It was just after Easter, toward the end of April, and I was on the Greek island of Kefalonia. I'd spent a magical few days experiencing the tiny seaside community of Assos, and the traditional Greek Easter celebrations. My account of that time is here. But there was one thing I didn't share with anybody at the time, but which was so vivid I have never forgotten it. I had an odd presentiment of the future. Not that I saw visions or heard voices or anything like that; my few experiences of the world beyond the veil are never so concrete or easily explained. But they are not easily explained away, either. And, in fact, Assos seemed to me like something out of a vision, in and of itself. I felt as though everything I saw and heard was trying to tell me something, in a barely audible whispers: the friendly water lapping at the rocky beach, the small, murmuring caves across the bay that I swam into, the handmade, whitewashed houses and stone walls, the atonal shepherd's bells, the giant, forbidding cliffs that seemed to protect and threaten the village at the same time. Assos was the sort of place where time no longer seems to move in a straight line but whirls in an eddy.
I wrote in the journal I kept at the time:
I have had many peculiar emotions here: everything from a sense of excitement to a sense of foreboding, feeling both close to the future and close to the past. I have a strange feeling, a conviction even, almost frightening in its certainty, that one chapter, one act of my life is about to close. I can feel myself in the future, looking back on myself now, although I can't see back the other way to know where I will be. If I could, it would be interesting!Several times as the years have gone by, I've looked back at how things unfolded after that Easter and wondered about what exactly that presentiment referred to, if indeed anything. Did something happen afterwards that dropped the curtain one one act and lifted it on another? At the time, I'd thought the great change in my life would happen when I went on a planned trip to Scotland. And actually, I think I was right about that.
One thing I discovered when I was traveling was that while buses and planes could carry me great distances, to amazing places and new experiences, thoughts could carry me even greater distances. The real traveling did not only happen on the physical level, but inside of me. I think I became aware of my own mind on a higher level. For several months I was tormented by homesickness, barely able to control my thoughts. It felt sometimes like the present was being subducted into a vision of the past that came to me in all my waking hours. At the same time I realized that these perceptions were not based on reality, and while I couldn't fight them, I could set them aside, carry on in spite of them.
I felt very cut off from civilization when I was living abroad. This was odd, and not at all what I expected. I spent quite a bit of time looking at museums, and artifacts, and ruins; but rarely did I feel any personal connection with them. They were made by people who had decided to stay somewhere and build something; I had not decided to stay anywhere and I did not know what I wanted to build. I was cut off, alien, lost both accidentally and deliberately. But the movement of things: water, wind, flowing clothes, dancing feet, leaves, flowers; time: I drank up that sense of movement. Movement was where I lived.
It was when I went to Scotland that I completely gave myself over to the joy of movement, when I let myself dance and threw away the lingering fears I had about being in the present, being in the middle of the journey. I picked up a book of Scottish quotations at the airport, and this one summed up my week in Scotland: "One crowded hour of glorious life, is worth an age without a name." I packed a lot of life into that one week, and have always felt it was a great gift. I loved South Uist and was at home there in a magical way. But South Uist gave me a greater gift: the ability to be at home inside myself.
I didn't really know that at the time, of course. I felt a surge of something within me; I felt as though a stone had rolled away, or something big and heavy and dark had rolled away. I knew I was going to sing and play music and dance. Fogsail an dorus! Open the door! And I did.
Once the door was open walking through it seemed to just be the right thing to do. I returned to Canada some months later, not because of homesickness but because I felt it was the right thing to do. I joined a concert band, learned to play an instrument. Suddenly I was part of something. It was bizarre, unbelievable, and totally normal and believable. I didn't have to run anywhere to find myself. How liberating that felt! I wriggled back into teaching, and quite the adventure that has been. I was cautious, I am cautious, I'll always be cautious, but I recognize and celebrate the power of forces in my life that are greater than fear.
I wanted to tell this story, now, because while we like to divide people's lives into easily digestible chunks, and happy stories and Hollywood movies tend to end with a marriage, I don't think the beginning or end of a new act is quite that straightforward. I heard once that where you are now is where you planned to be five years ago, whether you were aware of it or not. Well, it's not quite five years ago that I wrote those thoughts on Assos, or danced in South Uist, but it's close.
There was a moment on Assos, and again on South Uist, when I opened a door, and stepped out into a new world. The new world was around me, but it was also inside me. The beginning of now was then; I know it. This year, I will begin another dance. I'm getting married. I won't say much more about that now, because it's a whole other story that hasn't been written yet. There will be time. But I think the occasion does call for some superbly happy tunes. And here they are.
Fogsail an dorus (Open the door): the puirt-a-beul song that came to mind when I was writing this entry. Here is Capercaillie singing in the streets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj_gnLBsPEk
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