for decades), the whole middle section of that decking gave way completely, the damp wood dragging me down towards the rich soil beneath. I was covered in bruises and cuts, stings and scratches; it felt like someone or something – the previous owner, the house itself, the place? – was asking me if I was really there, if I was really in the place properly. It was almost the opposite experience of being in a thin place. There was no sense whatsoever, on that first day in this new house, of floating out of myself, no otherworldly, dream-like feel; I was being reminded instead that I was absolutely and completely in that exact place, at that specific time. There was no leaving to be had when I fell through those very real – utterly material – gaps. The blood gushed and the allergic bumps began to prickle the surface of my skin almost immediately; I was there, in that moment, and I remember feeling more aware of being alive than I had felt for quite some time.

  This morning, a perfect V of whooper swans flew above the lane – creamy white, and carrying ancient lore. The year my childhood home almost burned to the ground – with us all sound asleep inside – was the same year that I encountered whooper swans for the first time, the creatures I feel most drawn to in times of need. It was less than a month after the bombing. We were driving to get petrol – across the border – in the silken half-light of autumn. We were right at the mouth of the land-bridged island, just before Fahan, when the sound came . . . a sound I have never managed to get out of my head. Wing-beats like the beginning of life, or like the very ending of it, like all of the moments held in between. Eala glórach – whooper swan, its name meaning ‘noisy swan’ – but when I think back to that unnerving sight of the first whooper swan I ever saw taking to the air above us in all her ethereal beauty, it is the silence that she left in her wake that lingers the most. The sense that something does not have to be a thing of terror and sorrow, of trauma and loss, to move us into the depths of quietude. The knowledge, all at once, sent down from an unknown place like muddied, perfect feathers – that silence does not always have to speak of things that cannot be said. The sense that there are things that can move us to silence, to an inner place – neither here nor there – to warm and necessary tears, that are actually beautiful things. She went higher that October day, decades ago; I remember the guttural honking being so suddenly – so fully – replaced by silence. I stood, echoing the swan’s chosen way; no more words left me that day for quite some time.

  Whooper swans find great refuge in the places close to Derry. I read that in 1995, the year the petrol bomb came through my bedroom window, more of them wintered on Lough Swilly than anywhere else in the UK or Ireland. That swan I encountered was one of thousands that had made a long, hard journey, over land and sea, through weather both varied and treacherous to seek shelter on the shores that I was also enveloped in that year. That winter I shared company with so many of those creatures on the hill overlooking the River Foyle. All of us were still on a journey of a form, each seeking safe harbour – a place to call home – until the next wind called us up and away.

  My overarching memory of that year was encountering my first whooper swan, making for the sky above Inch Island. I have never quite lost the sound of those powerful, folkloric wings beating; the echoing, learned silence she carried with her into the early autumn sky is still with me, even today.

  •

  There is still an imagined, ghost-laden line running through the land that formed me, cutting across the surface of the sorrow-laden, resilient island I love so well. Oystercatchers still sing their siren songs on both sides of that border. Now I have found myself living on a real ghost-line. Our new home lies on the only section of the old railway line where any part of the track is still visible. It is the line that once connected the South and the North, faded at every other part of the journey it once carried trains along. The house, and the line outside our front door, are reminders, traces, of so much that has been lost. I cannot help but offer a prayer when I look at the old sleepers and the rusting metal, desperately hoping that the Brexit negotiations follow a path that allows mutual respect, each for the other, on both sides of that troubled border.

  Not far from here, just past where the swans have likely now already landed, is the Hill of Uisneach. When I finally decided to move here, away from Derry, away from the North, into the very heart of the island, I read about the land I was coming to – a place I knew almost nothing about. I learned that the area all around this quiet laneway is an incredibly sacred place. Since prehistoric times, the Hill of Uisneach has been the great assembly for the tribes and kings of Ireland. It was here that laws were made and disputes settled. The hill is a place of energy and renewal; people have been drawn here for over 5,000 years. It was the seat of the High Kings, a sacred site of worship, and the place where St Patrick built the burial ground for Ériu, the goddess after whom Ireland was named.

  And it was here that Catholic bishops met in 1111 CE to begin the work of dividing Ireland into dioceses. Division has been a part of this island’s history for millennia, and a crucial chapter of it started around the corner from the cottage I have just moved into. This is the royal centre of Ireland: the coming together of the five provinces. The fifth province is Mide, the magical ‘Otherworld’, the original, mythical thin place, created in the very first century. It is also the actual centre of the island, too – the exact midway point geographically, the Mide, the middle of this ancient rock in the Atlantic Ocean, sea and ice sculpted, divided by a border that none of us can see.

  I think of borders, of the one that has cut my island in two for the whole of my life. I think of it now with such soft tenderness. I see the moments dance in front of me – white and willowy. I am remembering joy now, and stillness. Days when we crossed over that line we have still never seen, that no one will ever really see, and how even in times of fear it still made our whole world change shape – and colour – entirely. The grey of our cold, concrete council estate was gone and in its place there was cinematic blue water all around – golden sandy beaches where the land met the sea, all held in place by hedgerows full to the brim with wild flora. Through deeply traumatic and unsettled times I have been brought or found my own way across that border to seek solace in the weeds and wilderness held in its hidden, healing, thin places. When I think of what the future may hold for all of us who have lived through the unimaginable ins and outs of the Troubles – we who can stand with one foot in the North and one in the South, we border-dwellers always weighed down by a sense of otherness – if a hard border comes back, I no lon
ger weep as I used to at the start of this mess. We are not willing to slip back down, to lose our hoarse voices to those we cannot shout above; none of us are ready to fall into the gaps between things again. The future, the one that lies in seed deep beneath our feet, in the darkness, is ours to shape. We are ready, now; we are all of us ready for whatever the future holds; we are remembering the way through the fog.

  The rain now grows softer – the swans have long passed me by and may have already landed on the lake’s surface – and my thoughts have moved with them; I am thinking now of migration and of place. I am in the middle of both the land and the morning, in the halfway point of December, too, but I am looking back at things long passed by, and I am thinking of all the days that have not yet come. I am thinking about stillness and about flight. About identity and acceptance – about choices, and the way that gratitude transforms, how every cell of your body can feel like it has just been born – fresh as oak.

  I think about all those I have shared a life with, and of their stories. Of who they are, on the inside and outside, on both sides of that imagined border. I think about myself, and of that shifting, liminal space between inner and outer, the belly of that soft, unseen place where we hold our rawest truths. I consider the new paths that I can already feel forming on my insides, to meet the new ones that now lie ahead of me on the outside; I can feel the shape-shifting begin. I think of the river. I see it there, as if it were right before my eyes, and I see that river properly, for the very first time.

  Like that river, I am becoming an unmapped space held in this in-between place, right in this island’s beating heart where borders feel like they hold no sway.