Escape to Iona
What I found on the "Island at the Edge of the Known World"
Hello! How are you? Well, I hope.
First off, my Literary Hub piece on Dora Maar was published this week. I was very pleased to see that it was featured as their lead story for the day!
This came at an important time for me as I try to establish myself as a writer (rather than a professor who writes on the side). Thanks to those of you who saw it when it appeared and wrote to me. It was lovely to have you cheering me on!
I had hoped to get this letter to you sooner, but I have to admit that I’ve been having a bit of a rough time lately. First, I had to admit to myself that I was not feeling great, and that was hard, especially as I feel like I’ve come so far and I really should be better at this by now—“this” being living through a major life transition and out of a suitcase at the same time. But I finally cut myself some slack and told myself I needed a break. On this journey, as I’ve transitioned from one new place to the next, I’ve given myself time to adjust and adapt. I’ve also learned to give myself plenty of time to process and think and treat myself well when I hit an emotionally difficult period.
What is it about our fifties that feels like adolescence all over again in some ways? Or is that just me? Or is it just those of us who are going through major life transitions? It seems like most of the people I know are going through one or another kind of transition. A lot of us have been adjusting to the empty nest as our kids move on to lives of their own—and we’re left wondering what our own lives look like when we don’t have to devote so much of ourselves to them. Quite a few people I know are also reinventing themselves in terms of their careers. And a lot of folks, like me, have come out of the pandemic newly single. I just happened to do all of those at once. I also sold my house, left the U.S., and beagn traveling around Europe for a year. And let me say, it’s been a lot!
Lately, things had been feeling really good and more stable. I put away my suitcase for a while and have been living in the same apartment in Edinburgh for three months. I had fallen in love with the city and wanted to give living here a try. Plus, I was just tired of moving every 2-4 weeks. As a result of this new-found stability, I was even able to start writing in earnest on a new book project. I felt like I was finally figuring out what I wanted my next life to look like.
Two weeks ago, I had a delightful distraction from writing when my daughter came to Edinburgh for a visit. It was an incredible week! And so hard to say goodbye again. The good news is that we both agreed we wanted to spend more time than just a week together when her winter break rolls around. I’m hoping I’ll be back in Edinburgh then and we can have more time together here. But that remains unclear.
I had thought I would write to you about all that we did during that week, but life derailed me after she left, and I just haven’t been able to sit down and do it. I will say, though, that the highlight of the week was a sea bird cruise (more like a speed boat ride—it was thrilling!) around the Isle of May, the isle of Craigleith, and Bass Rock. We saw puffins in the water around the first two islands and then on Bass Rock a massive colony of gannets. It’s called “Gannet City,” and it really is a special experience to be in the presence of so many beautiful, large, and graceful birds. When we got close enough, we could even see the gray, fuzzy baby gannets in their nests.
Another highlight was all of the booksores we visited. Edinburgh truly has an amazing collection of independent bookshops. We went to six different stores and each had to restrain ourselves from walking out with an armful of books. I told her that next time we can try some news ones—I could think of five more off the top of my head. And that isn’t even all of them! I suppose it says something when a city’s main train station is named after a novel (Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly).
After my daughter left, mid-July, it was time to get back to my life here, but I only had two weeks left before I’d have to decamp. In August short-term rents go through the roof during Edinburgh festival month. Fortunately, a friend needs a house sitter for most of August, so I’ll be heading down to Surrey, south of London. I had hoped to come back to Edinburgh in September, but I was finding it incredibly difficult to find a short-term let I could afford because the students are coming back, and everything is going really fast.
Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to finalize my visa application and am still a couple of months away from knowing whether I will be able to stay in Scotland long term without having to come and go on a visitor’s visa. I told myself when I left the U.S. last September that I would give myself a year to travel and figure out my next move. My one-year travel anniversary is approaching. And I’m just so ready to settle down again.
As you can imagine, all of this uncertainty can take its toll. For me, it has meant a difficulty concentrating and focusing on writing. Top that off with the fact that in my new writing project, I’m reliving, so to speak, some of the painful stuff that I went through these last few years. Trying to transform some of the most difficult parts of your life into art (or at least something that a few people might be interested in reading) is a really tough job. Some days I feel like I’ve been through the wringer remembering what it felt like to go through those things the first time and then trying to find the language to express it.
All of this meant that it became hard to be in my apartment most of the day trying to write. Last Friday, I had this visceral need to flee, so I went online and within two hours had planned an escape to the Isle of Iona, off an island on the West coast of Scotland. I left the next morning, and it took me most of the day to get there. A bus to the Waverly train station, a train to Glasgow, a train to Oban, a ferry ride to the Isle of Mull, a bus ride across Mull, and a short ferry ride later, I stepped foot on the “Island at the Edge of the Known World,” as it has been called. Beyond it stretches the Atlantic all the way to Canada.
I’ve long wanted to go Iona, ever since reading the memoir Iona Dreaming: The Healing Power of Place by Clare Cooper Marcus.
I taught this book, about a woman who stayed on Iona after fighting breast cancer, in 2015 in a course on American Women’s Travel Narratives in Cork, Ireland. Before I left the U.S., I scanned the many passages I had marked in the book, and looking over them now, I can see how much it has influenced my trip overall.
Marcus was a burnt-out professor from California, and her desire to get away from her cluttered home and her too-busy, too-full life really resonated with me when I first read it. She came to Iona for six weeks of reflection, a lovely variation on the Walden-Pond experience that I’ve always longed for. Instead, I chose to travel, visiting mostly cities because I wanted to meet people. I don’t regret that, because I’ve met many amazing people who have helped me think about what kind of life I want to build for myself now. But the appeal of a contemplative retreat in nature remains.
Marcus writes of feeling liberated, arriving on the island with just a small suitcase and settling in to a life of reading, writing, going for walks, and observing the many forms of life on the island—sheep, birds, plants, tourists, locals, and the ever-changing sea. I was only there for four nights, but I began to wonder if I really came all this way ultimately to end up on Iona. Perhaps this was my true destination after all.
Iona is a special place, where the veil between this world and the next is supposed to be particularly thin. It’s known history goes back to 563—yes, actually 563; it hardly seems like a date. That is when Columba, a monk from Ireland, landed on the southern tip of the island. Legend has it that he left Ireland as a “white martyr,” giving up his homeland (rather than his life) in order to serve God. He purportedly brought 12 devotees with him to establish a monastery. (Sounds like he had little Christ complex to me.) Columba was known for his many miracles and spreading Christianity among the Picts across Scotland. He became a saint and was buried at the monastery, which became a site of pilgrimage, and so it has remained for the last 1500 years.
The monastery would grow and thrive for the next 300 years as a center of learning, literacy, and Celtic Christianity. It’s hard for us to imagine, but then, when travel by sea was infinitely easier than travel on land, Iona was actually strategically located. It is in the middle of the many islands off the West coast of Scotland, and Ireland is in easy reach, which made Iona a center for the flow of ideas, art, and literacy. The famous illuminated manuscript, the Book of Kells, was written there. After repeated Viking raids, monks took the book, Columba’s remains, and other relics to Ireland.
In the thirteenth century, as Roman Catholicism spread across England and Scotland, a Benedictine abbey and nunnery were founded on the site of Columba’s former monastery, which had itself been built on the remains of a Druidic center of learning. (You can read what I wrote about the nunnery on Instagram.) As religious beliefs and practices shifted, Iona remained an important spiritual center until the Scottish Reformation in 1560. In the 17th century, it was used briefly as seat of the Bishop of the Isles in the new Church of Scotland, but then left to fall into ruins.
In the 20th century, the abbey was rebuilt and an ecumenical Christian community was established there by George MacLeod in 1938. It continues to this day, and worship services are held in the church at least once a day. Today, people travel from all over the world to participate in the Iona Community. While I was there, youth groups from the U.S. were in residence. There are also large homes with accommodations and services run by the Episcopal Church and the Catholic Church.
I enjoy attending services, particularly Evensong, in the Anglican cathedrals of England. So I went to the Sunday morning service at the Abbey to soak up a bit of its history. I found that the service was too contemporary for my tastes, and, frankly, too American (as the American groups were participating in leading the service). As soon as the service ended, the area was inundated with the tourists who flock to the island in the summer. They come off the ferry all morning long as it runs back and forth from Mull. And in the afternoon, the lines are long to get back onto the ferry. I felt relief each day as they left and the island returned to a calmer, peaceful state.
I came to Iona to connect with something—I wasn’t sure what. I knew that it was a special place, but it took me a couple of days to really start to feel that. It was during my walks that I was able to access what Iona most has to offer (in my opinion), a connection to something beyond this world—not in worship services or buildings but in the natural landscape.
Celtic Christianity, which flourished from about the third century to the ninth, especially in Ireland and Scotland, had a long tradition of viewing nature as God’s book. Reading the Bible isn’t enough. God is in everything around us, from raindrops to the glow of the full moon, from a spider’s web to the ever-changing tapestry of clouds in the sky.
Clare Marcus Cooper writes of reading a book on Celtic Christianity during her stay on Iona. She learned:
I can see now that in many ways, I’ve been looking for the “ultimate place,” that spot that feels like home, not just in the sense of feeling comfortable, but also in the sense of feeling at home in a place. I’ve not been sure how to describe what I was looking for, but Iona helped me understand that its about much more than the material realm—what the houses look like, how many cafes and shops are nearby, what the weather is like, or what there is “to do” there. It’s about finding a place that feeds my soul.
Here’s more from Marcus:
Iona is most certainly a place of resurrection. I felt it happening to me, as if I were coming to life again after so many months navigating planes and trains and busses and exploring cities. I felt it happen mostly on the beaches, which on Iona are white sand dotted with ancient volcanic rocks. The water is turquoise and various shades of the bluest blue, not unlike what you find on the Mediterranean.
The weather, though, is quite different—alternating wind, rain, and sun, and temperatures in the 50s while I was there, in the height of summer. I loved it! As long as I had my layers to take off and put on again, I was happy, although I did get rather soaked my last night there on my way to and from dinner.
On the beaches—in the presence of the wind, the gentle waves, the rolling clouds, the clear blue water, the rocks that looked like ossified elephants, the birds skipping along the sand, and even the sheep wandering onto the beach and calling to each other—I felt the presence of the sublime, the Source, God, or whatever we choose to call it, entering through all of my senses.
If you walk far enough (which isn’t that far, as Iona is only 1 mile long and 3 miles wide), you can find yourself all alone on one of these beautiful beaches and see what Columba and his men saw when they first landed there 1500 years ago and felt God saying to them, “Stay.”
I didn’t here anyone telling me to stay. But I did hear, “Return.” I decided to come back the last week of August and stay for seven nights this time. After that, I have a flat lined up in the small seaside town of Gullane, east of Edinburgh. There I can see what it’s like to combine my daily life of writing with walks on the beaches and along the coast and occasional visits to the city. I’m thinking this could be the perfect balance I need.
And with the rest of this gorgeous country on my doorstep, I could make regular pilgrimages to those places where I can feel rejuvenated by the presence of the sublime. Just taking the train from Oban back to Glasgow, I was in awe of Scotland’s rugged beauty. I used to think of the rolling green hills of England as God’s country, but now I think he lives here. Or, perhaps, this is the place where the gods of old came to play, throwing the giant rocks around, leaving them behind as mountains, as the old stories tell.
That’s it for now. As always, I’d love to hear from you and know what you are doing and thinking these days.
Until next time, all the best,
Anne
My god, this is gorgeous land! My sense still is that you're a fine photographer as well as writer. Look at what you've captured here! Even the charming picture of you and Emma has all that wonderful stuff in the background: the staid cathedral, the active umbrellas taking people along.
What if "place" is more subtractive than additive? What if we yearn for a place that removes distractions so we can just be, can just bring forth the "home" that is, after all, within us rather than outside us?
I just received an email from an old friend who's moved to her son's tiny house on a tiny island in the Gulf of Thailand with three suitcases. And one of those holds her art supplies. She can't even receive mail but she says she's never felt more unencumbered. This from a woman who lived years near the ocean in CA and then in Hawaii. Sweet peace; it's possible.