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The Language That Carries Us: Part Two – When the Word Is Spoken
If Part One belongs to language held in the body, this second movement belongs to the moment when breath becomes sound. In oral cultures, speech is never neutral. Words are not simply descriptive. They are acts. They intervene in the world they enter. This is why, within Irish tradition, language was never treated casually, and why silence was understood not as absence, but as restraint and discernment. To speak was to step into relationship and to accept consequence, not on


The Language That Carries Us: Part One – Before the Word
Oral tradition is fragile. Not because it lacks substance, but because it depends on closeness. It survives only where people remain in relationship – to one another, to place, and to those who came before them. Once that proximity is broken, once knowledge is lifted out of the hearth and placed at a distance, something essential thins. The words may remain, but the transmission weakens. In Ireland, much of what is most vital has never been written down. It has lived instead
