Kaleidoscope III 
Beannachtín : Wee blessing
My closest male friend had been dead less than a day the first time my young son cut his own hair. Way less than a day, really it was closer to half of a day. That morning all of us had woken up to a storm brewing in the west of Ireland, and he – my wee babóg – had woken up to the loss of a man he loves almost as much as he loves tractors, which is to say – an awful lot. The loss of his unofficial godfather. A man he loved in the way any of us might love a person who we take to be so magical – in the ways we hold them in our mind – as to feel like they could be a unicorn; a pixie; a god; Father Christmas.
This person, our wildly loved family friend, was a famous and extremely busy person. He had been when he and I had first become friends, but in the years following the birth of my first child, each of these things – his fame and his busyness – had multiplied in inconceivable ways.
Instead of seeing him in person – in muddy fields; at festivals; at community gatherings – we had started to see him primarily from afar. On a big screen; on a big stage; on the cover of a film festival brochure. It was strange for me, as an adult, but my wee one took it in such an interesting and inspiring way. He was able to bridge the gap between wanting to spend time with him in real life, and not getting to do that, so beautifully.
One time we went to see our friend perform his debut of a show that ended up changing his (and many other people’s) lives. The show was called Slí na Samhlaíochta: The Way of the Imagination and was a lyrical and musical exploration of the realms of Gaelic consciousness that often evade our rational, reasoning minds. This famous, magical friend of ours was, and still is, of course, the Irish writer and broadcaster Manchán Magan. In that show, along with a host of musicians known as the Other World, Manchán guided the audience on a journey through a place quite unlike any many of us may have known before in such an intimate way. He carried us along pathways that allowed us to dive deep into the Gaelic world, reflecting on the relationship between the Irish language and nature, landscape and the spiritual world. My life was richer, instantly, from having born witness to it.
As for my young son, his reaction to what he saw of it all is part of what changed my life. How my wee one processed watching a man he loves so dearly hold space in that way was a joy beyond all words. He had struggled, before that particular weekend, to say Manchán’s name properly – what with his being, alongside such an incredibly proficient talker – still only a wee one year old. It was a cold January night, that one when our friend took a large audience of festival goers on a journey into the wilds of the places unseen, between this world and the other worlds.
Winter, as she marched on towards her close, felt the most fitting time of all to have experienced this ethereal splendour. My lover had offered to bring our wee man, right after he saw the beginning of the show, back to our camper van, which we had parked up at the harbour in Doolin. Then I would get to stay on at the venue, while my boys went to warm our van up by their father-son/January-mammals-burrowing- in-for-winter cosiness vibes.
The excitement in the large, west of Ireland hotel room was palpable as we waited for the performing folk to take to the extremely large stage. There was a soft purple hue all around, lights glimmered like fireflies, or shooting stars, and voices were low as though a baby had just been born. I held our young son in my arms, his dada’s arm around us both as we waited for what we knew but also could never have known was ahead. There was a sense of something ancestral and ancient about it all. There was a feeling that we could have been anywhere, and at any time. It struck me that it must not have felt much different to have stood beneath a sky full of dancing lights; or to have first experienced snow; or to have followed a star to a stable under cover of night. This last point is not at all to liken our friend to the figure of the Christ child, but it is merely to say that there are moments in this life that leave us awe-struck; that leave us changed; that take what we know of this world and shake it up like a wee snow globe. Moments that change our whole entire lives. How blessed I feel to have watched my first-born child watch my closest male friend, one of the humans I adore most in all the world, step towards such a wildly inspiring, deeply moving moment in his own life, on his own journey.
My son’s eyes were wide as the sea as Manchán walked up the seemingly endless steps, when the moment to do so came. There was then, in the room, a thing as close to silence as a living earth can manage, as we all waited for the magic to begin. When really, truth be told, the magic had begun long, long before. It had begun, as all good things do, at the moment of conception. Rather, it had begun, as all wondrous things do, long before its conception, even. Maybe the magic Manchán gifted us that night had begun when he was my son’s age. Maybe he had witnessed something long, long ago that had changed his whole world. Maybe he had, at not quite even two years old, still unable to fully vocalise this exquisite, mythical, incomparable world, been in the presence of something so glistening in its wonder that he would spend a lifetime trying to express it. Perhaps, as a wee toddler, he had spent time in the company of someone, a special someone, a someone so amazing, so unthinkably superb, that he had made it his mission in life to pay tribute to them. Or perhaps it was a place that had led him onwards. A thin place, one where you catch a glimpse, even for the shortest, fleeting moment, of everywhere, everything – every love and loss and light – all at once. All I know is that experience on that frosty January night in the west of Ireland, my son’s first winter spent on the island to which he was born, was above and beyond what I know of the world we have taken to calling the real one. It was the stuff of magic; of spirit; of alchemy; of ecologies of truth and care and more.
The following morning in our van, as we three woke before the birds, our small son opened his eyes, laughing, and said, as clear as a bell: “Manchán went up the big steps.” His face was the face of a person who has seen another world and returned to try to spread the word.
In the months, and then years, that followed that winter’s night, my son’s love for Manchán deepened. They saw each other so little, yet my son found ways to allow the bond between them to grow. Often, I would find him smiling to himself, talking about, or asking about Manchán. When he first began to get his wee head around the idea of a phone, he began to hold a stone or shell up to his ear and have conversations with his mostly far away (geographically, physically) friend. He talked to him from abandoned cottages; stormy beaches; a ferry on the way to Scotland; a castle ruins in Wales; his own wee kitchen table, too.
Manchán had been ill for half of my son’s life when he got much sicker, then burned bright, bright, bright into the night sky, like the blazing, magical comet he is.
A few days before he died, when we had not yet told him that he would likely never see him again, our son dreamed of Manchán covered in rainbow feathers. I had never once told him that at the end of the gig that night, both me and another one of Manchán’s friends had dreamed him covered in feathers, too. It fell, my son’s dream, like a kind of gift. Like a prayer; a dream; a blessing. Suddenly I began to understand, really and truly, what it means to tie ourself to another being in a way that goes beyond this realm of blood and bone. Suddenly I understood, in a deep and dancing way, what it means to say – I will love you always. Come what may, there is a kind of magic that can, and does, exist in this unspeakably beautiful, wildly heartbreaking world of ours that transcends all we think we know about everything.
And so, when my young son cut his hair off, on that autumn morning filled with loss and love and longing, he had leaned back into something that neither I nor his father could really be part of. He was in conversation with many disparate but interwoven things.
With his ancestral line and their mourning traditions; with a man he loved who was taken by a storm; with what Paul Shephard calls ‘a beautiful and strange otherness.’
And so we held him, as he found his own way to navigate his magical friend going up the big steps, to another world. One that is not near in any geographical sense, but not far in any spiritual sense. One in which I am sure he will find a stone or shell which is just the right one with which to call our small, equally magical son, every time he wishes.
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Kaleidoscope III