Scotland was home before I arrived. The bones of my ancestors were sown into the skin of the soil, sang in octaves of wind, fanned through birch, alder and hawthorn. I felt them strike me with a diligent rhythm, a primordial urgency. A call to be heeded in halos of golden light that skimmed aisles of plush soil pathways.
Beckoning, insisting,
These colossal cathedrals of trees.
I listened. I listened. I listened.
Variants of green spraying through leaves in champagne prisms of shadow, delicately threaded through the morning ether. This land let me incubate like a womb, let me roll through mossy troths and moors freckled with dew and silver lichen. I held the secrets of hollow tree trunks and mushroom caves, sat by lochs and cried into creeks. Everything was animated, everything was alive. Singing. Vibrant in plush beds of sprouting emerald, dusted with wild flowers and yellow cacti that smelled like coconut.
It is the unsettling bridge between seasons, flickering boldly with the spark of probabilities. The singing wind carries an air of change.
The summer sun begins to shorten, leaving a shading of uncertainty across the land. I am on the brink of immense change and my body has recognized it before it has arrived.
I am in Threshold Space, preparing to turn to Los Angeles, tethered to a past that has lost is allure and glamor.
I speculate all the things I could have done and said in my time here, and decide everything is as it should be.
I vow to leave parts of myself suspended in the Scottish highlands, safely tucked in these groves of green, right before dusk.
In solitude but woven into everything.
With the land as my only witness,
I vow to remain equal parts wild and pure,
wild and pure and untarnished,
just like the Scottish highlands.