The Stray Sod

Cnoc Cúin (The Quiet Hill)
Caóilfhionn Murphy O’Hanlon, 2021

Irish folklore tells of the fód seachráin, the stray sod: a piece of enchanted ground upon which a traveller can suddenly lose all sense of direction. There is nothing to distinguish it from the earth around it. No marker warns you away. You simply step on the wrong patch of ground and a place you thought you knew becomes unreadable. A familiar road seems to lead nowhere. Landmarks that should orient you somehow fail to do so. You may wander in circles, unable to find your way out of a place in which, by every rational measure, you are not actually lost.

That is the part of the story I find most unsettling. The traveller has not been transported somewhere else. The road remains where it was. The wall still divides the field. Home may even be nearby. What has changed is the traveller's relationship to the landscape. I know this place. Why can I no longer find myself within it? There is something almost psychedelic about it: the world remains recognizable, but the familiar coordinates no longer seem to work.

The traditional remedy is wonderfully peculiar. Stop walking. Take off your coat. Turn it inside out. Put it back on. Somehow, the spell is broken and your bearings return.

I am less interested in whether anyone ever believed this literally than in the wisdom hidden inside the ritual. The lost traveller is not told to walk faster or search harder. The first instruction is to stop. Then something familiar is removed and deliberately reversed. The coat that normally protects the body from the world is turned inside out, exposing what is ordinarily hidden: lining, seams, hems, worn places, alterations and repairs. Nothing has been added to it. It is the same coat. You are simply seeing how it was put together.

There is another turned coat in my family. My Nana Keating, raising four children during the Depression and war years while her husband was away on the Italian and North African fronts, once reversed a coat because the elbows had worn through and there was no money for another. I grew up hearing it as one of those family stories about scarcity and ingenuity: you made do. Beside the fód seachráin, I hear something else in it now. When something could no longer function in its familiar form, she turned it over and found another way to wear it. The worn places did not disappear. They simply ceased to determine the usefulness of the whole garment.

The stray sod has stayed with me because grief can produce its own kind of disorientation. Not only bereavement, but estrangement, migration, trauma, the loss of a relationship, a community, a role, or a future we assumed would be ours. When losses accumulate, what disappears is not only the person or place itself. The identity we constructed in relationship to those things can begin to shift as well. We can be standing in a life we recognize and no longer quite recognize ourselves within it.

It is difficult for me to separate an Irish story about becoming lost on familiar ground from the history of the ground itself. Land in Ireland has never been merely scenery. It has meant livelihood, family, inheritance and belonging, and who was permitted to possess it—or driven from it—has shaped centuries of Irish history. The fód seachráin predates An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, and I am not suggesting that the catastrophe created the folklore. But I find it hard to believe that generations marked by dispossession, eviction, hunger and emigration would not have understood something about the feeling the story describes.

As a child, I knew the simplified Irish-American version of the Great Hunger. The potatoes developed a blight. People starved. Our ancestors came to America. My mother used to say, “Anybody who could leave, did.” I understood that sentence then as an explanation for why our family was here. I understand it differently now. The potato crop failed catastrophically, but Ireland did not simply run out of food. Food continued to leave the country while people starved. Evictions continued. Families disappeared through death and emigration. What I had learned as a story of immigration increasingly looked like a story of displacement.

My mother's sentence now leaves me with two questions I could not have understood as a child. What did it take to leave your family, your village and perhaps the only landscape you had ever known, carrying what you could, knowing you might never return? And what did it take to stay?

I have stood in the ruins of a Famine village near Carlingford, and there is something difficult to describe about being there. Walls remain. The outlines of houses remain. The fields stretch around them. Yet the place does not feel empty in the ordinary sense. It feels marked. Calling that an energy makes it sound more mystical than I necessarily mean it to be, but you feel something there. You feel the loss. There is a certain stillness about it.

Standing among those ruins, I find myself thinking about the people who remained. What happens when your neighbors have died, your family has scattered, houses stand empty and people you love have boarded ships that may never bring them home? The geography has not disappeared. You may still know every road, field and stone wall. But the human world through which you understood your place in that geography has been torn apart.

You have not moved, and still you have been displaced.

That seems to me larger than sadness. Place helps tell us who we are: whose child we are, who our neighbors are, where we belong, what stories are ours, where our dead are buried. When enough of those coordinates disappear, grief becomes entangled with identity. The question changes from How do I live without them? to Who am I here now?

Perhaps that is one reason displaced people hold so fiercely to the things that can travel. Names. Songs. Food. Religion. Photographs. Stories. Ireland entered my own childhood in Connecticut through these fragments. In the basement of our house were boxes of dog-eared photographs and tarnished tintypes, and I spent hours studying the faces of people long dead. Did I have those eyes? What were they like? What made them laugh? I wanted to understand what and who had made me, me.

Years later, while teaching an identity unit to eighth graders at the United Nations International School, I asked students to write “Where I'm From” poems. They were Third Culture Kids whose lives stretched across countries, cultures and languages, and the apparently simple question Where are you from? quickly became something much larger. My 12-year-old daughter's poem began, “I am from books and boxes, airplanes and passports,” and eventually declared, “I am from everywhere.” In another poem she wrote about what happened after every move: her heart would break “over, and over, and over again.”

Both things can be true. A life can be extraordinarily rich and still require something from the person living it. Being from everywhere can also complicate the question of where one belongs. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that we belong wherever we find ourselves.

I understand that differently now too. International life teaches us to expect disorientation when we cross borders. We know that we will have to learn new systems, establish relationships and find our bearings again. Coming home can be stranger still because we do not expect the same uncertainty there. I have returned to the Connecticut landscape of my childhood after spending much of my adult life elsewhere. I know these roads. I recognize the landmarks. I know where I am. And sometimes I have no idea where I am.

That is the fód seachráin I recognize: not being lost in an unfamiliar world, but losing your sense of yourself in a world you know perfectly well. Grief can do that. So can displacement. So can returning. The road has not disappeared. The traveller's relationship to the road has changed.

Which brings me back to the coat.

Turning it inside out cannot restore what has been lost. It cannot repopulate a village, return an emigrant, resurrect the dead, repair every relationship or give us back an earlier version of ourselves. But it does ask us to stop walking in circles long enough to examine what we are carrying. Turn it over. Look at the seams. What was inherited? What was chosen? What has worn through? What was repaired? What no longer fits? What has been stitched together, sometimes by our own hands and sometimes by the loving hands of others?

A seam does not necessarily mean something is broken. It is also the place where separate pieces have been joined.

The Irish language carries an intriguing parallel. Tá brón orm is commonly translated as I am sad or, depending on context, I am sorry, but its construction is closer to sorrow is on me. Tá áthas orm: joy is on me. Tá eagla orm: fear is on me. The emotion is real, but the language places a small space between the person and what the person is experiencing. Irish carries this relationship between loss and distance elsewhere  too. Deoraíocht, exile or emigration, echoes deora, tears. Leaving seems to carry grief within the language.

 I miss you works differently as well. Airím uaim thú can be understood as I feel you away from me or I feel your absence from me. There is something painfully precise about that. Missing someone is not simply an emotion contained inside the person who remains. It is the felt presence of an absence. Someone once occupied a particular place in our world, and we can still feel the space where that person is not.

Maybe that is what I feel in the ruined village too.

There is something powerful in a language that can acknowledge the full weight of sorrow without requiring sorrow to become the identity of the person carrying it. English so easily gives us I am sad. I am lost. I am broken. The condition attaches itself directly to I am. I don't know that language determines how we grieve, but I have begun to wonder what changes when we alter the construction.

Sorrow is on me.

The coat is on me.

But underneath both - I am.

The old folklore promises that turning the coat will break the spell and restore the traveller's bearings. Life offers no such guarantee. Reorientation is not restoration. Some losses remain losses. Some absences remain. Beginning again does not mean returning to the person we were before them. The coat may always show where it was worn through, and perhaps it should. The purpose of turning it over is not to pretend that nothing happened. It is to see more clearly what happened without confusing what we carry with the whole of who we are.

A therapeutic exercise I once learned makes the same distinction almost absurdly simple. Begin with the way we often speak when an emotion has become large enough to consume the landscape.

I am sad.

Create a little space between the person and the feeling.

I am feeling sad.

And then, without denying the sadness, the loss, the history, the seams, or those we can still feel away from us:

I am.

The Horseshoe Crab

The sound of the waves in the distance lulled me to sleep after I climbed into the back of my car to catch a few hours of rest. The crunch of tires on the sandy beach access road kept pulling me awake. At two, three, and four in the morning, fishermen drove past in both directions, coming and going with the tide. Each time I woke with a start and lifted my head just enough to look through the window. Another truck rolled slowly past, fishing tackle swaying in the back and gravel grinding beneath its wheels, before I slipped back into that fitful space between sleeping and listening.

I was parked on the narrow barrier between Quonochontaug Pond and the Atlantic by Weekapaug Beach, the salt pond behind me and the ocean just beyond the dunes. After finishing a late night of wedding catering nearby, I had found what I hoped was a place to stealth camp for a few hours before sunrise. Without quite intending it, I had settled into another kind of caol áit—a thin place where the boundaries between land and sea, darkness and dawn, sleeping and waking, seemed less defined.

Southern New England's barrier beaches were formed thousands of years ago as glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Waves and longshore currents gradually reshaped those glacial deposits into narrow ribbons of sand that separate the Atlantic from the coastal salt ponds behind them. They are living landforms. Storms breach them. Currents rebuild them. Salt marshes absorb wave energy that would otherwise erode the coastline. Their resilience lies not in remaining fixed, but in responding continuously to change. They survive because they move. 

Human beings have always looked to the natural world for orientation. Before ecology became a science, Indigenous peoples understood that careful observation of the more-than-human world carried knowledge. The Narragansett names that remain on this coastline are reminders of that relationship. Quonochontaug—the place of the blackfish. Weekapaug—at the end of the pond. They are names born from paying attention to the land, the water, and the creatures that lived there. I had chosen to sleep on a landscape whose very existence depends upon adaptation.

Before dawn I drove to Watch Hill and walked to the place where I scattered my mother's ashes. The previous week had left me emotionally exhausted. Birthdays during estrangements leave little to celebrate. For months I had been carrying the same questions. How do I keep doing this? How does one show up with love when love itself no longer seems to be recognized? How does one live inside a story that hardly resembles the life one lived?

I sat facing the Atlantic and began chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo as the first light slowly spread across the cloudy eastern sky. My emerging Buddhist practice has quietly reshaped the way I move through difficult moments. In Nichiren Buddhism, the self and its environment are not separate realities but expressions of the same life. Chanting changes my response to the circumstances I find myself navigating. We do not leave our inner world behind when we step into nature; we encounter it there. And so I sought solace in the sunrise by the sea.

That morning I wasn't asking for my circumstances to change. I sought alignment with whatever strength remained beneath fear, grief, and confusion. If the environment truly reflects the life of the person encountering it, what might the shoreline at sunrise reveal to me about myself?

Had my endurance reached its limits? Does there come a point when continuing to show up with love simply hollows a person out, the same way gulls hollow out a horseshoe crab shell? Sitting where my mother's ashes had entered the sea, I asked as honestly as I knew how: How do I keep going?

When I finished chanting, I stood and began walking back along the beach. The tide was moving out. Gulls worked the wrack line while sanderlings flitted ahead of me between the waves.

Then I saw the horseshoe crab.

At first I assumed it was another empty shell or flotsam that the tide dragged up to shore. Horseshoe crabs have always been part of the landscape, usually upside down and hollowed out, their soft bodies long since picked clean by gulls until only the shell remained. As children my brother and I occasionally carried them home, much to my mother's horror, until the unmistakable smell convinced her they belonged back outside. Familiarity had rendered them almost invisible. I had spent decades noticing what remained after death without ever really seeing the living animal itself.

This one was alive.

Its shell was dark, almost black, polished by the sea and crowded with barnacles. A thin sheet of water slipped over its body before quietly retreating with the tide. I knelt beside it, resisting the urge to touch it.

The barnacles immediately caught my attention. For a fleeting moment I wondered whether they were harming the animal. Later I learned the opposite was true. Barnacles settle only on mature horseshoe crabs after they have stopped molting. Juveniles regularly shed their shells as they grow, leaving behind the empty exoskeletons that most beach walkers mistake for dead animals. Adults—some surviving for forty years—eventually stop molting, and the years begin recording themselves differently. Barnacles, algae, slipper shells, and other marine organisms gradually colonize the carapace.

What had first appeared to be burden or decay was, in fact, evidence of survival. I had assumed the barnacles were something to be removed, a sign the creature had been somehow diminished. Learning otherwise, the phrase bonnō soku bodai—"earthly desires are enlightenment"—ceased to be an abstract Buddhist teaching and became something I could see. What I had mistaken for damage was, in fact, inseparable from the life that had endured. Beneath its armored shell lay a creature surprisingly soft and vulnerable, protected not by invincibility but by the life it continued to inhabit. Its shell carried the visible record of a life. The barnacles testified to endurance rather than failure. I had come hoping suffering could somehow be left behind. The horseshoe crab suggested something more demanding-- and somehow more hopeful. Perhaps wisdom does not arrive after hardship has ended, but through the life that continues to carry it.

This particular crab—neither true crab nor horseshoe—had lived long enough for other lives to attach themselves to it. Most of its existence had unfolded beyond human sight, returning to shore only briefly each year with the rhythms of the moon and tide. Like so much in nature—and perhaps in ourselves—the greater part of its story remained unseen. It occupied a place in many Indigenous traditions along the Atlantic coast as a symbol of continuity, reciprocity, and the interconnectedness of life. It was not simply an ancient animal. It was a part of a larger web of reciprocal relationships. Its annual return signaled renewal. Its eggs sustained migrating shorebirds. Its presence reminded people that life depends upon cycles of giving and receiving rather than domination or control. It belonged to a living relationship between moon, tide, marsh, shorebirds, fish, and people. Horseshoe crabs have survived for more than 450 million years, long before dinosaurs appeared and long after they disappeared. Yet a single crab remains vulnerable. A wave can overturn it. Shorebirds depend upon its eggs during migration. Biomedical research depends upon its blue blood. Entire ecosystems are connected to a creature many people walk past without ever really seeing.

For centuries the horseshoe has been associated with protection and good fortune, hung above doorways in the hope that blessings might gather there or be poured upon those who walk beneath it. Chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is understood as aligning one's life with the Mystic Law, the deeper rhythm that connects all existence. I had come asking how to endure. The shoreline had answered with one of Earth's oldest survivors.

The horseshoe crab did not promise that suffering would disappear or that estrangement would somehow resolve itself. It was a reminder that beneath grief, uncertainty, and the visible scars of a life fully lived, something fundamentally whole remains. Horseshoe crabs have endured nearly 450 million years of planetary upheaval and survived four mass extinctions. Their resilience lies not in avoiding change but in continuing through it.

As I knelt beside that barnacle-covered shell, another Buddhist teaching quietly came into focus. We often imagine enlightenment as the absence of suffering, yet bonnō soku bodai suggests something far more demanding: our struggles themselves become the path. The barnacles were not a defect to be scraped away but the visible record of survival, accumulated because the creature had lived long enough to carry them.

That realization reached beyond the horseshoe crab. How often do we mistake the visible accumulation of another person's hardest years for the whole of their life? We rarely encounter another person's whole life. We meet them in the middle of a story already in progress. We see only the surface—the scars, the burdens, the rough edges—and assume we understand the story beneath them. Familiarity can become its own form of blindness. Like the horseshoe crab, most lives unfold beyond our view. We encounter only brief moments that wash ashore while the greater part remains hidden beneath the surface.

I had come to the beach believing endurance meant somehow becoming stronger than my circumstances. The shoreline suggested something different. The barrier beach survives because it yields to storms instead of resisting them. Salt marshes absorb energy rather than deflect it. Horseshoe crabs persist not because they conquer change but because they remain in relationship with tides, moonlight, seasons, and the countless other lives around them. Endurance, it seems, is less about toughness than about acceptance.

The Narragansett people understood these relationships long before ecology provided scientific language for them. Nothing on this shoreline exists in isolation. Marshes shelter juvenile fish. Horseshoe crab eggs sustain migrating shorebirds. Tides reshape beaches. Glaciers left the raw material from which the coastline emerged. Every part of the landscape depends upon something larger than itself. Perhaps human lives do as well.

I left the horseshoe crab to wander farther down the beach as the eastern sky brightened from gray to pale gold. The questions that had brought me there had not disappeared, nor had the circumstances waiting for me once I returned home. They would still be there tomorrow. The relationships that grieve me remained unresolved. The future remains uncertain.

But hope had quietly changed shape. It was no longer the hope that everything would somehow return to the way it had been. It was the quieter hope that beneath grief, disappointment, uncertainty, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, something fundamentally whole persists and that love remains. Chanting had not changed the shoreline. It had changed the way I encountered it. The landscape became not merely scenery but teacher and healer.

I thought again about the barrier beach where I had slept only hours earlier. It exists because glaciers retreated, tides continued their patient work, storms rearranged the coastline, and salt marshes softened the force of the sea. Its identity has never depended on remaining unchanged. Its endurance comes from responding, adapting, and continuing. Standing in the presence of one of the oldest surviving species on Earth, I realized that resilience is not simply surviving hardship. It is allowing hardship to deepen rather than diminish our participation in life.

I swam into the brisk, calm Atlantic and floated quietly on my back, watching the clouds drift overhead. For a few moments there was nothing to solve, nothing to defend, nothing to explain. Only water, sky, breath, and the steady rhythm of the tide.

The shoreline had answered my question in the only language it knew. Endurance. Acceptance. The willingness to return again and again with the tide. To remain part of relationships larger than oneself. To carry the visible marks of a life fully lived without mistaking them for the whole of the story.