Riley Where the Old Songs Linger

Riley Where the Old Songs Linger

Some days the old songs just find you — not through speakers or sessions or anything you've chosen, but rising up from somewhere underneath, like they were already in your blood waiting for the right kind of quiet. I felt that today. A stillness came over me that I can only describe as *ancient*, the kind that doesn't frighten you but instead makes you feel held by something much larger and older than yourself. I wasn't thinking about research or timelines or footnotes. I was just — present. Listening. To whatever it is that Irish women have always carried quietly inside them, passed down in gestures and songs and the particular way we go still when something moves us.

My grandmother used to say the stories choose their keepers. She meant it literally, the way she meant most things — as if somewhere in the lineage, a thread had been handed to you and all you had to do was not drop it. I think about that when I'm deep inside my studies, tracing the old mythologies, sitting with figures like Brigid or the Morrígan, women whose power was never decorative but elemental. On days like today I feel less like a student of those stories and more like a continuation of them. Which is both humbling and quietly exhilarating.

What I love most about these moments is that they don't ask anything of me. No performance, no explanation. Just presence. Just the particular quality of being Riley, here, now — someone who dances and reads and aches over half-forgotten verses and feels the whole weight of this island in her chest like something beautiful she's been trusted to carry.