A spiritual thing

April 17, 2022 Easter Cross of daffodils at St. Magnus

While working out compatible schedules at the kitchen table for upcoming renovations of our homestead this Spring (2023), the contractor asked "Why Scotland?"  

The question arose when we roped off early April from the residing project.  It wouldn't work until after we returned from our Easter sojourn to Scotland.  

His question was out of the ordinary, having been asked during a construction scheduling meeting.  Off-balance, I replied:  "It's a spiritual thing."  

In other settings, I have addressed this question of "why" we travel to Scotland at Easter a number of times, in various hues and colors. 

e.g.  https://whitleyworldtravel.blogspot.com/2022/02/palmers-for-pilgrimage.html

https://whitleyworldtravel.blogspot.com/2022/04/what-was-and-what-remains.html 

But a more elaborate response would've been out of place.  My short answer seemed to satisfy the gentleman in any case.  We moved on, back to the work schedule.  

April 17, 2022  Hearth at Broch of Gurness

Whether the gentleman was simply being polite or genuinely interested on why we sojourn to Scotland at Easter, I cannot say.  But my quick reply needled me afterwards.  Surely our trips are about more than that?  Are they not about vistas and the north Atlantic?  Its seafood, smoky drams of uisge beatha and its people, with their mournful tales of the Fuadach nan Gaidheal against the joyful ceilidh here and now--these colors of life, of death and eternity, all interwoven into the tartan called Scotland? 

More, might not our sojourns be renovations in their own right, akin to replacing house siding?  Both are certainly made necessary by relentless weather; one by the natural world, and one by an indifferent modern age of soullessness, of disconnected existence in a so-called "virtual" world that is little more than digital illusion and imitation, sterile and empty.

April 15, 2022  Departure of MV Varagen framed

This recalls Emerson's transcendentalism (Self Reliance, 1841) .  "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself, for better, for worse, as his portion." 

One is too many, and today we have far too many youth luridly possessed by the unreality of social media in some instances to the point of suicide, or worse.  Human spirit has been discounted to valueless in such a world of AI and processing code.  Yet never able to come to the knowledge of the truth, as 2 Timothy 3:7 once styled it. 

Modern humankind shares little these days beyond anger.  Everybody's incensed.  Put upon. Bereft of the warmth of real human spirit, modern humankind is fast becoming stuck in endless recriminations.  As for enlightenment and the nourishment of mercy, not so much.  Thus it seeds self destruction.  A cosplay, a vicarious existence, a pretending to live.  The future without a future. 

April 16, 2022  Taversoe Ruick (Neolithic) Cairn on Rousay

Yet, here we have Scotland (borrowing the phrase from Idaho's state song).  Teeming with with spirit, its life a cacophony upon the bagpipes.  Scotland is real, a wholesomeness of living, a ceilidh danced in merriment not just upon the cairns of forebears but upon our own as well, in time.  Not a taking of one's life, but a giving.  Not disrespect, but holding love and cherishing it. Sharing at the table of generations. If only the troubled youth today understood as much.

We go to put our own lives in the context of eternity.  To find perspective.  And from that viewpoint, we kindle a spirit of peace. 

 

Taversoe Ruick--the way out