In early 2019, just before I moved to Scotland, I had a dream that an eagle brought me a book. I had already been hoping to move to Scotland, but really had no idea how or where that could happen with where I was at in my life at the moment (still emotionally burned out from my career and broke by choice from not being able to continue working in it essentially).
In the dream I was standing on what was to me a recognisably Scottish beach surrounded by hills and mountains. A golden eagle arrived carrying a large book and presented it to me before flying away again. The book was very old and extremely beautiful. The ancient binding was bright green and highly decorated with gold. In trying to describe it to myself later I thought of the Book of Kells which I had visited before in Dublin and the illuminated manuscripts of the 9th Century that I loved. This increasingly became an important detail in the dream and now a meaningful connection.
At the time I didn’t know what the contents of the book was at all. But the dream stayed with me. I even painted the eagle. I knew my pathway to understanding the gift was in Scotland. And soon some synchronistic events found me quite quickly moving on to an estate on the edge of Loch Fyne covered in neolithic and iron age monuments, stretches of coastline, and ancient deer trails.
Eventually I came to understand that the book was a story I would be gifted during my time living in Argyll. And I was. It's a piece of fiction that comes directly from the landscape. A story where the landscape is a main character not just a setting. In order to hear it I had to walk the place into my bones and let things be uncovered very slowly.
It is also a story I had to leave that place to write. I know so many of you are wondering why would you ever leave such a place? Some of that story will be revealed as we go. But one of the final messages I received while tucked into my little hermit-like retreat came when the old rowan tree behind my house fell. I understood very clearly "You were protected here, but never safe." And I know that was part of the gift. And a big part of the story. This landscape, like many special places, definitely had an opinion about what would could happen to the people who lived on it without right relation. I had been gifted a pass, a window of seeing and being part of it, but the opening would close and if I wanted the peace to wander and further dream into the making of this story I would have to go somewhere else. For now, forever, I don’t know.
So I’ve settled here in Canada, where I was born, to tease the story out. And what is that story? Imagine the age of the Celtic Saints colliding with wild, but tended landscapes of the oldest ancestors. A landscape of rock and forest and sea on the west coast of Scotland with its own sovereignty and slower destiny becomes for a time front line of a great spiritual change. Yet the old worlds don’t die overnight. Under the direction of St. Colum Cille (or Columba), the celtic Catholic Church based on the Scottish isle of Iona sends its missionaries to convert the people of Scotland to their beliefs. Iona becomes an important political centre of western scholarship and even bookbinding! But what happens to the unconverted people? Where are the women in these stories? There are many missing and unexplained stories about the women of that time who have been erased and I’ll be reimagining them into the history that has purposefully forgot them.
I feel like I want to tell my imagining of the story of that landscape through time and I’m a little daunted with the scope. How do we share the tales of 4000 years ago and weave in the purpose of the neolithic monuments that dominate the landscape? How to imagine the thriving Iron Age civilisations and their need of such battlement protections are part of the same story? What about the last hundred years and the family of this place that lost their men, but whose women went on to be Clan Chief? More and more I imagine it will be a series of stories, and we’re going to figure out how those pieces drop into place together, here.
I hope you’ll stick around.
Susie