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.

Finding Colors

My backyard is all a yellowish gray. The garden fence, the frozen blades of grass, the tree trunks and ivy, even the wookiee all blend together like some kind of old faded photograph. It’s obvious it was all vibrant with different hues once upon a time, but now, it’s all one ghastly, sickly shade.

At this point in the winter, my yard is in a state between dormancy and springtime. Now that the snow is gone, will the spring ever come? When I’m outside, I’m surrounded by yellowish gray, and the color brings on a sense of deepest despair.

I shouldn’t say deepest. Deepest despair came over me when musing similarly about color almost four years ago when I found myself visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in Poland. Among the many (many, many) sights that affected me that day was a room full of shoes that had been taken from the prisoners. They were, like shoes from any era, all different colors; if you looked hard enough, you could see a red shoe, a blue one, a yellow one, but their situation in history and my perceptions standing there on some of the most unholy ground on our planet, turned everything the same dull shade of gray.

So today, while I fought off similar, though lighter, feelings toward my backyard, I sought out something—anything—to give me hope. I peeked into the yellowed flowerbed along the driveway. It was covered with yellowish-gray composting grass clippings that my mom spread there last fall to protect the bed from the winter weather. Some grayish sticks of some dead flower huddled together in the shadow of the arbor. But if I just looked closely enough, maybe …

And there it was. A purple crocus just peeking through the yellowed grass. And suddenly, my backyard was no longer a symbol of deepest despair, but instead the first sign of change to a barren and monochromatic world.

:18° F:
:partly cloudy:

The Indiana Bat

Nobody likes bats.

I say this, knowing perfectly well that one of my readers has a Bats from Europe and North America sitting on her shelf, but she and I notwithstanding, raise your hand if you can honestly say this is cute:


This particular bat is myotis sodalis: myotis meaning mouse ear, and sodalis meaning companion. Small and unassuming, eaters of destructive flying insects like alfalfa weevils and gypsy moths, the myotis sodalis, or Indiana Bat, is truly the ideal overhead nighttime companion. It’s endangered, probably due to habitat loss and insecticide, but in some areas, it still thrives.

Bats, like myself, are creatures of the night, and the sounds they make—high-pitched beeps and screeches to assist in echolocation—can only be heard by a select few, rendering them typically silent in human standards, easily forgotten, ultimately ignored.

The Indiana Bat is named for the state where it was first discovered and described, but a colony of them thrives near my home in Pennsylvania. They have found a hospitable spot in the kind of place that I, myself, have consistently found hospitable, especially when I’m far from my home: a church.


This little white church sits on the windy country road to Canoe Creek State Park, casts its shadow over a cemetery where lie several of my ancestors, and literally has bats in the belfry—thousands of them. Home to several thousands of Little Brown Bats, this church, which hasn’t held a human worship service in decades, also plays host to a few hundred Indiana Bats.

My mother used to take my brother and me to Canoe Creek to swim in the lake, and now that I’m older, I enjoy piloting a canoe around the surface of the lake or hiking through the woods along its edge. Its historic limestone kilns are worth a hike to see, and apparently the bats think so, too. Their population around the lake is divided between the church and the kilns.

I used to dislike, maybe even hate, bats, but I find myself feeling a kinship with myotis sodalis. In its displacement from the land it was named for, it still seeks companionship under the eaves of a church, just as I have each time I have found myself living in a new place. And even in the face of adversity, these bats congregate together near lakes and other bodies of water before setting out on their own.

They may be tiny and unassuming, but myotis sodalis carry a message of strength and hope on their little skinny wings.