Be Here Meow--"Anois Beag"
How Irish Grounds Us in the Here and Now
“Be here meow.”
I’ve sported a button on my backpack with that motto for years. It’s like that old bumper sticker, “Visualize whirled peas,” designed, through word play, to get your attention. I mediate (an online chime keeps me focused) and each week I’m buoyed by collective silence through Quaker Meeting. I also take time in nature, go to yoga class, and work with my breath. All of this helps ground me in the meow.
I also do my best to watch my thoughts. I can very quickly go from 0-60 when feeling anxious or discouraged, my fears racing ahead like a dog chasing a bone. I come back again and again in these moments to my old friend, Nonviolent Communication (NVC). I now know the four steps as if moving my fingers along well-worn rosary beads:
What exactly am I seeing, hearing, or sensing? [Observation, Step One]. This gets me back in my body, and out of my stories. (Though noticing my stories can help in finding the observation. For example, if I’m thinking, “She never listens!” I can ask myself: What did she do specifically, right now, that means ”not listening” to me? For example, “I said to leave out the oil, and you added it…”)
How I am feeling—including in my body? [Feelings, Step Two] (I refer to this as “looking under the hood.”) This step helps me connect with the intensity behind my thoughts. For example, regarding the oil, I’d probably be frustrated and confused.
Seeking out the now… (Photo by the author, 2024, all rights reserved.) What I am longing for, on a core level? [Needs, Step Three] (What’s driving my response?) This is where the juice is. Why does a bit of oil matter so much to me? When I look at the list of universal needs, I quickly see that my frustration is not about oil at all. It’s about being heard, mattering, trust and connection.
And what is a next step I can take to meet my needs, even if in a micro, baby step way? [Requests, Step Four] This is the power step. All of NVC in my opinion is about taking responsibility for our own reactions and desires. Yet here’s where the pedal hits the metal. Often it’s a micro step. In this case, because my needs include being heard and connection, I’d most likely make a connection request: “I’m wondering if you can understand why I might be frustrated or confused?” Or, “So I’m curious — did you hear me say, ‘Forget the oil’?”
While a process for conflict resolution, NVC is, at basis, a mindfulness practice.
Helping us to steer clear of the slippery-slopes of judgments and generalizations (all forms of globalizing—taking us out of the present), NVC brings us into the immediacy of the concrete now: what we’re actually seeing, feeling and needing and what request might (as Marshall Rosenberg often said), “Make life more wonderful.”
The present is where change is possible—not in the past, the habitual (“You always—or never!”) or the future. The present is what’s real. The present is where true companionship takes place, with another or myself. As much as I enjoy a good read in a book, spiraling out into my own fabrications (whether about the past or future or my assessments) is not helpful or proactive. This is the common denominator of all thoughts and opinions: they distract us from what’s really happening, now. Globalizing is the thief of now: the thief of what we have in this present moment. We can use those moments up greedily or haphazardly or mindlessly. And our days go by so quickly…
As William Blake said, kiss the joy as it flies.
This is why I think we humans are drawn to art. As much as we can go back into our heads and talk about it or analyze it, when we stand before a painting or sculpture (an altar to now), we must use our eyes; when listening to music, our ears; when tasting a culinary delight, our tongues. Art brings us back into our bodies—the realm of sensation—because there is no other way to experience beauty and art than through our bodies and the present moment. (For me, a tune I wrote, Agnes’ Forest, brings me back immediately to now, through beauty, awe and wonder.)
I love in Irish that the way you say “just now” is anois beag (“little now”). It’s the smallest slice or drop of now; the one, like angels, that can dance on the head of a pin.
As if created by modern psychologists (or a guru), the Irish language has inherent in it numerous aspects that support a present-tense awareness and a detachment to static and fixed ways of thinking and seeing/being.
The most notable one is that most feelings in Irish are not connected to a linking verb the way they are in English and many other languages. In English, “You are sad” or “I’m angry” or “We are excited.” The linking verb (“to be”) functions like an equal sign (I=mad; mad is who I am). Through that linking verb, feelings define us. They become all of who we are: “I am a teacher,” “I am from New York City,” “I am mad.” In the
“Some are sad.
And some are glad.
And some are very, very bad.
Why are they sad and glad and bad?
I do not know.
Go ask your dad.”
― Dr. Seuss, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish spirit of responsibility, I prefer this linking-verb structure to, “You make me mad!” Yet when we use that linking verb, though we may not be consciously aware of it, we are allowing our feelings to bleed out into all of who we are. We allow feeling to define us. We are letting the horse run away with the cart. In practicing NVC, the present-continuous tense is often used instead (“I am feeling” rather than "I feel.."). That “-ing” brings us (somewhat) back to the present moment and away from the static I > (am my) feelings, with no degree of separation.
In Irish, in contrast, most feelings are not expressed with the verb “to be.” Instead, they are in the temporary state of being “on” you—like putting on some clothes or a cap you that can cast off, rather being your very essence or skin. “I am happy” is Tá áthas orm, literally, “Happiness is on me. “They are angry” is Tá fearg orthu (“Anger is on them.” Tá eagla orm. “I am afraid” or literally, “Fear is on me.”
“A feeling is not an identity that has a mind of its own and gets to run your life. When we over-identify with feelings, we may start to feel that they are truth—permanent states, even—that take control and determine our life paths. Feelings are just responses to certain events and people, …” More Than a Feeling: How Over-Identification Gets in the Way, by Lindsey Anton
There is something that rings true about this construction —that feelings are “on” us. That’s the way it feels sometimes, especially with intense emotions. Sadness for example can feel as if it’s weighing “on” me. When I am gripped with fear, it’s “on” me—much like being gripped by a dark shadow. I am also aware of how “hunger on you” can especially feel raw and intense in Ireland given its history with famine and the Gorta Mór (the “Big Hunger”). During the Great Famine, one million people died and at least that many emigrated. People were literally left by the British government to eat grass. The Great Famine also played a key role in decimating the Irish language. Edmund Spenser (yes, author of The Faerie Queene) specifically advocated this as a policy a hundred years before: let the Irish starve as a way to break their tongue and their resistance. But that sad story (scéal brónach) is for another day.
Irish is not the only language that expresses feelings as an experience you “have” rather than “are.” In French, for example, some feelings are expressed with “have,” such as J’ai faim (“I have hunger”). Yet what’s fascinating about Irish is that feelings are specifically “on” you. More, there are other ways that Irish reminds us that nothing is permanent or static in life.
Most strikingly, there is no verb for “have” in Irish. If you want to say you “have” something, you say it’s “at” you. For example, “I have two cats” (Tá dhá chat agam) is literally, “Two cats are at me.” This does not mean you’re being scratched or attacked by your cats. This is the closest to ownership that you can get in Irish: that (currently) there are two cats with or “at” you. Even more poignant, in Irish you don’t say that you “know” something. Instead, you say that knowledge is “at” you. For example, Tá a fhios sin agam, would be translated into English as “I know that.” Literally in Irish it’s, “I have that knowledge at me.” I love how this presents knowledge as bigger than any of us. None of us definitively or absolutely knows anything—or everything. We can be accompanied or graced by knowledge in any given moment.
I also believe these constructions reveal profoundly different ways of seeing property and community. What does it mean in a culture where “having” literally does not exist? I will be writing about that another day: how the Irish language beautifully reveals the high level of interdependence and community that the Irish enjoyed before colonialism. Again, the Irish language is like a time capsule: it can transport us back to a world that we now can only begin to imagine (or remember) as possible.
For now, I invite you into the present moment: the only moment we have (or is “at” us).
Slán go fóill, goodby for now,
Dian, i mBaile Atha Cliath (in Dublin)
P.S. I want to celebrate that last week I got my first paid monthly subscriber. This means so much to me! It was very affirming and arrived just when I needed it most: after taking a hiatus during my surgery and wanting/needing to get back in the writing saddle. If you have yet to subscribe, please do so! It really does put wind in my sails. I also so appreciate your sharing The Liminal with others. Thank you!
P.P.S. While there is a verb in Irish for “speak,” as in Labhraím leat, I speak with you, the most common way to say that you speak Irish is with that ag (at) form. “Do you speak Irish?” would be An bhfuil Gaeilge agat? (Do you have Irish at you? literally). So even language acquisition lacks a static quality in Irish. As a learner, I definitely find that to be true: some days Irish is “at” (or with me) more than others.
I have "on" such joy and gratitude for this new knowledge "at" me!
Well put ! 🥰