Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  I awoke after a night full of haunting thoughts – a form of reckoning I had not been expecting at all – and every single image that flooded into my mind was of Ireland. I spent the rest of the day feeling increasingly out of kilter – out of step with all the selves inside me – until I finally accepted I was allowed to feel that way, that it was okay to listen to the sorrow as it reached the highest point, to stand close by as it charted its path back down in small, concentric circles, like a skylark. Even when life – on paper – seems as though all is well, or more than well, the ghosts inside us still sing their hauntings, drag us back to places in our mind: ones we hoped we’d long forgotten.

  Over the days that followed, I felt increasingly called back to Ireland. So I followed the beat of the sea and immersed myself in the achingly ethereal Cornish landscape instead, trying to forget the way the light there reminded me of the light in places in Ireland. I spent time in places that – despite the throngs of holiday-makers that had settled in on Cornwall – held no other humans at all. I walked through graveyards, beneath and along cliffs, in coves, beside ruins and stones, relics and strands, underneath skies that held so much more than they could ever dare to share. I swam more than I have ever swum before.

  It was beautiful there in St Ives for the entire time – so blue and golden, so full of the sense of time and its unfurling; there was a gentleness to the earth as she spun. The sounds of the busy pathways – crowded, baked – felt muted, as though none of us were quite there. I wandered from place to place as though pulled by an invisible thread – gently but with intent – unsure of myself, of what I was supposed to do. Of how I was supposed to be.

  On the beaches, I shared the water with other people almost every time, but in the harbour I swam alone. I could have been a ghost of a soul; I could have been a shadow. It was not the harbour from that night in Bristol, back in the autumn, as a red fox crossed my path for a second time, just like it had when I was wee. But something echoed back to me on that trip to Cornwall from both of those days, from both of those foxes.

  I began, slowly, and with a sense of certainty that has not left me since, to feel different. The person I had been for decades was no longer the only one there, in that dawn-bright corner of Cornwall. There was someone else there, too. There was someone else there, nestled inside the body I dragged into the Cornish water. There was another me, inside that body. That body that had dragged itself into other bodies of water in the past. Bodies of water that were colder, darker and deeper than anything I experienced in Cornwall. Bodies of water that, if I had succeeded, I would never have come back out from. Bodies of water that I tried to drown my own body beneath. I realised back then, in the quietness of a hidden Cornish bay, that it was the first time I had ever counted them, those bodies of water I had tried to disappear beneath completely. I realised that it was the first time I had ever sat, alone by the water, and felt glad that my body was still mine, that I had never taken my own life, that my body was still there. That I was still there.

  •

  I swam every chance I got during that time in Cornwall. On the last day, I came out from the water when hunger got the better of me, and walked the grounds of the Irish saint Ia. Ia’s story is quite something. She went on the day of sailing to the seashore of her home to depart for Cornwall from her native Ireland along with other saints. Finding that they had gone without her, fearing that she was too young for such a hazardous journey, she was grief-stricken and began to pray. As she prayed, she noticed a small leaf floating on the water and watched it grow bigger and bigger to accommodate her form. She bravely embarked upon the leaf and was carried across the Irish Sea to make her new life in the land of Kernow. Her feast day is 3 February, a handful of days after St Brigid’s. Abandonment, being left behind, the need for bravery – the silken balance between delicacy and strength – all these tropes were written into our story long ago as Irish women: the sense of loss, and its ripples, too.

  We have been forced into silence, over and over and over again. We have been made to feel unclean, unworthy; we have been made to feel like we are not even really here. We have been beaten and abused, guilted and terrified; we have had the parts of us that are ours, and ours alone, ripped out from inside us, like a page of a story deemed unworthy of being given voice. We have had to keep on, and on, and on. We are women. We are the women of Ireland, and we are breaking the centuries of silence. We are giving wings to the birds in our goddess-born, warrior-strong bodies; these birds are ready to fly.

  Oystercatchers made a line out of their flight, as the light made an end to that final day, and I thought of St Brigid, another border-born female – one that we find in the year’s darkest days.

  When winter lays its head down, memories dance like moths, the delicate ghosts of who we once were. There is a moment – a turning point in our Celtic year – when the Cailleach, the goddess of winter, gives up her crown to let the goddess of spring take her place. The goddess that leads us from that darkness into the golden, healing light is Brigid. Her roots are entwined with an older, pagan goddess, whose festival at Imbolc welcomed the return of lighter days after the darkness of winter. In the Celtic calendar, St Brigid’s day falls midway between the winter solstice and vernal equinox and is celebrated on 1 February. It is a moment in the circle of our year when we can see the light reflecting and refracting, when we breathe out the hardship of the winter to learn that we have been strengthened; we have grown.

  Brigid was known for her kindness and compassion: a flame of inspiration in an ancient world of suffering. Once she was milking her mother’s cow when a poor woman came by looking for food. Brigid gave her all the milk she had in her bucket. Then she started to milk the cow again, filling another bucket, and again giving it all away to a poor man who came by. The cow had no more milk and Brigid was terrified. The cow rewarded her goodness with more milk.

  Born on the threshold of a door at the breaking of dawn, Brigid is a figure of liminality: the human equivalent of a thin place, in many ways. Patron saint of babies and blacksmiths, dairy-maids and fugitives, boatmen – seafarers in general – poets, the poor and many more besides, she represents those voices that for centuries have been silenced. She saw the darkness of the old ways and shone a light on them, showing strength, resilience and that unnamable thing that flows through the blood of a woman. What is it, that thing? What is that thing that makes us women? What is that thing that delivers strength in times of need, that lifts us up when we have been knocked, beaten and kicked down? That thing that keeps us standing, even on the darkest of nights, as the winds rattle at the place we thought we might be safe in? That thing that means we still rise, we still rise, we still and we always rise?

  We are women.

  Borderlines and the crossing over them are a central theme surrounding the woman that was known as Saint Bride, Bridget, Brigid. For most of my life I have viewed myself as being on the outside – sometimes through choice, sometimes, though, kept away by external forces, from spaces and places without my desire or permission. Often this was due to where I came from, because of the fact of being born in the very particular part of the map that I was. Identity, background, history, belonging, self – all so interlinked, and I had no idea how to untangle each of the strands from the other, no clue how to learn to see myself as something other than what I had lived through, and where I had come from. Bridges, boundaries, barriers: the lexicon of St Bride flowed through my veins like a blood-red cliché.

  We are women.

  Sometimes, though, the only person – the only thing – keeping us on the outside, making us feel like there is no way back into the harbour, is our own self. And sometimes the moment comes where that falls away, and we learn new words; a different path shows itself after the fog lifts. Sometimes, we even start to see a way through, a way to slip though the borderline: the one we built with our own hands alone.

  We are women.

  I didn’t know a word of Irish back then, not one soli
tary thing did I know how to offer up, like bird-song, to that hope-bright Cornish sky, but I knew that I would, one day, somehow. That I would learn the words for things I’d spent decades unable to name. When that time comes, I will learn, first, that the Irish for ‘to hope’ is dóigh. I will clasp this knowledge close to my heart, on another day than that one, back on the rugged coast of Cornwall, paying my respect to one Irish woman, and envisioning another.

  On another day, many years down the line from that Cornish one, in another Celtic land, under another sky entirely, I will learn that the Irish for ‘to hope’ is, too, the Irish for ‘to burn’. Embers, holding on for dear life, held tight inside the hearth’s womb, waiting to be rekindled. The kindling of yesterday, the women of yesteryear, lighting the flame inside our bellies, feeding the fire inside our hearts on a day not too far away from this one.

  •

  I made the decision to move back to Ireland from Bristol without any real reasoning or thought process. I handed my notice in, told my flatmate I was leaving and packed up the small amount of possessions I had become used to moving from place to place on the day after I returned from Cornwall. Something had begun to creep through the borderline I had built beneath my skin. Something had begun to eat at it, to work at the gnarly knots; something had begun to break the parts of it up and toss them into the mouth of the hungry sea. Something had started to catch, to burn, to flame. Something had started to hurtle towards me, like a storm.

  I already knew exactly what place that storm was going to carry me to.

  I already knew exactly what I needed to do.

  On the morning of my last day, making ready to leave Bristol and move back home to Derry – something I had sworn I would never, ever do – I stood outside the bit of garden at the front of the house I was in the process of moving out of. Out of the corner of my eye, movement, the darting of life and colour – a glistening, glimmering dragonfly. It passed so close that I could make out the fine markings on its body, I could see every bit of it, every bit of it there is for us to see. It left the bright, colourful Bristol scene . . . then, less than three minutes later, it returned – it had more to reveal to me – more, still, to remind me of.

  The first time I saw a dragonfly, my brother, our mum and I were driving a back-road from Dunree Head to Buncrana, beside squelch-thick, deepest dark bog-land. We’d been on the beach all day – swimming in and out of the shadow as the strong sun blazed. We had watched waves crash against rocks that curved over and back upon themselves, like the arc of a solid blue-grey rainbow. We had let the sun make dimpled patterns on our skin – minuscule islets, where sand had stuck with sweat and sun-cream; a dot-to-dot of tan lines on the map our bodies made of themselves.

  Fort Dunree, Dun Fhraoigh in Irish, means ‘Fort of the Heather’ – a reminder that this site has been an important defensive site for Lough Swilly down through history. It has been attacked many times over the years by invaders trying to get a foothold in Ireland including the Vikings, the Normans, the English, the Germans and the French. In 1798 Wolfe Tone was intercepted by the English navy on a French vessel nearby which spurred the British into building Martello fortifications along the Irish and English coastlines.

  We had not once thought of any of this past violence, that ghost-trace history, as we swam and ate our sandwiches, as we played ‘Pairs’ sprawled out on damp towels, as we read until our eyes made blue dots of the yellow-white light, as we drank so many Five Alive cartons that we started to feel a wee bit sick. We were there, in that place, in hiding for the day. We had escaped from a violence much more current, in the fast-beating heart of the city of Derry, than any that the fort may have witnessed in its stone-cold lifetime.

  Most of a dragonfly’s life is spent as a nymph, beneath the water’s surface.

  There is, in their ways of acting – of being – a sense of almost hushed secrecy. The sense that they are, in fact, not quite here at all. In almost every part of the world dragonflies symbolise change – a form of metamorphosis almost whispered of in their markings.

  All of a sudden, just as the dragonfly had drifted into the scene in Bristol, sound filled the air with its energy. A group of lads made their way past me, up from St Paul’s, up the hill at Montpelier; they were headed with their sound system to Stokes Croft. They passed me, just once – unlike the dragonfly – but as they did they were close enough for me to see the colours all over their bright, baggy clothes, not quite iridescent – not glistening at all, in fact – but as colourful as that dragonfly that sent me on my way from Bristol back home to my green island, bodies as full of that darting, indescribable vitality.

  There are places that dance on the caves of our insides, even as we try to cover them up from view. We forget their names. We lose their locations on any map. Their coordinates shape-shift and turn themselves into a thing of invisible particles, into a thing not unlike the mist that lives on the frayed and jagged edges of the Atlantic Ocean. Some seem to call us back to them again and again. Some places seem to ring bells, in the dead of night, in those glassy moments of borderless existence, the chiming of which only we can hear.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Grove of Oaks

  THERE ARE PLACES THAT HAUNT us, from the very first moment we wash up on their shores, well past the point we bid them farewell. There are places that echo on our cavernous insides, long after we make for less ghost-riddled lands. There are places that catch on our hidden parts. We waken from troubled slumber to find them dancing on the walls, shadow-like and spectral. There are places that speak so fully of our loss – of all that we once held dear – that we must shed them, all at once – like the skin from washed-up wood, decaying reminders of all that went before. There are places in the waking world that haunt us even deeper. There are places that we wish to forget for the rest of time but that are part of us, somehow, their barren, salty pathways form the lines of our insides.

  •

  I left my life in Bristol for my new life in Ireland in the same way I’d arrived – on a ferry that crossed the Irish Sea. Circles – the closing of them, the completion of cycles and of all the meaning embedded in between – are of vast and unwavering meaning to me, and so it seemed very important to make my return passage to Ireland in exactly the same way as I made my arrival. To make my way across the same roads on the same buses, on the same railway tracks in the same trains, on the same vessels traversing the same seas. It was not lost on me, even back then, that it was still very much the same me that navigated this immeasurable and daunting unknown.

  I stopped off on the way in west Wales to mark the ending of my old life away from Ireland. I swam at Mwnt – a sheltered cove – in the part of the water where I’d watched dolphins play the year before on my way to settle in Bristol. There were none around on that spring day as the sun hid behind the cliff edge, as the evening reached the sea and filled it with silence. Above me on the land above the bay stood the Church of the Holy Cross, a basic and beautiful wee medieval sailors’ Chapel of Ease. It was so calm up there, as calm as it was down below in the water.

  A chilly breeze touched the waves, and I remember thinking I was ready to leave the water. But time must have passed without me noticing because the moon was hanging against a darkening blue sky that evening at Mwnt before I left the sea’s soothing belly. I don’t know how long had passed since I’d told myself that I was getting out.

  Gulls had cried above me, the sea had seemed like it was holding its breath. Time hadn’t really felt how it normally does that spring evening. There was a moment where I knew the veil had slipped away.

  Honesty, loss, grief, seals, ship-songs, tendons, blood and bone.

  The thoughts that I recall having that night were not even thoughts at all, they weren’t as solid as that; the words that flooded my insides were a recollection.

  Hope, breath, memory, place, moths, circles, shadows and light.

  I saw myself as an object on the horizon. I saw myself as I never had before.r />
  Here, acceptance, always, traces, lines, moons, then and now.

  A wave came, and I knew it was time to leave.

  The veil settled back into its sacred, safe place, and I made for shore.

  I made for land, for the bed I would sleep in for the last night, before crossing the sea back to Ireland.

  From that crossing, I remember the light above Holyhead Port, in the tenderly falling spring evening. How it seemed to bleed out over all the soft grey clouds, and the screeching off-white gulls, as they turned in a not-quite-empty sky. The winds – bitter, full of fragments of ice that never quite became earth-bound. The waves – choppy, heaving themselves against the well-faded paintwork of the vessel’s iron.

  I remember the fear that churned in my belly during that journey ‘home’, back to Ireland, the land I’d been desperately trying to forget. The crippling anxiety that choked me when I tried to feel positive, when I tried to convince myself that this was the end to the line of sorrow I now knew I could not simply outrun.

  Memories re-emerged like the slick black heads of cormorants in the waves, slippery and fleeting. I remember cursing myself for imagining that moving back would somehow fix it all, fix me. I remember standing as the sun tried to break through heavy white clouds and feeling like I was making the biggest mistake in a line of many.

  I remember shadows.

  I remember darkness.

  I remember a coal-black crow watching me as I drank the wine I had brought with me onboard.

  I fell asleep on the vessel, in the gap before the black night gave up its delicate ghosts. I saw myself on the hungry river of my hometown, the place I am journeying to.

  In the dream I was on a coffin ship. I was wearing tattered brown rags. I was dressed in the dirtied peasant clothes of my ancestors. The night was darker than soot, blacker than a field of ravenous crows trying to dig up the remnants of the crops that didn’t come. The night was painted, tar-like with emptiness; loss seeped down from my very bones, through a garment that held no hope of keeping out the cold. I was on a ship, not quite visible beneath the black sky, hidden under smog and freezing fog but still, despite it all, I knew where I was. I knew I was in a time long gone, a time I never witnessed with my own eyes.