NeuroDivine

There’s a quiet comfort in knowing your feet are not the first to wear a path into the earth. When you are travelling through grief, or carrying the exhaustion of illness, you discover that others have walked these roads long before you.

Sitting here today beneath the unexpected heat of the midlands sun, looking up into the wide blue canopy above Monasterevin, the centuries feel strangely close together.

Parallel Journeys

This ground is thick with the memory of St Eimhín. Tradition tells how he travelled northward through the wilderness, tracing rivers and bogland until he founded his monastery at Mainistir Eimhín—Monasterevin. He carried prayer into lonely places and made sanctuary where there had only been open land and sky.

This week, my own journey ran in the opposite direction.

Only hours earlier, I had been keeping vigil beside my father in Antrim through the long silence of the night. Then came the difficult journey south, down the spine of the country, for the dialysis treatment that keeps me alive.

Leaving that room felt like a tearing thing. Part of me wanted to remain there indefinitely, holding the boundary between presence and farewell for as long as love could manage it. Yet illness imposes its own disciplines. The body demands what it demands.

And so I travelled.

Now, sitting quietly with music in my ears and sunlight warming pale skin, the distance between north and south no longer feels quite so vast.

Then. And. Now

The old saints of Ireland understood the cost of journeys. They knew what it meant to carry sorrow across difficult ground. They knew dependence, uncertainty, exhaustion, and the strange holiness that can emerge when there is nothing left but trust.

And above them was this same sky.

The midlands sky remains untouched by centuries. It pays no attention to county borders, human grief, or the passing of generations. The sky that watched St Eimhín raise his monastery is the same sky stretched above me now in rolled sleeves and summer light.

It is one canopy joining then and now together.

The Liturgy of the Present Moment

For a mind wired like mine, peace rarely arrives through abstract arguments or grand theological systems. More often it comes through small and tangible things: warmth on skin, the particular shade of blue on a May afternoon, the quiet breathing of Andrew asleep inside the house.

St Eimhín found God while journeying through the wild places of Ireland.

Today, I am finding Him in permission to stop moving.

Up north, the nurses have now fitted the driver that keeps my father peaceful and free from distress. Down here, the old sky holds its silent vigil over us both.

The journey has been made. The boundary has been accepted.

And the light, for now, is enough.