SKYE stephenson

I have been feeling a call to return to Scotland for a few years. This is because of some unfinished business I know I had with this land. Business that is ancestral, in part. And also having to do with my relationship with the place I was named for – the Isle of Skye. A relationship which has not been very positive up to this year.

This issue began the first time I visited my namesake, when I was eighteen. As soon as I stepped onto the Isle of Skye, I felt as if a ponderous weight had descended upon me, spinning me into a deep depression. I pleaded with my mother to take the next ferry back to the mainland. Gratefully, she agreed.

The next time was four decades later. This time I was with my husband. He had suggested we visit my namesake. I reluctantly agreed. This time, we drove over the Skye Bridge that now connects the island to the mainland. Our plan was to drive up one side of the island, and back down the other.

Although it was May, the weather was bleak, and the wind was howling like a banshee. We made it up the western coast, with the stark black Cuillin Hills framing the landscape to our left. But within two hours, we decided to leave Skye as fast as we could. Depression again descending upon me.

I never mentioned this to my friend Stephanie, who was born in Scotland but raised and lives in Australia. We met through our crystal training, and immediately felt a bond. Stephanie joined a sacred journey to Mexico I organized years ago. Ever since, I keep up with her through Facebook.

 About a year ago, Stephanie posted that she was feeling a call to return to Scotland for some ancestral healing. But she wasn’t sure when, or how, she could make this trip.

I texted her that I was feeling the same.

Months passed. 2023 ended and 2024 arrived. In April, I learned I had been awarded a Fellowship to travel to Scotland from my undergraduate university. I decided to make the trip in September. I did not post any of this on social media.

 Shortly, Stephanie emails to say she is going to Scotland, and it will be in September! Our travel dates coincide almost to the day.

 Stephanie brings along two friends – Liana and Vanessa. It was their idea that we should visit the Isle of Skye.

I tried to dissuade them.

 “We’ll help you,” the Aussies promised.

I wasn’t so sure.

I was feeling unsettled as we drove across the Skye Bridge on September 19^th. The weather was sunny and bright, with not a cloud in the sky. They suggested driving to the Fairy Pools right away.

Stephanie and I were discussing that long ago trip to Mexico as we walked down from the parking lot toward the Fairy Pools. That was when we noticed a woman walking just ahead of us, with a drum in her hand.

“That’s great you have your drum with you,” Steph said.

“I always take it with me,” the woman who I later would learn is named Mapi replied. She was Mexican – visiting Britain to run some temezcales (Mexican-style sweat lodges.)

Soon we caught up with her two travelling companions – Claudia and another Stephanie, who was Brazilian. Liana and Ness from our group soon joined us also.

The seven of us scrambled down to a spot where there was a deep pool of water, and stuck our feet in. Mapi played her drum and sang a sacred song in Spanish. We all joined in.

Next, Stephanie was taking off her clothes and jumping into the fairy pool, Soon the rest of us did likewise. The clear and cool waters flowed around us as we sang songs in English, then Spanish again, then one Mapi knew in Lakota, then Portuguese.

 In that circle of harmony and joy and sacred wildness, I felt my heart open wide to the beauty of Skye – the island, that is. And though I have never seen a fairy, it felt as if the fairies were leaping around our naked bodies as we sang. And there was love – between me and that land my parents named me for, with the love they felt for me, their first-born child. The one who almost died on her way out the birth canal. The one who felt reborn in the Fairy Pools of Skye that lovely September day, at an age when her hair was now gray.

Published in The Monadnock Shopper News Oct. 9-15, 2024