The essay that follows—perhaps a touch long for an online piece—is, in truth, a chapter from The Arrow Knows No Master, a book I’ve been quietly shaping since February of last year. It’s composed of individual essays—mostly reflective, occasionally philosophical—on archery as more than practice: on the strange, intimate calling of being an archer. One with the bow. These pages trace the arc of that peculiar unity, a kind of ecology all our own, where breath, silence, and motion gather into meaning.
If you choose to read on, take your time. Find a quiet corner. Let your thoughts breathe.
The finished book is planned for release at the TIFAM All Ireland Archery Festival.
Somewhere between the tale whispered by generations and the taut, quivering strand of tendon stretched to its limit, the bow kept speaking. Not with the articulated sounds of human language, no, nothing so simple or direct. Its discourse was one of palpable presence, a resonant silence that felt carved from the deep earth itself, older than the first markings on Ogham stone or the looping script of monks in cold scriptoria. It vibrated against the palm, a low thrumming that seemed to bypass the drum of the ear entirely and settle instead into the very architecture of the bones, a visceral reminder of ancient forces gathered, held, and yet to be released.
And I suppose that’s where the true heart of this lives—not on the well-lit, easy path of clean choice and immediate consequence, but in the liminal, crepuscular edge where inherited myth bleeds into the raw, unvarnished substance of muscle memory. It is the uncertain ground where the child’s fevered, unqualified longing to inhabit the grand, clean lines of the old stories dissolves, inevitably and irrevocably, into the man’s slow, often painful acceptance that stories, too, carry their own considerable freight, their own unforeseen and frequently brutal reckonings. You draw the bow, yes, the crafted wood bending into a curve of held potential, the taut string biting into the pad of your finger, a deliberate discomfort. The resistance you feel is not merely the opposition of air or the stubborn will of the material; it is the world pushing back, demanding respect for the energy you gather. But the draw is not just a physical act; it is a profound internal realignment. It changes the very architecture of your breath, stills the scatter of thought, shifts the subtle balance of your weight, gathering the riot in the mind and body to a single, sharp point of focus, as singular and piercing as the arrow’s tip. And the recoil—ah, the recoil is not the immediate, physical jolt of the weapon springing back against the shoulder. That is merely the superficial echo, the wave breaking on the shore. The true recoil is not contained within the weapon at all. It resides in the charged, suspended moment after the arrow has flown. The held breath, the heart stilled to a low, watchful drum, as you wait—you must learn to wait, with a patience the modern world has forgotten—to see what the world, vast, indifferent, and immense, chooses to do with the thing you have deliberately set loose upon it.
That, I have come to understand, is where morality finds its anchor. Not in the brittle, easily shattered cage of rules, handed down from on high and so often disregarded on the quiet. But in weight. The immeasurable, yet utterly palpable, specific gravity of the consequence that ripples outward from your action, and the equal, necessary weight of holding oneself steady and present enough to feel its inevitable return.
We forget, in the headlong, facile haste of modern living, how much of our actual life, the crucial, shaping part of it, is lived not in the bright, blinding flash of decision or the brief, elegant arc of the action, but in the long, slow, often unseen return. In the consequences that do not announce themselves with fanfare or thunderclaps, but slip quietly, almost insidiously, into our days, settling like persistent, damp moss on cold stone, long after the choice itself has faded from immediate memory, withered and gone dry as forgotten leaves. You speak a harsh word in anger, a shard of jagged sound flung carelessly into the air, and the silence that follows, the hollow space where laughter or warmth or easy camaraderie used to reside, wraps itself around your throat like a tightening noose, a physical manifestation of absence. You take a shortcut across the uneven fields of integrity, tell a small lie woven fine and near-invisible as spidersilk, and months later, the truth does not erupt with a dramatic flourish to accuse you in public squares. No, it turns up unexpectedly in a quiet room, sitting beside you like an unwelcome, persistent guest, its silent presence a chilling, undeniable reminder that it kept walking beside you all that time, a steadfast, unforgiving companion, simply waiting for you, with infinite patience, to catch up. The bow, in that way, is terrifyingly honest. It permits no self-deception. You pull the string taut, gathering energy and intent into a singular, focused point. You release that gathered force. And it answers, immediately and unequivocally, with the clean, irrefutable trajectory of the arrow, and the subsequent, unavoidable return of its impact, wherever that may be felt in the complex web of existence.
There is a memory, sharp and cold as an autumn wind whistling through the eyeless windows of a ruined cottage on a high bog road, of a day not long after my mother’s funeral. The world had ceased to hold its colour then; it had drained away into shades of perpetual grey and the relentless, damp, clinging brown of turned earth. Grief was not an emotion in that time, not a feeling I could name or process. It was a physical weight, lodged in my chest like a stone I could neither swallow nor expel. Nothing made sense; the familiar world had shifted its contours, becoming something alien, jagged, and wrong. I found myself at the archery range – a place I had frequented more out of a fading habit than any deep passion in the barren months prior – my hands shaking with an internal tremor I couldn’t quell. I drew the bow not with intent or skill or any conscious purpose, but simply because I needed something solid to hold onto, something that demanded a physical response, a deliberate focus that might momentarily eclipse the crushing, formless landscape of my interior world. I needed to feel that pull in my arms, the resistance of the wood and string, anything, anything at all, that reminded me I still occupied a body that was, however feebly, still capable of existing, still capable of action.
The arrow, loosed from that place of raw, unchannelled need and utter lack of focus, flew wide and useless, burying itself harmlessly in the protective netting with a dull, final thud that seemed to echo the sound in my own chest. I dropped the bow then, the familiar, crafted wood suddenly feeling heavy and alien in my hands, cursing the weakness that had flooded me, the utter inability to even perform this simple, mechanical act with any semblance of competence. An old woman nearby, another quiet, consistent presence at the range, her face etched with the kind of quiet endurance you see in stone that has weathered centuries of wind and rain, came over and stood beside me. She didn’t offer platitudes or reach out with empty, well-meaning comfort. She simply bent, with a deliberation born of long practice, picked up the errant arrow from the netting, and ran a hand, gnarled and strong as ancient roots, along the smooth shaft, feeling its balance, its slight flex. She looked not at me, but at the arrow held in her hands, held with a reverence that bordered on ceremony, and said, her voice a low, resonant murmur like a perfectly pulled string humming in the quiet air, “Some days, son, the flight doesn’t matter. Not a whit. The hitting of the mark. Only that you dared to draw.”
That line, spoken into the quiet space left by my own cursing and despair, settled into me deeper than any arrow ever could. It became a kind of unexpected anchor in the swirling, directionless tide of grief that threatened to pull me under. Because in grief, I began to understand, and in guilt, and in all those heavy, shadowed hours we are forced to walk through without knowing if we can make it to the end, sometimes all we can muster is the sheer, unvarnished courage to dare. To dare to get out of bed. To dare to face the day, to put one foot in front of the other. To dare to simply be, when every fibre of your being screams for cessation, for stillness, for oblivion. The ethics of recoil, I began to understand in the long, slow process of coming back to myself, includes this too—not only the dignity inherent in facing the consequence of one’s actions, in standing steady for the return of the thing loosed, but the quiet, often unseen, courage of the mere attempt. The willingness to draw the string, to gather oneself for action, even when you know, with a certainty that chills you to the bone, that the arrow will fly wild, that the attempt may fail.
In older times, in the tales whispered by turf fires on long, dark nights and recorded in manuscripts illuminated with the deep, resonant colours of berries and the grey ash of burnt wood – stories that carry the scent of peat smoke and damp earth within their very words – archers were not always the shining heroes, the archetypes of virtue and victory we often imagine. Sometimes they were figures etched in shadow, existing on the fringes of settled society, their skills viewed with suspicion or awe. Outcasts, perhaps, driven from the communal hearth. Blind seers, their physical sight taken, their inner vision perhaps more acute than any ordinary eye, their shots guided by a different kind of knowing, a connection to the unseen currents of the world. Widowers, their lives cleaved in two by sudden, irreversible loss, who turned to the bow when the world, in its clumsy sorrow or averted gaze, had turned irrevocably from them. But they all understood, implicitly, intuitively, the sacred, unbreakable bond between pull and release. Between the gathering of effort, the focusing of will, and the inevitable, sometimes brutal, arrival of consequence. The recoil of their lives, marked by sorrow or exile or a strange, internal vision, was not meted out as a simple punishment for some transgression. It was revelation. It was the stark, unavoidable truth of their place in the complex, demanding web of the world, flung back at them after they had dared to loose themselves, their skills, their very beings, upon it.
I think, too, of a man I met once, briefly, years ago, at a library event tucked away in a quiet, sun-dappled corner of the city. He was a Syrian refugee, his eyes holding the depth and distance of a landscape irrevocably altered by forces beyond comprehension. He had been an archer back home, in Damascus, before the war had come, before it had turned every ancient street, every bustling souk filled with the scent of spice and coffee, every quiet courtyard cooled by the sound of trickling water, into a place of brutal, unavoidable reckoning. He spoke not of the immediate destruction itself, the bombs that tore apart stone and flesh, or the gnawing hunger that hollowed the body to a shell. He spoke instead of what broke him, the subtle, insidious decay of the spirit that came in the unending, echoing silence of exile. “A man without a target,” he said, his voice a low murmur that seemed to carry the very dust of collapsed buildings within its resonance, “forgets how to hold the string.” He wasn’t speaking of archery anymore, not the mechanics of it. He meant purpose, that taut line stretching between desire and action, between the self and the world. He meant history, the long arrow of the past loosed into the present, and the profound, disorienting recoil of being severed from its trajectory, from the place where one’s own history was rooted. He meant dignity, the quiet strength held in the stance, the knowing, weighted presence of the bow in the hand. The absence of these things, he implied with a quiet sorrow that was more powerful than any shout, was its own kind of relentless violence, its own pervasive, soul-crushing recoil.
There is recoil in silence too. A deep, echoing absence where sound, where connection, where acknowledgement should be. In being unheard, your words lost in the careless din of the world or met with deliberate, calculated deafness. In pulling back again and again, gathering your strength, your truth, your vulnerability, your love, and finding nowhere, absolutely nowhere in the world, to release it. That unspent energy does not simply dissipate into the air like mist on a warm morning. It recoils inward, a silent, internal explosion that fractures the landscape of the spirit, leaving behind a terrain of jagged edges and hidden crevasses.
And maybe that’s what we forget most of all, caught as we are in the noisy theatre of action and its immediate, dramatic aftermath: that recoil doesn’t solely follow the things we do. Sometimes, perhaps often, it follows absence. What we don’t do echoes louder, resonates longer, carves deeper hollows, than what we do. The friend we never called, letting the fragile thread of connection snap in the busy rush of days, because we were too tired, too preoccupied, too afraid. The truth we let slip by, unspoken, because the moment was awkward, or the potential cost too high, or the courage simply wasn’t there to draw it forth. The kindness we withheld, hoarding it back into ourselves because it was inconvenient, or demanded a vulnerability we were unwilling to offer, a letting-go of our own carefully constructed defences. Those things do not vanish into the ether like smoke from a chimney. They come back to us, sometimes years later, arriving unbidden in strange, unsettling dreams that leave a residue of unease, or settling upon us during quiet evenings when the air suddenly feels thick and heavy with the palpable weight of the unchosen path, the unloosed word. And they sting, not with the clean, sharp pain of a snapped bowstring on the wrist, but with a dull, persistent ache, a reminder of a debt unpaid, an energy turned inward, a potential left fallow.
So what, then, is the ethical stance of an archer? Not just the literal posture, the feet placed just so, the shoulder back, the eye focused with fierce concentration. But the soul of it, the internal alignment, the relationship with tension and release that precedes the physical act? What does the silent, profound dialogue between the hand and the grain of the wood, the eye and the distant mark, the controlled breath and the steady pull of the string, teach us about navigating the tangled, uncertain wilderness of being alive?
I’d say it’s this, distilled to its rawest, most unadorned essence, stripped bare of sentimentality: to aim well, yes, to gather intention and focus with all the power at your command, even knowing, deep in your gut, in the intuitive wisdom of your body, that the arrow may fall short, or veer unpredictably off course, or simply miss the intended mark entirely. To shoot not in anger, which is a corrosive force that pollutes the aim and corrupts the inevitable consequence, but in acknowledgment—an acknowledgment of the forces at play in the world and within yourself, of your own limited, contingent place within them, of the inherent, unavoidable uncertainty woven into the very fabric of existence. To accept the recoil not as a punishment for a failure, not as a price exacted for falling short, but as a companion, an inevitable, necessary part of the journey, a force that returns to inform and shape you, whether you welcome its arrival or not. To live, to act, to be in the world, so that when the arrow finally lands—wherever it lands, be it in the heart of the target or lost irrevocably in the deep, unforgiving tangle of the briars—you can look at the wake it leaves, the subtle or profound disruption it introduces into the intricate web of the world, and say, with a quiet dignity born of earnest effort and a willingness to face the outcome, I tried to send something true. Something that carried the weight of honest intent, even if its trajectory was flawed, even if its arrival was not as intended.
The bow itself doesn’t ask for perfection, for a flawless arc and a bullseye every single time. The wood, marked by knots and grain, bent by time and use, bearing the scars of its own history, knows that perfection is a sterile, unattainable myth. It asks for presence. For the hand that holds it to be fully present, connected to the act, aware of the tension gathered and the potential of the release. For the mind to be stilled, focused not just on the target, but on the now of the draw.
And the world, loud and blinking and rushing carelessly past as it may often seem, still hungers, in its deepest, quietest, most ancient places, for people who understand presence. Who can stand steady in the face of uncertainty, in the pause that follows the action, and wait for the return. Who treat tension not as a threat to be avoided at all costs, but as a necessary force, a teacher revealing the strength or weakness of the structure, be it wood, or bone, or conviction. Who carry the memory of past draws, past releases, past recoils, not as burdens that weigh them down, but as wisdom embedded in their posture, a quiet authority that resides in the deliberate pause before action. Who know, in their bones, in the core of their being, that every arrow loosed is also, in a profound sense, a letter sent into the vast, mysterious unknown, a question posed to the cosmos—and every recoil, every return of consequence, is the universe’s indelible reply, the necessary return address scribbled on the envelope, guiding the meaning, the impact, the truth, back home.
I don’t shoot much these days. Not on the range, not with the same regularity as before. There is the constant drawing and releasing of words in the quiet, focused hours spent with the magazine I help to edit, attempting to gather disparate voices into a coherent whole, sending them out into the world to find their mark, and waiting for the unpredictable recoil of their reception. And there is the ongoing, demanding work of running TIFAM, the non-profit, which is its own kind of archery—identifying the targets of need, drawing together resources and human effort with deliberate tension, releasing initiatives and hoping they fly true, and constantly navigating the complex, often unforeseen recoils of bureaucracy, of human frailty, of the sheer, stubborn inertia of the world. These demands on my focus, on my energy, on my particular way of holding the string, have simply claimed the hours that once belonged to the physical discipline of the bow. But when I walk through the woods near my house, especially when the mist lies low in the hollows and the air is thick with the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves, a scent that speaks of dissolution and renewal, I still carry that deep, internal sense of the draw within me. I notice where the wind begins its conversation first, how it bends the tops of the great trees before reaching the ground, a subtle but profound influence. I watch the crows, those sleek, black, ancient messengers, their sharp calls slicing through the quiet, observing the landscape with an old, knowing eye. I listen, not just for the sounds themselves, but for the weight behind every rustle in the undergrowth, every snap of a twig underfoot, every distant call, waiting for the subtle, continuous recoils of the forest, the land itself, to reveal themselves in the quiet air.
And when my son, perched on the uncertain precipice of adulthood, wrestling with the world’s confusing angles, its blatant hypocrisies, asks me questions about right and wrong, about the baffling failures of the systems around him, about his own sharp, clean, justifiable anger at how unfair it all seems—questions that have no easy answers, no straight, true trajectory to a simple solution—I don’t offer him pat answers or empty reassurances. I walk to the corner where it leans, a quiet sentinel against the wall, a presence that has absorbed countless hours of tension and release, and hand him my old bow. Let him feel the weight of the wood, worn smooth by countless draws, bearing the history of tension and release in its grain. Let him run his hand along the wood, feel the subtle imperfections that speak of its origin in a living tree, shaped by time and the craftsman’s hand. Let him position his feet, lift the bow, and pull the string taut, feeling the deliberate, demanding building of energy, hearing the low, resonant hum that vibrates through the limbs, a sound that echoes in the chest.
“There,” I say, my voice low, resonating with the bow’s own deep silence. “There is your question, held in the tension between what is and what could be. Now, loose it. And go find what answers it calls back.”
That’s what the bow remembers, deep in its wooden heart, in the very structure of its being. That life is not about certainty, about knowing the outcome before the arrow ever leaves the string. It is about inquiry made in earnest, a question shaped by intent and loosed into the vast, indifferent, mysterious unknown. And it is, perhaps most profoundly, about the quiet courage required to stand still, utterly still, after the release, exposed and vulnerable, and wait while the answer comes flying back, sharp and fast and maybe, just maybe, not at all what you hoped for, carrying with it the full weight of its consequence.
The bow remembers the draw, the release, and the inevitable, shaping recoil.
And if we live well—carefully, mindfully, with a courageous embrace of uncertainty and a willingness to feel the weight of the return, without apology for our earnest efforts or illusion about the outcome—maybe we will too.
