When did you first realize you knew what your path was?
This is a strangely long personal story, which you probably didn’t intend from your question but I’m surprised to say I feel like telling it.
Orla says she figured it out young, through her obsession with Irish fantasy stories and mythology and how it all had more resonance for her then any other faith on offer. For me, it was a little slower. I was raised Catholic, like Orla, but neither of us were from actually religious homes. Like most people were Catholic technically.
But when I was 13 was when my health first took a dive and my grandmother took to the church hard. So I tried to believe, tried to get some comfort from it. Sometimes it worked. I loved to sing, church music was familiar and comforting. Lighting a candle and wishing. Holy wells and saints medals. My nana tried it all, she was my main care-taker.
When she died, when I was 15/16 I tried Buddhism for a while. But I couldn’t get passed the lack of control it gave me. How it demanded I give up, to a certain extent (very much my feelings coloured by my life then and not meant to reflect poorly on the complex group of faiths that make up Buddhism). It was a very sterilized, Western take on Buddhism anyway, divorced from all culture and context, that had no heart left.
I was an avid student of history and archaeology, on my own before I even left school. I knew my health wasn’t good enough to be a practising archaeologist but on my good days I could visits sites you could get to on buses.
One day sitting out in field filled with neolithic, bronze age, Iron Age and medieval Christian remains, it clicked. I saw my path laid out in front of me like it had always been there.
So I went and studied ancient history. One day I go to the bog bodies exhibit the National Museum of Archaeology in Dublin.
The bog bodies exhibit houses a number of bodies that were preserved in the peat bogs of Ireland. So despite being well over a thousand years old, they have skin. It not like mumification. When one of these bodies was found the police thought it was a modern murder at first. Each of the bodies are in these little round cubbies with a bench in them.
The best preserved body there is just a torso with arms, he’s called the Croghan Man. The hands are so well preserved you can see he had a manicure not long before he was killed. He has fingerprints. He would have been sixth foot, very tall for his day.
And there’s this teenage girl with a bad fringe (she’s knows better now) is sitting there on the bench writing.
Now I’m here as a historian, I’d seen the documentary on the excavation and attended one of Nick Kelly’s, head of antiquities at the times, lectures on the subject. But I’m also there because something is pulling at me.
It feels spiritual, but also deeply personal. So I’m really annoyed that there is this random teenager sitting on my goddam bench just scribbling in a notebook. But I figure she’ll leave soon so I sit down too.
I try to tune her out and have my spiritual moment, looking at these hands that are like new and trying to conceived of the vastness of time they’ve traveled through. This fixed point in time that the rest of us are all revolving around.
And this girl is still fucking beside me writing.
Just as I’m thinking of leaving, she looks up at me and says “isn’t it like time travel?”
I must have made some sort of reply but I don’t know what. And she goes “looking at his hands, it’s like looking through time. I love writing here.”
I bought that girl a cup of tea, she turned out to be a few years behind me in the same university, even taking some of the same classes but we hadn’t crossed paths until then. She’d even been to the same Nick Kelly lecture as me, but I was sitting in the back.
We talked for ages and I think we both figured out a lot about our faith, our craft and what we thought about the universe and magic from each other.
Anyway, this is the story of how I met Orla.
