Part One
The weather proved inclement - a southern English way to say that it rained a lot - so we abandoned notions of mountain walking and did other things instead. One day we visited the Isle of Eigg. One of a cluster of little islands scattered off the coast of western Scotland, and seen particularly well from the mainland near the mighty township of Mallaig, Eigg is interesting for a variety of reasons.
Like the rest of the appropriately-named Small Isles, Eigg is frequently subject to rain, wind, and low cloud: even when the western seaboard of the mainland is clear, the outlines of the Small Isles can sometimes be seen with all but the lowest slopes shrouded in mist. In 1997, however, something unusual happened on the social front on Eigg. There was a community buy-out: the current residents (all 84 of them) pretty much own the island. Since, as noted previously on Pale Green Vortex, much of Highland Scotland still languishes under the control of large landowners and estates, this is something of note. Life on Eigg cannot be easy, and it is with a happy heart that I see a group of people being courageous enough to take their lives into their own hands as far as this.
Community self-sufficiency is at a premium. Eigg provides all its own energy, from a combination of hydro-electric, solar, and wind sources. Even if the official blurb suggests that the islanders have been duped into swallowing the human-produced global warming propaganda, this still strikes me as admirable. Followers of Pale Green Vortex may have concluded that it regards all wind energy as evil. This is not true -quite. There is a world of difference between a few small turbines providing electricity for a local community and an enormous array of huge turbines organised military-like across entire hillsides by giant multinationals. Having said that, Eigg could probably do without its turbines...
As we walked past the scattered settlements on the island with their vegetable gardens (the island is mild, especially in winter, so some edibles do grow well), my mind wandered back to the spring of 1976. Along with my three commune friends, I hitch-hiked from Oxford all the way to Ellon, in north-east Scotland. We had been offered a modest cottage with several acres of land for our dream rural commune project, just outside the township. Ellon is located in the hinterland of Aberdeen, and one day on that Easter weekend I stood on a small hill, with the cruel east wind blowing wet snow into my face. I knew at that moment that I was not ready for this, to devote the remainder of my life to growing turnips on an exposed rise in a remote and forgotten corner of northern Scotland. Neither, it seems, were my colleagues. Within weeks the project had disbanded, each of us going our own separate ways. In some respects at least, the inhabitants of Eigg were doing what I had set out but failed to do. They are a bit of an example for the future; good luck to them.
Part Two
Mountain folk are often goal-focussed: get to the top of Everest even if you don't come back; bag another Munro before sunset; complete another long-distance trail. There is a place for such a style, I suppose, - I know it well myself - but another approach presents itself as sometimes more fitting, more conducive to cognisance and awareness of ones surroundings; more elegant. There is a word from old Scottish for a person who walks differently, a personage one occasionally meets in the modern literature on mountains in Scotland. This is the stravaiger. The dictionary tells us that 'to stravaig' is 'to wander about, especially without a sensible purpose'. The stravaiger is not a hill-bagger, a goal-oriented ticker-of-lists. It is a person who trusts in their spontaneity, their instincts, the natural rhythms and flows in themselves and in the world around them. The true stravaiger might end up spending all afternoon staring into a pool of water, or doing nothing in particular. At heart, the stravaiger is a bit of a Zen person, not to mention a little subversive, presenting a living challenge to the highly-valued notions of achievement and progress that drive the mainstream world. The real trick, I suppose, is to incorporate the ways of the stravaiger into daily life, even that which purports to be linear and progressive.
I was recently introduced to a person of similar ilk to the stravaiger; Slomo. Google him, he's easy to find. A friend sent me a link to the little film on Slomo. He in turn had been sent the link by another friend, who had probably been sent......... Anyway,Slomo was once a big boy in the medical world, but he chucked it all in for a life spent skating along the Californian coast. When skating, he says, he feels close to the divine, and when people see him they recognise him as 'one who got away'. A long time before, an old man had advised him to 'do what you want to', but it took many years for the wisdom of these words to manifest in physical reality. And for him to skate.
Many folk feel uncomfortable with the idea of 'doing what you want to'. Guilty, maybe. Life is meant to be hard, after all, full of knee-jerk self-sacrifice, a catalogue of unfulfilled dreams, disappointments, and unaccomplished ambitions. Not so: this is just a story we tell ourselves. And when Slomo does what he wants to, he is not following passing whims, moods, blind urges; the fad and fancy of the day. He is following the voice of his soul, his inner daimon, name it as you will. To skate is his calling, and I find it inspiring when I come upon the life of anybody who has the courage to follow their deeper instincts and intuitions, to trace the shape of their authentic uniqueness on this wonderful planet. These are indeed the people who have got away. And who have got it right.
