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.

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Macha’s Curse

Macha (“MAWK-AH”)  is a formidable force in the Irish mythical tradition. Her name means ‘Plain of Land’ or ‘Field’. She is often interpreted as an aspect of the triple goddess the Morrígan ("MOR-REE-ghan"); essentially her sister. Some believe Macha herself is a triple goddess as there are multiple Macha’s in Early Irish Literature.

In the story I share below, ‘The Pangs of Ulster’, Macha is described as a fairywoman. The Pangs is a remscéla (fore-tale) to the great Irish epic, Táin Bó Cúailnge, 'The Cattleraid of Cooley'. It is also known as Ces Ulad, 'The Affliction [or Debility] of the Ulstermen.'

Art: Macha by Bard Mythologies

THE PANGS OF ULSTER

There was a very rich landlord in Ulster, Crunniuc mac Agnomain. He lived in a lonely place in the mountains with all his sons. His wife was dead.

Once, as he was alone in the house, he saw a woman coming toward him there, and she was a fine woman in his eyes. She settled down and began working at once, as though she were well used to the house. When night came, she put everything in order without being asked. Then she slept with Crunniuc. She stayed with him for a long while afterward, and there was never a lack of food or clothes or anything else under her care.

Soon, a fair was held in Ulster. Everyone in Ulster, men and women, boys and girls, went to the fair. Crunniuc set out for the fair with the rest, in his best clothes and in great vigour.

‘It would be as well not to grow boastful or careless in anything you say,’ the woman said to him.

‘That isn’t likely,’ he said.

The fair was held. At the end of the day the king’s chariot was brought onto the field. His chariot and horses won. The crowd said that nothing could beat those horses.

‘My wife is faster,’ Crunniuc said.

He was taken immediately before the king and the woman was sent for. She said to the messenger:

‘It would be a heavy burden for me to go and free him now. I am full with child.’

‘Burden?’ the messenger said. ‘He will die unless you come.’

She went to the fair, and her pangs gripped her. She called out to the crowd:

‘A mother bore each one of you! Help me! Wait till my child is born.’

But she couldn’t move them.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘A long-lasting evil will come out of this on the whole of Ulster.’

‘What is your name?’ the king said. ‘My name, and the name of my offspring,’ she said, ‘will be given to this place. I am Macha, daughter of Sainrith mac Imbaith’ [possibly means, ‘Strange son of Ocean’].

Then she raced the chariot and outran the horses. As the chariot reached the end of the field, she gave birth alongside it. She bore twins. a son and a daughter. The name Emain Macha, the Twins of Macha, comes from this.

As she gave birth she screamed out that all who heard that scream would suffer from the same pangs for five days and four nights in their times of greatest difficulty. This affliction, ever afterward, seized all the men of Ulster who were there that day, and nine generations after them. Five days and four nights, or five nights and four days, the pangs lasted. For nine generations any Ulsterman in those pangs had no more strength than a woman on the bed of labour.

Photo: Emain Macha known today as Navan Fort in Co. Armagh. It was the royal capital of the kingdom of Ulster in pre-Christian Ireland. Only last year, archaeologists discovered new evidence of monumental Iron Age temples and religious complexes at Emain Macha.

THE DARK FEMININE WITHIN

Macha’s curse is critical to the unfolding of the Táin as the Ulstermen in the throes of childbirth are unfit for combat. And so, akin to her sister the Morrígan, as a fierce protectress of the land, Macha’s story is an example of the power of feminine grief, fury and retaliation in influencing the outcome of warriors in battle. In fact, the heads of mortally wounded warriors in battle are known as, 'Macha's acorn crop'. She embodies the dark feminine.

When we experience the dark feminine within us, we often reject her because she is simply not welcome in our society and so, she is not welcome in our bodies (as systems of oppression play out within our own bodies). These ‘dark’ emotions get stored as frozen tension within our being. They become our shackles. We enter a freeze state to cope with the threat of their activation.

Yet these emotions so desire to be felt, to be expressed, to be metabolised within a container of safety. They are a source of fuel, of lifeforce energy, of power.

I’M RAGING

For me, Macha serves as a reminder of how transformational expressing our rage can be. Macha’s rage is so potent it holds a supernatural force. I’ve yet to meet a woman who has not experienced the internalised rage of living in a patriarchal world. Expressed in healthy ways, rage can be a catalyst for change.

My most recent experience of rage happened the past week. I’m up on the Inishowen peninsula spending time in the wilds of beloved Donegal. On a visit to Doagh Famine Village, there was an exhibit of a ‘sod house’ a tiny exposed shelter on the outskirts of a community that an unmarried mother was sent with her baby to live because of the ‘shame’ she brought upon her family. Literally an outcast barely surviving in the wild. And what about the father?! This filled me with a bloody rage!

It brought me back to present-day Ireland, of a society simmering with untold grief as more is released about the cruel and abhorrent treatment of mothers and babies under the ‘care’ of the Catholic Church. One of the many grieving processes we’ve had to endure as we disentangle ourselves from the stranglehold of the church. And yet, this collective pain pales in comparison to the experiences at the individual level of the courageous survivors. This has affected my immediate family as one of my own siblings was born in a mother and baby home.

I am raging.

Art: ‘The goddess Macha curses the Men of Ulster’ by Stephen Reid, 1909

SO WHAT TO DO WITH THIS RAGE?

In the past my first step was activism. Straight into my masculine mode, taking action first. This came at the expense of my body because I didn’t metabolise the rage within. I spent 14 years working in global justice and it was only towards the end of my career, that I began to pay attention to my body’s response to injustice. This resulted in despair, exhaustion and multiple burnouts.

The first step now for me is noticing where I feel rage in my body:

• I feel it build at the back of my throat

• The sound it makes comes from that place, it’s almost feline like a hissing growl

• This sensation in my throat connects to a hallow swell in my stomach

• My heart contracts and my chest pushes up and out

• My eyes squint, brow furrows

• My pulse races

I then move through these feeling states whenever I can find a safe space. My two go-to methods to do this are conscious shaking or by using a ‘move as you are feeling’ practice like my own, Celtic Woman’s Call, or Primal Feminine Flow taught to me by my teacher, Jenna Ward.

Awareness of what is happening in our bodies and responding in real time is an immense source of personal power. It influences the impact of our stress response. It helps us move energy that could otherwise get stored as frozen trauma through out bodies, and use it to influence the actions we take. In my body, this moves me from a chaotic reactive space - to a rooted embodied response. It helps me feel sovereign.  

As an activist my process now is to 1. Metabolise the feeling 2. Take empowered action from this place.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

Grab yourself a cuppa, and cosy up with your journal as you reflect on Macha’s story and what it means to you. Here are some self-inquiry prompts to help:

• What speaks to you about Macha’s story?

• What thoughts, feelings or sensations bubbled in your body as you explored this myth? Where did they bubble?

• Can you locate where you feel rage in your body?

• What could help you metabolise your rage in healthy ways?

SOURCES:

The Táin: From the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattleraid of Cooley) by Anonymous translated by Thomas Kinsella