by Jimmy Ó Briain Billings
Originally posted as an Instagram post
Saudade; cianalas; joyful sorrows.. Sméara dubha in full fruit. Bláthanna fiáine blooming and busy with bees. Warmth from the sun on my skin as the first chill in the evening breeze viscerally reminds my body of eternal cosmic cycles so much greater than me. To whom I surrender. Of whom I am part. Whom I love beyond the bounds of what my single body could possibly hold (so how do We hold it?)
The land teaches limit. Only in the facile pursuit of limitlessness are we tampering with forces that govern limit. We only fool ourselves: tampering is not controlling and we will soon be shown the realities of limitation again. Wisdom is knowing you could and choosing not to. Knowing there are limits that should not be tested. It’s disrespectful. It takes denial of relationships. Love is the surest proof against the conceit of an unlimited individualism. Who am ‘I’ when ‘I’ love & am loved? My body understands an indescribable and boundless entanglement through love. The only way our bodies can thrive. Love reminds my body of what has been obscured by centuries of relentless violence and greed: a great limitless source that pours forth endlessly through people living well with the land, celebrating a limited life by living it. This is the real abundance we’re losing out on. Fuck our addiction to endless consumption: material objects, knowledges, spiritual practices, relationships. Losing love reminds my body of the colonial wound all over again, the destruction of lifeways which we need in order to live well with limit as our guide. I feel a historic pain in moments of loss. I grieve lost community and lost kin, lost relationships and lost wisdom. The ancestors grieve with us if we let them, if we’re open to experiencing our pain as theirs, theirs as ours. Ancestral wisdom is our relational tether to all that is. My body carries deep time memory of love unbound by flesh, and time, and space. We’re tethered to those wounds of separation. The deeper we realise the wounds go, the deeper the potential of our healings. True limitlessness can only come to be felt and known by holding limit’s hand in care, service, and responsibility to the metabolism. We have a ways to go. x