Restless in the Blood

During the later years of writing my first novel, I began to have rather a strange experience – the experience of being cheered to the finish line.

This encouragement wasn’t from family or friends, not in the immediate sense at least. Instead, it was an urging, ricocheting down my bloodline.

From my ancestors.

On my mother’s side, these were poor Irish smallholders, living in agricultural settlements in the rugged north of Ireland. Did they dream dreams of creative endeavour, of artistic fulfilment?

I don’t know that to be true but in my bones, I feel it to be the case.

Of course, they were way too busy eking out a living to have the luxury of anything beyond the most elemental self-expression; a flower arrangement; a sensitivity to how the setting sun shifted and fidgeted over the landscape; a poem conjured from the dying light.

That urge though, not brought to fruition in their lifetimes, has travelled down my bloodline, to a time and a place where I have the freedom and the means to fufill it, to honour that impulse, to satisfy the blind and remorseless yearning for self-expression, shared and acknowledged.

Through their gritted teeth, I feel them gruffly cheering me on. Gnarled and weatherbeaten hands on my shoulder, poverty-soured breath on my neck.

Go on, son.

Do it now.

Write.

Set us free of this restlessness in our blood.

Let us rest in peace.