The headland, Breanish, Isle of Lewis
The headland, Breanish, Isle of Lewis
O mother of the sea
lend me a wave that is strong and true
to carry me from this Age which unbinds me.
I do not need a ship, mother,
but make it a buoyant swell
to bear me up and float me on the sea’s dreaming
then beach me on some lighter shore.
When I land there, give me warp and weft again,
and an urchin quill to remind me
how the prettiest barb can lodge under your skin
and leave you undone.
Only lend me a loom and I will
take up the threads of this unravelled life.
I will weave a braid from three strands of seaweed
I will wind it three times around my finger
I will dig my salt-encrusted hands into the soil
and wed myself to the thirsty
brown roots of a new beginning.
Sharon Blackie
If you have ever driven the road through the district of Uig to the farthest south-western corner of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, you’ll know Mangurstadh Beach. It sits almost out of sight, well below the road, just as you reach the top of that rise, three miles or so before you come to the crofting township of Breanish. You’ll recall the rise, where the road you have been confidently riding falls away from you like a breaking wave – I’d bet you’ll never forget it – the place where you suddenly fall forwards into the open jaw of the Atlantic, where the sea and the sky rise up to ambush you. Just there, when you think that you are going to pitch headlong into so much space and distance, Mangurstadh Beach is waiting to catch you. If you allow yourself to be ensnared by its curving white sands and the bright turquoise and emerald green of the shallows, you’ll forever be a haunter-of-edges. If you don’t watch yourself you’ll turn to stone down on that beach, a sea-smoothed rock-creature with eyes that are holes where the sky shines through.
Pass by it if you can. Drive another four miles and, as if losing heart, overwhelmed by so much wildness and beauty, the road gradually peters out into bare stone mountains on the border between Lewis and Harris. It ends just beyond another white-sanded beach in the abandoned village of Mealista, one of many casualties of the Clearances. On this far section of the coast the prevailing gales are so strong that every few winters an especially violent storm will blow all the sand off the beach. After a year or two it creeps back, slowly, as if hoping that the wind won’t notice.
I lived there for a while not so very long ago, just two miles up the coast from Mealista beach – and I can tell you that the heart gives out along with the road there on the edge of the world, overwhelmed by so much wildness and beauty. Some edges cut through you like a knife. If you are lucky, though the cut may be deep, it will also be clean.
We are all edge-dwellers, those of us who inhabit this long Atlantic fringe in the far west of the continent of Europe. I have always been drawn to the edges of things, the places where two things collide. Where bog borders riverbank, where meadow merges into forest. Where you stand in the margins of what is behind you and look out across the threshold of the future. The brink of possibilities – will you cross? Edges are transitional places; they are also the best places from which to create something new. Ecologists call it the ‘edge effect’: at the convergence, where contrasting ecological systems meet and mingle, life blooms – life, diverse and various, unexpected, abundant and unique.
The shore is the greatest edge of all. Sometimes it seems gentle, on a still summer’s day when the sun warms the shallows and the soft sand cradles you. But you must also be able to face the storm. I have stood on the rocky shoreline by my old island house, facing into the ocean, arms stretched wide; I have closed my eyes and fallen forwards into a wind so strong that it held me up, my face encrusted with salt and globs of sea-foam caught in my hair. Those of us who live here must be comfortable with storms and with change, for it is on these unsettled, unsettling edges that we will hear the Call which launches us on our journey. And though we can never quite be sure what that journey will involve, we know that new possibilities may be created only if we surrender to uncertainty.
Whatever your cultural background may be, to stand on the dramatic shoreline of any of the Celtic nations looking westwards over the Atlantic is somehow to participate in the recognisable, powerful and curiously timeless experience of Celtic identity. Roiling seas, mist, constant shifts of light, ever-changing weather – all of our coastlines are edgelands, and for the most part we may come to them or retreat from them as we choose. On an island, though, edges are inescapable. As island-dwellers we are surrounded by them – bound by them or freed by them, according to inclination. Edges define an island . . . and yet an island’s edges are not strictly defined. They shift with the tides, in an ongoing, fluid, co-creative partnership between land and sea. They are in an unending state of becoming, and we are like them: we ebb and we flow; we soften sometimes, merge into the ecosystems of others, then retreat into the safety of our own sharply defined boundaries. We are gentle, and warm, and then we are storm. Perhaps this is why islands fascinate us so; perhaps this is why, at certain times in our lives, they draw us to them.
On Lewis, these apparent contradictions were both the geographical and the existential terrain I inhabited. On an island, nothing is fixed, and yet everything is fixed. Nothing is possible, and yet everything is possible, and both things are true at the same time. It creates an oddly vertiginous way of being. I came to Lewis – though I did not know it at the time – to test myself on the wildness of its edges, where the elements meet head-on. To stand and face a sea so capricious that one day it may shower you with fish and the next it may threaten death. Could I be equal to it? To stand steadfast under a thousand stormy skies and walk each day into incessant wind? Could I hold myself together in the face of it? To inhabit the remotest of places, to find its wildness reflected in myself. To find out what is left when those elements strip you down to the bone, and to let the rest fall away.
It was unboundedness which first drew me to this island in 2010, at a time in my life when all my stories seemed to have failed me, when every Heroine’s Journey I had embarked upon threw me back to the same starting point: the same state of mind I had been in when I first left the Wasteland for my small cottage in Connemara, almost twenty years earlier. The same lessons, still unlearned. This was far from my first journey; by now I had lost count and I had also lost heart. Did I have the energy for another? I didn’t honestly know. So I was biding my time on the edge. From the salt-smeared kitchen window of our old stone croft-house I looked directly out over the sea to the St Kilda archipelago, getting on for forty miles away. It was all that lay between me and the coast of Canada, 4,000 miles across a great and formidable ocean. The small isle of Hiort and the great bird-cathedral of Boreray would flicker in and out of view on the far western horizon as the light shifted from moment to moment, and legends of hidden, magical islands like Tír na nÓg and Hy-Brasil seemed suddenly far less fanciful. On a good day the world – all deep blue waters and vast blue skies – seemed infinite; but on a bad day those seas held me there, trapped me.
Over the four years that I lived there, I grew to know my three-kilometre section of the coastline intimately, and I grew to know its stories. Like all of the islands strung along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, Lewis and Harris – together known as the Long Island, the largest of a small cluster of islands collectively called the Outer Hebrides, or sometimes the Western Isles – are awash with myths and legends of the sea. On such a narrow island, deeply cut with sea lochs, it is impossible ever to be far from the sea; the village of Achmore is the only one on Lewis from which the sea cannot be seen. Throughout the past few centuries, almost all local families will have had at least one fisherman among them.
The sea dominated our crofting township: tiny Breanish, the last inhabited village at the end of the road which runs southwest through the district of Uig on the Isle of Lewis. None of its crofts is especially well sheltered from the full force of Atlantic storms and prevailing salt-ridden sea gales from the south and west. The soil is mainly peaty, and wet. Except for a tiny amount of low cover (mostly Rosa rugosa and scrub willow) in the more protected areas of one or two crofts, there are no trees or shrubs; the surrounding land is blanket bog. To the east is Mealasbhal, the highest of the ancient range of walnut-like mountains which run along the spine of Uig. To the north, and running along the border of what was then our land, is Loch Greibhat: a long, shallow loch which attracts large migrating flocks of whooper swans in spring and autumn. Humans are secondary inhabitants there: herds of thirty or more stags freely roam the village in winter; sea eagles dominate the skies.
On an island like this the sea is part of you, both outside of you and in you. Every day’s sea is different, and every new sea washes up new stories. You find them in the sheltered coves and the deep-cut geos. You find them in the rock-pools, hidden under red-fringed dulse. Turn over a stone on the sandy beach, and a story will escape, briny and encrusted with barnacles. So come out of the house; brace yourself against the wind which always is waiting to lift you off your feet. Turn right out of the big deer-proof gate and walk down the small track which runs down to the àird, the headland. Go through the gate, past the fencepost capped by a lone upturned weathered wellington boot, hoping someday for a mate. A little further and stop right there, just on the top of the small green rise where the path subsides.
Look at it. Look out at the world. It opens its arms and offers you only emptiness. The St Kilda archipelago may be seen ahead of you in the west; the isle of Scarp dominates the horizon to the south. If you should find yourself walking in the darker hours, you’ll see the light on the tiny island of Gasker pulsing to your left, just north of the Monachs, and the lighthouse on the Flannan islands will be flashing to your right. All of these islands are uninhabited. From time to time, you may see the light of a distant solitary voyager in the shipping lanes which run far out west. Otherwise there is only you, and the sea and the sky.
Walk west, in a straight line, keeping the small humpbacked look-out mounds to the south, keeping the tall stone cairn to the north. The grass is green here, and if you should be walking in spring you’ll find it scattered with dog violet, milkwort, lesser celandine, bird’s-foot trefoil, spring squill and tormentil. Jump over the natural channels which now are filled with water, and just over that last small green rise you’ll find yourself at the edge of the shore. Large smooth rocks and pebbles pass for a beach, and such treasures it holds for sea scavengers. Bright, battered plastic floats, plastic bottles and plastic fish-boxes. Fragments of cerulean blue rope, of green fishing net hopelessly entangled with seaweed. A vast array of single shoes, boots, wellies, flip-flop sandals. There is little that is shiny or beautiful, here among the washed-up detritus of the modern world. But if you are lucky you will find a shell, or a feather, or a very occasional piece of sea-smoothed driftwood.
Stop there for a while. Look out to a sea which is continuously in motion; watch the ebb and the flow, the shifts of the tides. Doesn’t it make you believe that any sort of metamorphosis is possible? Metamorphosis, the core of so many Celtic myths and stories; so many of our sea stories are about shape-shifting. See that dark line of seaweed, thrown up by the tide, which gathers on the pebbles there, between sea and land? That dark band represents the threshold between one world and another, for at the water’s edges, so the old Celtic stories say, you can cross over into the Otherworld. Myth is born here, cast up out of the waves, there for the taking by any beachcomber.
Between sweeping Mealista beach to the south and curving Mangurstadh beach to the north, this coast is all wilderness: jagged rock and smooth pebble, sea-stack and cliff and geo. But treasure always hides in such places, and if you should turn north here, just here at the point where the land surrenders to the sea, at the right time of the day, you will find (if you are lucky) a hidden sandy beach: a tiny thing which vanishes completely at low tide, set on the edge of a small calm bay protected by an arc of high rock on both sides. It is there that you will find the seals. More often than not, you will find just one, her grey head popping up from the sea, bobbing in the waves, large dark eyes staring straight at you. She’s waiting for a song, so sing to her. Above all songs, she’ll love to hear ‘The Sealwoman’s Sea-Joy’, written to express the delight of the Selkie who finds her lost skin.
~
There is an island to the far west of these lands, close to the end of the world; somewhere in your dreams you’ve seen it. Long white beaches, rocky coves, stormy seas. From the cliff-tops on its westernmost shores, you might sometimes catch a glimpse of Tír na mBan, the Isle of Women, way out on the horizon. When the sky is blue and the air is still – which happens rarely enough in those parts. Here, the wind blows hard and long through the dark days of winter, and summer is precious and fleeting. Somewhere along the stormiest section of that westernmost coast is a high, inaccessible cave where they say the Old Woman of the World lives still, with her companion Trickster Crow – but no one I’ve met has ever found that cave, though many have searched, and many have drowned in the process. Maybe she’s still there, stirring the soup which contains all of the seeds and all of the herbs and the essence of all the growing and living things in the world. Maybe she’s still there, working on the most beautiful weaving in the world, with its fringe of sea-urchin quills.
The island’s beaches are haunted by seals. Neither common seals nor grey seals; I’ve never seen their like elsewhere. But then they’re not just ordinary seals: they’re Selkies. And for one night every month, on the night of the full moon, they can take on human form if they choose, and it is said that on those nights they slip off their sealskins and dance on the beach under the moonlight.
On this island, once there lived a fisherman. He was a handsome man with coal-black hair and bright blue eyes, and he stood tall and strong. Although many of the local girls mooned over him and dreamed of being his wife, he never seemed to find anyone that represented the qualities he wanted. He was something of a dreamer, you see. They said that it was a miracle that he managed to catch any fish at all, for all the time he would spend staring out to sea when he took to his boat. He believed that love would come upon him like a clap of thunder or the crashing of the waves on the rock. And he never had that feeling with any of the girls he had grown up with: they were all too familiar, somehow. He wanted mystery. He yearned for something that he couldn’t name.
One night he was feeling restless, and so he took a barefooted walk along the beach as often he did. The sky was midnight-blue velvet, the stars shining brightly, and the full moon smiling down on him as he stared out into the waves. His eyes rested on a large smooth rock that lay in the far shallow waters of the bay, and it came to him that he could see movement on and around that rock. As he paddled slowly and quietly towards it, he saw a small group of women dancing in the sea. Their hair shone like the moon, their eyes glistened like the stars and their skin shimmered like milk in the water. Their bodies were long and graceful, their voices soft and lyrical as they called and laughed with each other. They were so beautiful that he stood quite still, drinking in the sight of them as they drifted farther away from the rock, playing in the shallow water.
After a while he noticed a pile of what looked like animal skins lying on the top of the rock. Chilled to the bone and yet strangely excited, he recalled all the old tales about Selkies. They could change into women, he remembered, by slipping off their sealskins. Without those skins they would remain human and trapped on the land, unable to return to their home beneath the waves. The man was overtaken by a strange yearning as he watched the women in the sea, and a feeling crept over him that this was the mystery he had been looking for, all his young life. Somehow, these women personified his love of the sea and her beauty and mystery, and he wanted one of them for his wife. So he crept quietly to the rock and stole one of the sealskins, folding it tight and tiny, and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket.
After a while the women called to one another and began to swim back to the rock, each one finding and putting on her sealskin, transforming herself back into a seal in the wink of an eye, and then slipping away into the water, disappearing beneath the waves. All but one of them. She searched high and low, clambering over the rock and diving into the sea around it, but she failed to find her skin. Seeing her distress, the man stepped out from where he had been hiding behind the rock.
‘I have your skin,’ he said to her. ‘But I don’t want to give it back to you. Won’t you stay with me, and be my wife?’ The sealwoman shook her head and shrank back from him, but slowly and carefully, as if he were gentling a wild animal, the young fisherman stepped closer to her, and as he looked into her eyes he saw hers change, widen, soften.
‘Seven years,’ he whispered to her. ‘Just seven years. Give me seven years, and then I’ll give you back your skin. After that, I’ll let you decide. If you still want to leave after seven years, then I’ll let you go.’ And at that moment the first light of dawn crept into the sky, and the glow of the moon began to fade. Reluctantly, then, the woman went with him, understanding that without her skin she could do nothing. She had no choice. But he seemed to her to be a handsome young man, and strong. And his eyes were kind, for all that he had visited this fate upon her. With one last yearning look over her shoulder, she waved goodbye to her sisters, their seal heads popping up from the sea, their eyes glinting like dark jewels in the fading moonlight.
The young man was happier than he had ever imagined might be possible. As he lay beside his wife in bed at night, he fancied he could smell the sea, and as he listened to her breathing beside him, he fancied that he could hear the whisper of the waves. He was content.
As for the sealwoman: she bore him a daughter, nine months after they were wed. At first she seemed happy enough with her life and with her child. Mara, she called her, after the sea. She would take her daughter down to the shore and teach her the ways and the lore of the waters, telling her stories of her people and of other mysteries beneath the waves. The child loved the sea with all her heart, but she was half-human, and so she loved the land too, and could not imagine ever forsaking it. She was at home in her skin and knew her place in the world. But then so had her mother been, when she was her daughter’s age.
The Selkie did her best to look after the child and care for her husband, but as the years went by things began to change. He went away from the house more often – either fishing, or drinking with his friends in the local inn – and she was left alone. She began to creep out by herself at night, stealing down to the shore, looking always for her sisters. But they had abandoned that beach on the night she was taken, fearing that the same fate would befall them. So she watched and she wept and as all hope began to fade she became more and more sorrowful. Her skin began to dry up, and her eyes and her hair grew ever more dull. When the seven years were up, hating herself for needing to leave her daughter, but knowing that she must find her way back to herself, which could come only with finding her way home, she asked her husband if he would return her skin. But he simply laughed and refused. She was still the most beautiful woman on the island, and she was his. Why ever would he let her go free?
The sealwoman grew slower and sadder. Frightened that she might lose her, Mara asked if she was ill, and finally her mother told her that she was fading from yearning for her lost home beneath the sea. Fading, because although she loved her husband still and loved her daughter even more, she was stranded in this place where she could not find a way to belong.
Mara feared the blank emptiness that had begun to reside in her mother’s eyes. And so she started to search for the Selkie’s lost skin. She searched every part of the house and every part of the land, but she couldn’t find it. She searched and searched until she exhausted herself. Then eventually, one night, after she had spent hours searching again while her father was out and her mother asleep, she found herself yawning in the boatshed and crept into her father’s boat to take a nap . . . and there under a heap of fraying ropes and soiled sailcloth she finally found the sealskin, hidden still inside the pocket of the old jacket that the fisherman had been wearing on the night he stole her mother away. As Mara pulled at it and the skin rolled out, she caught a faint whiff of the sea – the smell of her mother. But as she picked it up from the floor where it had fallen, the skin began to disintegrate in her hands. It was old and desiccated. It had not been used for a long time, and now it could never be used again.
Mara hurried home and wakened her sleeping mother, and with tears in her eyes brought her down to the shore where she presented her with her old shredded skin. She watched as her mother sank to her knees and wept. She saw the hope and then the life begin to drain out of her eyes – and then she acted. She half-carried, half-dragged her mother down to the sea, where she rolled her into the shallows and let the seawater cover her body. Slowly, slowly, the Selkie woman began to revive, but as she walked back to the house with Mara, there was nothing but emptiness in her eyes.
For many weeks the Selkie woman stayed in her bed. Her heart was a black hole; there was no help to be found, and her life stretched ahead of her, endless, dark and hopeless. She would never find her way home, never find her place, never again find a way to belong. But Mara would not let her mother die. And so she went to visit the wise old woman who lived in a small stone cottage, up in the hills at the far end of the village. She asked the old cailleach what she should do to help her mother – whether, indeed, anything could be done.
‘Your mother must help herself,’ the old woman told Mara. ‘You cannot do it for her. And though I know the ways of herbs and moss, and the paths that animals take through the old woods, I do not know the ways of the sea. But there is one who does, and if your mother can find her way to her, it may be that she will tell how she might be saved.’
And so Mara went home, and told her mother that she must find the Old Woman of the World, who was sometimes to be found in those days, still – if you had endurance enough to make the journey, and courage enough to face her in the darkness of her cave. At first the sealwoman said that she could not possibly follow this quest. She was too tired, and too ill. The way would be too difficult, and there was no guarantee of success. But Mara would not let the subject go. She pleaded with her mother and pleaded some more and then she wept, until finally, one morning, the Selkie could bear her daughter’s despair no longer, and she roused herself from her bed and put on her strong boots and wrapped herself in a warm cloak. She took nothing else with her, for the old cailleach had told Mara that the journey must be made while unencumbered with unnecessary things of the world.
The Selkie did not know where to go; not really. All she knew was that she would find the Old Woman of the World somewhere on the high westernmost cliffs of the island. And so, pulling her cloak tightly around her, she began to walk north. She walked in the rain along beaches with the wind so strong in her face that every step took twice as long as it ought. She clambered over rocks so slippery that she fell constantly into the water and had hardly the strength to haul herself back out. Her boots were cold and wet and heavy, and her heart was heavier still. At night she shivered in geos and cowered in coves. She drank from icy burns and ate seaweed for her only nourishment. It was hard, and she was weak, and when one wild day the storm raged more fiercely than ever and the wind finally whipped away her cloak and carried it over the cliff top where she was walking and on down to the sea, she sank to her knees and lay her forehead on the ground, and began to despair. But as she knelt there a strange rumble in the ground below her set her body vibrating, and she threw back her head and listened. And it seemed to her that, carried on the wind, in snatches, she heard a woman singing a song, somewhere down below, somewhere deep inside the cliff. And it seemed to her also that the strange shuddering rumble she had heard sounded something like the noise a spinning wheel might make, if pedalled furiously by someone who was skilled in the art.
She stood, and looked around her, and walked and peered and poked until finally she came upon the first step of the long stairway which was cut into the face of the cliff, seemingly ending in the sea, narrow and slippery, precipitous as could be. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and slowly, carefully, down the stairs she went. And at the bottom, she found the cave: the cave of the Old Woman of the World. The Old Woman herself sat there, spinning a fine thread shining with all the colours that ever existed, on a rich golden wooden wheel in front of an enormous frame on which was displayed the most beautiful weaving that had ever been created, fringed with sea-urchin quills. The Old Woman turned, and looked at the Selkie.
‘So you’ve come to find your skin,’ she said, and it was all the sealwoman could do to hold herself erect, to lift her chin and stop her teeth from chattering, and to nod a faint yes. The Old Woman beckoned her over to a glowing fierce fire at the back of the cave, over which an enormous cauldron bubbled, and it seemed to her that the steam rising up from the soup in that cauldron contained the scent all of the seeds and all of the herbs and the essence of all the growing and living things in the world. She sat, and the warmth began to creep back into her bones, and she listened while the Old Woman spoke.
‘So your old skin was no use any more,’ she said, looking long and deep into the fire and nodding, as though she could see pictures in the flames. ‘That’s the way it goes, often enough. I’ve heard all the stories they tell of Selkies who find their old skins and slip them back on, and away they go, out into the ocean, and live happily ever after, just as if nothing had ever happened to them, and nothing had ever been learned. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t always work out that way, and sometimes it shouldn’t.’ She passed the Selkie a cup of something hot and herbal and sweet, and she took it gratefully and sipped, and it seemed to her as she sipped that all the strength and vitality she had lost began flooding back into her bones. ‘You’ve done well to make it this far, Daughter,’ the Old Woman said. ‘But there’s more for you to do before you’re done.’
And she told the Selkie what she must do.
The Selkie set off again when her tea had been drunk, fresh and fit as the day her husband had first discovered her, there on the beach. The sea was calm now, and the air still, and she found the curragh at the base of the cliff just where the Old Woman had said she would find it, and she climbed in and slowly she rowed across to the tiny island a mile to the north, and a mile to the west. She brought the curragh to rest on a long white strand in a calm sandy cove on the north side of the island, and there too she found the cave that the Old Woman told her she would find. And as she entered into the cave she saw what she had been told she would see, and her hands flew to her mouth and it was all that she could do not to turn and flee and throw herself into the sea and wait to die of grief. For there in the centre of the cave were the skeletons and skins of eleven dead seals. These were no ordinary seals – neither common seals nor grey seals; they were Selkies. They had been killed and then skinned, and left so that their flesh had disintegrated and all that remained of each of them was a pile of bones, and a skin beside each pile, shining silver in the dim light of the cave.
Eleven skeletons, and eleven skins.
The Selkie crept close, dread in her heart, but there was no help for it, for she knew her eleven sisters – she knew them in her heart, and recognised the markings on their beautiful silver skins. A seal-hunt, the Old Woman had said, and the corpses abandoned by the men in the storm, ready to be picked up some finer day. But the hunters had never returned, and the bones and the skins of the Selkie sisters had rested in the cave ever since.
But there was more to be done before she was done, and so she did as the Old Woman had told her. She lit a fire in the darkening cave, and she sat vigil over the skins and the bones. And as night fell she began to sing the old lament over the bodies of her kinsfolk. No one knows the language now, and nor is it a language that is usually written, but here are the words she sang:
Ionn da, ionn do
Ionn da, od-ar da.
Hi-o-dan dao, hi-o-dan dao
Hi-o-dan dao, od-ar de.
And as she sang on she heard a rustle out in the cove beyond the cave, and through the growing gloom she peered out and saw an old grey seal crawl up onto the sand and make its way into the cave. And the grey seal, who she saw was an old, old Selkie, began to sing the song too. And as the old Selkie sang, throwing back her seal head (for the moon was new, and she could not take on her human form unless the moon was full) a wondrous thing began to happen in the cave. Slowly, slowly, the flesh began to reform on the bones of the dead seals – all but one: the smallest, and the youngest. And little by little, the skeletons began to reshape and to seem more like seals, and they grew fatter and then they shuddered and breathed, and finally, when they were strong, rolled over and slipped into their skins – all but one: the smallest, and the youngest. And ten of the eleven seals formed a circle around the sister-child who could not live again, and they lifted their heads up and sang a song of mourning. When they were done, they crawled out of the cave on their bellies, and came again into the ocean, beckoning to their sister to follow.
The Old Woman had told the Selkie that she would know what to do when the time came, and it seemed to her now that this was the thing that must be done: she reached for the skin that remained and held it to her breast, inhaling the faint scent of a lost sister. The old seal nodded, and then turned away and followed the younger ones back into the sea.
It would have been easy for the Selkie woman to go then. Her sisters were waiting for her, and if she followed them, they would lead her home. But there was one thing more she must do, one thing that could not be abandoned so lightly. So she folded the skin tiny and tight, and tucked it safely into the belt of her gown, and she found the curragh on the beach and, taking up the oars, she began her long return.
She came to Mara when her husband was away fishing, and she took her down to the sea and told her all that she needed to know. Mara was young still, but there was something in her that understood that she must let her mother go. She could see that the sealwoman wanted to stay with her, but something called to her, something so deeply a part of her nature that she could not – and must not – resist it. The need to find her place, to find her element, to find her way home.
And so the time came for them to part. Taking her daughter’s face in her hands, the Selkie looked deeply into Mara’s eyes and breathed her breath into her lungs, three times. Turning to the sea, she began to sing a strange song in a high voice. She pulled out her sister’s skin: newer than her own, younger, less marked by the cares and woes of the world. But it was the sealwoman’s bones that this skin covered now, and which shaped it; the two merged together, old and new, and in this merging a new form was created. With one last long look at her daughter, the Selkie slipped into the sea and vanished beneath the waves.
The daughter and her father mourned long and hard. Mara would often go down to the shore at night, hoping to catch a glimpse of her mother – but she never came. And then, exactly one year later, on the anniversary of her disappearance, Mara’s patience was rewarded. A seal was sitting on the rock and as it saw her approaching, it slipped off its skin and there she was: her mother. And yet somehow she was different. Her eyes and hair and skin were shining; and something in the way she held her body told Mara that she was at peace and at home with herself once more.
And so it happened ever afterwards that once a year, on the same anniversary of her departure into the sea, on the night of the closest full moon, the Selkie woman would come to the beach and talk with her daughter and tell her stories. She taught her to sing the song that she had sung in the cave: the song that would call to her Selkie kinfolk. She taught her the song so that one day, if ever she should so choose, she also could take to the sea. She taught her the song that would sing her soul back home. ‘The Sealwoman’s Sea-Joy’, the Selkie called her song, though it had once been known as a song of mourning. For all mourning may be transformed into joy if you have endurance enough to make the journey, and courage enough to face the Old Woman in the darkness of her cave.
~
Stories of shape-shifting seals are told all along the west coasts and islands of Scotland and Ireland. In these places, the people of the land have always lived alongside the people of the sea. They occupy the same world, and compete for the same fish; it’s not surprising that we should find in story the two merged into one. Such a commonplace story soon becomes legend, then legend is told as history, and so we have the MacCodrum clan of the isle of North Uist, who became known as the ‘MacCodrums of the seals’: they were descended, it is said, from the union of a fisherman with a Selkie. This explained the hereditary horny growth between their fingers which made their hands resemble flippers.
These Selkie tales resonate strongly with women, for the Selkie’s song is our song. It is a song of yearning – yearning for a part of ourselves that we feel we have lost – or maybe a part that we feel we might once have had, but never knew. How many of us have lost skins to this super-rationalistic world in which we cannot feel at home, in which we cannot feel as if we belong? No matter how furiously we pile on the trappings of the Wasteland, no matter how cleverly we shed our own fragile skins and clothe ourselves in the coarser skins of men which do not fit us, or the thick, traditional female skins which suffocate us, we cannot hide the fact that it does not work. We do not thrive. Sometime or other, we will know it. Sometime or other, we will break.
The Selkie story is the story of a woman who breaks. Taken literally out of her element, trapped on the land, where she cannot find a way to belong. She has lost her place in the world, and consequently has lost her stories. Like the Selkie, so many of us lose our skins, and all too often we lose them early. This can happen in so many ways: it may be stolen by another who does us harm; we might give it away to someone we trust, who then betrays us; or we might hide it for safekeeping and then forget where we hid it.
I do not remember a time when I was a child when I felt as if I were in my element, when I felt at home in my skin. I lost it too soon. It was not stolen: I hid it away, so deeply and so cleverly that it took me decades to remember that I’d ever possessed it. My early childhood years were rarely a time of open, joyful wildness such as others might experience; often I felt unsafe. My father’s violence towards my mother didn’t ever quite spill over onto me, but it didn’t need to for me to hold it as a distinct possibility in my head.
One day, coming home with him from someplace, walking down the street to the cockroach-infested terraced house we rented at the time, I listened with growing fear to his spitting rage, his mutterings about all of the ways in which he was going to beat me when we got home. I can’t begin to imagine what I’d done to offend; I was such a quiet and obedient child. A ‘paragon of virtue’, as my first school report later proclaimed; it was safer that way, for sure. He opened the front door and I burst through it, running up the stairs and into the bedroom, pushing the door closed, putting all the weight of my three-year-old self behind me, listening to his footsteps pounding after me up the stairs. He burst through the door and I fell to the floor. He looked down at me, watching him with what must have been terror in my eyes, and he crumpled. He sat on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands, and he cried. I picked myself up off the floor and I sat down next to him and put my hand on his knee and told him that it would all be all right.
I was a strange little animal; how could I not be? Watchful, cautious, hiding underneath a tough new skin I manufactured for myself little by little over the years. Never let anyone see you’re afraid; never let anyone see you cry. Always be strong, because you can’t rely on anyone else to be. It wasn’t till I reached my thirties that I realised that this skin I was wearing – the skin I had adopted because it seemed stronger, safer, more appropriate for the hard-edged world in which I found myself – not really a skin, but a protective, impermeable shell – wasn’t my real skin at all. And then the stripping away of the old, and the search for that true skin was long, and hard, filled with stops and starts and twists and turns and unexpected dead ends. Sometimes, even today at fifty-four years old, I wonder whether the search is over. It seems there’s always a new layer to uncover.
This skin which we lose is our power: our unique, authentic power as women. The power to create, to guard, to transform. We become disconnected from our female body-wisdom and instincts. We lose that power to the Wasteland. We lose it in so many ways. It is taken from us, with threats and violence. Or we follow the wrong path in life, a path without heart. We leave behind what sustains and nourishes us. We turn our back on the plight of the planet, out of fear, or out of ambition, or simply out of a refusal to see the situation for what it is. We might not have been responsible for making the world this way, but for sure we have been complicit in its creation, and in the maintenance of a civilisation which has caused so much damage.
But sooner or later, no matter how cleverly we try to hide ourselves, to turn away from the truth, we are called to change. To wake up, and to see, and so to take responsibility. To reclaim our power, and to participate in the remaking of the world. Joseph Campbell named it the ‘Call to Adventure’ – but it should be so much more than merely an adventure. It is a Call to Life – a full, authentic life. It is a Call to rise from the half-sleep of our existence, and take up our part in the great unfolding of the world. To become a Voice of the Wells. We must answer the Call, or forever be lost in the Wasteland.
For many women, that Call occurs at midlife. Dante expressed it perfectly, in the opening lines of The Divine Comedy: ‘Midway upon the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost.’ Most women experience major change in these middle years: physical change or professional; social or psychological; changes in our family and our relationships. Our children leave home. We are overtaken by disillusionment and dissatisfaction. We find ourselves unhappy in our jobs, in our marriages. We develop physical illnesses, anxiety or depression. Rage and grief threaten to overwhelm us. We begin to contemplate our own mortality. We question who we are, who we might have been, who we might yet become. We question our spiritual values and our material values. We begin to wonder what we are doing with our lives, what meaning we might find. We open our eyes a little wider, and take in the world beyond ourselves. For the first time, we see the Wasteland for what it is.
Like so many women, I have found myself lost in that dark wood. Picture the scene: it is 1991, and I am thirty years old. I am sitting in a car outside an ugly office building in a small town in Surrey for which I have absolutely no affection and whose edges blend and blur into other small towns on all sides and eventually into London to the north. I have no affinity for this part of the world; my internal compass points north and west, and my feet literally feel as if they are in the wrong place. I am working in this building as a scientific adviser for a tobacco company – a large multinational company which I dislike, in which I am surrounded by people who are far from the ‘merchants of death’ portrayed by anti-smoking activists and pressure groups, but who nevertheless share none of my values. I shouldn’t be in this job; I should never have been in this job. It bears no relationship to the person I think I am or ever have been or will ever want to be. I have felt this way for a good three years, but recently the iron band around my stomach and the hollow fluttering in my chest and the dread that I awaken to each day has grown and become intolerable. I can’t breathe; I’m constantly on edge.
This morning, I have battled my way north for the best part of an hour to drive no more than fifteen miles through the pre-rush-hour traffic which hurtles headlong towards London. I have stopped, started, stopped again. Stopped, stopped and stopped some more. Once, I sat in the queue at a traffic light for twenty minutes, edging forward one or two cars at a time, my entire body clenched, and at some point during this torture I floated out of my body and up through the roof of the car and looked down on myself from above. The person I was looking at inside the car wasn’t anyone I knew or recognised; the world in which she seemed to be living was insubstantial, dreamlike.
By the time I get to the car park outside my workplace half an hour later, I am afraid, and I have no idea what to do. I feel powerless to do anything. I’d like to pretend it hadn’t happened, but I know this sign all too well. Psychologists call it ‘depersonalisation’: a change in your perception or experience of yourself so that you feel detached from, and sometimes as if you’re an outside observer of, your own mental processes and your body. It makes everything seem unreal. It’s a proper psychiatric symptom; it occurs in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), which most professionals in Western countries use to diagnose mental health disorders, and it means that I can no longer ignore the fact that I have a problem, or continue to hope that I’ll just wake up one morning and find that it’s miraculously vanished. The origin of the problem? It’s big enough to be going on with: I don’t belong in this place, in this job, with these people; I’m not even sure I belong in this Age. I lost my way a long time ago, but long before that I lost my skin.
I find a parking space as far away from the building’s entrance as I can, and turn off the engine and sit there. I am incapable of moving. I simply can’t bear to get out of the car, to walk into that building, to live one more day in this state of . . . well, I can only describe it as chronic fear. I’m afraid of everything. Of being alive, of not really being alive. Of failing at being alive.
This shouldn’t be happening to me, I tell myself, as I sit with my hands still clenched around the steering wheel. How embarrassing, for a psychologist to find herself with a psychological problem. How incompetent of me, because during my PhD in neuroscience I specialised in the brain mechanisms underlying anxiety and panic. It seems like the ultimate irony, as if with one wave of some great cosmic wand I’ve suddenly found myself transformed from the master of a problem to its grovelling victim, and for a moment I want to laugh, but I don’t quite manage it because all of a sudden I’m drenched in sweat, and my breathing is beginning to quicken, and there’s a terrible clutching at my throat, as though someone has his hands around my neck and is squeezing and letting go, squeezing and letting go . . . and it’s a vicious cycle, of course: now I’m afraid of the symptoms of being afraid. My head knows perfectly well that this isn’t a heart attack, it’s a panic attack, but my body is nevertheless experiencing the symptoms of utter terror, and what I do or don’t know becomes utterly irrelevant as the age-old fight-or-flight mechanisms kick in.
Finally, after what seems like an eternity, but probably is no more than five minutes, the panic subsides. And yet that fiercely pulsating sensation of choking, of an enormous lump that I can’t swallow, remains in my throat, where it will continue to reside for two years more. Paul Simon’s ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’ is playing on the radio, and as I listen, suddenly, inexplicably, something settles into place: I need to get out of this job and away from this godforsaken town, before I too ‘do some damage’ – most likely to myself. Whatever it takes, whatever might be lost along the way, I need to cut myself loose from this increasingly meaningless life, and find another path.
So at thirty years old, in a car park in a small Surrey town, I heard the Call which beckoned me to change my own life, to search for a new skin to replace the one I had lost. I didn’t respond immediately; I had no idea what I might do with the rest of my life. I didn’t want to go back into academic life, even if it would have been possible, and it was apparent that I wasn’t cut out for corporate life. As far as I could tell, I had no other skills. I had an obsessively jealous older husband and no close friends. I had no tribe, I had no place. And so I parked the problem along with the car, and I walked into the building and sat down at my desk and got on with my job.
The core of that problem was that I hated the world I inhabited. In those days there was so little awareness of environmental issues, and yet I knew that humans were choking the planet. I had known it since, at sixteen years old, knowing everything and nothing, I fell in love. While studying for an English Literature A level, I read D.H. Lawrence’s novel, The Rainbow. It swept me off my feet. I had been brought up in a grey, heavily industrial town in the north-east of England; I was displaced at nine to another, larger, industrial city in the Midlands. In my early world concrete was king, and the air smelled predominantly of exhaust fumes and the chemicals spewed out from vast industrial chimneys. I felt no love for this world, no sense of belonging. I felt separate from it, closed in, claustrophobic. Some days, walking through identical grey suburban streets to school, I felt as if I were being buried alive.
Then I opened The Rainbow and fell head over heels in love with a world that had never been mine. But somehow, I recognised Lawrence’s representation of the deep and instinctive connection between humans and the natural world, and all of the ways in which it was being obliterated by the industrial machine. Growing up as the son of a Nottinghamshire coal-miner, who taught him the names of plants and trees and how to recognise animal tracks, Lawrence was well aware of the head-on, bone-splitting collision between those two worlds. I had only ever inhabited a world that was dominated by that industrial machine, but I yearned for the slightly dangerous, often subversive, and above all overwhelmingly passionate pastoral world which he showed me in that book: a world in which the connection between humans, the land and the natural world is deep, vivid and, above all, visceral.
I had had only the smallest glimpses of such a possibility in my life. When I was a small child my mother would leave me with my ancient and notoriously crotchety great-aunt while she went out to work. Aunt Meg lived in a small post-war council house a little way down the road from my infant school, on the far fringes of town and a short walk away from the sea. From the windows at the front of the house you looked out, across unused fields and abandoned wastelands which were surprisingly full of flora and fauna, to the heavy industrial complexes on the River Tees. ICI chemical works, steel works, chicken-processing factories, sugar-processing plants. My free days were spent rooting in Aunt Meg’s back garden, which consisted largely of an overgrown erstwhile cabbage patch next to an old Second World War bomb shelter, and a narrow, gravelly strip next to the house abundant with self-seeding wallflowers. I might fall asleep to nightmares of smoke-spewing chimneys and giant industrial pitchforks, and wake in the night to the sound of fog-horns, but in my daylight hours I learned about worms and snails and caterpillars; buttercups, pissy-beds (Aunt Meg’s colourful name for dandelions) and Grandmother, Grandmother, pop-out-of-beds. In that overgrown cabbage patch, in the untidy wastelands on the edge of town, and on the long stretches of dune-covered sandy beach just down the road at Seaton Carew, I had a sense of openness, of space, and a very fragile feeling of wonder at the teeming life around me.
It was fleeting, and I didn’t again experience that sense of connectedness which I yearned for until, when I was twenty-one and just about to embark on a PhD at the University of London, my mother suddenly decided to abandon the city; she moved to a tiny cottage in rural mid-Wales. Soon afterwards, she married a Welsh-speaking shepherd, and went to live with him in a small remote house up in the hills outside the small town of Machynlleth.
I took the train north at the weekend whenever I could afford a ticket, because for the first time in my life I was actually experiencing what it might be like to live surrounded by fields and mountains, rather than just reading about it. I would sit outside at night on top of the hill behind the cottage watching the stars, listening to the call of owls, wondering if there might be beauty and magic in the real world after all, rather than just in my imagination. The longing for that feeling never left me, but sitting in that car park not quite a decade later, I realised that I was facing the consequences of living with its antithesis.
There is a hollow desperation which, from the inside, borders at times on madness in living a life which you know is the wrong life, while not being able to see a way out. When all of your childhood conditioning tells you to stick with it, keep yourself safe, always vote for security and certainty. But I knew that I was not who I was supposed to be; I knew in my heart that I didn’t like my life; and my body was beginning to buckle under the strain. One weekend, shortly after that first panic attack in the car park of my workplace, I went to Wales to visit my mother. I didn’t need to save up for the train fare anymore; I had a nice comfortable company car to ease my journey. Somewhere among the hills and valleys, we took refuge from the cold and wet in a café which also sold a random assortment of old books and antiques. We ordered a pot of tea and went to sit at a wooden table by the window, staring out despondently at the pouring rain. And then an object on the windowsill caught my eye: an old Devon Ware jug, creamy yellow on the outside and rich, dark brown inside. The inscription on it read:
No star is ever lost
we once have seen
We always may be
what we might have been1
I glanced past the jug to my reflection in the window, and caught the dark circles under my eyes and the hollowness on my face. Swallowing down sudden tears, I snatched up the jug. The sticky label on its side declared that it was just £8, but I would have wanted it if it had taken every penny I possessed, and if it hadn’t been for sale I would have begged for it. I bought it, clutching it to my heart like a talisman, like the talisman that it has always been to me and still is today, and when I got home I placed it on the small desk where I sometimes wrote, sometimes read, always dreamed.
We always may be what we might have been. What was it that I might have been? All I knew was that it was anything other than what I now was. What was the star that I once had seen? All I knew was that it shone brightly in a place that wasn’t given over to the Wasteland. It shone down onto the top of a grass-covered hill at night as I sat watching it, head back, gazing up into a sky undimmed by light pollution. I closed my eyes and I saw myself getting up from that hill and walking down through the brightly painted wooden front door of a simple stone cottage, sitting in an armchair by a glowing stove, reading a book or maybe even writing one. I saw myself waking up to the nascent promise of each new dawn, taking my morning tea outside, listening to birdsong and the bark of a vixen in the wood. I saw my hands in the soil, my feet cold and bare in a fast-flowing river. The person I saw wasn’t anxious, alienated, brittle. It wasn’t her job that defined her, but her way of being in the world. She looked as if she belonged. Not just to a star, and a hill, and a cottage; but to herself, and the calling owls, and the wider world she inhabited.
In September of 1992, a year after my panic attack, I spent two weeks in Ireland. This was a country I had longed to visit since I was four years old, a country whose name was synonymous with music and magic and to which I had always felt as if I might belong – and yet somehow I had never managed to get myself there. A week into that holiday, I made a decision. I made it at sunset, standing on an edge. The Connemara coastline was rugged, rocky and intensely beautiful. To get there, I had travelled through a land that, while hardly empty of people, was nevertheless still intensely pastoral, and free of the stench of industrialisation which characterised so much of the country I’d grown up in. I stood there for a long time, staring out west to the islands. For the first time in my life I felt as if my feet were in the right place. My place, my culture and the stories of my ancestors rising out of the hills and bogs of this land where they were living still. The Call came again, loud and clear; this time I answered.
I returned home, put our house on the market, and made plans to hand in my notice when it sold. I had no idea what I would do when I got there, but I was moving to Ireland for sure.
I imagined, at the grand age of thirty-one, that this move would represent the end of my journey: that this would be the place where I could dig in deep and find that new skin which I so badly needed. As it turned out, it was only the beginning, and by the time I had moved to Lewis eighteen years later and stood on another far western shore, looking out to other islands, hearing another Call, contemplating another journey, a long and complicated tale had already unfolded. I had come to Lewis because I imagined, at the grand age of forty-nine, that this move represented the end of that long and winding journey I had been on since I was thirty. I imagined that this would be the place where finally I could dig in deep, where finally I might find that new skin which might fit me. And indeed, that particular phase of my journey did end – abruptly, in ways I could never have expected; brutally, as I found myself slammed up against yet another dead end. And so it was that I was hearing a new Call, finding myself hurled over a new edge, plunging into the darkness, then finding my path and embarking on a new journey – one which finally would make sense of the old. Edges, it seems, breed edges; and journeys, like edges, are fractal. There is never just one.
The Call comes when we break, or are ready to break. Sometimes it may come in the form of a change of circumstances: a relationship ends; we lose our job; we become ill. A child leaves home; a loved one dies. Sometimes the Call comes to us in a dream. At a critical stage in my own journey I had such a dream: a dream more vivid than any I had ever had before in my life. I dreamed of a creature with the face of a fierce, ageing woman and the body of a large hound. I held out my hand to her and she smiled; her teeth were pointed and sharp. Then she bit me. I looked down at my open, bleeding hand, and found that each of my fingers had turned into a bat. I had no idea then what I was dreaming, but I knew that I needed to know. After much research I discovered that the Greek goddess Hecate was sometimes represented with the head of a woman and the body of a dog. Hecate, who holds the keys to the Underworld, who calls us to follow her there, whose Call is a call to transformation. And the bats? In almost all cultures, they are a symbol of rebirth.
Some of us may hear the Call sooner, others later. But whenever it happens, whenever it transpires that we find ourselves on an edge, out of our element, out of our skin, there is something in us still which hears, no matter how deeply buried. Like the first August swallow fidgeting on the telephone wires, we know there is something we should be doing. We know there is a journey we should be undertaking. We cannot rest; we cannot sleep. Something in us knows that there is somewhere we should be going. And in the end, whether or not we think we can, we go because we must. We go, on a wing and a prayer, because to stay is to die.
The Selkie’s skin is the source of her life-giving, creative power. The skin – this pelt that once smelt so wonderfully of home and of herself, in all her natural wildness, in all her instinct and heat and passion – represents her unique self, her singular gift to the world, and it was stolen from her. The consequences of the loss, of this disconnectedness, this separation from her true nature and what nourishes and empowers her, have become apparent only after many years. She is living an unlived life, estranged from her own sense of authenticity, dried up and disconnected from intimacy – with herself, with others, with the world. Now she has heard the Call. She knows that she needs a new source of nourishing moisture to quench her aridity. What can she do? How can she find her lost skin? Is it even possible? What is it anyway, this ‘true feminine nature’? And what is she supposed to do with it once she discovers it?
And so, with such questions, the journey begins. On any quest, there may be dead ends; sometimes we can set off down the wrong path. When the Selkie’s old skin is discovered, when she understands finally what was lost, she cannot wear it again, because it has disintegrated through misuse. She cannot simply pick up where she left off; she must set off to find a new skin. Nor can she be saved by her daughter: she must save herself. She must separate herself from the Wasteland, and from the rules and control of the patriarchy – represented in this story by her husband. She must find her own way. It takes a monumental effort, for she has grown tired and jaded. But the choice is hers: to lie in bed and die, or to rise up, and find a new way to live.
We may need to travel a long distance before we find the new skin that fits us, and before we can learn to be comfortable in it – but first, we have to commit ourselves to the journey. We have to awaken from our torpor, commit to life instead of the desiccated half-life of the Wasteland. We must shake off the false skins we’ve cloaked ourselves in; we must let the old die to make room for the new. We must be willing to detach from who we have been, what we have become, before we can discover who we are really meant to be and what our work is in the world.
And it is hard, to begin; to get out of bed, to close our eyes and cross this first threshold. To fall forward into the wind, to let ourselves topple off the edge, to get in the tiny, rocking boat. It’s a big step, this first movement towards wholeness. It means leaving behind the safety of familiar social structures and supports. It’s a leap into the dark, a massive letting go. And yet, looking at our own lives, looking at the fate of the planet – it is clear that we’re all standing on an edge, whether we mean to or not. These are edge-dwelling times. We may accidentally fall over that edge, pushed from behind like a lemming, plunging to our death, numbed by the Wasteland. But if we want to live we must stand there consciously, aware of the troubled times and the endangered planet, and then of our own volition step out across this first threshold.
Sometimes a person may deliver the push that helps us over the edge. Someone familiar: a daughter, a friend; someone unfamiliar: an unexpected teacher, or guide. Often we need help, to set ourselves off on the journey. We need the young daughters, who will not let go of hope, who will not let us die; and the Wise Old Women with compassion enough to lend us their secrets, to whisper to us of the mysteries of life and death. We need help to set ourselves on the way that we have lost, to find our way to that deep knowing, and so to the fullness of our own power. Of course, there is always a reason not to go, always a reason not to change. Someone needs us too much, or we are too afraid, and besides how will we live? We have families and responsibilities, and we must eat and pay the bills. And so we stay in the Wasteland, and perpetuate the system that is crippling us and the planet.
But let’s say we go. Let’s say we not only hear the Call, but respond. Let’s say we take that first step. We leave the job we hate, or the damaging relationship. We want to find our lost skins, the missing pieces of ourselves that we seem to have lost somewhere along the way. We want to find the old cottage in the hills, the fast-flowing river, the work that makes us feel useful, and fulfilled. The Selkie crosses the threshold; she sets out. After all that she has been through, she nevertheless has the ability to see beyond what is known, to believe in a new beginning – even if she isn’t entirely sure what that new beginning might consist of. For she is between stories: the story she’s been telling herself about who she is is at an end; she has no idea what the next story might be. She travels empty-handed; she leaves the ‘things of the world’ behind her.
It is reminiscent of a pilgrimage, and for sure the true Heroine’s Journey resembles a pilgrimage more than an adventure, and edges – like shorelines – are the places from which pilgrimages begin. Step across that edge and it is a severance, a kind of death: we can never go back to what we were before. A pilgrimage asks that we give up everything so we might learn what is truly ours. A pilgrimage is a search for knowledge, a search for becoming. And pilgrimage begins also with longing: longing for deep connection; longing for true nurturing community; longing for change and the rich, healing dark. Pilgrimage involves a new way of travelling and seeing, and it is in our ancestry. The Celtic peregrini of the Dark Ages set off on great sea voyages to found their monastic settlements, travelling in large curraghs which were capable of sailing immense distances. And in the great Immramas and Echtrai, the wonder-voyages of old Ireland, heroes set out in boats to discover the magical islands which they believed to lie far away in the ocean to the west. The Celtic Otherworld sometimes was thought to be such an island, and one which remained outside the influence of patriarchal structure, for it was ruled by women. It was called Tír na mBan, the Land of Women; or Tír na nÓg, the Land of Youth.
There is no map for this pilgrimage we are on; there is no fixed path. And that is a good thing, because following the paths that others have set for us, the paths that the system confines us to – that is the cause of the problem. We have been too timid, too blind, too unthinking; now it is time to find our own way. There are no maps. When the Selkie obeys the call and sets out to find the Old Woman of the World, she doesn’t really know where she is going. All she knows is that the cave is somewhere on the coast, to the north and west. But she sets off anyway. She points herself roughly in the right direction, puts one foot in front of the other, grits her teeth, and she walks.
It was a pig which, in 2012, first brought Karen Taylor and me together: a handsome and good-natured pedigree Gloucester Old Spot boar called Rufus. Our two sows, Edna (named after the poet Edna St Vincent Millay) and Doris (named after Doris Lessing) needed a man, and Rufus happened to be available for an adventure. And so, one morning close to Christmas, my husband David and I set off from the far south-west tip of the Isle of Lewis on a slow, winding hour-and-a-half drive to the far north-west tip, livestock trailer hooked up and sheepdogs in tow. Normally, loading a pig of any description into a trailer of any description is challenging, but on this occasion, as soon as we backed it up and opened the gate to his field on Karen’s croft, Rufus just walked right in. He obviously had some foreknowledge of the pleasures that would be waiting for him at the other end of the journey.
As well as appreciating her pigs, I quickly became fascinated by the work that Karen (a former psychiatric nurse) and her husband Ron Coleman (a voice-hearer and former ‘user’ of psychiatric services) were doing through their company Working to Recovery, which provides resources for people working in the mental health field. They have a particular interest in the design of mental health services aimed at people who are classified as ‘psychotic’, and specialise in cutting-edge training courses for working with people who, like Ron, hear voices. They tell Ron’s own story of recovery, encourage engagement between mental health services, carers and service users, and spread their message that recovery is possible for everyone.
Karen, Ron, their twelve-year-old daughter, Francesca, and sixteen-year-old son, Rory, have lived since 2008 on a croft in the small Gaelic-speaking kingdom of Ness, which happens also to be the most north-westerly community in the European Union. Ness is best known for its continuation of the ancient tradition of guga hunting: each year in late August, ten men from the community go out to the island of Sula Sgeir for two weeks to harvest around 2,000 young gannets, considered there to be a delicacy. I drove there on a typically wild and blustery winter’s day, with heavy leaden skies which intermittently burst open to shower down icy rain.
Karen is a large, vivacious fifty-three-year-old woman with short dark hair, an enormous smile and beautiful eyes. She and Ron spend much of their time travelling overseas, and a certain amount of consequent chaos characterises the house – but this is a comfortable family home, where much living happens. Over tea and a bowl of butternut squash soup, I discover that after training as a registered mental health nurse, Karen worked for many years in the National Health Service in England, where she designed, implemented and managed innovative community care services. While she was managing a day hospital in Gloucester, she attended a MIND conference in Blackpool which changed not only the way that she saw the mental health system of which she was a part, but the future course of her life.
‘There were patients there giving presentations about their anger with the system. There were radical psychiatrists talking about different ways to practise. It opened up a new world for me: a world of service-user involvement and of patient rights. I started to become more radical at work, more challenging of the system. And then, at a similar conference shortly afterwards, I met Ron. He was speaking about his experiences as a voice-hearer, about his journey from diagnosed psychiatric patient to trainer, consultant and recovery specialist, and I was enthralled and inspired. It wasn’t long before we got married, and then we became involved in setting up the Scottish Hearing Voices Network, and soon after that we founded Working to Recovery together.’
The work that Karen and Ron do and the message they spread is, by design, revolutionary, intended to challenge a psychiatric system which they believe lacks heart. ‘The medical model, with all its emphasis on pathology and biology, brings with it a reliance on medication to keep the problem – and the person – under control. There is surprisingly little focus on recovery, on becoming a whole and functioning person. In fact, there’s an assumption that recovery is impossible: if you’re psychotic, you’re always going to be psychotic. It’s what defines you. You’re never going to be able to function. But that’s simply not the case. Recovery is perfectly possible: just look at Ron.’ And indeed, since Ron’s own recovery from mental illness he has gone on to write numerous books and papers on the subject, and is a sought-after lecturer at conferences around the world.
Karen finds herself constantly travelling around Europe, America and Australasia to spread their message, and so a home in the farthest reaches of the Outer Hebrides isn’t perhaps the most obvious place from which to embark on a jet-setting lifestyle. It wasn’t Gaelic roots which brought her here: although her family is of Welsh ancestry, she was brought up in Gloucestershire without any trace of Celtic tradition.
‘What brought us here is a bit of a long story,’ she laughs, ‘and unlikely as it may seem, it began in New Zealand. Ron and I were working there for a couple of weeks, delivering Recovery Champions training courses. There were quite a few Maori elders attending the courses, and I remember being struck by their strong sense of community, of belonging to their tribe. It was a kind of belonging that also connected them very deeply to the land, and it touched something in me that I hadn’t thought about since I was very much younger.
‘I was very close to my grandparents when I was a child, spending most of my school holidays staying with them in Frampton-on-Severn, a beautiful village in Gloucestershire. My grandfather was a labourer on the manor farm, and I would go to work with him, watching the milking, sheep-dipping and combine harvesting, and helping in his vegetable garden. My paternal grandfather also worked on a fruit farm, had a huge vegetable garden, and kept geese. And for a while my father ran a market garden and had free-range chickens. So I grew up with a strong sense of connection to the land, which I gradually lost as I became older and more focused on my career.
‘I started thinking about all that in New Zealand, and also about my own “tribe”, and what that might mean. While we were there something strange entered me: some wistful need to reassess myself and my place in the world, and to think about why I was doing this work, and where it might lead. At the same time, I was exhausted: we always worked incredibly hard, and although I loved the energy, I was increasingly feeling the lack of time for myself.
‘The other thing that I remember from that New Zealand experience is that there were spirals everywhere – for example, the landscape was full of unfurling ferns, the national emblem of New Zealand. The Maori carve spirals out of New Zealand jade and call them koru, and I was so strongly drawn to that symbol. When we got home I began to explore what it was that the spirals were evoking in me. It’s a dominant feature of Celtic art and imagery, of course, and so that led me back to the interest in Celtic culture which I had had very strongly when I was a child. Then, I was always doodling, and so many of my doodles were spirals; it’s a symbol that’s always held a fascination for me. And now, it wouldn’t let me go.
‘It represents the cycle of life and rebirth, and this seemed so relevant to the work we were doing with recovery, and with change. I kept thinking that the same sense of attachment to the tribe that I had found among the Maori in New Zealand had also been there for the Celts, as well as the attachment to the land. And the warrior culture, of course, and the fact that sometimes warriors were women. I have always considered myself to be a warrior woman. You have to be, to survive in this world.
‘I’ve also always been drawn to the west, and specifically to west coasts. We lived on the east coast of Scotland, and so it seemed natural that my interest in all things Celtic would eventually take me all the way west to Lewis. We went there on holiday in 2006, and I felt an immediate recognition. As if the island was calling me here.’
My own experience of coming to live on Lewis was very similar: a sense of being drawn, or called. In my case, drawn to the edge, to explore the wildest, fiercest and truest elements of my own nature. To let the wind and sea abrade all the rough edges of my life. Some of the same yearnings drew Karen to the island at that time.
‘I suppose . . . on the one hand, yes, I was on an edge, but on the other hand, I felt safe here, and held. More than anything, I was drawn to the ancientness of the land. Lewis rock – the Lewisian gneiss – is some of the oldest rock in the world. The wildness of the coastline, the beaches, the weather, the wind – all of it spoke to me of depth and change, and that was something I wanted badly. When we got back to the mainland after that first holiday, I couldn’t settle. Something was beginning to shift in my own life, as if one phase was ending, and another beginning. The sense of being drawn to the island seemed like part of that process. I wanted to embark on a new quest, a search for myself, for spiritual development, and a new way of connecting to the world and the land.
‘It took me two years to make it happen, but we moved here in 2008. It was a selfish move in many ways, though the family went along with it – some of them kicking and screaming! – but it seemed essential to me. When we first moved, Ron was travelling a lot, so I took six months off to settle the family in. It was the first time for years that I’d had proper time for myself. Most days there was just me and the croft, and it gave me time to learn to breathe again. It was a lovely warm summer, and I remember being out on the land till 11 o’clock at night, digging. It was such a joyful time. I’d walk down the croft and if I heard a lark singing, I’d look up and I’d sing back to it. It was as if I was singing in praise of the place, of the land, out of the sheer love of being alive. I felt more intensely alive than I had for a long time, and it was all part of the reconnection to this place, to the land and the Celtic culture.’
The rain has stopped, and so Karen and I clear the plates away and then head off outside and down the croft: I’m keen to see again the four Hebridean sheep which we had sold her the previous year. As we turn the corner of the house, a sudden gust nearly blows us off our feet and I stagger back and steady myself against the wall. It’s not as remote as you might imagine, here: other houses are close by, and all the crofts neatly lined up in a row behind them. The crofting and fishing villages strung out along this north-western coastline of Lewis represent one of the most densely populated rural locations in Britain, accounting for around two-thirds of the population of the islands which make up the Outer Hebrides. The sea is by far the dominant feature of the landscape; inland, as far as the east coast of the island, stretches a vast area of flat blanket bog.
We finally make it round the corner, only to be greeted by an extended family of excessively friendly kunekune pigs who have escaped from their field. Karen ignores them and they root around the garden happily; it’s obviously a common enough occurrence. Even though she now travels frequently, the animals and the croft ground her here, and that sense of connection to the island which she felt in those first months has stayed with her.
‘Living on Lewis, being outside watching the sea, watching the storms come in, feeling the energy of the wind, the light, the rainbows . . . looking after the pigs and poultry, engaging in those same routines every day, brings me back to this need for my feet to be strongly grounded in the earth so that I am nourished, so I’m able to carry out the work that Ron and I do.
‘When you sit on this small island and see the huge waves pounding against rocks millions of years old it gives a sense of perspective – how tiny we are in this world, how insignificant our lives are, yet every act of kindness, every moment of love, can make a difference for generations to come. Love is a dirty word in psychiatry, it’s an embarrassment, never to be mentioned. In that sense, I see the psychiatric system as a prime example of that “Wasteland” you’re talking about.
‘What is better? To fill someone with pills, then strap them to a bed and leave them alone? Or to sit beside someone in their “madness”, to really listen to their pain, anguish, joy, their search for spiritual identity, peace, meaning? To listen to the messages of the voices that they’re hearing, to help interpret, to hold a hand, give a hug, to bear witness to their story, to believe in them, to give hope, to help understand, to build resilience, to leave them with the possibility of transformation. So I can’t stop this work I do, every day seeing another person begin to understand the sources of their pain, begin to want to live, begin to love themselves . . . It is worth every sacrifice, every bit of energy I have. But being here, developing this connection with the land and the culture – that’s what gives me the strength to go on with it.’
As we stand and look down the field at the little black sheep, who are clearly fat and thriving, Karen talks about the draw of the old Gaelic culture here in the Hebrides, comparing it to the Maori culture which affected her so deeply in New Zealand. ‘It seems to me,’ she reflects, ‘that these cultures hold a secret to parts of us that have been lost in the West: our ability to live in accord with nature and with spirit. And this is also at the heart of our work: there is a growing awareness in me that our mental health suffers because we do not have our feet firmly planted in the land.’
And the land is at the heart of it, for sure. ‘Climate change’ may be new, but our broken relationship with the land is old. It goes back centuries – in England, for example, it goes back to the Enclosure Acts in the eighteenth century, which effectively removed the right of access to and use of common land from English rural life. But one of the many inspiring things about Lewis is a sense of connection to the land which is so intense that it defied all attempts to dispossess the people. At various significant points in this island’s history, its people were prepared to fight to resist the power of landlordism and to insist on the right to remain on the land which they had occupied for generations.
As we walk back to the house, Karen tells me that it seems right to her that she has gone through the menopause here on Lewis.
‘In a sense, I feel as if the Call to come to the island was the beginning of a quest: a yearning to make some sense of my life. The menopause is a time of looking inward, I think. It’s a powerful time, and working through that threshold phase – no longer mother, but not quite crone – is quite a process. Turning fifty made me stop and think about who I am and what I want from this life; so for me, this island has definitely been a place to begin a new journey – or a new stage in my larger journey. I’ve shed a number of sealskins over the past couple of years. During this time, I’ve been questioning myself and my way of being in the world, as a woman. I’ve especially been thinking about power. I suppose I am in some ways a powerful person, in the sense of being strong-willed, driven to succeed. When I was a child I always wanted to be a star, and when I was young I studied drama and trained as an actress. That sense of power is very good for inspiring people, for helping them along that very difficult path to recovery, but if you’re not careful, it can become controlling. To me, that’s one of the big problems with the world, with the systems we’ve created. I’m striving for a more authentic way to use my power, and for balance.’
All of this, she is quite certain, emerges out of living on an island. ‘It’s back to that edge again: I feel as if I’m always walking on an edge between getting it right and failing, but living here has taught me not to fear that edge. And not to try always to control it – living on an island teaches you that, if nothing else. You’re not in control. The weather is out of your control, and even just getting off the island is all too often out of your control when the ferries fail to run! The age of the land teaches me something similar. It’s not all just about that sense of strength, of the force of nature – it’s about understanding that I am not the centre of the universe, but just one small part of it all, a blip in this land’s history. I still want to change the world, but living on an island has also taught me humility. An island is a great place to deal with your Shadow. There’s nowhere to hide, on an island. It’s brutal.’