Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“Grief is a country that has no definite borderlines and that recognises no single trajectory. It is a space that did not exist before your loss, and that will never disappear from your map, no matter how hard you rub at the charcoal lines. You are changed utterly, and your personal geography becomes yours and yours only.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“To stand together under a sky - that no matter how grey and uncertain - still holds room for butterflies, moths, dragonflies and things we once were too fearful to name; things like whispered hope.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“The dark has been painted â€� over much time â€� as being a negative thing, a part of existence to be wary of, a bringer of fear and things best not to be thought of. Yet nature tells us a different story. The earth tells us, over and over, as each year turns the circle of itself around, that it is in the dark where beginnings are found.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“My sorrow had begun, by then, to spread itself out underneath my skin like a dark blanket â€� unbearably heavy. I felt the weight of sadness under, rather than on, my chest. Loneliness and the sharp edges of loss were trying to get out from in beside my ribs.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“There are places that dance on the caves of our insides, even as we try to cover them up from view. We forget their names. We lose their locations on any map. Their coordinates shape-shift and turn themselves into a thing of invisible particles, into a thing not unlike the mist that lives on the frayed and jagged edges of the Atlantic Ocean. Some seem to call us back to them again and again. Some places seem to ring bells, in the dead of night, in those glassy moments of borderless existence, the chiming of which only we can hear.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“As though the thing that best defined me was the suffering and the sorrow, the things I had seen, and the things I had lost. I could not, for decades, even try to imagine that there might be something in underneath it all, that might be a self that would remain no matter how many layers I might slowly learn to undo. (pp 237)”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“It wasn't that my friends and colleagues were not caring and supportive people; they very much were, and still are. It was just that sometimes even the explanations are too much to bear. (pp30)”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“Naming things, in the language that should always have been offered to you, is a way to sculpt loss. A way to protect that which we still have.”
― Kerri Ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“Looking back, though, I see that in spite of the confusion and sorrow that still filled my days, the road was widening, even back then. The path was still just as muddy, but I had begun to find a way through. I was not yet upright but I was no longer down on my knees.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“My mother tried to stick it out, desperate to challenge the sectarianism that spilled out of all the cracks in the surfaces of our town. She wanted us to stay put, not to be put out. But as the days passed she accepted that the barrier had been built around us, and if we waited any longer we might not make it out at all.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“to anyone else; he never did once in my company. I have never, and never will, google the term gifted to me by my grandfather. Some things are best left as they are. In Ireland, these places are often referred to as áiteanna tanaí, caol áit â€� thin places.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“Those who were not tramping onwards, the friends and family of those who were departing, would have had no expectation of ever seeing their loved one again. The moment of their parting would have borne a kind of loss I am not sure we can fully comprehend today â€� the loss from your life, without quarrel or other natural cause, of a dearly loved figure, the near death, in a way, of one who may still go on to outlive you, without you ever seeing their face again. I tried to envision all the weeping that hoary bridge had witnessed in its span, silvered, salted and scoured over centuries by bawling winds. By wailing bog winds, and by the caoineadh â€� the keening â€� that still vibrates like a dirge. That still echoes above the gorse like a tolling omen, a mournersâ€� hymn, knelling above the curlew’s nest like a chant.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“act of staying alive is a daily struggle. Battles, governments, laws, leaders â€� borders â€� come and go, but the land and its sacred places remain unmoved and unchanged in their core. There are some places in this broken, burning and bleeding world in which I have experienced moments â€� fleeting but clear as winter light â€� where I”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“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.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“The echoes of the Troubles in Ireland have been, are being and will continue to be a coal-black crow that covers us with its wings. In those moments between waking and sleeping, while the border between reality and nightmare dances, the past, if it has not been dealt with, will keep resurfacing. It is my belief, though, that we are learning to talk to that crow, these days. We are learning to talk with each other, too. How do we talk about things which are so real they are almost unbelievable? I spent decades trying to accept my own story, trying to make peace with the sorrow and the unending, haunting grief.”
― Kerri Ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“Places can be abandoned, dangerous, rugged or broken â€� haunted by the ghosts of dark memories â€� but still they might help us find a way through, a sense of safety â€� even just for a little while.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“In those days, things were ‘let beâ€�, as they say. Bombing, poverty, violence, a sense of the uncontrollable inevitability of things, had resulted in buildings â€� often historical, ancient â€� being left to live out the rest of their lives as best they could, unmanaged.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“This border â€� unseen, hand-drawn by man, and for him alone, too â€� has been the thread that has run through my life. A ghost vein on the map of my insides, it is a line that is political, physical, economical and geographical; yet it is a line I have never once set eyes upon. This invisible line â€� a border that skims the water I have just emerged from, as though it were a dragonfly â€� has been the cause of such sorrow and suffering, such trauma and loss, that I ran from its curves and coursing flow at the very first chance I got.”
― Kerri Ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“I kept thinking about my grandfather, and his childhood. By his bed he had always kept the most striking photograph of his mother. She is almost warrior-like in that picture, gazing past the camera towards a place unknown. Piercing eyes, a long neck â€� taut, like a swan’s â€� an air of the otherworldly in her stance. I both loved and hated that image, that woman. Her ancestral draw was so extreme that it called to me, siren-like, even through the cheap and flimsy paper that could never dare to capture her on its surface. There is a restlessness to her hands, a hunger in the way she holds herself. Despite the black and white of the print, there is no sense of her being in the shadows. After he died I printed a copy of that picture of my grandfather’s mother and put it up in the bathroom of my flat. A desire came over me to be able to see her when I wanted to, to nurture an odd sense of intimacy with the image of her â€�”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“Europe is defined, in many ways, by borders. They speak of crumbled empires, shifting boundaries â€� most of them, certainly the Irish border, speak of unimaginable suffering.”
― Kerri Ní Dochartaigh

“I felt held in a place other than where I was. I wailed and shook. It felt like I was standing in a place that I had been before. I imagined my grandfather was there by my freezing, hurting side. I keened for him, and honoured the loss that might still leave room for hope. It felt as if I was about to be thrown back into the solid world, but then straight away I felt like I was drawn in even deeper, held even tighter. I remember the sense of being in a long, thin tower of light, and of stillness. It passed, the light and the stillness, and I found myself properly back on the soft black sands â€� even though of course I hadn’t left there at all. I could hear again, then, the sound of wild birds screeching sharply in the sky. It felt as if they were lamenting some form of loss, too, on that haunting black stretch of land.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

“On another day, many years down the line from that Cornish one, in another Celtic land, under another sky entirely, I will learn that the Irish for ‘to hopeâ€� is, too, the Irish for ‘to burnâ€�. Embers, holding on for dear life, held tight inside the hearth’s womb, waiting to be rekindled. The kindling of yesterday, the women of yesteryear, lighting the flame inside our bellies, feeding the fire inside our hearts on a day not too far away from this one.”
― Kerri Ní Dochartaigh

“Oystercatchers made a line out of their flight, as the light made an end to that final day, and I thought of St Brigid, another border-born female â€� one that we find in the year’s darkest days.”
― Kerri Ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“Silence, like the moon, is a white circle moving through the seasons, shape-shifting its way across the phases of its own darkness.”
― Kerri Ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places