Anam Cara

Each language has a unique memory. The thoughts, whispers, and voices of a people live in their language. Gradually, over time, all the words grow together to build a language. The sound of the wind, the chorus of the tides, the silence of stone, love whispers in the night, the swell of delight and the sorrow of the darkness, all came to find their echoes in the language. As it fills out, the language becomes the echo-mirror of the people and their landscape. No one knows the secret colour and the unique sound of the soul of a people as their language does. A language is a magical presence. It is utterly alive. Because we use it every minute to feel and think and talk, we rarely stop to notice how strange and exciting words are. It is like the air: we cannot live one moment without it, yet we rarely think of it. The most vital centre of your life is your mind. Your world is moored to your mind. Now there is no power that awakens and opens the mind as language does. Words form our minds, and we can only see ourselves and the world through the lenses of words. As they age over centuries, words ripen with nuance and deeper levels of meaning. The memory of a people lives in the rich landscape of its language. The destructive things done by them and to them live there too.

When strangers intrude and take over what is not their own, everything in the place reminds them that they do not belong there. Their guilt and unease can be assuaged by making the take-over as clean and thorough as possible. They must control everything. This is what a colonizer does. Our Irish language was targeted in this way. The flow between the feeling and the language was broken. Your own language fits your mind. Ancestral memory and nuance break on the shores of thought.

A Philosophy of Dúcas

The longing of a people is caught in the web of their language. Dreams and memories are stored there. A language is the inner landscape in which a people can belong. When you destroy a people’s language through colonization or through the more subtle, toxic colonization of consumerism, you fracture their belonging and leave them in limbo. It is fascinating how a language fashions so naturally the experience of a people into a philosophy of life. Sometimes one word holds centuries of experience; like a prism, you can turn it at different angles and it breaks and gathers the light of longing in different ways.

In the Irish language, there are no specific substantive nouns of longing and belonging. This must mean that the Irish mind never saw them as fixed, closed realities, nor as separate things; or perhaps it means that the experience of them was constantly in the consciousness. Both belonging and longing come together in a wider, implicit sense of life and living. The word “dúcas” is the larger embrace. Dúcas captures the inner sense and content of belonging in that it means one’s birthright and heritage. This brings to expression the particular lineage of belonging to which one became heir on entering the world. The act of birth brings possibility and limitation, but it also confers rights. Dúcas also means one’s native place. This is where you were born and the networks of subtle belonging that will always somehow anchor you there. There are many deep and penumbral layers to the way we belong in the world. There is none more dense and difficult to penetrate than the time and place of our first awakening as children. In the Irish tradition, there would be a deep sense of the way a place and its soul-atmosphere seep into you during that time.

The phrase “ag fillead ar do dúcas” means returning to your native place and also the rediscovery of who you are. The return home is also the retrieval and reawakening of a hidden and forgotten treasury of identity and soul. To come home to where you belong is to come into your own, to become what you are, to awaken and develop your latent spiritual heritage. Dúcas also means the nature of the relationship you have with someone when there is a real affinity of soul between you both. When you have dúcas with someone, there is a flow of spirit and vitality between you. The echo of each other’s longing brings and holds you both within the one circle of belonging. In this sense, dúcas is what enables and sustains the anam-cara affinity.