Fuil-aithne: The Knowledge of Blood
Madainn mhath a Ghàidhealtachd! and Good Morning World! I’m in the middle of something as I walk through the town where I spent my first fourteen years. It feels like a Cartesian waulking rhythm — that old Gaelic work-song beat — as my mind swings back and forth between the boy I was and the man I have become. The rhythm is steady, hypnotic, carrying me along in this nostalgic confusion. I suppose I am a dualist of sorts, trying to piece together the mystery of who I am, where I come from, and how these fragments join into one life.
I meet a troupe of Italian actors, their coach kindly arranging access for me to step back into my old school. I walk through the classrooms where I first learned my letters and numbers, where the foundations of thought were laid. It is strange and stirring: a stage set from childhood, inhabited once more by the man I am now.
As if this weren’t enough, I later find myself at ancient Govan Church to view the mysterious stones where I meet two young women who feel like kin. One is a native of Lewis, the other a European studying Gaelic at master’s level. Why such a sudden recognition, such a bond for this man nurtured in the industrial heartland of Mother Glasgow?
Perhaps the thread began long ago when I was twenty. I started listening to Gaelic music, Na h’Oganaich and Runrig, without knowing why. The language, raw, lilting, gentle and ancient, bypassed my head and went straight to my chest. The laments, the waulking songs: they reached me like memories, not discoveries. Almost without intent, I began to learn some Gaelic. It was less a decision than a calling, as though the path had been laid down generations before I stepped upon it.
That longing was sharpened by the fact of my adoption. As a baby I had been cut off from the obvious markers of belonging: the family likenesses, the stories that root a person in place. My “genetic pathway,” was a blank page. Yet even in the silence of that absence, something stirred. Words, rhythms, and music pointed me to the Gaelic world as if it were already mine. What the Germans call Fernweh, the feeling of belonging to a place never visited.
Years later, a DNA test finally revealed the truth. My father’s line traced back to Islay, the Hebridean island off Scotland’s west coast. Suddenly the music made sense. The language made sense. The inexplicable pull of youth was a kind of homecoming.
The Gaels have a word for this: fuil-aithne or blood-knowledge. It is the recognition of kin, of belonging, even when logic cannot explain it. It is the body remembering what the mind has forgotten. Blood carrying knowledge, like a river carrying silt from distant mountains.
This expression explains the strange spark when you meet someone and feel you already know them. It explains how Gaelic music lived in me before I could parse its grammar; how Islay stirred in my heart long before a My Heritage traced it in my veins. It is belonging older than names or trees, belonging in the marrow.
But I think this Gaelic untranslatable is not confined to ancestry. It can also be spiritual kinship, the recognition of a truth or a voice as something already known. In my own faith I hear Jesus’ words: “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” Recognition that transcends reason.
Perhaps my life is simply a practice of listening — to music, to language, to the voice of blood calling across generations. Adoption did not erase inheritance; it only deepened its mystery. Further submerged in intrigue knowing I have spent some weeks on Islay long before I knew all this.
Fuil-aithne reminds me we carry more than we know. Blood remembers. Spirit remembers. And sometimes, through a song, a word, or the face of a stranger, we glimpse that deep memory, a homecoming both ancient and new.
Note: Waulking (from the Gaelic luadh) was the traditional process of finishing newly woven cloth by hand in the Scottish Highlands. Women sat around a long length of damp tweed, rhythmically beating and passing it while singing òrain luaidh (waulking songs). These call-and-response songs—rich with themes of love, loss, and history—helped keep time, lightened the hard labour, and preserved a unique part of Gaelic oral tradition.
Image: generated with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot
