Full circle
Symmetry, balance, focus, our stay on Iona ends as it began with a circle of stones. Each stone individual, unique in its composition, distinctive in its colour, grounded in its reality. I am inclined to mimic the shoals of Columba’s Bay with a vast bank of words. Like sand they fall from my pockets. What sea will polish them?
Vicki
Hagg[US] is home
We have arrived home — though some of our baggage is still traveling. The journey that took us to Scotland is still unfolding. . . . Ellen
Pristine enough waters
Iona was the place at which St. Columba introduced Christianity to Scotland from Ireland as his penance for having illicitly copied a gospel. He allowed a 1,000 people to be killed, defending and trying to stop his keeping this gospel copy. After Viking massacres, hardships of every sort, the Chrisitan community at Iona prevailed, and since the 1950s efforts by the community and others to winterize Iona and bring water, sewage, and other municipal amentieis to the isle have created a tiny 130 person year-round community and a summer community that runs over 100,000 by the end of he season. The Iona Community and activities at the Abbey exert an organizing influence on the island whether one comes for religious reasons — and we saw many who did– or for other reasons.
In the end, the spirituality of Iona is itself affected by the profound influence of the geography, the landscape, the sea, the crags and cliffs, the pebbles and the climate, which is extreme.
Whatever one thinks of organized religion, the religious community of Iona aims to be ethical — in its commitment to ecological stewardship, its commitment to fair tade, its respect for people. So it is no surprise that Iona turns out, in very essential ways, to be a community of artists ( people as imperfect as any others but often sensitive to the winds that blow across humanity’s fortunes and plights): stone polishers and jewlery makers, weavers, visual artists — oil and acrylic painters, water colourists, ink and pen stylists — organic farmers with botanical and edible gardens, musicians, dancers, writers, poets, seal and puffin lovers, cormorant and gannet aficionados, dreamers and visionaries whose understanding of the world’s beauty has led them to make a radical futuristic commitment to preserving the earth. This isle took us three days to reach, but it is not the backwater of the world, it is its avant-garde.
So, our week’s life on Iona has been spiritual and artistic: silence or communication, our own inner voices or the voices of those around us, our touching of stones, sea washed cave walls, our hearing of the wind that wipes out your own thoughts on the top of Dun I and the whipped caps of pristine enough waters crashing into granite cliffs, marble slabs, serpentine gemstone gashes in the green, green hills.
I have needed the whole week there to let go of the things that had stopped me from breathing and creating and necessitated this healing. I have slipped back to the place where I know myself, where my fall from the edge of the cliff forces my hand to manifest sail.
We spend a day’s journey to reach Edinburgh and the high artistic frenzy of The Fringe. Ellen
Noticing
breathing in, i know i am breathing in.
breathing out, i know i am breathing out.
allow.
stones, rocks, ledges, formations presenting, supporting, joining, containing, bracing, everlasting and everywhere.
nature’s verdant nuzzling up, creeping over, growing in between, standing up, molding, moving, grazed upon, blanketing, suckling the harshness, or is it the other way around?
both energies are present and in abundance: male and female. here it is raw, elemental, unspoilt and excellent company. i have graduated to a higher “degree” of witnessing and participating in community. without which stems a kind of social starvation, too extreme(?), o.k., then, arrogance for sure, and in which lies the absence of an essence fundamental to soul-life.
there is time here and there is space here and it is not pressed. it is not hurried.
the Abbey through time has been care-takingly preserved, stone by stone, crosses and markers, altar and sacristy, and the Iona community flourishes there. the Nunnery nearby, on the other hand, exists primarily in ruins with the care-taking and preservation existing in the grounds and the vibrant colors in the flower gardens. the walls eroding yet skyward, the sheila unseen by most but watching over and seeing through.
allow.
breathing, it’s easy, right? like paying attention. is there, or is there not, any point in placing our attention on our breath? as our tether between what is seen (body), and what is not seen (source of life force), there runs our breath: up and down, in and out, rising up and falling away. wave of life. this is the body-map’s “thin-place”.
here, the personal and the indigenous thin places are dancing together. time stretches out in an enormous curve. place is dramatic and gentle. this place knows waiting, watchful waiting where one single, small action makes it way to another of the same and progress is made.
what exists here is the space within which creativity/adaptability, knowing what to do and when to do it, is born and dies back into until called upon again. it must have a place to rest. as we do. admittedly, i am just beginning to learn. the lungs have sufficient moisture, the mind has sufficient relaxation, the body has sufficient vitality, the heart has not only sufficient, but increased capacity for goodwill and that is healing.
healing may occur in all places, but healing does not occur in all places.
space and time.
allow.
the colors are not only stone and green. there is also blue and pink, and black and white, and gold and brown, and these colors of the earth and air and sea are welcoming. and then there is the tone present in the people of the isle and its guests. more healing. more restoration. what happens here is not happening by force but by something else; a consciousness. how are our chest bones, spine, shoulders, neck and head riding the waves of the breath right now? what is the quality of our in-breath?
our out-breath? is there advantage to focusing here? i say yes.
allow.
mind relaxes. body responds. movement stirs. the cycle of nature and our own nature begins to synchronize and something occurs. what is it?
stuck is stirring. hard is softening. what is hidden has the covers being lifted. heart is massaged back away from the precipice of fear and toward love, which certainly must be intelligent, which must be foremother to creativity: open, knowing, receptive, able when it is time. community is the grounds-keeper, gate-keeper, and way-shower.
artisan, fisherman, scholar, baker, storyteller, teen-ager, crone, person walking along noticing: breathing in and out, telling stories. eyes moisten, often. connections are made. this is re-membering. this is when the teaching that took place takes place. this is experience. experience does not occur in a state of distraction.
experience is eyes wide-open, senses- alive and and making sense of life. distraction is partial and dim-witted and not “thin”, but weak. it is a compromised state of too much happening at one time. this is not what is happening here, now.
allow.
lost parts are being found. retreat is removing obstructions from pathways. there is a flow returning. the meter is changing. breath is dancing in between my ribs differently. integrity is perhaps first established in the quality of our breathing.
allow.
entanglement. think jewelry. all in a jumbled up knot. contracted space. the harder the pull, the tighter the knot. create space in the center, touch and move tiny parts gently. take the time to create this spaciousness. tightness begins to alter. loosening occurs. knots free up with ease not effort, not extreme effort.
allow.
on this isle of iona, there is something markedly “different”. time is a carving here. space is the place you rest into, and the ancient sits quietly and solidly with you.
this ancient, elemental place births refreshed life, renewed life, an appreciation and an expanded view. center is returned to its rightful place. gate open. mind and heart calmer and clearer. possibility may take root in this take-time, breathed-into body-earth.
i am not running cross-country. i am running cross-culture: i am slowing down.
i am catching my breath. i thought i’d never ask…..
allow.
i came here to be still. it’s as easy as noticing our breath (conscious breathing) and paying attention. it is not easy. it is simple, but not easy. it is unpopular.
i came here to be still. it is what i have said all along.
it is what i said when i was asked, “if you could envision one thing that you would journey to do, what would that one thing be?”
i would go to the “right place” at the “right time” and learn to slow down, to be still, to rest and re-member. i am here. and i am here now.
this iona is inexplicably, but reciprocally somehow respondent to what lies deep. it’s hide and seek at its best.
i am dancing. i am not leaping. i am stepping, and i am stepping simply, and i have good partners. we are remembering the steps when we were as the stars and the waves are. we are being. and it is spacious. this must be health.
anchored, aligned and aspiring: clarity arises. it is a simple dance.
breathe in. i know i am breathing in.
breathe out. i know i am breathing out.
allow is such a gentle partner.
tonight i have been invited to share facilitation of the evening service at the Abbey. the service is “inner space”. imagine that. i must have imagined that. we will dance a simple “dance”, one with our hands and our breath. it is for everyone. the “technique” will be to be present with the individuals that are there: to attend with intention, and to breathe.
tomorrow we part for edinburgh and begin our way home. i will leave my walking boots here.
Trish
Staffa
Thursday: Fingal’s cave on the island of Staffa. Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture so perfectly captures the visual power and resonance of the landscape. Resonance found again in the abbey in the drone of a multi voiced hum below a soaring lilt, resonance, on the wind, a lone bagpipe calling across the hill.
Wednesday:Our journey began as a fistful of threads crushed compactly into a ball bound by schedules. Iona has encouraged the ball to breathe, find her topography and let the prevailing winds tease the threads apart so that each personal journey winds its own path, a stone rolling in the tide, defining the landscape. The private exploration is profound and the communication has shown us how we are repeatedly linked, crossroad and knot. Serendipity abounds. I am here. Our wings hold air as we blend our stories to create new colours and patterns. Vicki
Excerpt — Land of Mystical Faith By PATRICIA LEE LEWIS
” I find a rock out of the wind and lie down. Immediately I am whirling, spiraling into the earth; wind fills my throat, my head, my closed eyes. I feel cleansed, and then I sleep. When I awake I have dreamed the words “I am always here,” and I know it is the truth.”
See her full article in Links. Ellen
Snakes on Iona
Iona is a place of legends, one of which is that St. Columba (like St. Patrick in Ireland) banished all snakes from the isle. One story states that a live snake was brought to Iona, and died immediately upon touching the shore.
We have been doing lots of walking and also scavenging and collecting elemental artifacts – round egg rocks from St. Columba’s Bay, pieces of dried seaweed, fibers and hair from sheep and cows (tangled in the heather, hanging from the barbed wire fences), and early on during one of these walks I noticed that the bays appear to be full of snake bones – serpentine bleached pieces of coiled driftwood, as if all snakes that swam ashore had immediately expired.
I now have a small collection of these “bones” in my room that I have been fashioning into “spirit sculptures” – making small snakes wrapped in found fibers (grasses, wool, seaweed, bound together with roving purchased here on the Isle) A fitting exercise, because banished or not, the snake is the Celtic symbol of creativity and re-birth, exactly what we are experiencing here.
Elizabeth
Colors and flowers everywhere
Finally blogging. It has been difficult to focus on linear thinking with so much visual stimulus. I am collecting stones, drinking in the ever-changing light and landscape, painting and sketching. Ideas are only primordial at this point. The landscape is so breath-taking that it brought me to tears earlier today. It is unlike anything I have ever experienced. Exactly what I have been longing for on so many levels. The group is a joy -so many connections are being made – friendships, ideas, segues…
Old themes of male/female are still with me. The symbols rise to the surface wherever I go. The two belong together – inextricably linked – balanced. I guess that is and has been what I look for in my work. To use art-making as a way to balance. I know when I am not working, I am not balanced. Yet the very possibility of inactivity and not working is what allows the work to come. Permission to gestate and not produce. Very unfamiliar.
Yet, I am fighting the angst that I will not be productive – that I do not deserve this gift of freedom, beauty, laughter and connection. I need to concentrate on allowing myself to take it in.
I am very inspired by the colors here. I know that my palette willl be different – happier – deeper pinks and yellow. Virginia
Tuesday
ENTRY 4 (Tuesday)
There is the opportunity for stillness here. There are the sounds of sheep, the wind, the sea, the seagulls—not phones and meetings. There are the Celtic traditions and arts to explore. ASODANA is Gaelic for “people of the art, or craft, or gift.” Last night we went to a traditional celidh and watched (and some participated) in the traditional dances. We have wondered what would happen if more of our colleagues had the opportunity to have this kind of experience. When we return, will we be able to maintain the creative spark that this is igniting? Will we remember to work more collaboratively? Can we be leaders in an effort to talk with each other less out of positions to defend (or siloes to defend) and more out of the vulnerable places that we create from? Will coming to this environment help change the original environment?
Elaine
Monday
ENTRY 3 (Monday)
These days remind me of the concept of “Artist Dates” in the popular book by Julia Cameron called “The Artists Way”. Each of us goes her own way during the day and then shares what has inspired her at dinner. The sound of music reverberating against and around the stone pillars and walls of the abbey; walking on the beaches and hills and scavenging materials while thinking what I can do with them; visiting the local crafts and fine arts shops and saying “Hmm, I could do that.” Every day is an artist’s date. In fact, I even tried my hand at sketching what I saw on the ocean side of the island—not for public view yet, however!
Elaine
HAGG[US] : A Kenan Breathe Project 