All of This is True
on holding space for opposites
Bus stop. A murky Friday morning. 20 miles from Dublin city. Breathing jittery coffee breath out into the tender air. 20 miles from the aftermath of fire and rage and broken things. No one speaks of anything else.
This is not us. This is not us. But it is us.
This happens in other places. Not here. But it’s happening here.
My attention is captured by a woman’s voice exclaiming: “Look, they’re posting their letters to Santy!” She is speaking to her son but I follow her outstretched finger to the post box, where three children in bobbled hats hold oversized envelopes decorated in red and green. Their mother instructs them to smile for the camera, and their excitement is palpable as she documents this significant moment for the family archives.
I’m a crier anyway. I smile and knock back another slug of coffee to stop the tears. Such pure and precious sweetness, but that’s not all. Running alongside this lingering image of innocent enchantment is another image. A child lying on a hospital floor. She is wearing an oxygen mask and hooked up to several tubes which may or may not be increasing her chances of survival. If you listen closely, you can hear her whimpers.
A child.
How can I hold both of these images?
I think of a poem I scribbled a few weeks ago. It’s the same feeling as I had then.
Thursday night marked the ‘live premier’ (I’ve been told to own this kind of language but can still only use it jokingly) of In Cloak & Womb, a song cycle for three female voices I’ve been working on all year. I describe these songs as ‘tracing the echoes of Brigid’; what interests me is what her essence stands for, how that might still live, how we might hold space for its echoes to reverberate and reconnect us to the planet and one another. I had so many gorgeous conversations with people after the show. We spoke of draoícht: the magic of sound, the magic of imagination when it creates something where there was nothing, the magic of a space like Croí Anú when it invites your whole body into a sigh before it has even been filled with voices.
A deep sigh.
And then -
floods of text messages. Dublin’s burning. A terrible grief has been overshadowed by the opportunism of extremists.
There is no room for racism in Ireland. Yes, this is true.
We must condemn this violence, this hate, this mindless destruction of public infrastructure. Yes, this is true.
People are disenfranchised. This is what happens when you allow the chasms of inequality to widen. Yes, this is all true.
Othering never got us anywhere, be it because of colour or class or something else.
I watch the Late Late Toy Show. I can’t help myself. I am a bundle of contradictions. Plastic everywhere! Stuff, and more stuff, nobody needs! But the children!
The children are exuberant, and full of the best kind of chaos. Their joy is contagious. Yes, this is true.
Consumerism is destroying the planet. Yes, this is also true.
A little girl, who is sick, can barely contain herself when she is offered the trip of a lifetime courtesy of Disney. She deserves this. Oh God, she deserves it so much. And yet all I can think is: “Dear Disney, how many children’s deaths did you contribute to when you supported Israel and not Palestine?”
To be alive now is to hold so much.
To be alive, and to fully commit to living, is to grapple daily with opposing things that are all true and yet don’t make their opposites any less true.
How can all of this be true?
I don’t know, exactly, all I know is that I will keep trying to hold enough space within myself for all of it.
“The children are always ours, every single one.” - James Baldwin