Older than moss, hands stacking the stones.
Our wedding was in Scotland, in an ancient hunting village on the edge of the Isle of Skye. It felt at once surreal and perfectly at home. We were very much at home among the highlands, and we thought of making a new life there. It was years later, feeling called to Vermont, that we learned that the Green Mountains and Scotland’s highlands were once part of the same land mass, now separated by time and distance.
We traveled by ferry to the Isles of Harris for their famous Tweed, and on to Lewis, where we visited Calanais. At the end of the earth, Calanais looks out onto water. You can see it across heathered moors, stone sentinels of the sea. At the circle I sat in the grass to draw a postcard to mail back to the states.
While I was there drawing, two fellows approached. It seemed they had appeared out of nowhere.
They said that they were musicians, and were to play that afternoon at a Ceilidh in Stornaway. They expressed an interest in what I was drawing, and as they sat down we struck up a conversation …
Still today, I have a sense that their presence was not ordinary.
Perhaps it was the will to come that had defined us, or that our presence was enough. As though some rite of passage was accomplished on arriving there, and another began on leaving.
Across the years, we return like seeds to the stones that embrace us.
Sláinte!
