Historical Setting: The Great Skellig in an unknown time
The shag spreads fine healed wings out in the sunlight on the higher perch of the rim into morning mist-rising; the huge bird’s pulsing red veins show translucent through the pitch of its feathers in this great wingspan that covers the sky hole. Just now, everything in the world shares an amazing, awed stillness up from the depths of joy itself. The bird is a totem to the victory of healing over pain!
As softly as the shag had hopped up to the outside to spread its wings, it hops back to the inside again, and fold back onto its branch as the little hermit draws the sledge over the door again and so everything here will seem normal when the woman arrives with goat’s milk and greens.
But nothing is the same now. Here, a healing is complete and a bird is prepared to return back to the sky. Frail hope has changed to a powerful, driving joy. The daily duties – the sweeping – the spreading of fresh straw — the receiving of supplies are all different now.
She must have noticed the great wide bird spread out at our peak as she was arriving. Does she just assume this is the place of the healing miracles? Or did she imagine the hulking black shag just flew up here from the sea? Maybe all of us mending here are just assumed to be the usual work project assigned to this monk. But I have to wonder if this little monk’s collection of us needy is his own secret, and the daily visitor doesn’t even know this fellow, assigned as the keeper of the dead, is really gifted with the task of the overseer of life.
As for me, I am able to move and stretch my healing limbs. A long complete stretch surges energy through me from my toes to my fingertips. So now, if the shag flies off to perch on the rocks at the rim of the sea, I will use that inside branch left here to pull myself up little by little until I am standing. Whenever the hermit leaves the stillness of this little place, I will be the one making this a hive of healing. Like a nesting parent, I’d encourage this bird to just fly off into the vastness of sky with all the birds, and leave this branch for me.
I know something of healing.
(Continues Tuesday, June 16, 2026)
Lazarus Ink 