Spirit in the Skye

I am nothing; I see all; . . . I am the lover
of uncontained and immortal beauty.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

A week earlier, I had boarded an airplane with no company but my backpack, entrusted EasyJet to carry me from Cologne to London, and then spent the next week working my way northward to Scotland. American by birth, Scottish by soul, always inexplicably drawn to an area of the world known to me only through Robert Burns and sheet music for my oboe, I stood today on the Isle of Skye, a “thin place” between the seen and the unseen, between people and spirits, between perception and reality.

The next year, my roommate would ask me whether, when I missed Scotland, I was longing for where I had been or who I had been when I was there, but I cannot unravel the one from the other. Here, on the Isle of Skye, I am where I am; we are one and the same. Like the island, I have finally separated from the rest of my kind, independent. I am weightless, flying apart from the mainland, shackled only by gravity to the rest of the world.

I travel alone, the only person I know in the group of ten picking its way across a field speckled with dormant heather and grazing sheep, splashing across a narrow creek, sinking into the mud on the edge of the mountain. It squishes into the tread of my sneakers as I teeter on the edge of a soaring, narrow trail; I dig my fingernails into the peaty wall beside me, regaining my balance, and inhale: an expanding balloon ready for release.

Further in and higher up, I trade the mud for bare rock, scaling a thin land bridge to the pinnacle of the island, the world’s minaret, the first stop on the way to the sky, the gateway to Heaven. I have arrived.

Here I stand, the only living creature on Earth. The ephemeral clouds in the deep blue sky were created only for this moment, only for me. The distant ocean sparkles diamonds. The salty sea air blowing across the moor blends into a perfume intended, from the first, for me, and me only.

This is my land. I am this island; I am this view. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. My spirit sheds its physical constraints and rises into the sky.