Thin places

by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

There is untold darkness to the world that we have been given, and after many years of battling against that darkness I have learned to be still in its presence. To lay a place for it at the table, to sit with its black feather-tips, to let its echoes dance across the landscape of my insides when the sadness comes, silent like a fox.

You watch murmurations of starlings on yet another night of rioting, and you want to know what the birds know. What draws them towards one another in dance. What keeps them so close together and what taught them how to gather, how to be so delicate with one another. You go into school. You sit with people who only see violent things – those things like bonfires and scorched skin, flags and kneecappings – on the news. Whose parents warn them not to be friends with weans who live on housing estates.

There are places that are so thin that we see right through it all, through the untruths we have told ourselves about who we are. We see through every last bit of the things that we once thought defined us. We see that, like a landscape that has undergone vast and irreversible shifts, we, too, might be capable of change.

My ancestors believed that to behold the divine, all that was other than our own selves, you needed to be ready. Those who stood in a line too long, too far back for me to see the end-point, believed that place and time came together, in those delicate moments, to meet your own willing self.