Iona: The Tucked-Away

One cannot get to Iona by happen-stance; it requires intention and patience. One must fly to Glasgow, Scotland, an interesting and rough-shaggy place in its own rite. I found Glasgow (pictured to the left) to be eerily similar to Edinburgh, but with more warnings of "don't cut through the park (by the - stunningly beautiful! - university) at night", and more...nitty-gritty realness. After that 13+ hour flight (for those of us coming from the West Coast of America), you must take a ten or so minute nervous-feeling bus ride (could just be that I'm STILL not used to the 'wrong' side of the road) to a train station where you must hop a train to Oban (pictured in a previous entry), being selective of which train car you park it for the 3 hour journey up the northern coast of Scotland; the first two cars continue to Oban and the last 4 or so split off and go to another Scottish city further inland. The journey is beautiful, taking you through sighing hills of green, thrashing trees of strength and beauty like Switzerland (with more rain). Once in Oban, you'll find the 45 minute ferry ride to the Island of Mull a rather peaceable relief from the churning of train tracks, only to be met with yet another arduous albeit scenic toss-and-jolt: the bus ride across the Island of Mull is an hour long on a narrow-even-for-a-single-lane road with passing" sections" (big enough only for cars - not buses - to pull into). The pictures are abundant for the taking, though, and the windows even created some cool glare into the shots. It was on this ride across Mull to Iona that I wrote a poem called "Beauty"; I was bold enough (apparently) to share it during "circle time" with the group of 8 wonderful women I had the privilege of sharing this past 9 days with. After my reading of it, three approached me and asked if I would read it again so they could write it down! (I started to cry).
Anyway, after the Mull bus, you take a short (10 minute) ferry across the Sound of Iona to the Island of Iona. You'll see the Iona Abbey up to the right, small crofts, shops and cute houses lining the (west) coast, and the ruins of the Nunnery more centered, as the rocking ferry slides into its dock to let you off to begin your at-least-one-mile trek to wherever you're staying. Only some locals are allowed to have cars on the island (and even then, the permits are hard to obtain) because the 150 (11 of them children) inhabitants on this 3-mile-by-1-mile island understand the delicate and, these days somewhat precarious balance their "thin" (in terms of the "already-not-yet" veil between divine and earthen) place is in. Here it is; the place of longing. The place I'd set my heart out for nearly 8 months ago, the place that sparked this summer's trip: Iona.