Destinations

These two excerpts are from my diary, made during my search for the western edge, passing through Loch Rannoch, and the Isle of Skye. I've left them as is, as questions I posed to myself, remain unanswered. Ignored, until this week.

---

1

Curious; though about 20 yards from the summit, I stopped for a rest - I sat on a little grassy bank, and gazed down at the Loch of Rannoch. It was a moment of peace, which reaching the summit did not match. Reaching the summit felt like a phyric victory.

---

2

I've been walking out to the lighthouse at the end of the Waternish peninsula. I can see it from where I am sitting - oh, maybe a mile or so away across undulating fields.

But I've stopped by an old derelict house - a huge gray three story house - roof collapsed - a shell inside, the chimney half down. Ghosts of interior walls.

A house of legends - hundreds of years old, surely?

Ghosts: when was it inhabited? By whom? It's just past a group of old crofters cottages - they only have low walls remaining, as if someone had laid down all the foundation stones, and left. So, this house is probably the remains of some wealthy land owners house - perhaps one of the ancient lairds of Scotland; now disappeared; almost.

It's quite beautiful - melancholic. Humming in its presence. My heart soared when I saw it, and I left the path to the lighthouse (fuck the lighthouse!) and struck out over boggy fields towards it; across burns and streams which vein this countryside - sheep scattering --- and so I sit here, in a relatively sheltered spot, by a collapsed stone wall, under its soaring presence, framed by deep blue skies.

--- and,
here, now, like ---
Rannoch, climbing Craig Varr

Both times it feels as if I've reached the end - the place I needed to be - before I reached the original, designated end --- the accepted end, of this walk --- and?

Chosen - all along; here: where people used to live hundreds of years ago, for perhaps hundreds of years, gazing at, if they noticed, the same view I see now - only the sheep and the rabbits remain. Unafraid. Not dinner.

Destination before end point. Is it necessary to go all the way? Who set the end point? Me? Or did I merely accept it? Unthinkingly.

I feel that I've reached my place, for today . . . yet . . .

I am not sure if I am brave enough not to go onto the. . . lighthouse. . . . . .

And so I shall go, following the other walkers, like the one whom I was catching sight of, a half a mile or so ahead of me.

But I've "deviated" onto my own route - a route with no visible paths. Yet I am where people once lived - and I share that space with those from another time; another reality.

So here is my place, and my now. All further travel, even "on" to the lighthouse will be part of the return. I know it.

And do I take heed, and stop traveling, eyes fixed on horizons? Walking towards an end point - and then another end point - and another. . . a series; a recession; a receding, never obtainable end point. Regression.

And do I pass destinations, my destinations, every day? Unnoticed?

One day, I must recognise where, and when -- to

Stop.