Kaleidoscope III 
The illustrated Children’s Bible I had at home started, unsurprisingly, with the Creation Myth. God made the world. We are made in his image. It didn’t comfort me. I think that even from a very young age I understood that there was more than one story. That bible sat on a shelf with so many other books, and there was a library in town that housed so very many more. There was also a sense that something about me, the way I thought, didn’t fit. I asked too many questions, and they were the wrong kind of questions. I found it hard to listen, drifted off into my own little world when I was supposed to sit still for too long. However, the connection between religion, faith and story gave me a sense of the importance of narrative as a tool for connection and meaning-making. In the Irish context, with Bridget and Mary, there’s also a sense of the importance of the Divine Feminine, and the blurred boundaries between the Christian and the pagan. We light candles to Mary and not Jesus when we want something. This is also very stark in the way we explore the stories of St. Patrick, or the saint Lí Bán, a princess transformed into a mermaid in the wake of a dreadful flood, who lived for three centuries as a half-woman, half-salmon before being caught in a fishing net, baptised and renamed Muirgen by the monk Comghall. There’s a weirdness there, that we can’t escape. It’s in us. We worry at the surface, trying to decipher what’s beneath.
Holy wells are dotted all over Ireland, and visiting an isolated one can feel like a portal to another time, another place. Driving to Monaghan one day, I came across St. Dymphna’s well. There was an altar for outdoor masses there, metalwork that combined shamrocks and Celtic symbols, flaking rust. It was a quiet place, but standing there, I had a sense of being out of kilter, out of time. St. Dymphna is tied to mental health and trauma. She comforts the despondent. I quite enjoy the purposes of saints, each with a special gift. Anthony for lost keys, Francis for animals, and Dymphna for things that were so pervasive here, and so unspoken. We might not need the church, but there are times we need to be connected to each other. We so often reach, but cannot touch.
I hungered for story as a child, but I found it difficult to sit still, to ‘attend’ and I remember changing the pronouns of prayers at mass because it felt strange to me that everything was ‘he’ and ‘him’. There was always a sense that this was not for me. However, I found it really difficult to articulate the things that didn’t sit well. Of course, as I came of age, and became more aware of some of the specifics of what the church had done, I had more words to put on my feelings. I didn’t understand, though, how you could say one thing and do another. I still find it hard to get my head around. I have a memory of being in the Vatican at sixteen, on a school tour and looking around and being overwhelmed by a sense of dissonance. An internal shift that moved me one more step away. By the time I reached my twenties, whatever thing inside me that had allowed me to separate the ritual from the organisation had disappeared, and I couldn’t sit with it at all anymore. You can’t get away clean though, not entirely, I still attend funerals and weddings. And there are times I feel the need to pray. When meaning eludes me, as it often does, I read, I write, I turn things over and over in my head until their surface becomes smoother, less abrasive. If I cannot do these things it impacts me, physically and emotionally. I sleep less well, my skin begins to flake and break apart, I get headaches, and dizzy spells, I feel everything but none of it directly. Making things, and exploring things that others have made is healing for me in a way that’s tangible. It lights up the part of my brain that meditation is supposed to activate but has never quite managed to, for me. Writing, reading or observing something intricate and moving, a piece of art or detail in the world that grabs me is one of the only ways that I can still myself, forget the noise of everything around.
I do have a love of ritual. Routines are comforting, of course they are, and a ritual is a routine imbued with meaning. I light candles, bless myself when I see an ambulance and the rhythmic language of childhood prayers is something I return to in times of crisis. When I’m abroad, I visit churches and am comforted by the smell of incense and the mix of dim and colour. I look at lions that do not look like lions. I search expressions on faces in the stations of the cross. I think of the people I know and love who have or have had faith. I have faith too, I feel love very deeply. I see the robins and the blue tits in the plum tree in our garden, and I watch the fledglings grow. I dug up some trees that needed new homes last summer, and their root network was intertwined. We’re all connected in ways we don’t expect. My child has recently become fascinated with this animal called the bobtailed squid, which is only the size of a walnut, but it has this organ, the light organ, that allows it to camouflage successfully, by matching the shine of moonlight through the waves. But the light organ only develops because of this bacteria, Vibrio-Fischeri that sets up home inside it. Knowing how things work only deepens the miracle of them, and there are so many opportunities to experience awe on this planet that we don’t take adequate care of. I look at her, this being who was so recently a water creature in me, and I feel a responsibility to respect the right things, and live curiously and lovingly. I want to care when others are hurting, and it can be difficult to not be consumed by it, we all exist with walls up, but we have a need for windows in them too. And we need to use them, to keep looking.
To encounter a piece of art that moves you is to touch something that’s so much larger than yourself. People search for meaning, but it’s everywhere. In a poem that takes your breath away, as Emily Dickinson did when as a teenager I would read her over and over again or as the work of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Wisława Szymborska did for me this year reading in snatches on the bus to work as the sun rose and the streetlights dimmed. I’ve been learning more about birds since we moved into a house with a garden, their fragility and strength and I’m interested in how they’re observed by other eyes, and what those images communicate. As I read, I try to let a poem just be a poem, which can be difficult when you’re a writer, the urge is to look at how an impact was achieved, and whether it’s intentional, or not. There’s a right time for everything, and as your experience of the world develops, so too does your capacity to connect with other perspectives, not with the openness of a child, but with curiosity and kinship. You open and you close, unfurl again.
Visual art is something that I encounter, much like poetry in fits and starts. Things need to hit you at the right time. When I write about things that move me, it never feels enough. I don’t write as an expert or an academic, and often don’t have the bank of knowledge that’s required to put them into context. When I read, look at or hear a piece of art, it’s the emotional truth of it that lingers. That connecting to some truth or detail that’s bigger than yourself, or the sense that an experience can be specific and collective at the same time packs a punch. I’ve been looking at this photograph from 1910 by Heinrich Kuhn, Drum and Tin Soldier, recently. There’s a dreaminess to it, but tempered with exactness. I’ve resisted the urge to look into the specifics of technique and historical art photography since becoming drawn to this image, because there’s a sense of wonder that I feel when I look at it and I want to inhabit it for a little longer before I go down a rabbit hole of context. Art hits you differently at different points in your life, and you can experience one story from multiple perspectives, which feels mystical. For me, writing isn’t so much an attempt to make meaning, as to trace the edges of what’s already there. To work out how I feel about things, and make sense of them, even though so much of what happens is senseless.
For some people, the purpose of their spirituality is to allow them to cope with the world more easily. When I was a child, my mother would tell me stories to get me to eat. I would get one sentence per bite, and the texture, temperature or sense of fullness would have to be endured for the sake of the next twist in the tale. The moments that we share, the narratives we weave or present, what we choose to show each other, contribute to our capacity to understand and endure. When a task is onerous, a journey is long, or sleep is hard to find, we tell each other stories. Sometimes they are old stories, that have been around for a long time, and we make our own of them. We see and we feel seen. Creating is an act of faith, as is receiving. When hope is hard to find, we tend to reach for it anyway. When we can’t see a future, sometimes the only thing that we can do is make one up.
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Kaleidoscope III