“There are no unsacred places; only sacred places and desecrated places.”
Wendell Berry
At times it can be unpleasant, the shallow water of the rectangular lower pond full of the shit of hundreds of birds, full of disintegrating pieces of the sliced bread we’re not supposed to feed them, full of rubbish. Other times it is clean, or cleaner, or clean enough.
As I walk around them one cold morning in Spring, the Waterworks are very busy, as they are every time I walk there. People cutting through the park, walking or running laps, or sitting for a while. It gets some use. The odd fella wades with his fishing gear into the water on the upper reservoir, which although also entirely and obviously man-made has a much wilder feel to it. Amazing what a few trees and bushes can do for a place. Or he may sit at a specially designed area around the edges. Unlike the swans, ducks, geese, terns and gulls of the lower pond, the pike and other fish cannot fly away.
There are a few factors that add some je ne sais quoi to the Waterworks: rumours of an otter, the flock of parakeets, the community garden at the northwest edge, the fact they featured prominently in Anna Burns’ Milkman. And, not least, the view of Cave Hill.
It wouldn’t be quite right to say that Cave Hill looms over Belfast because, for one thing, looming implies a general sense of malevolence I wouldn’t ascribe to the place. In spite of the urban myths which were prevalent in my youth about satanic rituals, and in spite of the fact that more than a few people have chosen to end their lives there, Cave Hill does not have a bad energy about it. I myself am not sure if it was ever a sacred site for our ancestors, that knowledge may be lost now. I do know that the United Irishmen hid out there after their failed 1798 rebellion. And they were not the only people throughout history to seek refuge there – as Belfast was blitzed to shit by the Luftwaffe, many residents clambered up for safety. A hiding place doesn’t loom, does it? It offers itself, it invites, even if the invitation is a final resting place, an escape from this wicked world.
If I’m at home on a Tuesday night I usually join a lovely walking group – the Roy Walkers – in summiting the hill. It takes an hour up and a shorter hour down. It is always cold and always windy at the top. It is often misty and sometimes even the overwhelming, completely unnecessary light pollution of Belfast doesn’t penetrate. By some miracle, and to my recurring surprise, it is rarely rainy. On pitifully few occasions I have brought little gifts, offerings. I’m trying to get to know the mountain, to be in relation with it. It is not enough that I can see it from my bedroom window, though that helps – I must also visit, bring intentions, or questions, dried coca leaves and my trust. I should really bring offerings of oats, and butter, and cheese. Things this land would like.
The gorse that covers Cave Hill in the summer months is a sight and an aromatic experience, and the view – all the way to Carrick, across the lough to Holywood, across all of Belfast to the Cregegh hills in the east – is amazing, no matter how many times I look. There’s something about seeing an entire city at once. It is not as desolate nor as cold as the other Belfast hills such as Divis and Black Mountain. There is a mother sparrow hawk with two young in the forested part lower down the hill. Surely there are badgers, pine martens and more animal friends, though I’ve never seen them. There is also a godless amount of dog shit. Several times the Roy Walkers have recalled the history that Cave Hill was due to be quarried. Some mineral deposit was, momentarily at least, deemed by the authorities to be more valuable dug up and sold than literally holding up a mountain. People who think like that are nearly universally considered sensible. They talk about natural resources but don’t see the mountain itself is a gift, and to receive any gift you need to be humble.
In our minds wilderness is forever something else other than what we know, somewhere else other than where we are. Our minds are right, in their way. How else can you make sense of Irish history, indeed world history, if not as a process of unwilding, of “civilising” which involved depopulating lands of their native species of flora, fauna, and, yes, people? We do not know wilderness because we have never seen it. Thousands of years ago Ireland was once woodland uninterrupted from one shore to another in all directions. It is now the least biodiverse place in Europe with the least amount, under 1%, of native old-growth forest. The bluebells in the fields across the Belfast hills recall a time and place where trees once stood. We’re no longer wild. We can curse the Brits, their empire and its boats, 800 years of rapacious plunder, but the truth is also that we have welcomed civilisation, content to sleep the sleep of reason and live in the nightmares it produces. We have not loved the land back to health. Quite the opposite. You just need to look at the sorry state of Lough Neagh, our largest lake, which has seen a collapse in insect life and is effectively being suffocated to death by algae and poisoned by agricultural waste. Of course, it is a bit difficult to love the land back to health when the aristocratic quadruple-barrelled surname direct descendent of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who stole the Lough in the Conquest of Ulster, continues to exert property rights over it, and gives out sand dredging licences to all and sundry. The fact we continue to allow him, however, is on us. It is important to see things as they are as well as how you want them to be.
My father told me about an experiment where scientists recorded the sounds of animals like lions which they then played out of speakers at a watering hole to see if it scared the other animals. Then they played another recording of human voices, just a normal conversation. “What do you think inspired more fear,” he asked me.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Buddhist teachings recently. Thich Nhat Hahn, mostly. Trying to make sense of the senseless. He and his followers teach that we must love every living creature. They encourage the practice. Gentle loving kindness, they call it. They also teach us to abandon differentiation, the categorisations of, among other things, human and non-human, and eventually of living and ‘inanimate’. Of course, the limits of what is considered life are blurry and shifting. Ecology suggests that it is just as right to think about a watershed, or forest, or mountain range as an entity in itself. Indeed, possibly the entire earth, or Gaia, is one being. Hard not to call it living, alive. Harder still to see it so wounded.
The beauty of a thing doesn’t matter, not much, or at least it shouldn’t. Certainly not as much as we’re led to believe. I was reminded of this in 2016 when an unlikely protest camp sprung up near the Woodburn reservoir near Carrickfergus in opposition to an exploratory oil drill. The forest within which fly-by-night bandit company Infrastrata situated their drill was owned by Northern Ireland Water. It is truly nothing spectacular, basically a narrow strip of monoculture tree plantation between fields. An ecological catastrophe. And yet even that damp, diminished clump of trees held a place in our hearts that amounted to love. It moved us to act, including some of us who had no truck with “tree hugging hippies” or even mild criticism of the system. In the end the company got their drill on site and sunk it, and millions of pounds, into the earth. They struck water. The forest refused to allow for further desecration. It must have felt loved.
It is impossible for me to write the words “desecrated places” without immediately thinking of Palestine. Gaza in particular is among the most defiled, devastated places on earth at present, with the IDF raining down a world war’s worth of munitions incessantly for eight months. Of course the desecration is not unique: the deep red scars in the earth in the Congo basin, the dirty, poisoned water of Flint, and the decomposing bodies piled up amid the rubble in Khartoum all testify to that. But Israel has desecrated the Holy Land beyond imagination, beyond even the capacity of language to convey. Every obscene act you could imagine, at every plane of existence, has been carried out countless times. It is not a straightforward, efficient killing. It is a one-sided total war on life, everything that makes life possible, and everything that gives life meaning. In short, it is a war against the land, a war against the earth itself. Ecocide added to genocide in the list of crimes gone unanswered.
It is also impossible for me to think about people loving land and not think about Palestine. The Palestinian people’s love for the land is astounding, bordering on incomprehensible. In spite of, or maybe because of the levels of cruel destruction, Palestinians have shown a deeply admirable commitment to caring for the land. By all accounts Palestine is beautiful. Or, in many parts, it was. But the beauty of a place doesn’t, and shouldn’t matter. If we are serious about living, about being human, we would defend even a scrap of land, even the most desecrated places. We would show it our love and we would care for it. Palestinians are living in the future, teaching us how to live.
Since October 2023 the horror has sat in my stomach, undigested. Days turn to week then to months and all I want is to vomit. My mind cannot process what it is witnessing, so up steps my body only to fail too. One night I wake in the smallest hour, the quietest, the loneliest, safe in my unbombed bed. “We must not succumb to hopelessness.” I expel it all, the suffering of the world, wash it away into the bowels of the earth. What else is there to do with all this pain but purge it? I cannot carry it. Only the earth is capable of holding us and our pain. So I bury it in the earth, the big, beautiful earth. It gets buried, becomes a problem for the earth, for our children, and their children.
Wilderness is something to which we feel entitled and, thus entitled, with which we can do as we please, whether that be preserve or destroy. The ownership is all that matters. But wilderness never existed, it was always an excuse to do to nature what we do to people, or to do to people what we do to nature. European colonialism was premised on and justified by concepts of wilderness, from Terra Nullius in Australia to “a land without a people” in Palestine. At its roots modern conservation is scarcely any different, even if the slogans may sometimes portray the effort as being about protecting what we love. This too is a sensible Western misunderstanding of the relationship between people and land.
To crudely paraphrase Audre Lorde, it is important to do everything where you are. Not that you can’t or shouldn’t move around too, or fall in love with other places. I’ve done a lot of that myself. It’s just that, wherever you are, that’s where you have to do everything. I mean that we have to love everywhere, both the beautiful and the broken. We can and should love even the ugly places, the forgotten and the forgettable. They need to be loved – maybe more than anywhere else – and we need to love them. We think we need to heal the earth as if we were the Mother and the earth our children, or we the doctor and the earth our patient. And while it is true we need to stop causing so much harm, it is also true that, whatever we think we are doing, we are not healing the earth. The earth is healing us. We often speak about land in the narrowest terms of nation states, where the nature of the relationship is entirely one-sided. Take, take, take. Mine, mine, mine. The earth does not belong to any of us, we belong to the earth, and by loving the earth we love ourselves. There is no separation. The land needs to be loved, and love is an action more than it is a feeling. When was the last time you gave a mountain a gift, sensible people be damned? When will you next?
I will return to Cave Hill as often as possible and try to remember to give it something in return, be it literal or metaphorical. But there will be long interruptions to my visits to the mountain. I’m not sure, after nearly twenty years of practice, if it is easier to leave or to stay. Belfast is a home that I love by leaving, and I leave something of myself here each time that I don’t get back. People often ask why I don’t just leave for good, as so many have done over the years. The answer is that I can’t. No one can. Cliche but true, places are are part of us as much as we are a part of them.
what they did yesterday afternoon
by warsan shire
they set my aunts house on fire i cried the way women on tv do folding at the middle like a five pound note. i called the boy who use to love me tried to ‘okay’ my voice i said hello he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened? i’ve been praying, and these are what my prayers look like; dear god i come from two countries one is thirsty the other is on fire both need water. later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt? it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere.