Back To The Wild

There are times in our lives when we try our damndest to ignore The Call. It is not in line with logic; it does not conform to our plan. Worse yet, it goes against the social grain. The Call begins as a tap, a whisper, a faint call to attention. It sneaks in from our periphery—unnoticeable if we are not looking out for it. Ignore The Call long enough and it begins to chink away at our bones, our muscles, our immune system. Eventually it will rattle at the gates of our sanity, and if necessary, come crashing through our stone fortress to drag us, wailing, into the fire. It will do what it must to wake us up. Which is why we must make a practice of waking ourselves daily.

I was never one to ignore the Call. Not for long anyway. But that was all before I had a child, a business, a spouse…before this lifelong wanderer had clocked in eight years in the same town. I was treading the path of normalcy. No surprise she came looking for me. She began with migraines. That was standard enough for me—I’d grown used to have one or two a month. But these were two to three days a week. Sinus headaches that nothing could cure. Anger, anxiety, tightness. I didn’t feel that stressed. I have a fairly relaxed life: I wake when I want, work for a few hours, go for beach walks most days, meet friends for coffee. Our house is comfortable, and we have money enough. What would I be stressed about? 

But the Calling grew louder. It came in images and waves of unshakeable desires. It came in the form of an inexplicable longing for an ancestral homeland I never knew. My body craved rain and clouds, trees and rivers, heather, moors, and mountains. (Eight years in a desert under a blinding sun can have that effect). Suddenly and without explanation, I needed Scotland. You could have offered me an all-expenses paid trip to anywhere in the world—anywhere else with trees and rain and rivers—and I would have turned it down in favor of a boot-strapped trip to Alba.

I tried to push it away. It made no sense. We didn’t have the money for that kind of trip. And how could I really travel to a country where I know no-one, with a four-year-old in tow, during a pandemic?? Each night I gave up the idea, each morning the desire came roaring back with the ferocity of a sex-starved adolescent. I threw a few stones in the pond to see what would happen: an invitation from a WorkAway host, a gift of enough miles to buy two plane tickets, a response from my husband— “Go.” 

So we went. Without expectation. Carrying only the hope that we wouldn’t get covid and that my daughter wouldn’t hate it. One month in the Highlands of Scotland. I had no idea why—I only knew that I had to go. I was terrified.

One week before crossing the Atlantic I came across a paragraph in a book I’d just bought on a whim:

“Like caged birds, when we tame our spirits and our lives, we lose something precious, something vital within us that gives us meaning beyond words. When we reconnect, miracles can happen. We can gently blow those embers back to a blaze and can find ourselves to be far more than we ever realized, living in an infinite universe, full of life. Full of magic.” *

THAT. That is why I am going.

When we arrived in Inverness all I could think was, “What the fuck am I doing here??” as I pulled my jet-lagged daughter around Culloden Moor. Two days later we woke in a wee cabin in Avielochan—our home for the next few weeks. We walked through fields of heather and ancient stone, stands of nimble birch. I sank to the soft ground, spread my fingers through the lichen, breathed in the wet earth. THIS. This is why I am here.

For the first time in years I felt I could breathe. It wasn’t just the green, the moisture, the trees. It was the way the heather rolled out along the path and up the hillside, the slender, towering birch with their age-encrusted hides and delicate leaves shivering in the breeze like a crowd of tambourines. It was the stones peering out from their turf-skins whispering of the secrets they’d seen through the millennia. It was that every rounded hill stood chance of holding an ancient burial ground; every forest the long-forgotten stories of Celtic Warriors and Highland raids. 

So imbued with story is this land that it seeps up through the earth like bog water, giving an audible squelch beneath the boot. The songs of the past permeate the air and thrill the skin. If only I could learn to translate with foot and flesh.

The earth herself recognized me. I see you, she whispered. I know you.

I touched my Wild Soul. I’d found home. 

* Wild Magic: Celtic Folk Traditions for the Solitary Practitioner, by Dana Forest