The Green Thread: A Story of Sacred Noticing

Part Two: Respond

Continuing the journey of awakening to the spiritual path around us

When we last left Liam, he had just received a book of Irish poetry from Miss Hennessy, the librarian who recognized his slow erasure of self. Reading those poems, he’d noticed—truly noticed—what he’d been doing: the violence of self-denial, the cost of trying to be someone else’s idea of acceptable. More importantly, he’d become aware of spiritual footprints—the traces we leave behind in every encounter. Simon left footprints of fear. Liam had been trying to leave no footprint at all. Now came the hardest question: Could he learn to leave a footprint of truthful presence? Could he respond to the world from wholeness rather than fear?

III. The Response

The change didn’t happen overnight. Sacred noticing isn’t magic—it’s practice, daily and unglamorous. But Liam began to experiment with a third way of being, neither the full Dublin boy he’d been nor the English ghost he’d been trying to become.

He started small. In Literature class, when they studied Yeats, he raised his hand and let his accent come through naturally as he read aloud. His voice lilted and sang the words in a way the English voices couldn’t quite capture. The room went quiet—but it was the quiet of attention, not mockery.

“Beautiful,” Mrs. Patterson said simply. “That’s how it’s meant to sound.”

Simon Blackwood rolled his eyes, but Liam noticed something new—a flicker of uncertainty in the gesture. As if Simon was recognizing, perhaps for the first time, that his cruelty was revealing his own poverty of experience.

But Liam noticed something else too: the quality of the room had changed. Where before there had been a certain tightness, a holding of breath whenever he spoke, now there was… space. Room. His authentic voice had left a different kind of footprint—one that made the air feel more open, more breathable. Even Mrs. Patterson seemed to stand a little taller, as if his willingness to be himself had given her permission for something too.

Respond. The third movement. Not react—respond. Choose, from a place of awareness, how to engage with what’s present.

When the next jibe came—”Going back to the bog this weekend, Paddy?”—Liam paused. Noticed the automatic shame rising in his chest. Paused again. And then spoke from a different place.

“Actually, my grandmother lives near the Wicklow Mountains. Do you know them? Some of the most beautiful country in the world. You should visit sometime—I could show you around.”

The invitation was genuine. Liam had discovered something Miss Hennessy had known all along: the antidote to exclusion wasn’t to shrink yourself small enough to fit their spaces. It was to maintain your own center and invite others in. To leave a footprint of welcome rather than withdrawal.

The change in the room was palpable. Several students looked up, surprised. Simon opened his mouth, then closed it, unsure how to respond to genuine invitation where he’d expected defensiveness. The trace he’d tried to leave—that familiar atmosphere of mockery and shame—dissolved before it could settle.

Some accepted Liam’s new presence. Most didn’t. But Liam found he cared less about the numbers and more about the quality of connection when it came. A boy named James, quiet and thoughtful, sat with him at lunch one day and asked about Dublin. A girl in his art class, also new though from London, recognized a fellow traveler and smiled.

And slowly, Liam’s mother’s fish pie tasted like itself again. Not apologetic. Not disguised. Just what it was—a gift from home, offered to a new world. When his parents had friends over now, Liam no longer disappeared into his room. He stayed. He told stories. He let his voice carry its natural music. And he noticed: the room felt different when he was truly in it. Warmer. More alive. His presence was becoming a kind of gift.

IV. The Green Thread

By the time Liam finished secondary school, he had learned to inhabit the in-between space with something approaching grace. He was the boy who could quote Seamus Heaney and play hurling, who understood both Irish history and English literature, who could navigate multiple worlds without losing himself in the translation.

The green in him—that essential Irish thread—hadn’t disappeared. It had woven itself into everything he became, enriching rather than limiting his identity.

At university, he studied anthropology, drawn to stories of migration and adaptation, of how people carry their cultures across borders and blend them into new forms. He wrote his dissertation on the Irish diaspora in England, interviewing dozens of immigrants who’d made the same journey his family had.

In every interview, he practiced sacred noticing. Listening not just to the words but to what lived beneath them—the grief and resilience, the losses and unexpected gains, the complex truth that couldn’t be reduced to simple narratives of rejection or acceptance.

But more than that, he learned to attend to the spiritual footprints in each encounter. He could feel when an interview subject relaxed, when the quality of their presence shifted from performance to truth. He learned that his own quality of attention—patient, curious, non-judgmental—created a kind of sacred space where people felt safe enough to share their real stories. His presence was becoming a container for others’ truth-telling.

One woman, in her eighties, told him: “I spent fifty years trying to be English enough. And then one day, I was at my grandson’s wedding, and they played an Irish song for me, and I wept. Not because I was sad—because I finally understood. I was always both. I was always enough.”

She paused, looking at Liam with eyes that had seen decades of hiding and emerging. “And you know what changed? Not the world around me. But the trace I left behind me. When I stopped apologizing for being Irish, when I let my whole self show up, I left a different feeling in rooms. People could breathe around me. Does that make sense?”

It made perfect sense. Liam thought of Miss Hennessy, long retired now but still occasionally sending him books and notes. He thought of his parents, who’d given him the gift of movement even if they couldn’t fully understand its cost. He thought of himself at fourteen, desperately trying to erase his own face.

And he understood: sacred noticing had saved him. The simple practice of paying attention—to what hurt, to what called, to what was actually present rather than what he feared or wished for. The pause that created space for choice. The response that came from wholeness rather than fear. And through it all, the growing awareness of his spiritual footprint—the quality of presence he brought to every encounter, the invisible trace he left behind that could either diminish others or create space for them to breathe.

For it is often in these moments that God is moving inside us, sometimes without our awareness. And in those moments, we leave behind not just memories, but traces of grace—spiritual footprints that others might follow toward their own wholeness.

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In memory of all who have journeyed between worlds, carrying their colors faithfully, leaving footprints of presence for those who follow.

A reflection in the spirit of awakening to the spiritual path around us

Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham image and reflection

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?

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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