all it takes to hearken back is a bottle of tasty oban.

recently, my housemate casey and i were out and about looking for new bottles of scotch. as we were looking, i noticed a bottle of 14 year old oban, which immediately reminded me of my dear friends joe and chris lafferty.

joe and chris once lived in oban. i was only in oban once, just passing through on my way to the fair isle of iona. my time in iona was one of the most magical times i had in scotland. it was the only holiday i took while i lived in the u.k., and it was glorious.

i was in edinburgh for the fringe festival at the time, so i had to catch a train from there to glasgow, and from glasgow north to oban. oban is a sea town on the west coast of scotland. from oban one must take a ferry across to the isle of mull. mull is a breathtaking island, so driving the length of the island to catch the next ferry is nothing but pleasant. at the very end of mull is a village called fionnphort, which is where i had to catch the ferry for the mile-long jog to iona.

it was nearly dusk when i arrived on iona, and very foggy. i could hardly see fifty feet in front of me. i hadn't made plans to stay in a hostel, so i was planning on camping out on the beach. i ran into someone that told me that the iona community discourages primitive camping to protect their scarce and rare grasses. so i was wandering around in the fog and near dark, playing with stones on the beach and dancing on very large rocks. out of respect to the people of iona, i wandered back towards the town to try to find a hostel or family willing to take me in. on the way, i heard sheep and walked through the fog towards where i heard them. eventually i found the sheep, and to my surprise and delight, they belonged to the owners of a hostel. i walked in and was given a bed for the night. later i found out that people book rooms on iona several months in advance, and that it is unheard of to simply 'walk in' and expect a bed.
well i did.

the next morning, i woke up to the clearest, most beautiful day i can ever remember. scotland it rather grey and dull and cold most of the time, but this day the sky was blue and it was warm enough to walk around in shorts and a t-shirt. so i explored all day. i wandered around and sang and prayed and drank in the rugged beauty of the ancient island. i could write pages about my time on iona, but i'll share just one story.

i was sitting on a hillside, munching some crackers and cheese, when i was approached by a monk from poland (iona is steeped in christian history, a story for another day) who told me that his monk friend was off on a tiny island just beyond where we were sitting. he said his friend was exploring, and that he'd been gone for hours. we talked for awhile and his friend came back, and they were off to continue their adventures. i was interested to see what the polish monk was doing on the tiny island for all that time, and there was only about a foot of water between iona and the tiny island, so i took my shoes off and waded over. the island was about 150 meters long and 50 meters wide. it was grassy on top (tended by sheep. i don't know how they got there), and had tall, steep, rocky walls that ran down to the water. i spent hours on the wee island, climbing up the rocky ledges and basking with the sheep. it was a delightful time. as i walked back to the edge of the island to get back to the 'mainland,' i realized that the tide had come in since i'd first gone over, and the water was now chest-deep. i looked around and realized that i was completely alone. no polish monks, no locals, not anyone. so i simply removed all my clothes, held them over my head, and walked back to iona. also, i hadn't bathed in days, so i took this opportunity to wash myself in the sea. it was invigorating, it was freeing. i've never felt so alive.

so here i am, sipping my oban, thinking of joe and chris, and dreaming of fonder days. i'll leave you with another quote from 'the wounded healer:'

"through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. when they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. for a compassionate man nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying."