Anam Cara

The True Shelter of the Porous Wall

Among the most delightful features in the West of Ireland landscape are the stone walls. These walls frame off the fields from each other. They bestow personality and shape on the fields. These walls are more like frontiers than hermetic boundaries. When you see a wall on the mountain, you see the different styles of openings between the stones. Each wall is a series of different windows of light. Rabbits, hares, and foxes have favourite windows in these walls through which they always cross. Each wall is frontier and simultaneously a labyrinth of invisibility. Often, as children, if we were herding cattle on the mountain, we would shelter during showers by these walls. When we looked out from one of these windows between the stones, we would see the whole landscape beneath us in a new way; everything was framed differently. These walls, called “foiseach” in Irish, are also often shelters for all kinds of growth: grasses, plants, briars. They became home to a whole subculture of insects, bees, birds, and animals. Because of the shelter and kindness of the walls, you would often find the sweetest grasses there. Sheep and cattle were never slow to find out the sweetest grass. Wouldn’t it be interesting if instead of hermetically sealed barriers, the areas of beginning and ending in our hearts and lives could be such rich and latticed frontiers? They would be windows to look out on alternative possibilities; in other words, the freshness of other styles of being and thinking could still be somehow present even if they were not directly adjacent or even engaged. The natural shelter that grows on both sides of such frontiers would be left alone, to grow according to its own instinct. The most trustable shelter around the human mind and heart is the one that grows naturally there.

Every life has its own natural shelter belt. So often our severity with ourselves cuts that to shreds. Then we wonder why we feel so naked and unsheltered when the storm comes. The wisdom of folk culture always recognizes that when the storm of suffering rages one should not go out there into single combat with it. Rather, one should lie in and shelter close to the wall until the storm has abated. There is a lovely humility in the idea of lying low and sheltering. It recognizes that the storm comes from the penumbral unknown; it has a mind and direction of its own, and the vulnerable individual can but shelter until the time of tranquillity returns. The modern tendency to safari into subjectivity to find the cause of everything was alien to the folk mind.