Erris

The Sea of Tranquility holds proof that at one time, absolute success with no small measure of wealth, was guaranteed to the first of us to place our footprint on new frontiers for posterity. Neil Armstrong’s iconic boot print is not very old but looking back on it now, our world was a far bigger place before neoliberal globalism rendered us largely redundant as a species. Nowadays, the sight of Apollo’s impressions on Diana’s desolation merely compels our subconscious to relive a moment destined to forever echo through space-time. “One small step for man but one giant leap for mankind,” etcetera.

Our capacity to receive such echoes is evidence that our so called ‘Thin Places’ are a phenomena that can follow us anywhere we have been, or might yet go.

Becoming a modern day pioneer has lost much of the life-or-death risk that was once synonymous with the achievement of global fame and notoriety. Introversion, with large dollops of Nerdism seem to be the modern prerequisites. Though in fairness, we must also admit that the stigma of failure can be traumatic for those who don’t make it.

The rest of us are mere witnesses to their visionary greatness. We are reduced to rushing outside to leave our imprints in fresh snow, disregarding countless impressions in the frozen mud beneath. The advent of global warming means that those of us without snow, must now content ourselves with waiting for the tide to recede. That’s when we graciously accept the gift of a clean canvass by a sea much closer to home and far safer to visit than Tranquility. These adrenalin alternatives are to ‘Thin Places’ as a fire cracker might appear, or not, alongside a supernova. But we humbly accept that beggars can’t be choosers.

A complete and contemplative human will always recognise a ‘Thin Place’ by the automatic, if subconscious deployment of the complete suite of modern human faculties. When these augmentations mentally detect those timeless echoes, external physical sensors are boosted by an internal antenna that subtly expands to receive them for subsequent decipher. The process would be similar to cupping an invisible ear with an imaginary hand to then visualise with our third, or thinking eye.

These space time percussions are apparently strongest during periods of Déja-vu, when a property of that one day in the past or future, finds an identical match in the day in which we find ourselves exposed to them. The future can never be excluded because science now tells us that time was never compelled to always run in one direction, like a stream downhill. That also explains why our ‘Thin Places’ can be so much more in flux than the rest of our, apparently, purely physical world.

To most of us, a world in flux simply means that tomorrow could be as different from today as today is from yesterday. Time only flies because changes now come at us thicker and faster than at any time in human history. The result is that each passing moment is crammed with more changes than our already rapid evolution can properly process.

Ultimately, we are forced to skim through life without paying it sufficient attention, or without fully learning from our experiences of it. Logically, that makes our post modern-world an increasingly unfamiliar and unsafe place. It would be prudent therefore, to consciously devote at least some small fraction of our precious time to an appreciation of what reality really is.

We must make the most of our time-outs when they present themselves, because their instances will definitely decrease as long as each passing moment contains less possibilities than the moment that just preceded it. So when our time comes to stand on our gifted patch of virgin sand, we should close our eyes and soak up those echoes from other ages. We might even amplify them by creating in our minds the same day in that other time and then dare ourselves to feel its wind on our face and even smell it. We are each born with that power of creation and in some, it may be strong enough to let us open our eyes and really see it.

However, there are bound to be many and possibly countless histories associated with each ‘Thin Place’ and not all of them will carry stories of fearlessly famous pioneering heroes. Documented history can only be written by those who survived it, and we know that couldn’t always have been the case. Sometimes destiny writes a chapter of history that we will never discover in a book. The echoes of that history may be stronger than we expect, and may overwhelm any comparatively passive invitation to investigate or mentally recreate them.

In a really ‘Thin Place’, the membrane that forms a boundary between the present and infinity can become particularly porous. That is where or when people and things can flit unnoticed through it from either side. In the duality of everything, our physical reality must exist alongside a metaphysical reality, just as our better nature serves as a buffer to the nastier side of us that we try to keep hidden.

Historically, Erris was once the edge of a Kingdom called Errisdowan. I use a modern Anglicised spelling to render the correct pronunciation. You see, modern Irish would spell it ‘Oireasdomhain’ and the older Irish would require characters that are simply and sadly, not available on my keyboard today. Just to complicate things further, when that name was first adopted, it would have been written using the Ogham script.

Anyway, both names translate as the ‘Westernmost Reach’ and the ‘Westernmost reach of the World’, respectively. The early inhabitants called themselves ‘Fir Dowan’, which translates as ‘People of the, or this world’. If you ever get the chance to visit Erris, you will see that it lives up to that description, while also experiencing some of the highest tides on the Wild Atlantic Way. When those high tides recede, you can expect to see some very wide expanses of virgin sand in which to re-create a lost reality from its echoes.

It was an extremely significant achievement for a hardy and adventurous people to reputedly take a fleet of ancient ships from the general region of the Black Sea, beyond Greece to Ireland. Apparently, they lost more people than they gained en-route to Europe’s Westernmost Reach.

When they then called themselves ‘The People of this World’, it is reasonable to assume that they encountered people who were not. That is only part of what makes Erris the extremely ‘Thin Place’ that it very obviously is, but for those who can’t see it and believe it for themselves … please read on.