Category: abode

Posted on

communion

I bless myself with burn water,
loch water,
rock water;
with moss water,
bog water,
sap.

I eat a gorse flower that faces toward Suilven
and a gorse flower that looks to the sea.

I stand with the many-armed hazel,
the gatherer of the wood,
larch cones caught in its branches
and honeysuckle vines twining up its trunks
and its own catkins dangling overhead,
quivering delicately
like mercifully silent wind chimes.

I hold the lean paper limbs of birch
and pull myself to them.

I make myself belong.

Culag Wood, Lochinver, Sutherland, Scotland
20th May 2020

Posted on

lockdown, day 14

A gusty morning after a blustery night. I lift the lid of the stove to see if any of last night’s fire has survived and particles of ash blow up into my face, arcing up over the stove and drifting down in a circle around it. It’s quite a beautiful sight, little white flakes falling up and down through the air like an unleashed snow-globe. The smell is less refreshing – acrid and stale. It’s like having a miniature storm aboard, mirroring the one raging on the nation’s airwaves over our Chief Medical Officer’s recent visits to her Fife holiday home. Whatever discomforts I’m waking up to, at least it’s not that.

Indeed, while I do not welcome the forced nature of our seclusion, I am secretly relishing the opportune solitude. It’s early days of course but I find I’m cocooning myself in the boat even more than necessary, with social interaction quickly becoming a fading memory of an unfamiliar past. “This is an easier time for introverts than extroverts,” someone remarked on the radio the other day. I’m thankful for being, although sociable, essentially a solitaire. I am so glad not to be in the public eye.

Lochinver harbour, Sutherland, Scotland
6th April 2020

Posted on

Suileag

The passing sunlight makes a cross on the worn wooden floor of the bothy. Outside the great mount of Suilven heaves around the winds.

Sun. Hill. Shelter.
Observance. Love. Relief.

simple cross shadow on old wooden floor illuminating its worn grain

Suileag bothy, Assynt, Scotland
10th September 2016

Posted on

window

coloured glass window pane above clear window pane holding misty roofs

After nights and days of rain the room is silent when we wake, but we open the curtains to a dense white mist. It presses in against the long window panes, cocooning us in a wet softness. The houses across the street are dimly apparent but the rooftops and hillsides beyond have vanished. There’s just what’s immediately here.

It reminds me of certain winter mornings in Montreal when I would wake to find my old un-double-glazed windows covered in a layer of frost. The frost was thick enough to be opaque, screening out the view of the apartment block opposite and giving me a rare sensation of privacy. And as the sun rose above the apartments, my frosted panes would become suffused with a gentle light, and the room would suddenly seem holy, like a small chapel glowing within patterned glass windows – because, when you looked closely, you saw the frost was a latticework, incredibly intricate, of intertwining fern-like fronds.

Our mist windows are uniform in comparison, and dull rather than illuminate, a damp blank haze. Yet still we have the temporary intimacy of insulation from the world, that depthless proximity which allows us to notice what we usually overlook, to feel what we usually forget to: quiet hovering glances, the warm breath of each of us, near.

Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
11th November 2015