Mysteries and loneliness (Or, Scotland: An Epiphany)

Two nights or so before I left Scotland, I had dinner at a great little Brazilian restaurant near the university. It was delicious, and the company was grand -- R. and N. and their friends S. and I., who also happened to be there, if you'll recall, on the night that I first got inkling of the book deal. Anyway, we had a grand time. Good food and good laughs and reminiscing over She-Ra and He-Man and other classic cartoons of youth. Castle Grayskull. Oh, the memories.

At one point, S. and I were talking about Scotland, and the different things that had brought us to Edinburgh. She is English, but has been living in Edinburgh for a number of years. She said something that fascinated me. Scotland is so barren, so inhospitable, and the beauty is so wild, so open. Sometimes I can't take it. I need to go back to England every now and again, just to be surrounded once again by rolling countryside, and gentle hills, and trees that give you shelter. 

And I had a another little eureka moment, in a trip that seems to have been full of them.

Scotland is inhospitable, in what feels like, sometimes, a few hundred different ways. The hills are big and stark and bereft of trees. The weather is cold, and damp, and in the winter time even the sun deserts you. I've never been so cold in my life -- and for such a sustained period of time, too -- as I was when I lived in Edinburgh. This even in spite of the central heating in my flat, and my trusty little radiator that flared to life every time. When I lived in Portobello, I used to go to the swim centre and revel in the novelty of feeling completely, truly, one hundred percent warm. Sometimes I'd sneak in and stand in the lobby just to feel the warmth. No Turkish baths, no trip to the sauna on those excursions -- just me, soaking up the heat.

The people can be inhospitable, too. In three years of living in the country I came away with only one or two good Scottish friends -- the rest of my friends, diehard Edinburgh-ites though they might now be, have all come from other places. England. Wales. Australia. I mentioned this to the aforementioned Scottish friend once and she just nodded. "We do tend to keep to ourselves," she said. "Friendly enough, I suppose, but at the end of the day, we stick to our own."

Of course this isn't a blanket statement for all Scots. And I'm as aware as anybody that this could be as much an Edinburgh thing as a Scottish thing -- I've lost count of the times that people have mentioned Edinburgh's reserved nature. How quiet it can be, how "up its arse" (to quote another friend), how ever so slightly snobbish. But be that as it may -- the Scottish reserve, or the Edinburgh reserve, or whatever, plus the weather, the wind, the cold -- I spent many a lonely day and night in Edinburgh. Like I said in this post, there is no wind like a Scottish wind. There is no night like an Edinburgh night, particularly if you are hungry, and cold, and want nothing more than a warm night at the pub but can't afford it. Sometimes it felt as though the very city itself was a monument to loneliness: to centuries of Scottish struggle, and pain, and the need to wrestle out of stone and mortar what was so elusive in one's daily life -- namely, that sense of permanence, of importance, of needing something to pull you through a life that was so hard.

I do not know how many hours I spent, walking alone through these city streets. Or how many hours I spent, again alone, driving through the country, looking out at the open moors. Rain falls in sheets in this country -- unforgiving sheets of bitter cold. At times, it can be beautiful. More often than not, it's just depressing. No doubt economic hardship is the same regardless of whether you get sunshine or not, but struggling in the midst of a constant torrential downpour is not one of my favourite memories.

And yet. And yet. When S. talked about the barren nature of the Scottish landscape, something tweaked inside of me, and I thought back to that night on Iona, sitting silent in the Abbey while the wind raged overhead. George Mackay Brown, the minister who was responsible for re-establishing Iona as a centre of pilgrimage, said famously that Iona was a "thin" place -- an area of the world where only a tissue separated the world from the spiritual realm. Where you were, in effect, only a hair's breadth away from things that could turn you inside out, instantly. 

Scotland, in a hundred different ways, has been a thin place for me. When I think of my time in this country, I remember hard things -- hard nights, hard job hunts, hard searches for friendship. Even the joys in this country have been difficult; won over a long period of time, or at once elusive and unforgiving. Yet all of this, I think, has done more for me than decades of comfort. The inhospitability of this country is what draws me, what keeps me coming back, what thrilled me so much when I lived there. An inhospitable landscape will strip you, whether you fight it or not. And when you are stripped to the barest sense of who you are, you exist alongside that tissue, that veil, all of the time. I feel like I spent three years in the midst of Scottish hills and stone and wind, and lived a hair's breadth away from my truest self every moment of the day. All I did was write, and dream, and work really hard. And there were hidden, untold joys in there, just waiting. It wasn't an amazing time, for sure -- write and dream and work really hard doesn't sound exactly like a well balanced life. But there was power, there, in being stripped to the truest essence of myself. I was being turned inside out. Maybe not instantly, maybe not in the kinds of exciting ways that characterized my most recent trip to the country, but still. I wrestled and lived and struggled with the veil most the time.

I don't feel that way right now, back in Canada. And I know that that probably has a lot to do with my current situation -- there's food in every cupboard, and I am not quite as bare, in every sense of the word, as I was when I was living along Edinburgh's shores. No doubt there will come other cities, other thin places to make me feel the same. But right now, it's been something of a wonder for me to sit, and realize exactly why I respond to the Scottish landscape, to the wind and the rain and the loneliness.

When I think of God, and God-like things, I think more of the mystery and the loneliness at the heart of what God means. When I read about mystics, I am not struck by their expriences of community so much as I am struck by their sense of the solitary -- of embarking alone on some strange encounter with the mystical forces that have wrenched their lives apart. Teresa of Avila struggled with trying to impart her spiritual experiences to others (and then managed to impart them anyway). St. Columba, that saint who made Iona so special, lived out his years as a quiet, solitary man who loved the isle. He had his community, but at the same time, the driving force that pushed him over the waves and into a small grey island - that was something special, just for him.  That had to make for a solitary existence in some way. The wind, and the rain, and the sheer simplicity of a life on an island of mossy green rocks, with the sheep and the pilgrims, and all of it fed by the conviction that you were doing something important, something special -- that isn't something you can share with everyone. You can try, but I don't know if the true nature of that kind of experience comes out until you, too, experience it on your own.

And so. I do feel like I had some kind of spiritual epiphany on Iona, an epiphany that in turn has reached back and flooded my Scottish existence with a soft kind of clarity. I do not belong to the God of happiness, and eternal life and fluffy clouds and angels playing harps in the sky. I don't know if I ever have. My spiritual life has been so much more about the struggle, and the questions, and touching that other only when you're absolutely alone. And somehow it is easier to see that reality -- that spiritual realm, or that outlook on life, whichever way you want to look at it -- when I'm surrounded by the rain and the wind and standing in the shadow of those barren, empty hills.

It's a hard country. But delving deep inside yourself, looking at the essence of who you are, what you want, what you mean -- that's hard, too. It's mysterious and peculiar and frightening. It's so hard that one can find it easy to let the glitz and the busyness of one's life bury the truth, and say instead: I don't want to go there. But when the landscape around you is so desolate, and your own life becomes so bare, all that you have left is the mystery. All you can do is lie open, and find a way to make peace with the rain.

That's what Scotland does to me. That's what it's done for a whole host of people. Now, when people ask me why I pine so much for a country so grey and so hard, I'll know exactly what to say.