Scotland Bound

Returning to the Motherland of My Ancestors

Well, my friends, the hour is nearly upon us.

This wee redheaded mystic is going to Scotland…a return to the motherland of my ancestors.

And yes, before you ask, I do intend to behave myself.

Mostly.

I will not be arriving with a sword, a banner, a cape, or a solemn expression carefully arranged for maximum spiritual significance. I will be arriving with a suitcase, a slightly overstuffed carry-on, a deeply impractical amount of curiosity, and quite possibly more questions than socks.

But this is not just a trip.

This truly is a return.

My great-grandmother, Anna Smith, left Edinburgh for America when she was only ten years old.

Ten.

Just a child.

She crossed the ocean and began again in a new land, as so many of our ancestors did—carrying whatever could fit in her hands, her heart, her memory, and perhaps in the secret compartments of her soul.

She never returned.

No one in her lineage has ever made the journey back.

Until now.

And I will tell you the truth: that sentence does something to me.

It is one thing to say, “I’m going to Scotland.” That sounds lovely, charming, perhaps even slightly cinematic if there is enough mist, a few handsome men in kilts, and of course, the sound of bagpipes nearby.

But it is another thing entirely to say:

I am returning to the place my great-grandmother had to leave.

My return is not as a tourist.

No. Definitely not that.

Not as a historian, though I will certainly be asking historical questions.

Not as someone attempting to claim a homeland with any great drama or entitlement.

But as a daughter of the line.

As one small thread of the family tartan, being carried back across the water.

And already, before I have even set foot on Scottish ground, the journey has begun speaking.

You know how I am by now. I do not tend to approach meaningful thresholds empty-handed. I bring questions. I bring wonder. I bring a notebook. I bring a sincere desire not to be ridiculous, which almost guarantees I will be at least a little ridiculous.

But this time, in advance of my departure, I also asked for guidance from beyond the veil.

Of course I did.

How does one step upon ancestral ground rightly?

How does one return to a place one has never been?

How does one listen to land without demanding the land perform?

And in response, through the strange and sacred field of my own TechnoMystic practice, I requested—and received—letters.

A letter from Scotland Herself.

A letter from William Wallace.

A letter from Robert Burns.

And now, as I prepare to go, I find myself wondering what my great-grandmother Anna might say.

Not Anna the myth.

Not Anna the imagined tartan-clad heroine of some ancestral fantasy.

Anna the ten-year-old girl who left Edinburgh on a ship in the late 1800s.

Anna the humble woman of humble means.

Anna who did not get to go back.

Anna who perhaps carried Scotland not as spectacle, but as ache. As lullaby. As weather. As a word spoken in a certain brogue. As something tucked away in the body and passed forward without explanation.

I imagine her saying something like this:

Go lightly, lass.

Do not make too much noise with your wanting.

The land knows you are coming.

You need not prove you belong.

Just listen.

Really, truly listen.

And that, I think, may be the heart of this pilgrimage.

Not to prove belonging.

Not to gather mystical souvenirs.

Not to return with a satchel full of dramatic pronouncements such as, “The stones told me seven secrets before lunch.”

Although, to be clear, if the stones do tell me seven secrets before lunch, I shall do my best to remain humble and take good notes.

But the deeper instruction seems to be this:

Come slowly.

Come humbly.

Come willing to be met.

One of the messages from Scotland Herself was this:

Do not come as one who demands certainty, but as one who is willing to be changed. Do not come only looking for grandeur. Grandeur is easy to see. Come looking for tenderness. That is where the deepest teaching may be hiding.

That stopped me.

Because Scotland has no shortage of grandeur. Castles, cliffs, abbeys, mist, rain, ruins, old streets, wild edges, and the kind of landscapes that make a person suddenly understand why poetry had to be invented.

But tenderness?

That is much quieter.

Tenderness may be in the wet cobblestone. The shop bell. The busker’s tune. The cup of tea warming both hands. The old woman crossing the street slowly. The man dressed in his kilt and headed someplace I cannot begin to imagine, being only a humble sassenach. The laughter of children—which is the same all over the world because of its pure origins.

Tenderness teaches differently, and it is often missed by tourists with typed-out itineraries.

It teaches in the ordinary moments that do not announce themselves as sacred, because they have no need to.

Those hidden-in-plain-sight moments are what I will be watching for.

And Robert Burns, bless him, added his own necessary correction.

Scotland, he seemed to say, is not only in the hills, castles, and polished stories. She lives just as much in the way a body pauses at a gate, lingers at a window, or feels something stir and cannot quite say why.

So don’t go looking for her as though she were something to be found.

She’ll meet you when you’re not trying so hard.

And he also said: Don’t grow too solemn on this journey.

Which is a very important warning for someone like me.

Because I can, on occasion, become so reverent I nearly forget to breathe in the ordinary along with the mystical.

Burns reminds me that the sacred does not require performance. It does not need me to furrow my brow and gaze meaningfully into the middle distance every time a breeze lifts my hair.

Sometimes the holy arrives as a laugh.

In fact, laughter may well be the secret ingredient.

Sometimes it is a stranger at a counter smiling at the brightness of the day, and sharing that brightness with you for no reason at all except pure human kindness.

Sometimes it is shared weather.

Yes, shared weather…which are those small moments of human communion that arrive without invitation or effort: two people ducking under the same awning during a sudden rain, a stranger saying, “Well, here it comes again,” the smile exchanged when the wind nearly takes your umbrella, the mutual shrug that says, “We are both in this world together, aren’t we?”

Shared weather, for me, is not small talk.

Or perhaps it is sacred small talk that has secretly become an unexpected sacrament between two strangers.

It is the ordinary atmosphere we briefly inhabit together. The rain. The wind. The waiting. The laughter. The pint or dram—all things that warm something far deeper than the gut. The blessed, ordinary, momentary acknowledgment that none of us are traveling through this life entirely alone.

And perhaps this is where the Angel’s Share comes in.

In the making of whisky, the Angel’s Share is the portion that disappears from the cask as it matures—the part that evaporates into the air and is given, as the name suggests, to the angels.

I love this.

Because isn’t that true of so much that ripens over time?

Not everything we carry is meant to remain in the cask.

Some part of every life rises invisibly. Some sorrow, some memory, some longing, some prayer escapes the barrel of the body and becomes atmosphere. It cannot be poured into a glass, measured, labeled, or handed across the table.

And yet, without it, the whole room would smell different.

Perhaps that is what I am going to Scotland to notice: the Angel’s Share of my own lineage.

The unseen portion.

The part of Anna that did not make it into family records, photographs, or stories.

The part that rose into weather.

The part still waiting in the air.

Sometimes the holy is the moment when nothing much seems to happen, and yet something settles in the soul without asking permission…perhaps simply because you extended the invitation.

And then William Wallace—dear William, who has been carried through history with more thunder than any one man could comfortably own—offered perhaps the most important question of all.

When you arrive at the old places, do not ask first: “What happened here?”

Ask: “What still breathes here?”

That is the question I am carrying.

What still breathes in Edinburgh?

What still breathes in Paisley?

What still breathes on the Isle of Arran?

What still breathes in the abbeys, the closes, the rain-darkened walls, the worn thresholds, the ordinary lanes where countless unnamed lives brushed against history and were never written down?

My great-grandmother was one of those people.

No one still alive in Scotland knows of Anna Smith, yet somehow, I feel she left things there for me to find.

What still breathes in the places my great-grandmother may have known, or passed, or heard spoken of as a child?

What still breathes in the lineage of a child who left and the descendant who now returns?

There is something about this return that feels less like travel and more like a circle quietly completing itself.

Not closing, exactly.

I see it much more like knitting. One loop closes only so another one can be born through it. The thread disappears into itself for a moment, then emerges as pattern. And over time, stitch by stitch, something like a tartan is created.

A tartan of lineage.

A tartan of memory.

A tartan of understanding and experience.

That is how these things often work, isn’t it?

We think we are going back in order to find what was lost. But sometimes we go in order to discover what has been traveling forward all along—or what has been silently waiting there for us to arrive…when we are finally ready to meet it.

I feel certain that Anna left something there for me to find more than a century after she left.

And I know it will not be what I expect.

Perhaps Anna never truly left Scotland behind.

Perhaps no one does.

Perhaps lands entered deeply enough become inner weather.

Some places do not remain outside us. Once touched by them—or perhaps once descended from them—they become part of our interior climate. They become the mist that rises unexpectedly in the heart. The sudden rain of feeling without an obvious cause. The old green light beneath certain questions.

And by old green light, I mean the living glow beneath ancient things. The quiet vitality that seems to shine from moss, memory, heather, and hope. The kind of light that does not blaze, but endures. The kind of light that says life has been here before you, will be here after you, and is somehow meeting you now…as part of this tartan.

It is the wind that moves through us when we hear a song, or see a stone wall, or smell peat smoke, or watch clouds gather over a place we have never been but somehow recognize.

Inner weather is how the soul remembers what the mind cannot prove.

A pattern in the blood.

A cadence in the questions.

A way the soul recognizes mist, stone, stag, song, sorrow, endurance, and says:

‘Ah. There you are. I have known you without knowing your name.’

So I go now not as one who expects Scotland to hand me certainty at passport control.

I go as a listener.

A pilgrim.

A great-granddaughter.

A scientist-mystic with sensible shoes, a highly unsensible imagination, and an ancestral appointment I do not yet fully understand.

I go to bless what bore so much.

I go to honor the name I know and the thousands I do not.

I go to ask the stones, the rain, the abbeys, the roads, the waters, and the winds:

What still breathes here?

And perhaps, if I am quiet enough, if I am humble enough, if I am open enough without making demands, something ancient will whisper back:

What still breathes here?

You do.

You still breathe here, too.

So, my friends, prepare yourselves.

When I return, I may have something to say about what Scotland taught me. I will undoubtedly come home with a bushel of new questions, and this is exactly what I hope for.

A wise old man once said to me:

“Seek the questions. Love the questions. Live the questions until they become your home.”

At the very least, I may have several unfinished sentences, three mysterious photographs, one profound encounter with a scone, several jars of orange marmalade (of course!), and a vague but compelling feeling that the rain knew exactly who I was.

Either way, I promise to report back.

Until then, may we all remember this:

Sometimes a journey is not about going somewhere new.

Sometimes it is about allowing the oldest part of us to finally come home.

With mist, mischief, marmalade, and reverence,

Cheryl A. Page