TENALACH: When the Land Sings to Us
| Reflections on returning to Scotland |
(Tenalach is an Irish Gaelic word that means when we feel so connected to nature and the beauty of the land that we can hear the Earth singing to us. A beautiful sentiment from our mystically genius ancestors)
Words are difficult to describe what has been happening to me here in Scotland since my return to these wild and ancient lands for the third consecutive year. All I know is I'm being changed; the fire of my heart proper stoked; the wings of my soul, brushed and encouraged; a joy running childishly jubilant amongst the rustle of my being.
Yes, yes, it was the Isle of Skye that began it, a kind of spiritual pilgrimage I'd been dreaming in and my dear brother, Ryan McKenna, helped bring manifest, as he invited me to join a private tour he was taking there.
The Scottish Highlands are a special crucible: the vast beauty therein, stretched amongst cradling valleys, mighty mountains etched with waterfalling crevices, wandering skies of gusting clouds and contrasting spectacular, smatterings of blues, and the empire of pastoral greens, embellished by the constant romance of rain that charges the volume of verdant.
If green be the colour of the Heart Chakra from fabled Vedic lore well then Scotland isn't just therapeutic--it's a holy church for the heart. And moreover, if beauty is the religion of the Earth (as one of my Gnostic teachers bemoans), then Scotland is its holy grail, where we go to sip the elixir cup and have our eyes flung open beyond temporal vision to stir the eternity of ethers and see Gaia at Her most poignant and devastating magnificent.
Yes, devastating: there were several times on our hikes to the Faerie Glen and the Old Man of Storr, when my loquacious sighs bordered on joyful exasperation when all I could muster was, 'I need to grow my capacity to behold beauty.' It felt so, like my very senses were being stretched to their limits; where even the sweetness in the air, wrapped in unseasonably cold northern winds and cornucopias of fragrant and moist flowers, made me drunk with beauty.
As a mystic long practiced in spiritual arts, my sensitivities moaned and visions poured over me like the same mercurial tributaries dancing down the mountainsides.
I saw holy revelries from times long past at a stone circle; seasonal fetes when the turning tides of Mother Earth was cause enough for merriment and community to bridle in the most meaningful of ceremonies, bonding brilliantly to the sacred ecology.
As I stood atop a hilltop at the Faeirie Glen, tears ran from my eyes as songs seemed to sprout from everywhere. I took in the vastness around me of all the green, glistening hills, mountains and valley prayers, and I felt that I had melted into the foliage itself; made so small by the towering beauties around me. Yet, rather than a belittling that would strike fear and anxiety, it felt like bliss to be so dominated by loveliness. I slid effortlessly into surrender.
The long drives were not drives at all but travels through further landscapes that bore themselves open like sacred scriptures; holier than any word. As we listened to olde Celtic music and choral hymns in the van, I felt my soul being lifted into empyreans beyond and also planted and plunged deep into the bosom of Gaia where Mother became a world.
I returned to my dear friends' exquisite home near Dunkeld, at the foot of the Highlands, where the valleys begin to lurch into seeming infinitudes. And I felt and still feel delicate like a babe, just slipped wet and shining from the womb, as if reborn by the Earth Goddess Herself, petted with kisses of startling wisdom.
Flowers seem to bloom from my very breath and my heart is in constant song, struck by mystical music which it cannot help but yield to. An impromtu trip to Rosslyn Chapel yesterday, one of the great wonders of the world in my humble opinion, almost tipped me over but then ultimately offered, by its divine sanctuary, a space for consolidation. As I sat near the altar in that most majestic of chapels where the Rose leyline shimmered 'neath us, I once again heard the angels singing that I first heard there when I visited in 2022. And it seemed to interlace all the jubilations into the depths of my soul; fastening the perpetual reveries bounding around and within me to my spiraling heart.
Is this all because Scotland, dear ancient Alba, is a special place for me personally, because my ancestors were here and in most of Britannia? Or is it something universal, the result of being in the enthused telluric, geomantic fields of these sacred isles, Caledonia, Alba, Ireland, Albion...and simply feeling Gaia's glory in the spaces that are revered as the Heart Chakra of Holy Her?
I don't know and perhaps I never will for certain and that is blessed. All I know is something resounding is happening to me. My soul is being ennobled by the beauty of nature, the benediction of the land itself, restored by the powers of Gaia Herself which are so strident and prolonged here in the pastoral poetics of a land so vast in its raw wildness.
And that is the last thread that is so clear right now: as I have ventured on this current experience of Scotland, it has been the constant teaching that the Earth and our living relationship with the Great Mother whom She is, is of the utmost importance to attend to. That there is, indeed, a magical realm here, that Heaven is on Earth, and the more time we spend with Her, the more we are remembered as Her divine children and creation, awakening the radiant depths of our slumbering souls.
And like the Taoists of old who revered the teaching of 'wu-wei' or not doing, we don't have to do anything but behold Her. Behold beauty and let Her holy beauty work on us. For if we are to entreat the wisdom of the ancient Gnostics, we are truly Her design; Her luminous progeny. And living as outcasts in our jilted cities will only smother us in self-interest and prisons of egotism. But out here, in the sacred wild, we are truly re-membered and re-sourced. We find ourselves stumbling into healing awe as marvels upon marvels of natural beauty surround us, calling us home to a place we've terribly forgotten and yet, in this marvelous instance, are returned to, again and again...
If you are enticed to read on into an ardent epilogue, I leave you with the winged words of the great Irish mystic AE as he described, over a century ago, being restored to the enchantments of the holy lands here:
"I HAD travelled all day and was tired, but I could not rest by the hearth in the cottage on the hill. My heart was beating with too great an excitement. After my year in the city I felt like a child who wickedly stays from home through a long day, and who returns frightened and penitent at nightfall, wondering whether it will be received with forgiveness by its mother. Would the Mother of us all receive me again as one of her children? Would the winds with wandering voices, be as before the evangelists of her love? Or would I feel like an outcast amid the mountains, the dark valleys and the shining lakes?
I knew if benediction came how it would come. I would sit among the rocks with shut eyes, waiting humbly as one waits in the antechambers of the mighty, and if the invisible ones chose me as companion they would begin with a soft breathing of their intimacies, creeping on me with shadowy affection like children who steal nigh to the bowed head and suddenly whisper fondness in the ear before it has even heard a footfall.
So I stole out of the cottage and over the dark ridges to the place of rocks, and sat down, and let the coolness of the night chill and still the fiery dust in the brain. I waited trembling for the faintest touch, the shyest breathing of the Everlasting within my soul, the sign of reception and forgiveness. I knew it would come. I could not so desire what was not my own, and what is our own we cannot lose. Desire is hidden identity. The darkness drew me heavenward. From the hill the plains beneath slipped away grown vast and vague, remote and still. I seemed alone with immensity, and there came at last that melting of the divine darkness into the life within me for which I prayed.
Yes, I still belonged, however humbly, to the heavenly household. I was not outcast. Still, though by a thread fine as that by which a spider hangs from the rafters, my being was suspended from the habitations of eternity. I longed to throw my arms about the hills, to meet with kisses the lips of the seraph wind. I felt the gaiety of childhood springing up through weariness and age, for to come into contact with that which is eternally young is to have that childhood of the spirit it must attain ere it can be moulded by the Magician of the Beautiful and enter the House of Many Mansions."
(from the Candle of Vision: https://sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/cov/cov03.htm)