I. The Fish Pie
The kitchen table in their new English village held a casserole dish that might as well have been a mirror. Liam O’Connor stared at his mother’s fish pie. It was the same recipe his grandmother had served in Dublin.
The fish was surrounded by mash,
dollops of love, and island hospitality,
clearly showing what made their fish pie the best.
But here, at fourteen, displaced from the only streams he’d ever known, Liam felt the metaphor settle into his bones with an uncomfortable weight.
Like the fish, slippery and fun filled, we look for friendly spots full of food yet devoid of danger.
The move to Thornbury had been necessary—his father’s career, better opportunities, the vague adult promises of “a good future.” But Liam had left behind more than a city. He’d left behind the easy laughter of cousins, the peculiar cadence of Dublin streets, the unspoken knowing of being among his own.
Notice. That’s what would save him, though he didn’t know it yet. The first movement of sacred awareness, the simple act paying attention to what was present, not what he wished was there or feared might be there.
At school, the boys had already formed their territories. Simon Blackwood and his circle occupied the center of the social solar system. Super confident in their Englishness and generations-deep roots in this place, they wrapped their casual cruelty in posh accents. They noticed Liam’s difference immediately, the way predators sense vulnerability.
“Paddy,” Simon called him. “Potato boy.” The jokes came in daily installments, each one a small paper cut to the soul.
Liam didn’t yet have the language for what he was experiencing. Still, he could feel it: Simon left a trace behind him wherever he went—an atmosphere of anxiety and diminishment that lingered in the hallway after he passed. Even the air felt different after Simon spoke, as if cruelty had weight and texture. Liam learned to sense these invisible footprints, the spiritual residue people left in their wake.
Liam did what many immigrants do. He began to edit himself. The green Irish accent is packed neatly away. The stories of home, sealed in boxes. At night, alone in his new bedroom that smelled wrong and felt wrong, he would practice his new voice. Flattening the Dublin lilt, rounding his vowels into proper English shapes.
I once tried to wring the Irish out of me, he would later write in his journal. Transplanted to England like a green frog from the water, where everyone else was a newt and I was not.
His parents didn’t understand. “You’re doing well,” his mother would say brightly, seeing only his grades, not the soul-erasure happening behind his eyes. His father spoke of opportunity, of blending in, of the practical necessities of success. Neither noticed the boy at their kitchen table was slowly disappearing.
But Liam noticed something else, something he couldn’t quite name yet: when he walked through his own house now, he left almost no trace. He moved like a ghost, careful not to disturb anything, not to take up space, not to remind anyone of his foreignness. His presence—once so vibrant in Dublin, full of laughter and stories—had become nearly invisible. He was learning to leave no spiritual footprint at all, as if he could protect himself by becoming nothing, or something that would not offend.
II. The Pause
It was Miss Hennessy, the school librarian, who first interrupted Liam’s vanishing act. She was older, Irish herself though long settled in England, with eyes that had learned to see past the performance.
“You’re working hard at being someone else,” she said one afternoon, finding him alone in the library’s corner, hunched over homework as if he could make himself smaller through concentration alone.
Liam looked up, startled. The kindness in her voice was dangerous—it threatened to crack the careful shell he’d been constructing.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he lied.
“Of course you do.” She sat down without invitation. “I did the same thing myself, forty years ago. Thought if I just became English enough, the loneliness would stop.” She paused, letting the silence do its work. “Do you know what I learned?”
Liam shook his head.
“That you can’t outrun your own face. And more than that—you shouldn’t want to.”
Pause. The second movement of sacred noticing. Creating space between stimulus and response, between the world’s cruelty and your reaction to it. Miss Hennessy was offering Liam something more precious than comfort—she was offering him a choice.
“But they don’t want me here,” Liam said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Not really. I’m always going to be the Irish kid, the outsider.”
“That’s true,” Miss Hennessy agreed, and her honesty was somehow more consoling than false promises would have been. “You’re in the in-between place. Not fully Irish anymore, not English either. Do you know what we call that in Irish?”
“What?”
“Idir eatarthu.” She smiled. “Between and betwixt. It’s uncomfortable, Liam. But it’s also where the interesting people live. The ones who can see both worlds.”
She leaned forward, her voice taking on a different quality—teaching now, but gently. “Can I tell you what I’ve learned? Every person leaves a spiritual footprint, whether they know it or not. It’s the quality of presence you bring to a room, the atmosphere that lingers after you leave. Simon Blackwood leaves a footprint of fear and smallness. You can feel it, can’t you? That heaviness after he speaks?”
Liam nodded, hugely surprised she’d named what he’d been sensing.
“And you, my dear, are learning to leave no footprint at all. You’re becoming invisible, walking through life on tiptoe. But that’s a kind of violence too—violence against yourself. And it leaves its own trace. People can feel when someone isn’t really present, when they’re hiding.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a small book—a collection of Irish poetry. “The question isn’t whether you’ll leave a footprint. You will. The question is: what kind of footprint do you want to leave? One of hiding and shame? Or one of truthful presence?” “Read this. Notice what it makes you feel. Don’t fight the green in you. Let it show.”
That night, Liam read the poems and felt something long-frozen begin to thaw. He noticed—truly noticed—for the first time since the move, what he’d been doing to himself. The violence of self-erasure. The cost of trying to be someone else’s idea of acceptable.
He sat at his window, the book open in his lap, and let himself feel the full weight of both his grief and his hope. The green thread was still there, wound through everything he was.
Miss Hennessy’s words echoed: What kind of footprint do you want to leave?
He thought of Simon, leaving traces of fear wherever he went. He thought of himself, trying to leave no trace at all, tiptoeing through his own life. He thought of his grandmother in Dublin, whose presence filled a room with warmth before she even spoke, whose very existence seemed to say: You’re welcome here.
That was a spiritual footprint. That was what presence could be.
The question wasn’t whether to cut away his green thread. The question wasn’t even whether to show it.
The question was: Could he learn to be present—fully, truthfully present—and trust that his presence itself was a gift?
To be continued…
Reflection for the week: Notice the spiritual footprints in your own life. What traces do you leave in rooms, in conversations, in the hearts of those you encounter? What would it mean to become aware of your presence as a kind of offering?
Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham image and reflection