Anam Cara
Studies in a changing home
The body as home
An Archive to changed state
Moving now as mother
Moving as being
Moving as body
The landscape listens
softly to lie in the flax
To carry
To hold
To nurse
To heal
Beannacht
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
( John O’Donohue )
“Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world in. By being attuned to the wisdom of your senses, you will never become an exile in your own life, an outsider lost in an external spiritual place that your will and intellect, have constructed.” ( John O’Donohue )
Perhaps here I arrived again
To find route and to run free
to root and earth
fall and rise
Moving
A new form as yet unknown
this dance becoming
a search
My feet wanting to bury deep into the earth
The mind left
Of constellations, the day and its discontent will always fade
How can I move now
Take root
Steady
“Your body is your clay home; your body is the only home that you have in this universe. It is in and through your body that your soul becomes visible and real for you. Your body is the home of your soul on earth.”
“Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.”
Walking now
A new version of home as my body shifts
This form
a Journey
as yet unknown.
This film was made in Donegal in 2016 in collaboration with Dowd Donall Gillespie
