When a Curse is a Blessing
Sacred Law and the Pursuit of Dermot and Grainne
Learn More About The Coracle
I am thrilled to announce the maiden voyage of The Coracle, a three-part rites of passage mentorship carried on folk tales, myths, and Mū magic. Part One: The Journey of Safety and Belonging begins May 18th. (It’s not necessary to sign up for all three journeys, they are self-contained. Part Two will launch in Fall, 2025.)
This online odyssey will help you discover where or why you are not experiencing true internal safety, and present you with remedies carried by the images in myths and fairy tales for centuries. The process is a bit hard to describe. I’m not trying to by mysterious by not giving a lot of details, but I honestly can’t fully explain the magic that’s involved without reducing it. Let’s just say that fairy tales are a spiritual technology. That doesn’t mean I don’t know how to work with this magic, or to show you how you can, too. Maybe the first step of The Coracle, like any proper journey that will change your life, is to trust your gut. Should I go? Is it time? Only you can know, and only you can make the choice to say yes.
We will meet on Zoom over five Sundays, May 18-June 15th, and there will be replays if you can’t make it live. 10AM HST, for 1.5-2 hours. Five live sessions, four weeks, with ceremonial and email support throughout the duration, along with a group forum to connect with your fellow voyagers.
Please reach out if you have questions, or book a free discovery call on my website. Register here if you’re getting a full-body yes by clicking on this link if you’re ready:
The Channel is Open
Last Friday evening, as the sun set in the Pacific Ocean behind me, I had the great privilege of entering the slipstream of mythology by telling a story I love, the Pursuit of Dermot and Grainne, from the Fenian cycle of Irish myths.
Telling a story like this, at least telling it the way I want to, requires allowing myself to be carried into another dimension. Maybe multiple dimensions. The people in the story are not from the past. They are you and me—and all the people we’ve loved, longed for, hated, feared, and had to let go—our parents, ex partners, lovers we met in Greece when we were 18, friends we had a bitter falling out with, friends who died too young, strangers who wandered into our lives for a brief period who upend our lives with magic or mischief, then disappeared.
“Are you channeling?” People have asked me after hearing me tell a story. Occasionally I get, “You’re a great actor.” To be honest, neither word, channeling or acting, feels right to me. When I think of channeling, it seems like what I’m saying isn’t coming from me. It is. When I think of acting, I think of someone pretending to be someone else. That is not what’s happening when I tell a story. I am me, but also not me.
What I can say definitively, is that I have a relationship with these stories. I allow them to move me, and I move them by telling them.
I have been deeply tired for several years, despite sleeping well. Today in an acupuncture session the practitioner asked me where I experienced the tiredness in my body. “My head,” I said, almost immediately.
“I thought that’s what you’d say,” He replied.
“I am very mental,” I told him, “And I like that. I like what I create with my mind. I don’t find it exhausting at all. It’s exhilarating.”
My acupuncturist agreed it was a good thing, and shared that he thought the exhaustion in my mind was because I am tuned into so many voices. Transpersonal was the word he used. In other words, I’m channeling! (The remedy isn’t to shut the voices out, it’s to move nourishing qi toward the head, by the way.)
I grew up reading. It was, and still is, one of my greatest joys. I’ve noticed over the past few years, that people younger than I am prefer to listen these days over reading. This makes me curious. Are we going back to an oral culture? And what place do screens play in this cultural transformation?
While I am a total book nerd, I find it encouraging that young people are returning to listening.
How we receive the stories matters. I’m not going to say that sitting around a fire is better than hearing a story on Zoom, or that Audible is better than a leather-bound book from the library. Sure, I have an opinion about that. You can probably guess it.
What I will say, is the stories are still here. So are we. What matters, is that we find each other. That is how we move a culture.
Right before I left today, I asked the acupuncturist what the English name for the herb moxa was, which he’d just used in my treatment.
“Mugwort,” he told me. “The ancients said they received all the information about the meridians and points from the plant.”
I hadn’t heard this before, that Chinese medicine, which seems so complicated and technical—all those charts!—was shown to humans by a plant, but it made so much sense. Like pua’aehuehu (Mū Hawaiian fern medicine,) or ayahuasca, mugwort is a plant medicine carrying the knowledge of a whole system of healing.
I experience so many synchronicities, you’d think by now I’d be a bit blasé, but I’m not. What the acupuncturist didn’t know was that four weeks ago, right before our first session, while enjoying an outdoor bath at my friend’s while I was watching their cat, I discovered a patch of mugwort growing alongside the tub. I’d never seen it before in Hawai’i. It’s not common here. I picked some for my friend journeying in The Coracle with me, and some for myself. Someone else also offered me a gift of moxa during this time.
What’s the message? Maybe it’s mother that mind of yours. (Mugwort is sometimes called motherwort.)
I’m not sure, but I know the conversation is open, and now that I know that, I can begin to be more active in what I ask the plant, instead of just passively receiving its gifts without any reciprocity between us.
I’m sharing this with you, because I want to emphasize how willing the non-human world is to communicate with us. The plants may not need us as much as we need them, but can we really be sure of that? Sure, they would go on if we weren’t here, but maybe they like what we create with them—entire systems of healing and cultures as beautiful and sophisticated as the Shipibo, the Tang Dynasty, and Hawai’i.
So remember that when you read my written telling of the Pursuit of Dermot and Grainne I’m about to share with you. Ask yourself these questions: How are you moved by the story? What can you offer it back in exchange? How is the story moved by you?
This is how we will revitalize culture on Earth. Let’s begin now.
The Pursuit of Dermot and Grainne
I suppose this all began that day when Roc’s son was frightened by an animal and ran between Donn’s legs to hide. Nobody knows why, but Donn, who could have helped the lad, instead squeezed his legs together until there was no air left in the boy. His heart stopped. He was dead.
Roc was enraged, rightfully so, he was quite mad in his grief, mad enough to perform a magical ceremony that brought his son back to life. But not as a human boy. Roc put his son’s spirit into the body of a wild boar. He also put a geis on the boar-boy to kill Donn’s son, who himself had a geis put on him never to pierce the skin of a pig. If you’re confused, don’t worry too much about the details. Just listen and soon enough it will all play out the way it’s supposed to for you. There’s something for all of us in a story like this, something ancient as a bear skull in a den that can only be reached by descending deep inside a cave whose opening is a slit just big enough for everyone who needs to squeeze through it.
Now a geis is a strange, contradictory thing, combination curse, spell, taboo, and obligation, that could also be a blessing. And these are not just things that existed in ancient Ireland, most of us are under some kind of geis today and probably will be in the future, if we have one, for we need them. A geis, like kapu, Hawaiian sacred law that, when violated, could result in death, is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes the limits of an obligation are the only thing that can evolve us.
You may have heard of Donn’s son. Dermot O’Duibhne was his name. He was the boy I mentioned at the beginning of this jaunt, the boy with a geis on him never to kill a pig, cursed by Roc who had lost his own son to the cruel act of Dermot’s father. Despite the curse, Dermot was the greatest warrior of the Fianna, the band of roving warriors led by Finn MacCool, who we met earlier as a young boy sucking on his thumb after mistakenly burning it on the Salmon of Knowledge, whose wisdom had seeped into him that fateful day by the River Boyne.
Some of you may even know that Dermot was also known as Dermot of the Love Spot. Bol Sherca, it was called in Irish, a mark that made anyone who saw it fall in love with him, a permanent Cupid’s arrow smack in the middle of his forehead. Dermot did his best to keep the love spot covered, growing long bangs through which he looked up, tilting his head that made the court ladies swoon thinking he was a flirt, but in truth, he was not tempted by them. His loyalty was to Finn MacCool and the Fianna.
At the time of our story, Finn MacCool was getting on in years. He could still leap across the great chasm he tested himself against every year on his birthday, but he could foresee a day soon when he wouldn’t quite make it and would have to pull himself up to scramble over the edge. That would be the day to surrender his leadership of the Fianna.
In the meantime, he resolved to enjoy life to the fullest—the feasting, the fights, the poetry and sharing of song and story, the pleasures of the marriage bed—only Finn didn’t have a wife. The mother of his son Ossian had been a deer woman and had slipped away into the forest shadows many years ago. Finn was a great chief, but a lonely man. He needed a wife.
He consulted with the Fianna who all agreed, the only woman in Ireland worthy of being his wife was the daughter of the High King, Cormac Mac Airt. Grainne was her name, and she was known as a woman whose intelligence equaled her beauty. They sent some men to the High King’s court and asked for Grainne’s hand. Would she marry the greatest leader the Fianna had ever known, poet-warrior Finn MacCool, whose hands carried magical healing powers, who could charm the birds in the trees and never lost a game of chess to anyone but his most trusted warrior, Dermot?
If only they had sent Dermot to offer for her hand, things would have been much different, for unbeknownst to the Fianna, Grainne had glimpsed him as a twelve-year-old maid on the hurling field. The wind had blown back his hair and she saw it full-on, the Bol Sherca, The Love Spot. She was slayed, bound to him in one instant. Poor Dermot had no idea.
If only… two little words that keep so much from surrendering to the completion of grief. We are going to erase them now, gently like water straying from the river at the bend, splashing a little further up the sandbank than usual before rejoining the story, the river on its way to the sea. No regrets. It’s time to truly grieve and release ourselves from the hungry ghosts that blight our future…
Anyway, Grainne had been waiting for this boy for a long time—all through her girlhood. Although a young maiden, she was already a bit disillusioned with love. The boy with the love spot had not come. When would he come? Maybe he wasn’t coming. He wasn’t coming. She lost faith. So it was, “Yes, I’ll marry him,” when the Fianna came courting for the old chief Finn MacCool.
She left her father’s house and journeyed to the hall of the Fianna, and it was there, peering from behind a curtain as she was about to enter the feast, that she had her first doubts; first when she spied her intended’s son, Ossian, so handsome with the elegant shine of the deer passed onto him from his mother. Finn, sitting next to him, though handsome and clearly a man of dignity, was weathered. Deep lines on his forehead and cheeks. Just a few gray hairs, but still, he was no Ossian. And he was certainly no Dermot of the Love Spot, who Grainne spied next, recognizing in an instant the youth she’d fallen in love with at twelve years old. She knew immediately she could not marry Finn MacCool.
As I said, Grainne was a woman whose intelligence equaled her beauty, She stepped from behind the curtain and took her place next to Finn. She smiled and nodded and nobody had any idea what was going on inside her, how she wanted to leap with all her being into the arms of her future husband’s most trusted warrior. No one had any idea how hard it was to keep her hands and voice from shaking, as a servant she’d commandeered poured wine containing a sleeping potion in everyone’s goblet except for herself and the leaders of the Fianna. Boom. Heads dropped on the table. Snores. Most undignified.
The Fianna looked at her in shock. She was steady-eyed, asking each one of them if they would run away with her. “I can’t marry him,” she told them without guilt or shame. No need for explanation. It was what it was. Absolutely loyal to their chief Finn MacCool, every one of them refused. Finally, she came to her real target, Dermot of the Love Spot.
“And you Dermot? Will you run away with me?” she asked him directly.
“My lady, with all due respect, my loyalty belongs to Finn MacCool, my chief.”
Grainne had no choice—remember, she had been bound to him years ago because of his love spot, though she didn’t reveal that to him. “Well, then,” she said. “I place a geis on you. You are bound to run away with me.”
Dermot’s heart sank, knowing he was going to have to tear his heart in two, leaving half with Finn and taking the other half into the wilds with this woman. No one could disobey a geis. It wasn’t just unheard of, it wasn’t possible. Some things in life just are. No way to control it. It is what it is. He was just going to have to bow to it.
And so Dermot set off with Grainne while Finn was still asleep. Grainne was not used to hard travel and whined in a most un-royal way, demanding Dermot carry her. He refused, hoping she would give up and go back to Finn and this could all be over.
The drama of their situation had attracted Aengus Og, the god of love, who thoroughly approved of their match. He gave them some advice: they would never be able to sleep in a cave with one opening, or a house with one door, or a tree with one branch, and they would never be able to eat where they cooked, or sleep where they ate. Band on the run. They would have to keep moving if they wanted to keep ahead of Finn and the Fianna.
The next morning when Finn awoke at the banquet table to find them gone, his heart broke, not so much at the loss of Grainne—that sting was pride’s—but from his friend’s perceived betrayal. Dermot knew he was loyal, but Finn had no idea he had only fled with Grainne because she’d placed him under geis. He gathered the Fianna and set off in pursuit, intent on revenge.
With Finn in hot pursuit, Dermot and Grainne fled across the land. Each night Dermot would make a nest somewhere for them to sleep, but he never touched Grainne. He remained chaste. He would leave a piece of raw fish in each place they slept as a sign to Finn that he had not touched his intended, which only enraged his chief more.
Closer and closer they came. Sometimes Dermot and Grainne could actually hear the hounds of the Fianna. It was on one of those days that, when fording a stream, water splashed up Grainne’s thigh. Cool and delicious, ticklish was the water. She flushed. She quite liked the feeling. Looking up at Dermot, also flushed, standing on the riverbank offering her his hand while trying to look away, she said, “That water has more courage than you.”
I don’t know if it was because he truly wanted her or, if it was the shame of being called less than a man, but Dermot took Grainne to bed that night, bedding down in a nest of crushed grass and ferns like the forest deer. Now they were husband and wife. He left no messages of purity after that for Finn.
One night they slept in a house with seven doors. Wouldn’t you know it, the Fianna finally caught up with them and blocked each door. No escape.
Aengus Og descended saying he would spirit them to safety, but Dermot refused. He had been ready for this to be over since the beginning. No, he would battle it out, fight his brothers and his chief. “Go with Aengus Og,” he growled at Grainne, who let the love god spirit her away.
Dermot began opening doors. One by one, six doors opened. Face to face with his brothers, who each offered him the chance to escape. Dermot closed each door until he came to the seventh and there, at last, was his best friend, the chief to whom he’d sworn fealty, the great Finn MacCool. “You’re a dead man if you come out that door Dermot O Duibhne!” roared his chief.
Dermot stepped through and met the wrath of Finn and the Fianna with his sword raised. Swords clashed, spears clanked, hounds bellowed. Dermot was everywhere at once. No one could strike a fatal blow, the battle went on and on until Dermot, taunting the Fianna, ended it in one leap off the tip of his spear. Up and over the warriors he sprang, fleeing to Grainne who was safe in the company of Aengus Og.
This time he built a proper camp for them. He had lost his band of brothers, betrayed and broke his best friend’s heart; maybe it was time to enjoy what life he had left to him.
There was a famous tree in the forest where he made this camp, a rowan tree. Dubhros was its name, and this tree was said to have sprouted from a berry dropped by one of the Tuatha De Danaan, the fairy folk. Anyone who had three berries from it would be restored to health. The berries could heal all wounds, even make a middle-aged body young again. The tree was guarded by a giant, Searbhann Lochlann who could only be defeated by three strokes of his own club.
It just so happened there were three warriors who lived near that place who’d been at odds for a long time with Finn MacCool. When they heard he was nearby they approached him and asked to make peace. Finn looked at the three and saw an opportunity. “I’ll make peace with you if you bring me the head of Dermot or three berries from Dubhros, The Rowan Tree.”
He was tired from this long chase. The men saw it. Still, they knew he was strong enough to slay them all with one sword, and that if they wanted peace, they’d have to choose one of the options. Dermot was known far and wide as undefeatable. The berries were guarded by a giant. Their prospects were not good. “Let’s give it a go,” they said to each other. They might all be dead by the end of the day, but they were tired of fighting. One last try, then.
Early one morning they snuck into Dermot and Grainne’s camp. Dermot heard the rather dim barbarians rustling in the brush. After bashing their heads together, he trussed them up and lay them in a heap at Grainne’s feet.
Unable to move, the three warriors quickly confessed what they were about, “We only wanted to make peace with Finn MacCool,” they blabbered. “He told us our options were to bring him your head or three berries from the sacred rowan tree that restores youth and beauty.”
Grainne’s ears pricked up at that. Perfect health? Luminous beauty? Yes, please! All these years on the road had taken their toll on her complexion and lately, her bones had begun to ache.
“Dermot, my love, bring me those berries,” she purred like Elizabeth Taylor asking Richard Burton for the Krupp diamond.
When Dermot didn’t look eager to leap into battle with a giant, she tried another approach:
“My bull, my big, strong-shouldered man, I need use those berries. I haven’t told you yet because I’ve been waiting for the right moment…but I think I’m with child.”
Dermot had no choice. Grainne was to bear him a child. Tired of fighting and fleeing, heavy-hearted, he set off to battle the giant Lochlann, guardian of the sacred rowan tree, to please his expectant wife.
This time he was not able to leap over the giant on the tip of a spear. It was a bloody, bashing battle between the two of them that almost got the best of Dermot. Finally, blinded by his own blood, Dermot got his hands on the Giant Lochlann’s club and bashed him over the head three times with it, cleaving his skull from fontanelle to the base of his neck. The giant’s brains spilled onto the soil of Erin.
Dermot was not proud of it, he took no joy in killing a fae guardian. He hadn’t even felt blood lust, only resignation. It was what it was. He picked some berries for Grainne, then some more for the three warriors to take back to Finn. “Maybe some unforeseen good will come from this,” he thought.
Grainne was delighted with the berries. She did look even more beautiful, Dermot noticed. Why not take up residence in this leafy fountain of youth? He built them a little treehouse up in the branches and they moved in with the birds.
Now there’s something you should know about our fated, fleeing lovers. In all their years of wandering, wherever they spent the night curled in each others’ arms, the soil grew richer and more fertile. Fields overflowed with barley and wheat, enough to make it through the winter and more. Wives were more fertile and husbands more virile.
Stories began to be told that the love of these two blessed the land. The verb of their loving became a noun, a healing balm. Poems were written about them. People left little offerings at springs and in apple orchards in their names. Finn heard this as he followed them, and his heart grew even more bitter. Once the people praised him, now he was the cuckold chief, chasing a woman he barely knew and didn’t love out of pride. The three warriors were right, life force was draining out of him. He was starting to look like a hollowed-out lightning tree.
When the three enemy warriors gave him the berries, he smelled Dermot on them, the musk of his most trusted friend. He knew the warriors were lying when they said how they’d got the berries, but he also knew now where Dermot and Grainne were hiding, so he let their deception slide. He gathered the Fianna, at this point a ragtag bunch soured by their leader’s bitterness, and they shuffled into the forest to find this holy rowan.
Now Finn was known to love a good game of chess. When they found the tree, he challenged his son Ossian to a game. Ossian was a good player, but rather like Telemachus, he was no match for his father. Three times Finn had Ossian trapped, three times his son surprised him by countering his moves that kept him in the game. Funny thing, each time Ossian countered, a berry from the rowan fell onto the square, guiding Ossian to victory. Finn leaped to his feet, spilling the chess board. He knew there was no way Ossian could beat him. The only man who could beat the great Finn MacCool, bearer of the Salmon of Wisdom’s knowledge, was Dermot O’Duibhne.
“Are you up there, Dermot?” he hollered into the branches.
“I am!” Dermot replied without hesitation. Fuck it. “And with Grainne, too!”
The leaves parted and there they were, Dermot and Grainne in passionate embrace, kissing so hard their teeth clashed and berries burst their skins spraying the Fianna with dark juice.
“Come down,” Finn demanded. “Finish this as a man and not a bird hiding in a tree. Come face me at last. Fight your chief.”
Dermot heard this and something inside him broke, some thread of loyalty to the past that had nothing to do with the man who had suffered for so many years as an exile, not by choice. Could not Finn have listened? Could he not have understood his beloved Dermot was under a geis? Could he not have asked why have you done this, Dermot?
Even now he was waiting for Finn to say, “Come down from that tree and let’s talk like brothers,” but it didn’t happen. Instead, he heard his chief turn to the Fianna and say, “If you let him leave here alive I will kill each one of you. Whoever kills him I will grant the highest honor. Songs will be written in your name.”
This was too much for Dermot. Words burst out of him like fire-tipped arrows. “I am a fugitive because of you, living a half-life. Now you would kill me! Really! After all I’ve done for you? Now you would turn everyone against me, my own brothers the Fianna. I will never fight for you again, Finn MacCool, but I will fight for myself!”
And with those words, he jumped out of the tree into the midst of the Fianna swinging his sword and screaming like a banshee.
Only it was not Dermot. It was Aengus Og in his shape, which Finn realized after the Fianna had decapitated him several times, only to have his head grow back right in front of their eyes. The real Dermot had escaped on one of his dolphin leaps, spinning and whirling high above the fight.
The Fianna were too weighed down by bitterness to follow him. Soon Dermot was far from the lover’s tree, landing at Grainne’s feet, who Aengus Og had once again spirited away to safety. He looked up at her and finally, was truly enchanted by her ravishing beauty.
“Not a bad fate,” he thought, smiling up at her. She gave him a Mona Lisa smile that promised secret delights. At last, Dermot accepted her.
They resumed their flight, but this time enjoyed it more, especially the nights when they lay down in their nests of bracken under the white Milky Way, surrounded by snorting deer who danced with them in their shared dreams.
Finn kept on with his pursuit, turning to his skills as a diviner as his body aged. All three of them were exhausted, but didn’t know what else to do but go on. One day fate would find them all and end the story for them.
In the meantime,there were days of walking and nights of legendary lovemaking. Grainne sang to Dermot when he was tired, soothing him with lullabies she learned from the moon. Sometimes he woke in a cold sweat, brandishing his sword at the dark night, convinced the Fianna were upon them. Those were the times their lovemaking was the sweetest. When Dermott smelled the honey hair of Grainne, felt her skin smooth as river pebbles bumping up against his flinty bones when he sank into her silence, he was overcome with so much gratitude at the world’s beauty he wept. Grainne would smooth his hair from his forehead as he rested on top of her, careful not to crush her, though she’d just been urging him to do just that, the imprint of rocks on her spine, her hips sparking like silica.
One day they were sheltering in a cave by the sea when the waves brought an ocean being to shore, Ciach, The Fierce One, who had traveled there over the western sea in his sealskin coracle. Ciach was a chess player and gladly accepted Dermot’s challenge. Ciach’s ocean magic outwitted Dermot’s more steady land wisdom, and the sea being won the match. Under the sway of this ocean man, Dermot was not himself. He casually mentioned that perhaps Ciach could claim Grainne as the prize for winning.
Shocking, right? Well, I will have to say I heard Grainne was not entirely enraged by this. After years of being chased, she loved the drama of a good fight and the potential of a new lover, but she pretended she was indignant and laid into Dermot, and pretty soon the heat of her words and his retorts had inflamed her for real. As Criach disappeared from the tawdry scene she grabbed a knife and plunged the blade into Dermot’s thigh.
Dermot did not scream in pain. Grainne did not beg for forgiveness. Instead, they looked at each other for a long time, as long as it took for white flowers to blossom from rowan branch tips, for those flowers to harden into berry buds, for those berries to ripen and fall to earth a thousand times. It was a silence there was no coming back from. A numb silence. Finally, Dermot spoke.
“You took everything from me. My people. The freedom of walking under the sun. I am hunted like an animal by the ones I loved. I have no honor. My life is a joke. You have made me your jester, here to entertain you and satisfy your every whim. I have killed a giant for you who only wanted to guard a sacred tree. I am defiled and so are you. If only you could have loved Finn MacCool, the finest man I ever knew. If only you would hate me.”
Grainne finally heard the truth. I mean really heard it. It flooded her like an un-dammed stream and the pain was so great she had a hard time breathing.
Words started sputtering out of her—hard to understand. More like sounds a snared rabbit would make. Finally they cohered and Dermot heard her say, “I couldn’t help it. When I saw you as a twelve-year-old girl, when I glimpsed the love spot, I was lost from that moment. No man besides you would ever do for me. I drowned in your beauty and I’ve been trying to get to the surface to breathe ever since. I couldn’t help it, but it was my fault at the same time—all of this. Dermot, you are all I have. You are my stag on the mountain. You are my mountain. I beg you, don’t leave me. I’m sorry.”
Dermot looked at her on her knees before him and began to speak. I’ll not tell you what he said, only that it went on for a long time. Back and forth they accused and forgave until finally they were all talked out and sat together on a blanket of quiet. “Are you hungry, Dermot?” Grainne asked. He nodded yes. “Then hand me the knife so I can cut this bread I baked for us before all this drama.”
“My love, the knife?” Grainne asked again after Dermot did not reply. Finally, she stopped and looked at him and the look in his eyes took whatever she was about to say next right from her lips.
“Look for the knife in the sheath,” Dermott said, without accusation, utterly defeated by all he’d lost in the name of a love he’d never wanted.
All this time she’d forgotten the knife was still stuck in his thigh. For the rest of her life she would know no deeper shame.
Finally, after sixteen years everyone grew tired of this endless, futile pursuit. Dermot and Grainne would stop fleeing. Let Finn have his revenge. He had earned it. But once again Aengus Og intervened, persuading Finn not to punish the lovers. Finn offered his terms. He would give up his pursuit if they would live quietly in Sligo, not rubbing their love in his face at court. The lovers agreed and settled down to make a life together. Ireland wept with relief. Finn returned to court with the Fianna. Dermot and Grainne settled into married life, coming to know each other in a different way, through the day-to-day tasks of tending the land and raising a family. Nobody was chasing them. Life was not exciting, but there were other rewards, and they still enjoyed the comfort of each other’s bodies under goose down on long winter nights.
But there was something about the vagabond life that Grainne had not reckoned on. After years of being chased, she found she missed the drama. She may even have become addicted to it. Sometimes she found herself picking fights with Dermot for no reason, or screaming at her kids for laughing too much. You’ve seen it before, making mountains out of molehills. That’s what happens when adrenaline becomes a god.
One night sitting by the fire with Dermot she said, “Husband, don’t you just wish for some excitement around here?” Dermot looked around. He had grown used to the domestic comforts. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said tentatively. He had known Grainne long enough to know when he should pay attention. What was she up to? Was she going to turn his world upside down again?
What she said didn’t seem so drastic at first. “We have everything we’ve ever wanted, my dear, thanks to you and all you suffered, but I can feel there’s still a hole in your heart. I’d like to heal that wound by inviting Finn MacCool and the Fianna to a feast here in our hall. Wouldn’t it be grand to feast once again with the Fianna?”
This was not what Dermot expected, but when he heard the words he realized it was what he wanted most in the world. Grainne, that witchy enchantress, had seen right into his soul. Mesmerized at the thought of reuniting with his beloved chief and band of brothers, he answered her as if under a spell, convincing himself this was a marvelous idea. “Yes, it would. The best feast I can imagine would be one with Finn and the Fianna at my table once again. To sit with them and sing until dawn! I can imagine nothing I’d like more. Grainne, you’re right. But do you think they’d come?”
Grainne did think they’d come, for she knew these warriors were even more hooked on the drama than she was, they had all been calibrated by blood lust, their nervous systems thrummed to axe and drum. She could hear their hearts pounding under their skin from miles away, these men who had fought over her, and knew they would never be satisfied until the tension had burst. “I do,” she told Dermott, and the words were like a marriage vow.
The invitation was sent. Finn and the Fianna accepted. They would come in a year to feast at the table of Dermot and Grainne.
Preparations began immediately. The villagers, people who had gathered around the exiled lovers, were happy to do the work. It was all they could talk about for the whole year, how Finn and the Fianna were to be reunited with their dear brother Dermot. Dermot told his children stories about the Fianna and they fought mock battles and learned many songs to sing when the feast finally came to their door. At last, the time to be happy had arrived.
Exactly a year after the invitation, Finn arrived with The Fianna in tow. You can imagine how eager they all were to get a look at each other. Grainne was sure Finn would be a stooped old man by now, and Dermot was expecting to help his former chief up the stairs with a hand on the elbow.
To their surprise, Finn didn’t look much older than the last time they’d seen him, but they could see in his eyes that they had aged.. Grainne was no longer the most beautiful maid in the kingdom about to be married to a middle-aged king. She was a married woman, still beautiful, but the weight of her years was starting to show on her.
And so the feast began—bards reciting poetry, never an empty goblet, roasted swan on the table, and the warmth of conversation that kept the hall so warm they forgot that outside the snow would soon be on the mountain. Peace wasn’t so bad after all.
But was this peace? Dermot still tossed and turned in his sleep. Finn still sat awake long nights staring into the dark. It was on a night like this, new moon, full dark, that Dermot and Grainne awoke to the sound of hounds on the hill and a horn. When Dermot shifted to get out of bed, Grainne clutched at him, “Stay here, my darling. That’s something sent out of fairy, I’m sure of it.” But Dermot would not have it. He was dressed and out the bedchamber door as if he’d never been married or fathered children.
Spear in hand, up Mount Bulben he climbed, following the baying hounds until he found Finn himself, not the fairy court. “What’s this, Finn? You don’t have my permission to hunt on this land.”
If Finn MacCool bristled at this, he kept it secret, replying calmly, “Oh no, nothing like that, just wandering the hills with the boys. You used to love that, remember? Out in the night with the wind and stars, cracking jokes, telling stories.”
“Yes, but why the hounds? What’s going on?”
“Ah yes, you heard them. The hounds have caught the scent of a boar—absolutely gigantic—I just got a glimpse of him. You should see him. Probably the biggest I’ve ever seen. A legend in these parts. The men ran after him with the hounds but I know better. They’ll never catch him. I’m just sitting here waiting to see who comes tumbling back down the mountain.”
When Dermot heard that he had to go. A boar! Hunting with The Fianna! All he’d missed out on came swooping on him like a silent owl on a field mouse, shattering his domestic trance. He had to join the hunt.
“To hounds!” he cried.
Finn tried to dissuade him. “Stay out of the fray, Dermot. You know you’re not so young yourself anymore.”
Of course, this had the opposite effect. Finn was no fool.
“I never retreat,” Dermot retorted. “You of all men should know that, Finn. To hounds!” he yelled again, and spun away from his chief in the direction of the baying, hurtling up the mountain where a great beast was about to turn and charge back down. The boar of Ben Bulben.
If he had waited just a second longer he might hae heard Finn whisper, “Ah, Dermot, I was afraid you’d say something like that.”
The Fianna rushed down the rumbling mountain behind the boar who was knocking trees down in its blind rage. When the beast exploded into a clearing, Dermot was there surging toward the fight, putting himself right in its path as the hunters swept past him to safety. Dermot loosed his hound, but when the dog saw what was coming, it slunk away. It was just him and the boar then.
Aengus Og didn’t come this time, or any other of the magical creatures he’d met in his vagabond years. The beast was so ferocious all he could do was hurl his spear at its snout and pray to any gods that would hear him.
The spear didn’t even break the skin of the bristly snout. The boar spun on as Dermot circled. Whack! He brought his sword down on its rump. Snapped in two.
Without a sword or the help of a god, he realized he was just, after all, a man.
That’s when, for the first time in his life, he knew terror. He would die on this mountain.
When the boar gored him it felt inevitable. But the beast didn’t kill him outright, he flung him with a tusk onto his back and took off, Dermot gripping onto his bristles as the monster tried to hurl him off. Miles and miles they crashed through the brush, knocking down saplings and tearing up tender roots. Some say they traveled back over the entire path Dermot had traveled with Grainne, returning finally to the base of Ben Bulben, the fateful mountain. There, the boar dumped Dermot off, and there, without ceremony or hesitation, before Dermot could inhale or exhale, tusks raked him from groin to throat. His guts spilled out onto the soil of Erin.
At last, Dermot exhaled.
But who came walking out of the trees to find him on the ground? Finn MacCool, chief of The Fianna, great warrior and bard of Erin. Finn walked over to his best friend and said coolly, “What’s this? Ah, Dermot. Looks like that boar got you good. I told you to stay back. Looks like the jig for you might finally be up.”
Now if you’ll remember, Finn’s thumb had healing powers from the time he’d burned it on the skin of The Salmon of Wisdom. Anyone that drank water from his cupped hands would be rejuvenated, no matter how dire the wound.
Clearly, Finn had forgotten this when he spoke to Dermot. It was too late for Dermot to remind his friend and chief. He had already slipped beyond speech. What had once been a voice that sang his chief’s praises, was now a death rattle.
Ossian knew, though, Finn’s son by the deer woman, and when he saw his father standing over the dying Dermot, chatting away about consequence and chickens coming home to roost, rambling about the sixteen years he’d lost chasing him and Grainne, and the shame of being a cuckold, he was horrified.
“When did I ever show you anything but love Dermot?” Ossian heard his father say.
Much to the mens’ surprise, Dermot managed to speak. “Finn, my chief, you know I only betrayed you because I was under geis. Save my life, I beg you. Bring me water from your healing hands.”
“Where would I get water out here in the forest, Dermot?” Finn said in a calm, bemused way.
Ossian couldn’t hold back any longer, “Dad! There is a spring not nine paces from you! You are bigger than this. Be the miracle you are. For all you have been to me my whole life bring this man you love the water of life!”
Finn pretended to be surprised at the nearby spring, when in fact he’d heard it with his salmon senses gurgling all this time. He’d known it was there when he sat waiting on the mountain for Dermot to answer the hound’s cry. He strolled to the pool and scooped water in his hands, bending toward his dear friend. Looking into the dying Dermot’s eyes he said, “Alas, I have some cruelty still in me. You did that, my friend,” and opened his palms to let the water fall to the earth.
Ossian, desolate, cried out, “Dad! If you don’t save him I’ll never talk to you again!” To his relief, Finn turned and walked back to the pool. Taking his time there and back, he bent once again with cupped hands to Dermot’s lips and… opened his palms again. He couldn’t do it.
By now the rest of the Fianna had gathered and were weeping at the sight of their comrade Dermot gored from groin to throat, with his steaming guts spilling out. Ossian was beyond horror, he was heartbroken. He didn’t yell, only said in a stunned voice, “Dad, this is the moment your whole life has been building to—right now, right here. You must save him. Change this story, bring Dermot the water of life.”
Something in Ossian’s voice shook Finn. He turned and headed back to the spring, quick as a hare this time. Running. For the third time, he bent to the spring and cupped the water, sprinting back to Dermot. With his healing hands just inches away from his friend’s lips—Dermot died.
Finn, grave and silent, watched the life leave his eyes, the gray film draw over them. The weeping of the Fianna was a terrible sound that traveled all the way to the castle to Grainne in their bedchamber. The bed was still warm from Dermot’s body, the sheets and pillows smelled of him. He was dead. Nobody wept like that for someone still living.
Finn made his way back to her, catching Dermot’s staghound that had run off on the way, called by the passing of his master’s spirit. Finn leashed the hound. Ossian and Oscar and the rest of the Fianna covered Dermot’s maimed body with a cloak and keened as the sun rose, giving them nowhere to hide their grief. It seemed like the whole mountain was mourning the death of Dermot O’Duibhne.
Grainne was waiting for Finn at the gates. When she saw him holding Finn’s hound by the leash she knew it was true, what she’d heard in the hounds’ baying. “Please leave me his hound at least,” she asked Finn MacCool.
“I don’t think so,” he said looking in her eyes without malice. He had moved beyond that to a colder place. “The hound stays with me.”
Finn turned, and with leashed hound in hand, began to leave that desperate scene.
He stopped. Grainne’s lips trembled. Finn turned his head and said over his shoulder in Grainne’s direction as he walked away, “Satisfied?”
Years passed. Grainne was not really cut out for selfless motherhood. She filled her children’s heads with stories of Dermot so that he became almost a god to them. One by one they left the nest to train as magicians and warriors so that they could avenge their father. Grainne sat alone now by her fire with only her memories of how she used to sit there with Dermot for company.
One frigid winter night: a knock at the door. Who’s this? A cloaked stranger was admitted. The servants escorted him to the fire where he removes it and there, standing before the woman who had rejected him so long ago, was Finn MacCool.
Grainne wanted nothing to do with him. “How dare you!” she hissed, but he refused to leave. He waited. He waited through the servants heaping buckets of dung on him. He waited through a fever that wracked him for days (He almost didn’t survive that.) He waited until he was gaunt, the way a child would wait for his parents to come back from their execution.
Only no one was coming back. They both knew it. Finally, Grainne relented and asked for him to be brought to her by the fire.
She looked at him. Haggard, grizzled, red-eyed from a lifetime of tears finally loosed. She knew she didn’t look much better. Grief had had its way with her, too. The wrinkles in her cheeks may have been the tracks of tears. Her hair was more white than yellow, though it was hard to tell because it still shone, but like the moon now, cool and contemplative. She could barely remember how she’d burned like the sun in her youth. All that trouble led to this: stuck again with Finn MacCool by a fire that never completely warmed her bones.
“What is it then? Why this mooning at my door?” she snapped, afraid she would cry herself.
It took a few moments for Finn to gather himself, but when he spoke his voice was steady. “There are so few of us left who remember him, Grainne.”
At that, his voice cracked and a fist clenched Grainne’s heart. She mustn’t cry. She must hold tight to her dream of vengeance.
Finn spoke again into the space hollowed out by their shared grief, “Tell me a story about him—anything. Some adventure from your years together in the woods or the way you two loved to sit by this very fire. I only want to hear his name spoken in the air once again by someone who loved him. Let the rest fall away. Let’s be done. Remember him with me, our Dermot of the Love Spot. Bring him back with your words, Grainne. Just for a moment let us live once again in the enchanted grace of his presence.”
Grainne said nothing for a long time. Finn didn’t pressure her. The embers stirred and a white flame flickered back into life. Grainne looked closer as the flame shifted from orange to white to blue, remembering the heat of Dermot, the way she’d felt as a twelve-year-old girl that first time she saw him, and all the times after. For her, his beauty had never faded. The enchantment never broke.
Rain began to fall. “I remember when…” she began.
Finn looked at her far-seeing eyes with a soft smile. At last, husband and wife, Finn and Grainne lived together for the rest of their lives.
Thanks for reading this issue of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles. I appreciate you! If you’d please hit the like button if you were moved by this, leave a comment, or share with a friend, I’d be most appreciative.
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Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
This story! The lines that stand out for me:
“Sometimes the limits of an obligation are the only thing that can evolve us.”
“If only… two little words that keep so much from surrendering to the completion of grief”
At the cruel suggestion of a careless relative years ago, I tucked the idea of a familial geis into my pocket and indulge self-pity in response for time to time.
Recently, a wise woman suggested wounds from such “curses” -but, oh how I like the term obligations - can somehow become gifts. I will be thinking about how my reception of this story will move IT. An invitation to wonder…