LOUGHCREW & LAR & LOVE (& GRIEF)

NOVEMBER 2024 by RACHEL JANE LIEBERT

In 2022, after Teah, Tia and I applied to the AHRC for funding to do this project, my fam and I went to Ireland to ask the lands for their permission, too. A cascading series of mistakes introduced us in a 3-second window to a Gaelic elder, Lar Dooley, protector of ancestral cairns in Loughcrew, County Meath. It was Samhain – the dark month – this month, actually – when the ancestors are at their closest. Lar helped us to plan a ceremony on the back of a napkin and under a starlit sky just before dawn, we cleansed ourselves in an ancient well (now mainly covered by a not-so-ancient road) and walked up the hill to climb on top of a cairn known simply by the letter ‘T’.

I was barefoot and the cold was excruciating – I could barely think of anything else. The winds mocked my attempt at even just a flicker of flame. Our plan was failing. My friend left, and I sat up there alone, feeling disappointed, kindof desperate, with no idea what to do except get my boots back on. So I just quickly, unceremoniously muttered: CanIdothisproject? 

“Only if you trust yourself”

The immediacy and lucidity of the words caught me completely off-guard – I had barely even finished my question. I was so stunned – and the message seemed so clear – that I asked and said nothing else despite the glaringly open comms. I hobbled back down the cairn, now accompanied by this conditional ‘yes’ as it immediately started to reveal its trickster energy, doing flips of meaning.

“Only if you trust your self”

As I begin to see myself as my ancestors, and my ancestors as also non-human, my self in this project has started to both unravel and entangle – with everyone and everything. Were the Loughcrew lands asking, telling, urging, inviting, beckoning me to trust in this en/tanglement? 

I write entanglement as en/tanglement to bring out the tangles, the knots. So often in decolonising work we – Pākehā – can tie ourselves in knots – it is exhausting to be in and (I am told) it is exhausting to be around.

Including because these knots become nots – we go round in circles, we get scared of ourselves, we cancel, we retreat – tied in (k)nots, we cannot move – things are too “complicated”. (This word first caught my ear in relation to settler colonial genocide when I went to Palestine 12 years ago – it was a constant refrain by Jewish Israelis, no matter what their politics.)

Likewise in the ‘post-human turn’, entanglement is often implied as a problem – as something that takes away ‘our’ agency – it is as though we (researchers, activists) have no sense of what it means to be beyond individualism. We are lost – in the dark.

But/and as Lar has taught me, it is also here in the dark that our Gaelic ancestors are closest.

Or at the kitchen table. Recently my fam and I returned again to Loughcrew and I had the pleasure of chatting with Lar in his home over several cups of tea and a Samhain altar. Lar is now in the middle of intense chemotherapy, facing death for the third time in his life as though he himself is constantly being called toward ancestor-dom, living in a liminal space that so perfectly mirrors the surreal beauty of the lands he and others have now made home. This time I found there to be a kind of elemental synaesthesia there – spiderwebs shimmer above land as floating streams – thistles look up from grass as fallen stars – clouds wrap around hills in a frothing tsunami – the ancestors sit and chat at kitchen tables.

Chats with Lar always feel sacred. He is a fountain of knowledge about our Gaelic ancestors’ lives and practices yet I have to enter a mode of attention where I do not (often cannot) try and mind-grasp facts so much as  b  r  e  a  t  h  e  in the stories, imagery, whispers, tohu, affect – beckoning me also into a liminal space/state where binaries are at bay and paradoxes play…

I wanted to ask him about love, because love – as I understand/feel/dream it – is what drives Lar via a vibrantly-coloured mythic story that connects him deeply to Aotearoa and is enshrined around his neck through a whale-bone pikorua – two shoots, spiralling around and with each other – much how I envision Matike Mai – where the relational is our shared more-than-human materiality, our whale bones.

True to form, when I asked Lar about love he ‘just’ spoke about his love – Ani – enacting love’s energy rather than analysing it. This was the energy that directed Lar on his self-described “mission” to revive Gaelic cosmology in Ireland, and for reasons beyond articulation he found himself at Loughcrew to do so. Here on two adjacent hills – one public, one private – are the remnants of 5500yo domes hand-made via our ancestors’ collective placement of rock after rock after rock after rock after rock after rock after rock after

rock

rock rock rock rock

rock rock rock             rock rock rock

  rock rock rock rock                rock rock rock rock

rock rock rock rock                 rock rock rock rock

rock rock rock rock rock                 rock rock rock rock rock creating an overground tunnel leading into a central recess of art that animates once a year when the rising sun shines a single beam of light directly onto it. On one hill there are eight of these cairns, with each rock-tunnel-art entanglement angled in different directions to catch different sunrises – one for each of the 2 equinoxes, the 2 solstices, and the 4 mid-points in-between.

In short, these cairns work as a giant clock. Telling our peeps when to plant/grow/harvest aka how to survive with and as the seasons and therefore with and as the Cailleach – our oh-so-witchy earthmama…

Back in the day, Lar continues, these cairns would have been covered in white quartz, charging in the day and glowing at night as they radiate an electrical charge that refuses the colonial separation of time/space – a refusal I am slowly realising is necessary for communing with ancestors.

Indeed for Lar, the best way to hear our ancestors is to simply sit up here in the dark, and listen.

Perhaps this is why colonial Ireland (for Ireland too is in decolonial struggle) still describes these cairns as “tombs”, with people assuming that they are where the dead were buried and therefore a place to be distant if not afraid. Not unlike Pākehātanga, the Church in Ireland twisted people’s relationship with death, ancestors, earthmama.

Reverberations that ache in my/our (whale)bones.

And so I also wanted to ask Lar about grief. After the unceremonious ceremony I described above, we got back to the house and I was overcome by a deep, indescribable sadness that was both mine and not-mine. Tears streamed out of me for five hours. Soaked in ancestral waters that were undeniably femme. And that have not stopped since. I told Lar about this and, after listening closely, he didn’t hesitate:

I’ve found an awful lot of grief up there. I mean I live here so for me it’s different – I was able to go up there in a sleeping bag and just sleep in the cairns and say, “Ok, tell me what this means”. So the grief is real. I go up there and I feel grief all the time. And the grief is because of what we have lost. And for Māori as well, what they have lost because of colonisation. And it goes all round the world. It was patriarchy gone mad. And I think the real grief is the fact that we have lost contact with grandmother. And the only way that we can go back through the ages and find our true lineage is through the female line. And the land itself is a feminine identity and everything that lives on the land is a feminine identity. And all of a sudden the Church came in with this patriarchal ‘Man is right, woman is wrong’ and I think that’s what broke everybody – including Pākehā – because, Who are we? We don’t know where we came from because we have lost contact with mother earth, with grandmother, with the beauty of the world, with how the sun relates to the earth, how the moon relates to the earth, all of that’s gone. And it’s painful for everybody because nobody understands, Why is life so difficult? Because we have lost contact with everything that for 300,000 years was who we were, and in the last thousand years that has completely gone. But there’s this feeling in us all, What’s wrong with this world? Where did we go wrong? And where we went wrong was putting man in charge, the male entity in charge. The grandmother would make decisions from a point of view of wisdom, from a point of view of how human relates to the world we live in. The wisdom-keeper always kept full contact with the earth, she was the medicine woman, the witch, the wisdom-keeper. Patriarchy doesn’t like that because there’s no control in it. The inability of the male to understand the female entity that we live on is endemic to how every culture has grief involved. What did we lose in order to become Irish? That’s the grief that I think everybody feels.

What did we lose in order to become New Zealanders?

What did we do in order to become New Zealanders?

For the grief that we Pākehā need to feel is not just about what we lost but also what we did - do - to Māori.

When I returned to this recording to write this post, I was struck to discover that – in mine and Lar’s entire 90-minute chat – it was these particular few minutes that were covered over by the loud noise of a jug boiling – someone else in the kitchen was making themselves a cup of tea.

English Breakfast Tea aka “normal tea”, normality –  an everyday reminder of the settler colonial state in Ireland and in Aotearoa.

This colonial interference forced me to physically lean in and listen hard. Is my body showing one way that we can be response-able within this grief-full context?

Me and my baby Taha, with Lar and my friend Stephanie, on our first visit to Loughcrew.