On the bus away from Dublin, both grief and settling land on me. After leaving the airport yesterday, I decided against the transfer to stretch my legs. Immediately, I noticed a feeling of home, ease. Although it was a matter of days, my body remembered the road and water nearby, the familiar plants & oddly welcoming cloudy chill. It felt like a place that belongs to me in a way deeper than should be possible in 3 days of previous visits. Finding my feet back in Siobhán and Martin's home, the comfort there, the fear of slowness fell away.
As I explained my desire to study Irish, Martin asked my motivation. There was a twinge of shame as I shared my passion and previous work with Indigenous language revitalization, and the eventual obvious blindspot - that I too had lost the language of my ancestors. Underneath my yearning to defend the voices colonialism is choking is something I’m finally ready to feel. Tears well as I name this deep ache for the words I should know, words I would know had the British not crushed & pillaged the aliveness of this landscape all those years ago. Those sounds would have taught my body its relationship & roots, and as Manchán Magan writes, given me my ceap, an anchor tying me to this rugged island.
Magan offers the word aduantas, the feeling of fear blended with sadness when confronted with newness. That's what travel often produces in me, and certainly so when returning to the home of my ancestors. I long to have a sense of self inseparable from the land, seas, hawks, trees. Instead, I grew in an vacuum of pavement & consumption, with no offering of connection with the soil beneath the concrete. It was one thing to take to battle for this connection for others. It's entirely another, one full of heartbreak, to admit this is what I most long for myself. The vulnerability in naming this longing comes with more weeping than I can hold. It spills onto my cheeks, & into the loughs, the seas.
The shame of not knowing, the feeling of putting on clothing that isn't truly mine, is overwhelming. As I allow my body to sow relationship with these fields & waters I wish to be mine/ours, I pray I can let in the truth. My disconnection came through violence & theft. Extraction and dispossession meant my family had to flee in hopes of survival, even if it meant a cultural death,. The shame is in fact not mine to carry, it never was; it's to be carried by those who starved &us.
The center of my ribcage grips for air at the pain that flows through generations inside me. For now, my purpose is to let the anguish pass through me to make room for the aliveness colonialism stole.
