So this week's post is about the three marks of a poet, imbas forosnai, teinm laeda, dichetal do chennaib - and the whole time I was writing it, my engineer brain was sitting in the corner with its arms crossed going "prove it."

That's the fight I actually want to talk to you about today. Not the poet stuff, the fight underneath it.

I'm a Chartered Engineer. Twenty-four years of it. I need things to check out, to be testable, to have a mechanism I can point to and say "this is why this works." And then I turn around and teach imbas forosnai - a "gift of clairvoyance," according to the old texts, knowledge that arrives already lit, no mechanism, no test. My engineer brain does not like that sentence. At all.

I've spent a long time thinking those two parts of me were supposed to pick a side. Like I had to choose - be the rigorous one or be the spiritual one, and stop pretending I could be both without one of them being a bit of a fraud.

But here's what I keep coming back to: any science we don't yet understand looks exactly like magic. That's not me being clever, that's just history. Lightning looked like Zeus (or given his affinity with the sky, maybe the Dagda in a bad mood?) until we understood electricity. Bacteria looked like curses until we had microscopes. We didn't used to have a mechanism for gut feelings either, and now there's a whole field of research on the gut-brain axis. The "magic" doesn't disappear when we understand it - it just gets a diagram.

So when I sit with something like imbas forosnai, I've had to stop asking my engineer brain to either accept it on faith or throw it out. I've had to let it just... not know yet. Which, if you knew how much I like knowing things, you'd understand is genuinely hard for me.

(This is also, incidentally, exactly what's underneath that phone alarm I mentioned in the post - going back to actually listening to my body instead of demanding it explain itself first. My engineer brain wants a mechanism for that too. It doesn't always get one.)

I don't think the fight ever fully resolves, if I'm honest. I think I just get a bit better at letting both of them stay in the room instead of throwing one of them out.

Bríd libh

Órlagh

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