Scotland

I finally got to Scotland at the invitation of Jeannie Bouza Rose. Edinburgh in November surprised me; the low lying sun cut through the closes in Old Town, the castle reappeared every ten minutes or so through a veil of mist, and the landscape paintings that hung in the museum off the Royal Mile conspired to hook me. I knew I’d be back, and I knew it would be yet another city that I would have to get to know better.

I wasn't prepared for the complexity of Orkney. Just off the northern coast of Scotland, it has my kind of wild landscape, generous people, and epic examples of both geological and human history; a perfect recipe for the spiritual shenanigans that I would inflict upon my fellow travelers for the next week or so. Sending wishes to the night skies by a beach fire on Warebeth Beach, rubbing the gravestone at the cemetery there looking for George Mackay Brown, making Earthworks at the Brough of Birsay, walking the path of ancestors at Skara Brae and Mae’s Howe, all of it, made a deep, soulful impression on me, and we simply can’t wait to go back.