Less Ordinary » Scotland

21:5:800 – Day 18: Returning

Amy Palko — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:33:00 +0000

Yoga

On a recommendation from the delightful @suburbanyogini I bought Darren Main’s Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic. I cannot tell you how much I am enjoying it, and I’m finding that it is really helping my yoga practice. It’s not a book for poses, technique etc. As Darren says it’s more about how to take yoga off the mat and into the world.

I found the following quote from that book particularly reassuring:

Yoga, like all mystical traditions, is a practice, not perfection. It is the process of returning to your yoga practice over and over again that gives you the benefits. Doing the perfect yoga pose or clearing your mind of all thought is well and good, but in the end it is the practice of returning to yoga that allows you to live life to the fullest.

I just love that. I returned to my yoga practice this morning not seeking perfection – just returning. Returning.

Writing

Today I seem to have turned my words towards reminiscence. I don’t really know why. But then, as I’ve discovered, I so very rarely know why I choose to write about anything. I realize now that I have returned in my writing practice, just as I have returned to my yoga practice.

Grandad wanted just to drive us back home again. He had driven me and my tiny daughter the 6 and a bit hours to get to our new home on the north western tip of Scotland, and now that we had arrived, the disappointment was palpable. Our home sat on the edge of the kyle: a long inlet where the Atlantic flows past, shaping and reshaping the sand bars. It was an old shepherd’s cottage built sometime in the early nineteenth century; its walls were a dirty whitewash, its outbuildings crumbling with rust red corrugated iron roofs, its coal shed door was lying off its hinges. Quite frankly, it was a tad uninspiring.

I pushed the key into the lock and turned. The door swung open to reveal concrete floors, dirt-encrusted walls… it was dark, dirty, and I was thinking that I had made a big mistake. This was our new, fresh start. Our wee girl was only just turned 1 and I was 7 months pregnant with our son and I was standing in this house in the middle of nowhere, which was an utter shambles, and, as I was about to discover, had no electricity or running water. I felt my daughters small chubby arms wrap around my legs, and I bent down to pick her up. Balancing her on my hip, I turned to look at my grandparents who both had a look of horror and dismay.

“It’ll be fine.” I try to reassure them, although even I cannot deny the waver that has entered my voice. “All it really needs is a lick of paint. And some carpet. And a bit of a spring clean.” I realize that I’m not convincing either them or myself. My baby starts to cry, and I can feel the tears spring to my own eyes. Grandma and Grandad don’t seem far off crying either. They reluctantly turn to leave, Grandad placing a £20 note in my hand as we hug. “For paint”, he tells me. I walk them to the door, and my baby and I, we wave good-bye and blow kisses as they drive back down the single track road.

We stand there watching until the car turns the corner and can no longer be seen. Then it is just the two of us, standing outside a house that is barely inhabitable, surrounded by miles and miles of empty wilderness. As far as my gaze allows, I can see no evidence of humanity other than the single track road which runs empty in each direction. I am 20 years old and I am the most isolated I’ve ever been, both then and since. We leave that house a year later, and the whole area a year after that.

Fast forward one decade…

The sky stretching out over kyle and cape is a clear blue. Not a cloud can be seen, and the water is smooth, glassy, turquoise. I am standing in front of the house that used to be my home and my children are running in the field that slopes down to the shore. I slip my hand into my husband’s and look up at him, wondering whether to ask the question that has settled upon the moment. “Did we make the right decision moving away? Did we choose correctly? Look at how free the children are. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should move back. Maybe.”

I am seduced by its wild beauty. The months of wind and rain, the drafts that whistled through the house, the isolation, the dark nights so black that I could not see my hand in front of my face… they all evaporate like dew under the heat of a northern sun. All I can think of is the freedom, the air, the water, the land… the solitude. The lack of neighbours that left me so utterly desolate ten years ago suddenly seems like bliss. I feel the strongest need to retreat, to run away and live on the edge of the wilderness. Far away from the madding crowd.

But it’s not to be. It’s not right for us, and we know it. As we drive away along that single-track road, in the wing mirror I catch site of the peeling white wash, the rusting red roofs of the outbuildings, the gate where I stood and waved goodbye to my grandparents, and there… there I find release. I am set free, and the memories that I have of this corner of the world are gently wrapped in the fabric of my heart and placed gently, reverently in the past.

As we drive back down south, the narrow road winding its way past wild cotton and marsh reed, a bird of prey soars overhead. Circling on thermals, its wings spread wide and its eyes far-seeing. We drive on, facing the future.

What do you find yourself returning to? Are you returning by choice or by habit?

21:5:800 – Day 11: Finding Love in Thin Places

Amy Palko — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 22:56:41 +0000

Yoga

Flow. I started this yoga practice looking for flow, and while I’ve had moments where I could sense flow in my movements, in my breath, but on the whole flow has eluded me. Today I found what I was looking for. And I’m not surprised in the slightest that it arrived on the day when I chose to practice with the intention of gratitude.

Writing

Whereas the yoga flowed, the writing did not. Every word felt like a wrench, as though I had to tug it from my heart to get it to speak, to sing. I think it was worth it though. What do you think?

The last of the day’s sunshine is glancing off the flaking white paint of the old lighthouse that stands just outside my window. At the very edge of the land, it is falling into silent decay. The glass from the windows is broken or missing. The doors are boarded up. The lamp is missing. Around all four sides, it is surrounded by high fencing designed to keep out the curious. All day long the gulls and terns swoop over its flat roof and turret, and the ships pass by its extinguished beacon.

And yet, it is still completely beautiful to me. I don’t care that the light no longer pours through thick glass, an intensified beam that cuts through the miles and the darkness. For me, its very presence is a source of light in the world. As I look out at it now, I can see the sunset reflected on the interior walls, turning the drab and dusty turret bright orange. I close my eyes and imagine what it must be like inside that turret, the pure amber light flooding my senses. Tiny dust motes dance on faint zephyrs, and the distant call of seabirds floats in across the waves that gently lap at the breakwater.

There are some places where the division between the earthly and the divine seems less definite. The Celts called these “thin places”: places where you sense the sacred, places where, if you were to reach out your hand, reach it right out in front of you, then you just might feel the touch of an angel’s wing. When you find yourself in one of these places, you enter a state of sublime consciousness, where the very edges of your ego begin to dissipate and you dissolve into the in between.

In these thin places you can bathe in gratitude, you can let your wishes dance from your heart out into the ineffable, you can just be you and know that this is enough. There lies an invitation to just let go, to release your fears, your pettiness, your smallness, your worries, your sadness, your regrets out into the sunlight where they can evaporate like dew in the heat of an early summer sun. Take this invite; take it and feel grace enter into the thin space between now and always. Take it and feel yourself melt into the moment.

I remember another thin place I once visited. It was also a lighthouse. This one was called Rua Reidh and it sits out past Gairloch, on the far western coastline of Scotland. Standing in its grounds, looking out to sea, there is nothing between you and America other than miles and miles of bluegrey waves, their white crests punctuating the Atlantic vista. As I stared out at the enormity of ocean, the sun began to sink beneath the wide, steady horizon, and the sky turned from blue to peach to burnt orange to deep ruby before ending in a black velvet sprinkled with a million tiny stars. Diamond dust strewn across the heavens.

Except this descent into darkness was momentarily disrupted by the rhythmic revolutions of the lighthouse beam, as it cut through the night sky, sending out a long line of light across the cold black waters. Standing so close to this light, with my love standing behind me, his arms entwined around my waist, my head resting against his chest, we are dazzled by the brightness. The cold night begins to settle all around us, but we are entranced by the rotations of the lighthouse beam, and we stay standing there for a long time.

It is possible to fall so deeply, irrevocably in love in these places that the love found there shines throughout a lifetime. It illuminates the days when the sun refuses to rise, and sorrow and confusion reign. It chases away the shadows brought by money worries, parenting woes, work stress and domestic fatigue. It calls you home when you’re lost in the dark. It carries you through the good times too: the birthdays, the Sunday lie-ins, the champagne fizz and the sweet understanding that you find in one another’s arms when you’re reunited after a long day’s work.

I think of all this and more as I stare out of the window at dimly outlined shape of the dilapidated lighthouse. The sun is now journeying around the globe, and night has fallen across the river Forth. Unmanned lighthouses, automated pulses of light, strike a beat in the deepening blue. I stare out and feel profound gratitude for the thin places. They’ve brought me more riches than one person could ever hope for in a single lifetime. A solitary gull cries as it soars up passed my window and out of view, trawling the twilight behind it. I breathe, reach my hand out in front of me, and touch…

Have you visited a thin place? What did you find there?

Finding Home

Amy Palko — Tue, 25 May 2010 19:37:07 +0000

As the last seagull of the day flies past my window, its snowy white underside illuminated by the final rays of dying day, the Bass Rock lighthouse flashes in the distance. This bright spot of light is rivaled only by an approaching plane, its altitude lowering as it closes in on its destination. The other large vehicles, the huge ships which so often visit the little harbour outside my front door, are nowhere to be seen. All safe out in deep water, well warned of rocky outcrops by the Bass Rock lighthouse’s siblings, or tethered up to shore, docked and dormant.

Watching these twilight comings and goings it strikes me that I live in a place of transience. A place as marked by its ebb and flow just as indelibly as my landlocked Ochil home in the Scottish central belt suburbs was marked by stasis and static. Here the sky stretches all the way to the horizon, which is merely discernable by a gradation of indigo blue. Here the water flows one way in the morning, and the other way come evening. Here the birds of the sea, the gulls, gannets and terns, swoop in across the waves, wings arching out across breathless, cerulean sky or grey, torpid stormcloud.

So different from the suburban space of decking, magnolia and immaculate 4×4 jeeps. So different from the monoblocked existence of demanded homogeneity where nature is tamed and curtailed til it is crafted into something suitably consumable. So different from the carefully defined allotments of land territorially guarded by petty tyrants. That was a space of consumption and constriction where fitting in was more important than any silly idea I may have had about self-expression or creative spirit.

I once wrote about an urge I had to dance in the hot summer rain. To throw my clothes off and free myself from the shackles of a limited existence. I longed to feel the raindrops define the edges of where I ended and the world began. To feel my self, my soul, my spirit dissolve and then resolve anew: cleansed and blessed and unafraid of what ‘they’ might say. I never did quite manage to break free from that suburban fear of neighbourly opinion, and so had to make do with opening the window and stretching out my arm until I could feel the rain running in rivulets up the white inner skin of my forearm, pooling at the elbow joint, before soaking the sleeve of my t-shirt.

But here… everything seems infinitely more possible. As I gaze out at the darkness, which has now descended with irrefutable swiftness, I once again catch sight of the rhythmic lighthouse gleam of pure white light. The slow pulse of the light’s rotation soothes my mind and loosens my chest enough to breath deep and long. I have arrived at the place of beginnings and endings. I have arrived home.

Anon 6 Launch

Amy Palko — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:31:48 +0000

Last night I went to the launch of Anon 6, which is the 6th edition of Anon poetry magazine, but the first by new editors Colin Fraser and Peggy Hughes. Anon is a really interesting publication which selects its poems through a process of blind review in an effort to ‘treat the poem as a freestanding artefact to be considered without reference to the poet’s reputation or previous work’.

As Peter Finch commented in his Foreword to the inaugural edition:

Publishing is a tough business. Anon, gloriously, and I have to say bravely and inventively, will put this right. Names here don’t count. Only the poetry does. It is judged by its words, its form, the way it sounds, the way it looks. Quality matters. Remember that elusive factor? At Anon it’s back.

I really do recommend you get a hold of the back issues, as it really is a treat: a poetry magazine with really high production values, fascinating essays and, of course, brilliant poems. If the buzz at last night’s launch is anything to go by, the new edition is going to be very popular indeed!

Congratulations to all the Anon team and to the Scottish Poetry Library which did a sterling job hosting the event!

PS You can follow both Anon Poetry & the Scottish Poetry Library on Twitter!

Holidaying

Amy Palko — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:15:17 +0000

Have been up to the north of Scotland on holiday, and thought I’d share some of my photos:

This trip provided me and my family with a much needed break – fresh air, wide open spaces, and the rugged beauty of wild, rural, remote Scotland. If you want to see more, you can check out this Flickr set.

Homecoming

Amy Palko — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:16:02 +0000

Meant to post this yesterday, but I’ve been so busy trying to meet deadlines that I didn’t manage it. Yesterday, you see, was St Andrews Day, and I wanted to share the new advert which has just been launched telling everyone about Homecoming Scotland. 2009 is the 250th birthday of Robert Burns: one of Scotland’s most famous sons. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be saying more about Homecoming in a later post, but until then, enjoy a bit of Scottish singing!