Scotland is a place called home.
It's taken 17 months, and two more visits to find the words.
*dusts off this space*
Well folks, it’s been a year since my last post. While I’ve probably written more in the last 12 months than I have in any other point in my life, that’s all been in my journal, for-my-eyes-only kinda stuff. I’m feeling a fresh pull back to writing and I’m jumping right in a topic I’ve got no less than 20 unfinished drafts about. It’s gonna be messy, but it’s gonna be done.
I had a hunch it was going to happen. An inkling that I’d go to Scotland and it would break my heart. My heart was already feeling pretty battered and sore, so my thinking was a good clean break and some wide open space would give it what it needed to heal up whole. And break it did. Wide open.
“I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.” - Mary Oliver
What is it about Scotland? I’ve been trying to answer this and write about it since my first trip September 2023. I’ve struggled to respond with anything other than ‘It’s fucking Scotland!’. A frustrating answer I know, it explains nothing but also everything.
Scotland isn’t the first place I’ve travelled, so it’s not just a matter of the travel bug. I’ve spent a late winter in Malaga Spain, and a few warmer escapes to the Caribbean from wintery Ontario where I did nothing but beach-side bed-rot for a week.
I’ve had the privilege of travelling even further, and have left parts of my heart in places I had hoped to travel back to. It’s also not the first place I’ve imagined myself living. I’ve watched whales play off the coast of Stradbroke Island and dreamt of what family life on the gold coast of Australia would be like. I’ve wandered the ancient roads of Rome, lit by a golden sunlight only Italy knows, thinking through how I might retire there.
But Scotland, oh, Scotland wrapped it’s arms around me, snuggled me in close, rested it’s chin on my weary head, took a deep slow breath and whispered ‘Welcome home lass, I’ve been waiting fer ye.’ Then it set it’s hands on my shoulders, making distance enough to meet my eyes with a soft intensity, making sure I not only heard it’s words, but knew them to be sincere, without question. As I managed the slightest nod of acknowledgement it opened the door and said ‘Come on through, I’ll put the kettle on’. I took my own bone-deep breath and wandered in.
Scotland is the first place I’ve felt what it is to feel well and truly home. It’s a beautifully bizarre feeling, one I know I’m not alone in feeling. Scotland has wrapped it’s arms around many, welcoming them home. Countless more have had this feeling in various places all over the world, including my own country of Canada to be sure. But I also think this is a feeling many don’t know, maybe can’t know, or have no need to know.
To some, my love of and growing connection to Scotland may seem dramatic, romantic, escapist, silly or just plain weird. At times I find myself wanting to explain it, to make them understand what I know and feel. Other times I resign myself to not being understood, believed or thought sane. After all, why explain the unexplainable. Why justify the wanting. Why reason with the unreasonable. One of the gifts Scotland has given me is learning I could just be. Be fully, completely, oddly and gloriously me.
I live in Canada, a stunning country by it’s own right that admittedly I’ve scarcely explored. And still I wish to gather up my life here and move it across the sea – an impossibility until my children are grown, busy creating their own lives.
So for now I go about my days, heart broke open, rooted and tending to my beautiful life here in Ontario. At the same time planting seeds and nurturing their growth for a time more than a decade from now when a move to Scotland is possible. It’s a real exercise in living in the and.
When I feel the wanting building, and the itchy discomfort of being rooted here, an ocean away from where my soul feels home, for the foreseeable future I will start to intellectualize my feelings. Nothing kills a romantic notion faster than logic am I right?
I’ll start saying things like ‘I acknowledge that any time I’ve been there I’ve done so on vacation. That’s not real life!’ Or ‘of course I feel like can be me when I’m there, I’ve left all my responsibilities on the other side of the Atlantic.’ Inevitably I’ll settle on ‘maybe, probably, surely, the sparkle will wear off after a time I’ve lived there with my whole, real life along side me.’
In truth, I don’t believe any of it! That’s what someone who doesn’t know what I know, felt what I’ve felt, or experienced the change that I have, would say. It doesn’t help with the longing to try to pretend I believe it either. It makes me feel crazy to re-write the truth in such a way. To bring the very real feelings, experiences and connections into doubt is to dishonour all of it. I also don’t subscribe to the idea that eventual disinterest is a reason to not fully enjoy the magic while you can.
So yes, the discomfort of being rooted can make me want to crawl out of my skin at times, and on quiet nights the sadness starts to flow from my eyes. But this sadness isn’t despair or grief; it’s memory, gratitude and magic too. It’s part of the deal when you set out to break your heart open– and I’m all in.
I think it’s easy to assume that if I’m dreaming of a life in Scotland I’m not present in my life here, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Each time I come back I find myself exploring and enjoying where I live now. If I can’t be there, I can be fully here. I intentionally seek out opportunities to do what I enjoy doing in Scotland. Once the jet lag wears off you can find me in my local forest walking for hours. My girls and I are chasing sunsets at the beach a short drive away or discovering a new coffee shop together. It’s what inspires my creativity and my art. It’s what made me walk onto a full pickleball court knowing no one, and making connections anyway. Perhaps most shockingly, it has got me spending hours each week outside, in winter. WINTER. ME. GLEEFULLY.
It also helps to settle the restlessness with songs and stories written by others as deeply stirred by Scotland. The lucky ones who’ve felt the chin of Scotland rest on their own weary head while they too took a deep breath and felt the stirring sense of rightness, of one’s soul being home.
Scotland broke my heart wide open and I can’t seem to find myself wanting it closed again. What I do want is to travel often enough to Scotland to maintain it’s break, even pushing the boundary to discover just how beautifully a broke open heart can live.
When will I go back? Sometime in 2025 probably. I am also looking forward to someday soon when I’ll take my daughters on their first transatlantic trip (I’m looking at you 2026). Introducing them to my favourite people, touring them around to my favourite parts, and finding new things we love about it together. I hope in their own lives they come to know where their soul calls home and I hope to explore it alongside them while I listen as they share what makes it so.
More Scotland stories to come. Probably.
If you’ve got your own connection to Scotland, or somewhere else, please share it with me!
So glad that you loved Scotland and hope you will come back soon. I am Scottish but I spent most of my adulthood in England and abroad. We have now moved back to Scotland, and something in my soul has settled. It has decided 'we are home'.
I have had almost a years break from doing not much on substack since when i started it, about a year ago, also. I understand the pull to Scotland, even though I've never been there. My daughter grew up with me singing Loch Lomond to her! Keep writing!