Caledonian Absolution Part One

        Late fall in Scotland can be a beautifully depressing place. Undulating hillsides
dotted with sheep and the occasional lowing cow, trees aflame with the gold and red hues of autumn, cobalt skies reflected in the long, narrow lochs of the North Country. The Highlands. And then heavy clouds roll in off the coast and all becomes grey, dark, black. Boots become buckets.

        It is creation all over again; something formless hovering over the void that once was the land of the Scots. All is a deluge. You remember Noah and his ark. You consider cubits. You ponder names for all the beasts that are soon to come, two by two, parading to you. In this mist you sit, contemplate myths. This landscape, these often treeless hillsides covered in blowing heather, lends itself to a story waiting to be told.

        After a long lesson on the supremacy of Scottish cask ales delivered by a couple of friendly locals in a pub older than the country I come from I suddenly find myself chatting it up with a South African five years my junior on the last bus leaving Inverness. Loch Ness bound the road winds through twinkling villages perched at the edge of darkened lochs. Rain whips the road in front us, wind spurring us on from behind. 

        Jonathan, a blond haired, blue-eyed Dutch descendent from Cape Town, South Africa, is all smiles and inebriated tales of travels far and wide. When he finds out I’m an American he shoots me a sidelong glance and makes a quip about President Bush. It’s 2007 and much of the world is not a fan of the Man, to say the least. I laugh right along with him, letting him know that while I may be from America I am a free man. I pledge allegiance to no one. I make no mention of the apartheid. Every country has its closets, skeletons spilling out from open doors.

       Our bus pulls up to a bench, one lone streetlight blinking dimly in the night. Through the window I can see rain blowing sideways in the light of the glow. I ask Jonathan how far the hostel is from here. He stares at me with a silly grin. He has no idea. We stand in the rain as the bus rumbles away, taillights eventually disappearing behind the curtain of night. Welcome to Loch Ness.

       The tourist map I have, the one with advertisements for boat and balloon tours, pub-crawls and weekend cabin rentals running lengthwise across the top and bottom, says we are still over half a mile away from our destination. I think back on the cute girl in the shoe shop in Seattle that sold me these brown leather boots and how she promised me they were waterproof. Time to put the word of a saleswoman to the test.

       We trudge silently through the water, me in the lead as if I somehow knew better then he where we were going and the best way to get there. Ten minutes later a small wooden sign up ahead reads “Loch Ness Travelers Hostel” with an arrow pointing toward a street across the road. The road is gravel when dry, a river during the fall and winter months.

       We pass cottage after cottage, each hearth burning bright with flame in an attempt to ward off the damp chill of this late October storm. Jonathan is soaked and looking miserable. I can’t help but laugh. Two road weary travelers washed up onto the shores of Loch Ness. Only Nessie, that mythical leviathan of the deep, is wetter than we right now. Towards the end of the river road we see the sign for the hostel. It has always intrigued me how the words hostel and hostile have nothing in common except pronunciation (and even that depends on who is pronouncing it). One an invitation, the other a provocation. A small courtyard populated by a fire pit and two wooden picnic tables are a welcome sign that warmth and a dry bed are soon to follow.

       A girl with a cheery Australian accent greets us as we pile inside, leaving the downpour to the loch, the trees, and the mysterious lady of the sea. We step into warmth and homeliness. A long dinner table is the centerpiece of the dining room; a full size kitchen with big picture windows sits just to the left of us and in the living room a charcoal fire burns quietly in the fireplace.

      We have found the exact solace I was pining for as we passed those inviting cottages along the way. Travel tends to lend itself to a litany of paradox. You travel to lose yourself yet your “Self” is what you so often run smack into. You roam to journey away from the familiar, from the drudgery of a routine yet you end up longing for something familiar, something that is a little piece of home away from home.

       The Aussie girl tells us it has been raining like this for days but it is supposed to clear up tomorrow. Too bad providence doesn’t watch weather reports. She shows us to the group dorm we will be staying in for the next few days. We flip a quarter to see who takes a shower first. South Africa wins.
I take off my shoes and drape drenched socks over the screen in front of the fireplace. Squatting, I watch flames undulate and dance in an erratic almost erotic way. Fire. The primal element.

Late Summer Fields

Fall was still to come,

yet everything was already falling.

A young nation of ideologues,

spellbound.

A thousand stories

silenced,

giving rise to

a thousand more.

Smoke signals from

a troubled land,

an island of immigrants

seeking shelter

amidst the powdered glass

and disfigured steel.

Divorced from the motherland

we were orphaned

yet again.

We gathered in late summer fields

and wept,

“Ashes! Ashes!

We all fall down.

Hush! Hush! Hush!

We've all tumbled down.”

A Different Kind Of Story

It’s been so long I’ve almost forgotten my voice. That place of depth, clarity and wisdom from within has felt all but dead these last few years. The wisdom’s so often been turned to anger, too often become a thing consuming me in the worst kind of way.

My soul is still out to sea. I can hardly remember what land even looks like anymore.

Mom would say its Jesus I’m in need of, a chorus of friends nodding their heads in agreement. But some narratives grow so thin, are stretched and worn out to the point of falling apart that no one dare play the reel for fear of it disintegrating before their very eyes.

Let’s pretend that the Christ narrative was a vehicle I rode around in for many, many years. That vehicle, like all vehicles, eventually broke down. So here I am, trying to assess exactly what is salvageable and what needs to be left behind.

For the first time in years I am finally ready (I think) to begin picking over all these rusty parts. I’ve got a few parts from other vehicles I’ve used here and there. Perhaps I can put together something that will take me down the road a piece. Something that can transport me through this life and maybe even into the next.

See here’s the thing about stories, the thing about narratives. Once you understand the basics of how these kinds of things are structured and the power they have to carry you along to the point that you actually believe they are real you begin to realize the thing for what it is.

You wake up to the fact that not only is everything stories, but that also everything you do in your life is dictated by the stories you tell yourself about your life.

With that being the case I suppose it’s up to me to choose which story I want to use to fuel my life.

So most of my basic needs are met. I have food on the table, roof overhead, my health and a relatively happy family nearby. For the better part of a few million years these are the things that we as a species strove for. And now, at the beginning of this new millennium, many of us in the West have most of what we need for survival (and most of us have much more).

The thing that I find lacking, the thing that eludes me to the point of utter desperation, the thing that I personally attribute so much of my personal and our cultural depression, sickness, sadness, anger, fear and outright emptiness to is not necessarily a narrative of faith but a narrative of community.

Humans are not meant to be out of community. We’ve spent 99.9% of our existence as a people in community. The advent of mass agricultural technology allows us to disconnect from a place and roam about listlessly, freely picking up roots and creating a narrative that attempts to transcend our basic humanness.

At the core we are communal animals. The last 100 years have become an unintended worldwide experiment in what happens to humans when they are no longer bound to a community for their existence. We have risen above the family, above the tribe, above the village, and above the town.

This mass transcendence is so strange, so unnatural, that none of us are equipped to deal with the ramifications of this disconnect.

It’s as if an entire ecosystem decided to uproot its various parts and go off in separate directions. As if each tree, root, plant, and animal took on an ego unto itself and asserted that they no longer needed one another to live.

I write all this to say that I often struggle through everyday longing for true connection. For the grace, love, acceptance and deep sense of belonging that can only be found in communion with others.

Is this just a kind of romantic nostalgia for a time that never was? If it is, then why do I see nearly everyone in my generation seeking after the same thing? We are grasping at community in whatever way we can find it, desperately trying to reconnect that severed part of ourselves with the larger whole.

Community is what we all need yet most of us have no idea what it looks like or how to create it.

Where do we, where do I, go from here?

Arising

The stillness holds a kind of unexpected ferocity, the quiet mind is never completely silent. Thoughts simmer on low, a distillation process extracting ideas and stories from the subconscious stream burbling up from the aquifer of the soul.

The alchemy of the mind is an ever-unfolding mystery.

One foot falls in front of the other and we call this walking. One thought rises like a cloud from the great sea of the mind and we call this thinking.

Clouds gather, perhaps rain upon us for a bit then dissipate back into the sea. You can learn to wave at the waves as they rise and crash around you.