Lambay
On intimacy without arrival
Lambay lies to the east, closer to the rising sun
than the land it split from aeons past.
It sees its source before the mainshore does.
Huge basking sharks, gaping-mouthed,
drift by like toothless guardians,
four, five at a time.
And presumably the plankton too.
Kangaroos, wallabies -
whatever legend Lambay hides.
With your own hammering waves
and lonesome wind
tossing salt and weed upon your rocky limbs.
An island off an island.
How long have you been your own Self,
with your strange treasure and your aloofness?
Lambay Island,
I see you.
I know you.
Intimately.
From the main shore of my being.
We imagine intimacy as a form of arrival. To know something, we must reach it, enter it, walk its ground. We cross the water, name the species, learn the history, measure the coastline. But perhaps there are other ways of knowing.
Lambay is a small island off the coast of North County Dublin, visible from the shoreline where I was born. It has held its place on the horizon throughout my life. Near enough to recognise, distant enough to remain itself. Its aloofness is not absence. It is integrity.
Some places become familiar without ever being entered. We know their outline, the light upon them, the weather gathering around them, their disappearance and return. Over time, their presence enters us.
There is knowledge made from facts and another made from acquaintance. To land on Lambay would be to know more about it. It would not necessarily mean knowing it more deeply.
Yet distance leaves room for projection. The Lambay I know is partly the island and partly the life from which I have watched it. That does not make it imaginary, nor does it make it mine. Every intimacy is formed where what is there meets the one who sees it.
Perhaps intimacy is not the collapse of distance, but attention sustained across it. The willingness to let something enter us without insisting that it surrender all of itself.
Perhaps that is why Lambay has remained so close.
It has never ceased to be elsewhere.