Níl Aon Tinteán Mar Do Thinteán Féin
‘There is no hearth, like your own hearth.’
Sometime ago, I kept having this Aisling (“ASH-ling”), this vision, this dream of being on the land. It was pitch black. The night cold and lonely but for the comfort of the cosmos twinkling overhead. I knew I was near home but I couldn’t find my way. I felt like I was blind-folded, hands feeling into the dark hoping to grasp at something to make meaning with. I wrote in my journal, "I'm on the land. I know I'm close. I can sense it. I can almost smell the turf but I don't know where my home is."
As is with these elusive flashes of illumination that tantalise us in our dreamscape, this continued for a time with no clarity.
Then one night back in this familiar place; on the land, in the void. A light switched on. I squinted my eyes and made out a small stonewashed cottage in the distance resting into the hills. A candle flickered in the window. A flame, a beacon to guide me home.
Cottages in a Landscape by Lawson Birch
Where is home?
It took me a good while to comprehend that the land I was searching blindly on, was in fact my body. And the light in the cottage was me attuning to the intuitive guidance - that home is in this body. In this one vessel that I have been bestowed for this lifetime. I had been searching for my elusive ‘home’ my whole life. And yet, here I am. Living in it.
Táim sa bhaile cheana féin. Tá an baile i mo chorp.
I am already home. Home is in my body.
Building a loving, nourishing and safe home takes time. We are always tinkering in our homes. Doing spring cleans to clear it of what we no longer need. Renovating to make ‘improvements’. Leaving the door open for our loved ones. Locking it and building fences to keep out those who make us feel unsafe. Creating boundaries to determine who can cross its threshold and enter, and into which specific rooms. Hiding our treasures in the attic. Burying our undesirables in the basement.
We experience the full spectrum of life in our homes. The roar of laughter, the spirit of intense joy and celebration, the company of feasting, the pleasure of desire fulfilled, the nourishment of meals, or indeed the tension of these times. Resting, dreaming, tormenting ourselves roaming around our homes on sleepless nights. Birthing creations, birthing life. Bathing, cleansing, tending. Bleeding, allowing parts of ourselves to die as we hit the bathroom floor on our knees in grief. Our homes witness it all. Our homes feel it all.
Níl Aon Tinteán Mar Do Thinteán Féin
“NEEL AIN TEENTAWN MAR DUH HEENTAWN FEY-N”. ‘There is no hearth, like your own hearth.’ This proverb is one of Ireland's most well known. I myself have known it my entire life. And yet, it is only now as I approach the end of my fourth decade on this plain, do I perceive it through an embodied lens.
The closest English language equivalent is, ‘There is no place like home’, infamously invoked by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz as she taps her ruby red slippers and Glinda the Good Witch tells her, “If we know ourselves, we’re always home. Anywhere.”
Dorothy is right. There is no place like YOUR home. No body like yours. That desire you feel to come home; the one we all innately feel as part of the human experience. It is the journey home to our bodies. Because home is in your body. Home is YOU.
And yet, at times, it’s so hard to live in our beloved homes as we have to share them with our demons, our menacing lodgers. We can’t risk accidentally leaving the door open and letting one out for fear of being shamed by our respective societies.
Societies that tell us not to spend anytime at home. To always be out hustling for the future version of ourselves, the person we’re supposed to become, the home we’re supposed to build. You know that flawless has-her-shit-together future you, who lives in her exquisite stately manor.
There are many capitalist structures that are designed to ensure we don’t accept ourselves, our bodies, our homes as is. And make a ton of money out of it. In this vein, acceptance of you as you are is not complacency, it is a form of resistance and an immense source of personal power.
You see, we’re always in the process of becoming. We become until our dying breath. So if we don’t accept ourselves now, when will we? It is honourable to desire personal evolution but it is equally honourable to love your home now, demons and all. To rest by her fire and allow the warmth of her hearth to nourish your bones.
By the Fireside by Guy Orlando Rose, 1910
An invocation for home
As I unfold into my journey of acceptance of my own home, I am giving myself permission to enjoy the process of reconnection with Gaeilge, the Irish language which lived dormant in my body for so long. I wish I possessed the linguistic fluency of my teenage years but I don’t. Someday I will. As I am, I have been creating these affirmations in Gaeilge (with guidance) and English for the women in my programmes to use as a source of embodied power. I invite you now to invoke these words as homage to your earthly home, or to simply click play and allow the sound to wash over you and the language to fill your cells as a sacred sound vibration.
Baile - Home
Táim sa bhaile cheana féin. Tá an baile i mo chorp.
I am already home. Home is in my body.
Soláthraíonn an baile díol mo fhreastail.
Home provides me with everything I need.
Bíonn an draíocht allta ag coipeadh ar a theallach.
Wild magic brews in its hearth.
