Goodbye Dundee!

I just took my last evening walk in Dundee.  I’ve spent all day saying goodbye to some of my favorite places, and taking pictures of them.  Groucho’s Records, Vintage Strings, the arts center, and Tartan Coffee.  All great places.  I also stopped in to Signpost for one last time to say farewell.  Oh, and I picked up a copy of Harry Potter.  I love Harry Potter.

Here’s my journal entry for tonight:

The Tay is a deep cool blue this evening, the color of cordial, hesitant goodbyes.  The railway bridge shudders at the train’s passing and the feather in my fingers pulls away with the wind just as I am pulling away, drawn on by my stream of existence, following the voices of my plans and hopes and dreams and trying hard to hear God amidst the din like music barely audible between crashing breakers.

But tomorrow!  Tomorrow the haste of packing, the anxious pit in my stomach telling me I’m forgetting something, the buses from Dundee to Perth and from Perth to Edinburgh, the planes from Edinburgh to London and from London to Philadelphia.  Then Mark!  A friend made in two semesters and kept for life.  Now I get two short days with that man.

Then home!  Strange that home is more a waystation than a destination now.  And yet it is important.  Lindsay preparing to leave for college, Mom and Dad preparing to empty their nest. Mom is especially changing her way of life and going back to work as a teacher of other’s children.  I pray she does as well with them as she did with us.

Beyond that, fond reunions and new friends at Covenant.  It will be a glorious time.

Goodbye Dundee!  Goodbye Becky and Amy and David and Annabelle and Emma Jane and Dave Hendo and Hugh and Graeme and Deuan and Jenny and Darren and everyone at St. Peter’s and Kelly and Monika and both Davids and Isabelle and Dean and Mike!  I’ll miss you.

Crannghal

This is a sculpture at Sabhal Mor Ostaig.  It is a bronze casting of the frame of a willow coracle like the ones Saint Columba would have used to bring Christianity to the Picts in Scotland.  Saint Columba is another one of my heroes.  He helped preserve learning in the west, and spread Celtic Christianity through the highlands and the Hebrides.  And he did it sailing a flimsy willow boat like this one.  The name of the sculpture, Crannghal means “framework of a coracle, or any skeleton-like odd contrivance” in Gaelic.

An interesting fact about the word Gaelic: when referring to the Irish dialect you pronounce it “gaylic” but when referring to the Scottish dialect you say “gallic.”

Skye, the first leg

After hillwalking in Glencoe with the gang from America, I parted ways with Matt Brown and co. and caught a bus to Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye.  Kyleakin consists of a pub, some houses, and three hostels.  I stayed at Skye Backpacker’s Hostel, which I recommend to anyone for its sociable atmosphere, relative inexpensiveness and quirkiness (the beds aren’t numbered, they are named after various magical creatures.  Mine was “selkies,” a kind of water sprite).

The next day I went to Sabhal Mor Ostaig (don’t pronounce the bh at all), the Gaelic College, where the Isle of Sky Festival (Feis an Eilein) was held.  I camped out on the college grounds, ate at the cafeteria and heard some amazing folk music in English, Gaelic and French (one of the bands was from Quebec).  Also had a great talk with a guy named Tom Spiers who was in one of the bands.  He told me how he got into folk music by hearing American music like Dylan in the sixties.  He played the fiddle.  That makes him cool.

I love music that is close to the ground, growing up out of daily experience and fruitful, open imaginations.  It’s amazing that music that is rooted so deeply in a culture and time I haven’t grown up in still speaks to me so immediately.

I have returned

It’s been a whirlwind trip into the highlands and islands of Scotland.  I don’t know where to begin.  That’s me standing in Lost Valley near Glencoe.

The greatest thing about the past week is that I’ve learned that a friendly man finds friends wherever he goes.  From Jason, Justin and Ryan, who were part of the Glencoe trip, to Tom Spiers, the folk musician and amateur historian, to Han Lee, the exchange student from China, I made friends at every stop in my journey.  Maybe that was the point of the pilgrimage…nah, I still don’t know.

The Pilgrimage

Well, my week of traveling is almost upon me.  I’ve spent half of today feeling sick (darn you Pizza Hut!) and the other half feeling thankful I’m not sick.  It is so good to have a belly full of pasta after a day of not eating.  Mmm, pasta with sauce so meaty it was more like sloppy joes than spaghetti.  I am satisfied.

That aside, I can’t wait to get on the road.  Tomorrow I meet Matt Brown and cohorts for a few days of highlands adventure, then I break away and head to the Isle of Skye on my own.  It feels like I’m preparing for a pilgrimage, but it’s a very hazy, undefined, wishy-washy kind of pilgrimage, where I won’t know its purpose until after it’s over, if then.  In other words, it is exactly the kind of pilgrimage I’m likely to take.  I can’t wait.

Once I get back I’ll post pictures and try to tell you all about it, but experience has shown that I am very poor at summing up a week of adventure.  Nonetheless, I’ll give you snapshots as best I can.  Until next week, God bless!