Narrated Essay: What the Circle Asks

In Bailick Park in Midleton, County Cork, nine immense stainless-steel feathers rise from the earth and curve toward the sky, forming an empty bowl. From a distance, they look almost weightless, like the remains of an immense bird. Up close, they are ribbed steel with riveted joints, casting a dark industrial sheen against their soft green surroundings. Their shape carries the invisible weight of famine, but also something more receptive and circular, like palms in open prayer.

The sculpture is called Kindred Spirits. It honors the Choctaw Nation’s gift to Ireland during the Great Famine of 1847. Only fifteen years after the Trail of Tears—when starvation, disease, and death plagued the Choctaw as they marched from their ancestral homelands in the southeastern United States—the tribal nation learned of the treatment of the Irish people under British colonial rule. They were themselves still impoverished, still living in the aftermath of trauma and devastation. Yet they gathered $170, roughly $5,000 today, and sent it across the Atlantic to feed families they would never meet.

Kindred carries the old root of kin and kind. I’m reminded of the distinction between being kind, which is an expression of our feeling of belonging, and being nice—which derives from the root word nescius, meaning “ignorant” or “not knowing.” To be nice is to be polite no matter how we feel. But to be kind is to extend our relational and ethical imagination beyond those familiar to us: to recognize ourselves in lives we cannot see, in people whose language, history, and stories are not our own, yet whose tender aliveness is no less real than our own.

In The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig coined the word sonder: “the profound realization that every random stranger you pass is living a life as vivid, complex, and real as your own.” I think of sonder as I move through airports and hotel lobbies, glimpsing faces illuminated by phones, people pulling suitcases through corridors. Everyone is carrying a world unseen: a diagnosis, a divorce, a child asleep at home, a hope they have yet to speak.

I arrived in Ireland a few days before I was set to teach at Ballymaloe House. It was late September, and I had given myself the unusual permission of having nowhere I needed to be. I stayed in small inns and drove along stone-walled lanes, past fields bright with rain, lakes shagged with green moss, farmhouses with whitewashed walls. I sat in framed windows, holding porcelain cups of tea