Well, here we go. Back on Brigid’s Path, (after know myself, reconciling the past and joy) and this time it’s the Poet aspect I’m meant to be sitting with. I say “meant to” because I’ve been half-avoiding this one, cos poetry has never felt like mine to claim – I’m no poet, or so I’ve told myself for years.
But Brigid doesn’t just mean poet the way we mean it now, all verse and rhyme. In the old triads, the ones that list out threes of everything Gaelic culture thought was worth naming, there’s one that goes: three things that constitute a poet – knowledge that illumines, chewing of the marrow, and improvisation. In Irish: imbas forosnai, teinm laeda, dichetal do chennaib.
Three marks. Not three techniques you learn in a workshop – three ways of knowing.
Imbas forosnai – knowledge that illumines
For-osna. Lights up. Brings to light. Makes manifest.
This is the kind of knowing that arrives already lit, if that makes any sense at all. Not information you went looking for, but something that illuminates the second it lands – and you can’t unknow it afterwards.
I had a deep knowing from January this year that something was wrong. It took til March to take the drastic step of taking time off work. And even then I was hesitating about the amount of time I took. It took a few months after that before I could even hold a decent conversation at home.
We all have this deep knowing inside of us. We’ve just very often trained ourselves to ignore it. It’s not scientific, like? So how do it work? Well, I believe it’s our bodies and souls speaking to us. It’s the signs and indications our bodies and souls give us that we can’t put into a so called normal box, so we learn to ignore them. We can call it intuition, self-knowledge, all we want – but we all know things deep down that sometimes it suits us to ignore.
The old sources call imbas forosnai a gift of clairvoyance. I don’t think you need to believe in fortune-telling to recognise the shape of it. Are you telling the future, or creating it? I still don’t have an answer to that one. (Ask me again once I’ve chewed on it properly.) I just know that January me knew something March me eventually had to act on, and the gap between knowing and acting nearly cost me more than the knowing itself.
Teinm laeda – chewing of the marrow
This is the one I actually understand in my bones, cos it’s just rumination. Chewing the pith. I think of a cow working the same mouthful over and over, getting everything out of it slowly, no rush. Teinm laeda is knowledge you don’t get in a flash – you get it by staying with something long after everyone else has moved on. Turning it over. Turning it over again.
Really, this is most of what I do. Most of what any of us do, if we’re honest, when we’re actually working something out rather than performing having worked it out.
Dichetal do chennaib – improvisation, straight from the head
Now, this is the one that stops me in my tracks every time. Dichetal do chennaib literally means from the head – and it’s the mark of knowledge that arrives whole, spoken, in the moment, with no chewing at all. No illumination beforehand. Just composed, extemporaneously, because the moment demanded it.
The example I keep coming back to is Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, standing over her husband’s body, and the caoineadh – the keen – coming out of her already formed. Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire wasn’t drafted. It wasn’t chewed over for weeks. It came out of her, whole, because grief needed a shape and she gave it one on the spot.
That’s dichetal do chennaib. Not composure. The opposite of composure, actually – it’s what comes when there’s no time left to compose anything.
So where does that leave me, walking this bit of the path?
I’ve had my imbas forosnai moments this year – the deep knowing I sat on for far too long before I acted. I’ve definitely been chewing the marrow on some of it for months, cos that’s just how I process things, slowly, going back over the same ground until it gives something up.
What I haven’t done much of is the third one. Dichetal do chennaib asks you to trust that something whole can come out of you without being prepared first. I’m not sure I trust that yet.
But I am doing something about the imbas forosnai bit. I’ve gone back to my old practice of tuning into my body daily, actually asking it what it needs instead of overriding it and hoping it’ll sort itself out. I’ve even put a phone alarm on to remind me – which tells you everything about how easily I still talk myself out of it without one.
That’s the practice underneath everything I teach in one of the courses I’m building for the school right now. More on that when it’s ready. For now, it’s just me, an alarm, and the discipline of actually listening.
So that’s the homework, really. Not to force an improvised moment, but to notice when one’s asking to happen and not talk myself out of it – and to keep checking in daily with the knowing that’s already there, so it doesn’t take til March next time. What’s the knowing you’ve been sitting on? I’d really love to hear it, if you feel like sharing.