Dùthchas Belonging

Kith and Kin

Dùthchas in Scots Gallic means Belonging and that’s making my heart beat deeper again this week. I was on about it last week and it’s not gone away, still twining my legs and nibbling at my heels like a cat who loves me. Like my cat who loves me. I’m listening hard to feel into what it’s trying to show me.

Some of it is because last Tuesday was the most beautiful day. Perfect sun, gentle breeze, air resounding with birdsong and filled with the scent of blossom, and I sat out by the pond in my favourite place all day. Add in I got so much work done too – how’s about that, fantabulous surroundings and lots of good work, you just can’t knock it.

I belonged there, that day and indeed as the land-spirit burbles in my ear, you belong here every day. And I do. It wants me, the land wants me and the spirit wants me, I belong.

It’s a sort of hereditary connection but one of blood or the usual meanings of “family”, but then in the Old Ways family isn’t really about blood, it’s about tylwyth, spirit family who may but often are not of the same blood as you. I remember Granny down the bakery telling us kids about it over tea and seedy cake, how our blood is the physical, biological patter of the body we currently wore. But, she said, spirit is much more everlasting. It’s about your non-physical self, your essence. And your essence goes into lots of different lives to experience lots of different bodies, races, creeds, genders, orientations.

I was about twelve I think, at secondary school and mine was a convent *rolls eyes*, and struggling with biology taught by a nun who seemed to need to walk a tightrope between her religion and her science. Looking back, I can sympathise, but at the time she really annoyed me as Granny’s lesson seemed to make so much more sense. I remember trying to help her, trying to explain what Granny had told us! Ha! That got me a ticking off and a detention! At the time I rolled my eyes (that’s what got me the detention!) thinking some grownups are just so incredibly weird 😊.

So, for me, dùthchas is about twining spirit-threads, my threads with the threads of the land, so I can hear what the land tells me, shows me. And I do with the land here, and especially the garden. It called to me from the very first moment I saw it and the place where the pond is, where I sit is the first place I went to when I came to view. I turned into the garden – just a rough quarter acre of rough grass, nettles, scraggy neglected trees and dilapidated hedges. And I saw That Corner.

At the time it resembled a pit! It was surrounded by a circle of double height concrete blocks and filled with old tins of lager disintegrating crisp and sandwich packs, scapr of cloth ant clothing. Like I said – a pit!

But it didn’t matter. The spirit of that corner yelled to me, grabbed me and made me sit on a scruffy concrete block told me it wanted the pond right there, just a small one, and even gave me a pic of the waterfall I was to build. There was a poor scruffy tree next to it, bark splitting, hardly able to put out leaves, and the twisted remains of a climbing rose with just one yellow flower. I nearly burst into tears. How could people treat a place like that? And then why did I ask myself daft questions like that … people are far too often horrid in their souls!

I promised, right then and there, I come to live there, look after the garden clear the garbage, rescue the trees.

And that’s all it takes. Really and truly that’s all it takes, promise to help the land and it twines your legs like a loving cat, and will support you through thick and thin. You gotta keep that promise though!

So here I am. Belonging. Dùthchas with my own kith, that’s called and accepted me. Heaven.