Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  This city is a city of history, he told us. If the river we are standing right beside floods in forty years’ time when the temperatures have risen too high, we will lose that history. We stand together, the teenager told us, to preserve our history.

  We all cheered, many of us screamed out at the top of our lungs, some of us wept. We were thinking of those children, the children of our future – of our present: the ones who are making history. But as we cried out, some of us were also paying our respects to those children who were lost, the children of our past. We were mourning them, as we stood there; we were laying to rest all of those children born on the outer edges of history: those children lost to this land.

  This year has been so full of political, social and environmental change. It feels like there is no steady ground beneath our feet. There are now only a few days left before the UK makes one of the biggest decisions of the century – which political party will be chosen to try to lead us all through this terrifying storm. A solo blackbird is singing its heart out in the tree opposite my house. It is a long-drawn-out song, the feel of which is nearing dirge-like, sorrowful, seeped in loss. We are losing things, that blackbird and me. We are all losing things. We are losing them every single day. One day, perhaps, I will go outside again, to this same sun-filled spot of concrete, on this quiet street in the heart of Derry, just a moment’s walk from the River Foyle, to find this blackbird gone, vanished into deepest memory. I hope, deep to the core of my being, that that does not happen in my lifetime, or during the lifespan of any of us alive today, though we in this part of the world know better than to count any of our blackbirds before they are hatched. There is still hope though – so much hope, burrowed down deep inside so very many of us. No matter the political confusion, the ecological grief, the fear of the darkness ahead, we must leave room for that most human of all things: we must carve out room for hope. The last year in Derry I have experienced calm the like of which I never imagined I could know. It came gradually, that acceptance of this place, my hometown – that sense of moving along a path forwards, rather than being stuck in the mud of the past. If someone had told me that one day I would live happily in Derry, in a stable, loving relationship, I would never have believed them.

  A few days ago I was outside my home, warming up to go for a run in St Columb’s Park, and I was once more caught utterly off guard. The British Legion building is at the end of my street, and throughout my time here I have watched marching bands gather outside, flags of the red hand of Ulster and beer cans in tow, singing songs of the Queen and moments of Remembrance for past wars that saw such loss. I never, ever imagined that I could live so close to such extreme behaviour again, such a reminder of all that had played such a part in the division of this city, the aching sorrow that had been an outcome of the violence caused by fighting between Protestants and Catholics. A member of the Royal British Legion – an organisation that honours servicemen – struck up a conversation with me outside my front door. He was old, the man, and he was in pain. He talked to me of his hip replacement, of the loss of his freedom, of the unimaginable loneliness the death of his wife had brought him. He asked me what I did, and of my background, and he listened as I shared a little of the life I had lived a few streets away from where we stood. I could only see his eyes but I knew that there was no anger or resentment at all in either of our eyes. He told me how important meeting me was for him, and that he knew for sure that I will have a safe, peaceful life, that he knew that I will be okay. It shook me to my core when the old man told me that there is something in my eyes that is ‘catching’. He said that it is actually more than in the eyes; ‘it’s in what’s behind the eyes’. He walked slowly towards his car. He looked back, beaming – and said goodbye, and I knew it then.

  It is time to leave. The old man has given me permission, in a way, to look to the future. I know it, and I know – deep inside of me – that I can never un-know it. I know that the time has come for me to leave this city. I am being called to another place, to other places, and now – for the first time, properly – the time is right for me to leave. I am ready. The peace I so desperately needed to make – here, with this place where I was born – is made. I don’t know when exactly, or how, it happened – I know only the where of it: the acceptance and forgiveness happened inside me, as much as in this oak-fringed place. Yes, this broken, beautiful city has changed in the decades since I was born but the crucial changes – the ones that let me know that I am ready to leave – happened in spaces that cannot quite be mapped. It has been a long time in the sculpting, this sense of letting go, of making space inside for healing – and I will do everything in my power to shelter the hollow inside me I have carved. I will not run from here in anger, fear or helplessness. I am only leaving because the time has come. I have no more space for violence or for destruction, for fear and uncertainty; I have grieved already for my city, as much as I can. I am leaving so the space inside me is kept safe. So that I am kept safe, too.

  I reach the park just as the afternoon light has reached the dip in the hill. I watch as it casts its shafts onto the old hawthorn tree standing alone in its muddy field. I listen as the wrens flit from branch to branch, as the hooded crows call to the soft blue quietude of the sky. I let the small, curved part of the back of me lean into the V of the middle of the tree, in a way I haven’t done since I was a wee girl. It feels, all at once, like an exact fit – as though I am supposed to be here, as though maybe I don’t need to move from this exact spot, ever. I want to see how we look – if there are any big gaps I am unaware of, or if I am nestled into the V of this tree as tightly as I think I am. I want someone else to look, and to tell me if how I feel is real, is valid – but there is no one else around. I am alone but for the crows and the wrens, the blackbirds and mistle-thrushes, the wrens and blue tits, two squirrels and a single magpie. The light has changed, hurriedly; it is on its way home, so I make for mine, too – the rented house I am making ready, now, to leave. I slide my body out of the dip in the hawthorn, wet bark under hand, autumn leaves underfoot, and walk back up the hill. The light throws itself down onto the wee hill beside the statue of Columcille and the dove, and I look to the circle of oak trees to the right. I follow the light around to the walled garden – strewn with rubbish, grass burnt, stone walls graffitied with republican threats – and there in the muck, beside a dead hedgehog, is a small mammal skull. A beautiful, sculpted thing of grace: a reminder of the way that our bodies – the bodies of us all – are full of bone, solid and as white as a dancing moth. You are blood and bone, as I am; we are the stuff of blood and bone, the stuff of life and death, and all that we are met by in between.

  I leave the skull, one of the most exquisite things I have ever found, and think of what is held within this place, this ancient wood of oaks in an equally ancient city. It is a place that has been so important for me, and I wonder what trace – if any – I may have left here upon this land. I wonder if it can be felt in any way by another – human, badger, bird, moth – by those both made of bone, and not. Any of us can experience a thin place. Some of us will be called towards them – over and over again – as though a bell is being rung for us. Others might never experience a thin place in their lifetime. I only know how my own experiences have been. I can only share the way that my own insides feel when I am standing in a place that drags me away from sorrow and fear. Places create ripples inside of us; they rise and they swell inside each of us in turn; how we experience place is completely unique to us alone. I have had wildly varied experiences at Shroove from one day to the next. I have come away, on occasion, feeling almost bereft that it didn’t come – that sense of being both out of, and entirely in, myself and my surroundings. I searched – anxiety and doubt growing in me like ashes from a fire long gone out – to no avail. There are days when it will not be what you want it to be. The veil will be thicker than mud on some days. All things flow and change; this much we all know. They course through this world, gently trickling
on some mornings, bursting through the banks in terrifying, powerful waves on others. Nothing – not a single person, thing or place – remains the same for ever.

  Thin places are safe spaces, where we are given the chance to be alone, to pause – a gift we find ourselves being given less and less. There is room, more room than we might normally have, to wonder. Room to ponder what lies beyond the life we are used to leading, the everyday pumping of blood through veins. Places to wonder what it means to be made up of blood and sinew, and what – aside from carved, delicate white bone – might be left of us after we are gone, if anything.

  I am thinking now, really thinking, about blood. How it charts a path inside us that we cannot ever really see, how it ties things all up with thin red thread, how we do not choose it – how we never really lose it, though we may try in vain. It is in the veins, too, like a dream of time, a cinnabar moth, in the places where the sinew tries to hide.

  December, full of holly, hips and robins, marches on. As the days make the shadows stand taller, and taller still, the land is red with robins, and I am grateful for them, so grateful; the winter still holds red breasts – and those red breasts still hold a song. I think now, almost every single day, about the hedgerows of this land. Of all that they have lost, of all that they still hold close.

  The cold outside my window has taken a different shape as the land curves towards the winter solstice. I find myself thinking about a day long gone by, across that border, the one that none of us has actually seen. It has been a very long time since I thought about that day, the day my brother and I were followed, in the midst of dark, terrifying, violent times, to the cove at Kinnagoe Bay by a blood-red, flame-tailed gift of a fox. Of how we took him as a thing given to us in place of the one we had just lost: our father. I wonder when the last time was that I really sat and thought about my brother’s little-boy face, the way his voice used to sound, the way he looked when he fell asleep on the drive home like he always did.

  Something deep down has shifted, and with that quiet change, a space has been carved inside me; there is room now for things, for things that there once was no place for before.

  •

  My island is one more colour, too, one that we cannot ever forget. A colour that shows itself best of all when it is set against a backdrop of white – against snow and ice – against bog-cotton in places not quite barren. Against all things that have not yet been hurt or broken, against the wood white butterfly as she dreams her way through the Burren.

  This island, my island, is red. It is the colour of fire and of blood, of anger and war, of brutal strength and of warning.

  It is the colour that shouts of courage in the dark.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Hollowing, Hallowing

  THERE ARE PLACES THAT DANCE around us – like moths drawn to the light of a flame from a fire just making ready to take its leave, or that may, in fact, have never even been lit at all.

  There are places that will not be pinned to any wall, no matter how exquisite their colourful, near-celestial markings.

  There are places where space and time do not, can not, will not exist within the confines we have so keenly tried to erect here for ourselves – on this our solid ground, here on our carved-out lands.

  There are places that are so beyond what we claim to know is true as to make them almost imagined, mythical in that way of labyrinths and nymphs, of unimaginable beasts, of stepping in the same body of water twice. Of curses and twisted things, of lost humans and found objects, of forgetting and forging, casting out and dragging down, of the power of naming and speaking it out loud on the highest hill to be found. Of holes and caves and caverns and nooks. Of crossing points and meeting mounds and halfway hillocks, of the in-between that maybe holds the still point. Places that sing of all that came, of all that is here and all that will come.

  Places that speak in tongues, in stillness, in those delicate, moth-light ways that cannot quite ever be silenced.

  •

  What does it mean to come from a hollowed-out place? What becomes of a person, when the mark left by the highest spring tide is still not a safe enough place to build?

  To hollow out is to remove the inside of something: to make an empty space in the place of something else. Sometimes, there is space inside us but no matter how we may want it, nothing grows there.

  Hollow has an Old English root, holh – hole or hollow place.

  There is frost on the ground in the heart of winter but in my mind I am back on a fire-bright day half a year back. It is the end part of June 2019. I am across the border. I have followed the gently carved meanderings of the River Foyle from my hometown – past Culmore Point at first, then Quigley’s Point – to the body of water’s western banks at Moville, where the Bredagh River flows into the sea. Moville has two possible Gaelic origins: Bun an Phobail – ‘Foot of the Parish’ and Magh Bhile – ‘Plain of the Ancient Tree’. Cooley Stones and Skull House are the most ancient sites – taken by Christian monastic settlers and repurposed as a cross and a graveyard – when such things were introduced to this northerly corner of the island, likely by St Finian in this instance. I am camping on the ethereal banks of the Bredagh River, at Glencrow, beneath the tallest trees I have ever known. I have never seen so many crows in my life. They craekk and craw, and they gather themselves into a murder above the oldest bridge in Ireland, built by the hands of St Patrick many midsummers ago.

  I am at a staggeringly northern point, but I am in the South.

  On my first day here alone, I take myself along the river, past blackbirds that sing of the long-gone past, through a meadow that catches the sun as it ebbs out of the June-pink sky. I am on my third day away from the internet. I take no images on my phone of the elderflower and the butterflies, the dipper and the mating insects I cannot name, the folkloric copse and the cinematic coastline as it comes into view. I am off Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for a while. I will not be releasing these whispers of moments out into the ether as any post or insta-story; no tweets will pin this moment to any wall. I want to see how it feels to just be in this place.

  I have been battling with my own self for most of the year when it comes to motherhood. I’ve been thinking how some of us are not properly mothered. How some of us are unable to be mothers. How sometimes the two things come together, and there is nothing we can do except make peace with it and with ourselves. I’ve been slowly trying to unravel the idea of child and mother – nature and nurture – and allowing the grief to take its natural course. There are ways to mother beyond what we often hold as the real or proper way. Equally, we can be mothered by those who are not our blood, by those we have never met. We can mother our own self, if we will only allow ourselves.

  I walk alone along the shoreline and I think of all those who have stood on these sandy banks before me, in the shadows of coffin ships and unimaginable, inherited grief.

  From 1873 onwards emigrants leaving their starved, broken corner of the world through the port of Derry were carried down the Foyle to the spot on which I stand to join the Allan and Anchor steamship lines. The liners could be seen by those they had left behind as they passed along this coastline en route to America or Canada. If there was a local person emigrating, it was customary to light a bonfire on O’Donnell’s Hill, just above where I am rooted, so that it was visible to the passing ship: a farewell of light.

  What does it mean to hallow a place?

  When we hallow a place, we bless it and we make it holy. We sanctify and honour it; we consecrate and hold it as sacred. We keep its ways and we hold them close. We listen to the place and we feel its reverberations in our bones.

  St John’s Day is celebrated nearing the close of June – marking the birth of John the Baptist. The night before is linked to the summer solstice and is known as ‘bone fire night’ in many parts of Ireland. Tine Fhéile Eoin – St John’s Eve fires – were originally lit as part of a Celtic celebration to honour the goddess Áine, who was associate
d with the sun, fertility and the protection of crops and animals. However, as with many pagan festivals, the Catholic Church took over the event and linked it to the birth of St John.

  On St John’s Eve, the veil between the worlds is lifted entirely. White cats appear as women, folk dance themselves into different forms, and it is said that the fairies play sweet music and entice the people to come with them to their caves. The people who leave on this night never ever come back again.

  This St John’s Eve, on my first night camping in this haunting place since I went sober, I sleep in a crow-straight line in the direct view of an ancient fairy ring. My ancestors would have prayed by the fire for the land and good weather on this date. If they did not offer such prayer, a bad harvest would surely come, and the white trout would not come back up the river as they were wont to with the midsummer floods. And so I kneel alone in prayer: a prayer to the mother of the land, a prayer to all those who came before. A friend arrives and we tend the fire until the night has given way to the day. We talk of history, of borders, of womenhood, of ritual and of place; we talk of hope.

  We awake the following morning, on St John’s Day, and we swim in the belly of the Atlantic at Shroove Beach beneath the lighthouse, underneath a sky full of oily-skinned cormorants in low flight. That day would have once been the day on which swimming began that year for my ancestors, and as we swim I feel safe in the knowledge that the keeping of this ritual might offer us two protection from drowning for the full year ahead. Silence passes between my friend and me. I watch as she is held within the arms of the thinnest place I know. I dip in and out – of place, the water, of the wind as it calls each of our names beneath the summer rain.

  We walk the shore path from Greencastle towards Moville, gathering driftwood for the fire in the cove at the foot of the home of a writer we both admire, Brian Friel. We feel his presence with us as we gather, his hand steadying us as we think of what lies ahead of us both in the coming months of the impending Brexit. My friend in London, and I here – in this hollowed-out, hallowed place, a place that has known such haunting, reverberating loss.