Image description: Crum Woods in summertime Eastern Pennsylvania, with cut-outs of characters by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are Wheel of Fortune & Five of Cups.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
I’ve been reflecting on the tendency to seek belonging in places that one does not belong. Two years ago, on September 18th, I sat down in what was then my new backyard—enclosed by two elder oaks, a giant black walnut, a big old maple and a black cherry tree—and made a recording of myself reading James Stephens’ telling of an Irish story that I couldn’t stop thinking about. It was the story of Tuan Mac Cairill who, legend has it, was one of the first people of Ireland.
Just two weeks prior, I’d arrived home from a solo drive across the country from Berkeley where, after many trips back and forth to and from the east coast, I’d finally accepted that it was time to come home. I had many ideas about what California was or could be for me, and I deeply wanted to belong there but I just didn’t. Sometimes we want to belong in places we just don’t, or refuse to belong in the places we do. And that was a problem for me, for a long time.
So on that early autumn day in my backyard I read aloud, for thirty-six minutes and thirty-three seconds, James Stephens’ telling of Tuan Mac Cairill. It’s a story about transition and longing, which I certainly related to then, and have many times since. I loved it so much and explored the scenes often. I’d made the recording because I wanted to learn how to tell the story in an old way, by listening.
Next month, I’ve agreed to tell a story for an equinox fire at the barn where I ride. I’ve been thinking about the perfect tale for the occasion of crossing the threshold into autumn. At first, I settled on Silver Nose, the Italian version of the popular French fairytale Blue Beard. It’s about a poor woman who’s so eager to belong anywhere other than where she actually does, that she runs off with a demon who winds up torturing her, before he then goes after her sisters.
When I’m preparing to tell a story in a group, a few weeks of concerted practice is the very least I can offer the tale. But a couple weeks passed, time was ticking, and I had no desire to say the scenes of Silver Nose aloud. And then one morning during yoga I finally realized the perfect tale for fall.
Tuan Mac Cairill is a story about grief and letting go and shapeshifting and a battle between new gods and old. And this sounds dramatic I know, but I knew instantly what I needed to do. I went right to that two-year-old backyard recording and started practicing.
The context for the story is old Ireland, maybe sometime around the 6th century, when the old ways have been subsumed by Christianity but there’s a thick residue of the pagan gods that came before, as I imagine there is to this day.
A monk named Finnian hears about a magician who still worships the gods of yore, and sets out on a mission to convert him. He succeeds in his mission—not easily—but I’ll spare the details for time’s sake. Suffice it to say, the magician takes Finnian’s God into his plural kaleidoscopic heart and the two develop a deep trust and friendship.
One day they’re talking, and the monk asks the magician—a man by the name of Tuan Mac Cairill—to share about his history and genealogy. Tuan is hesitant at first, but eventually gives in, and it’s not long before Finnian realizes that the magician he’s been speaking with is actually, miraculously, one of the very first people of Ireland.
Defying everything the Christian monk thinks he understands about reality and about time, Tuan tells the whole winding tale. He tells of many lives he’s lived since the day he arrived to the island, first as a man, then a stag, then a boar, an eagle, a salmon until finally a baby boy again. He remembers every detail from every life and shares generously.
Tuan Mac Cairill had arrived on the boats with the very first people. Together, they set up a society that flourished. He describes his people from that time as having no wits, and not needing them; so amicable and cooperative was the world that they’d made together.
When disease decimates the whole population, Tuan is the only survivor and for twenty-two years, lives without human contact. As the tale goes, he trades all a man knows for the language of wolves and the buoyancy of stags and the cunning of the wild cats.
So you can imagine how it feels one day, after two decades without people, when Tuan is up on a cliff and sees ships rolling in to the harbor. The excitement fills his body and he becomes like a balloon bouncing, one boulder to the next, following the ships with his eyes as they come.
There is a sense in this moment that for every morning of the last two decades that Tuan woke up with a sorrow he couldn’t afford to feel, it was all worth it because he’d lived to see this day: The arrival of new family, new bodies to huddle close to on cold days, a people to struggle with and die for. In other words, belonging.
I know this feeling in myself, in my friends, in people I love. That longing, and the excitement one feels at the possibility that I’ve waited so long and this could be it. The place or the person, the job or the project, the teacher, the idea, the modality, the theory.
But human eyes have a knack for draping our dreams all over, no matter how ill the fit. And if you’re somewhat familiar with the trouble of old tales, you can probably guess from the way I’m describing Tuan’s hoping that this particular scene does not unfurl into the happy ending he’d let himself hope for.
As Tuan bounces along the coast on all fours, watching the ships come in carrying his future family, a violent storm rolls in. The sky becomes black and the sea follows. The boats, one by one, bob to the top of cresting waves and then crash down as if they are dice thrown from the hands of God. You might imagine the look on Tuan’s face as he sees each boat plummet from his view, only to stop its spiral at the bottom of the sea.
It’s been more than twenty years since Tuan has touched a human being and I swear I can relate to this feeling. As a kid, as a teen, as a young adult and even sometimes now, I’ve felt as a ghost might; some of the realest dimensions of my life never before seen through human eyes.
And still, the despair that Tuan must have felt as he watched those ships crash, was beyond. Far bigger than he, that’s for sure, and we can see that directly when we look through the mind’s eye at how small and powerless his human body was, looking out to sea at the ships in that vast storm.
Perhaps, had these ships not come carrying the promise of belonging after so long without it, and of the kind of affection and mutual admiration that Tuan knew existed because he’d felt it those years ago, the sight of it all may not have disturbed him to the extent that it did. It was as if his whole being was changed by seeing, which is often the case with unpalatable visions. When there’s more pain incoming than a person can process in real time, that’s one way to think about trauma.
In his telling of the tale, James Stephens writes, “The night came and with it a thousand darknesses fell from the screeching sky. Not a round eyed creature of the night might pierce an inch of that multiplied gloom. Not a creature dared creep or stand.”
Disappointment poses a great challenge for many humans. It’s common to see and believe every ship that comes in as bringing promise. And then when the storm comes and our wishes crash against the rocks, it’s equally common to refuse to accept this painful plot twist as true.
So many things in life reveal themselves to be far from the fantasy we’d had, and still we stay bouncing up and down those rocky cliffs, so many highs and so many lows, just hoping. And when the storming sea puts ships at the top of teal waves, we take that to mean something more than it does, and then are shocked when it all comes crashing down seconds later.
At this point in the story, Tuan tells Finnian that he’s not sure whether that night he simply fell asleep, or was knocked out by the wind. All he knows is that when he falls asleep, he starts to dream.
From Stephens’ telling, again:
“There I dreamed, 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.
I stood a while, stamping upon a rock, with my bristling head swung high, breathing through wide nostrils all the savor of the world. For I had come marvelously from decrepitude to strength.”
A lot of us just don’t do what Tuan did, when faced with profound disappointment. If you think about the strength of both his need for connection and the fantasy that came with it, you might notice as I did how his falling asleep in despair had an air of acceptance. Whereas to stay awake would’ve been to remain in the tension of the will writhing against things as they were, to sleep was an allowance. A relief from the vigilance of yearning.
It’s not quite a resignation. No doubt, he falls asleep as many of us have with salt-soaked cheeks, and that’s a protest in itself. But there he allows his sorrow to wash over and dream him. When he wakes he has a new life, and he finds belonging inside of it. He becomes king of the deer, and of others. At least, for a time.
When Tuan allows the depths of his disappointment to dream him into something new that he couldn’t have dreamt for himself, he makes way for the beating of a new heart. Throughout the story, this cycle repeats several times as he grows old and is reborn in new shapes.
In his life as stag, for example, he grows old and in his weakness becomes vulnerable to animals who once feared him. It’s only when he surrenders to death—intends upon it actually, by telling all the wolves about the feast they’ll have with his body the next day—that he dreams that night and is born a new shape in the morning. A boar, something he could not have chosen.
It seems to me that what’s revealed in the moments of disappointment and un-belonging has some salt in it. When the thing you thought was for you isn’t, when what was once home is telling you “get out,” and when the hope of welcome gives way to the overwhelming bitterness of rejection, those things have something in them that can change you. It can stimulate the beating of a new heart, a new phase where new kinds of things are precious.
Tuan went to sleep and woke up with new hopes. Hopes he wouldn’t have known to have had he stayed fighting for what was just not on offer. Interestingly, and I love this detail, he doesn’t give up his love for the people and his hope to belong with them again. In fact through all his lives, he seeks them. Eventually, in his life as salmon, he’s caught and cooked and eaten by a queen who later gives birth to him. There, he belongs again to humans.
And no one knows if he’s still living in Ireland to this day, recalling every detail of his many lives. I guess if he is, we won’t know whether he’s on land, in the air, in the sea or somewhere in between, so we’d better be kind to everyone!
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
You’re reading the free monthly Offering for September 2022. I make these Offerings weekly for those interested in contributing as little as $5 per month or $50 per year. Paying subscribers get access to the archives, beginning in July 2021, which include both text and audio formats beginning in October 2021.
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Sources
Stephens, J. (2012). Irish fairy tales. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Stephens’ Irish Fairy Tales, including Tuan Mac Cairill, is available in full online here.
Reminds me a lot of the 3 of Swords, of strength and resilience, of a new kind of heart emerging from what was once wounded. ❤️
Jessica, I'm back logged on my reading and just finally read this. The way that you used dream as a verb that happens upon you from an exterior effect..."But there he allows his sorrow to wash over and dream him."...I feel as if you are illuminating a characteristic of healing. I love this description of acceptance, so much so, that I think I can help myself (& others?) surrender to it more. Thank you.