Friday 11 January 2013

Ciara Shine



It would have been the late eighties, early nineties. Ciara Shine would have been in her mid twenties. She lived with an older man, who was unwell,  and they were both regulars at Sandy Bells where he played fiddle in folk sessions.
Ciara was from Cork. She had straight auburn hair and wore clogs. She worked in a horticultural nursery. Her accent really did lilt. She was quite kind and quite wise. She could speak truth at you. Her eyes had a sad strain  to them, like she`d cried or been sad or very exasperated recently. 
Though not close, Ciara got to know you well enough to see the hidden stuff; the evasions. And then had to tell you what she saw. And this would sting  terribly because what she said was true and because you didn`t then, nor for the next twenty years, possess the means to change.
You may not  remember her actual words, which were delivered outside Proctors pub ("time for medicine"),  at the top of the Meadows, round the corner from Sandy`s.But you`d remember that the winter evening, busy with people and traffic, was dark and wet, full of headlights, and remember the taste of what she said.
Ciara: who worked with the soil, growing plants, who had a straight forward belief in the universe; its essential goodness, who was at heart happy because she connected with others.  She  made friends easily, her doors were open, her faith freeing.

And in this picture of Heuston station in Dublin she is standing there (where I have transported her), hugging a plant, clogged feet firmly rooted, noticing and enjoying  the shadow painted by a cast iron pillar onto a train . And this shadow, to Ciara Shine, casts the stark, sacrificial cross as the simple all-embracing, flowing arms of love. The train station a cathedral of the everyday where light and shadow play, motes of diesel dust glimmering high in the arches, like minute stars.
Meanwhile, the young man is surrounded and constrained by barriers, timetables, deadlines and maps. On the far wall some nuns recoil from a courting couple. Another nun closer by says her rosary. The man and his friend Kate, en route to county Galway, are tense and introverted.

Your memory has wiped her words but their essence, sad and emasculating, was that you didn`t love or trust yourself; that your actions sprang out of weaknesses and fear.
Because you evaded it with incantations you didn`t know in your gut that fear is a distorting impulse. That it rises and falls like the wind

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