Image description: A hand is holding a tarot card, Three of Cups by Pamela Colman Smith. In the image, three people are dancing in a circle, embracing one another with cups in their hands surrounded by fruits. Their bodies are distinct due to their different colored clothing, but not by much else. Often read as an image of joy, this is an image of relational selves; “making each other up” as they go. That we are so constituted by one another is the source of both joy and grief.
If you’ve been reading the Offerings for a while, you may be familiar with the Irish legend of Tuan Mac Cairill. I’ve told this story in various forms, as a tale about being dreamt into new shapes by grief; an understanding that continues to reveal itself in new ways as time passes.
Tuan was a magician from pre-Christian Ireland who arrived to the island as human with a group of other humans who he lived with in ease for many years.
When a disease wiped out the entire population he was the lone survivor. He went on to live several lives as wild man, stag, boar, hawk, and salmon, before finally reincarnating among humans again as a boy.
I’ve been returning lately to the scene when, after twenty-two years living without human contact, Tuan watches in horror as a fleet of ships carrying people are smashed against the rocky coast by a sudden, massive storm.
As all hopes of human connection are torn from him in an instant, “a thousand darknesses fell from the screeching sky.” He falls asleep sobbing. But as he sleeps, something curious happens.
“There I dreamed,” he tells his friend Finnian.
“And I saw myself changing into a stag in dream, and I felt in dream the beating of a new heart within me, and in dream I arched my neck and braced my powerful limbs. I awoke from the dream, and I was that which I had dreamed.”
Tuan went to sleep a human, and woke up a stag.
Bereaved people in the early stages of grief following the death of a loved one often describe a sense of profound disorientation and alienation.
Grief researcher Matthew Ratcliffe writes that such people may feel “curiously disconnected…cast out into a strange and often isolated realm.” Grief, for Ratcliffe, is “an emotional response to loss which “involves recognizing, responding to, and adapting…”
Just as Tuan wakes up in a new body after experiencing immense loss, so it may feel to move through the world in the absence of a relationship one has come to depend on in some way. It may feel that one has four legs now, instead of two. Or that one’s eyes are on the sides of the head instead of the front and so, one must acclimate to moving with a new kind of vision.