Scotland Expedition 2025 - Day 4
This last day of this expedition felt strange. The work was completed and I felt a bit without purpose. That’s why it took me a while to write to you. Yet, some interesting things happened to me on a more personal level.
Yesnaby view point, Westcoast Orkney, Scotland
I checked out of my hostel and went to Skara Brae, one of the oldest archeological findings of Orkney, and there are many on the islands, which is a small village from 5000 years before present. What you see is a group of houses huddled together underneath the earth, held up by stacks of flat stone slabs and connected by underground alleyways. The remarkable part is that the homes are still quite visible how they were structured.
There were very fascinating objects found on site, a couple of which I was curious what I could sense in them. They seemed artistic or magical in some way, balls of stone full with spikes or a conical shaped stone with 4 engraved points on both sides.
Skara Brae homes connected by underground passages.
When I connected to them and tracked their origin, I saw images of the kitchen, of working with dough and bread making processes. With one I saw a lot of blood, skulls being bashed and opened, as if it was used for the slaughtering of animals and preparation of meat for meals. Not so mystique after all :)
After this visit I lingered and spoke to other tourists, many advising me to go to certain places, but honestly they didn’t inspire me, so I decided to venture into nature and see what places I could connect with. Closeby was a viewpoint and I decided to go there.
The Yesnaby viewpoint provided a beautiful perspective on a set of cliff and headlands, but most of all the flagstones, flat layers of stones like tiles, that emerged from the earth showing lines and lines of different colours, they intrigued me lots. I walked along the cliff until I came at a cove where the sea was rolling underneath and that place held a sort of walkway where a natural chair was present. But to get there, I had to pass on this walkway, with on my right a sheer cliff and the Atlantic bashing against the cliff. I felt fear and anxiety, but very different than how I have lived it in the past.
The cove with its beautiful layers of flagstone with a chair of rock and stone on the right.
Sitting on the chair of stone and rock with a beautiful view
Much of my life I have had to deal with various forms of anxiety, some really paralysing fears of death. I know the different sensations in my body, and the interesting part was that I could feel their echoes, but it didn’t grab me. My knees didn’t buckle. But I didn’t walk down that walkway along the cliff blindly, I did feel the fear and I was curious what its origin was. I was about to walk away and leave it, just go for lunch, but then I thought: ‘why not?’. I am here now, this is a beautiful moment to experience. A power rose up me, energy flowed, and I walked over the walkway and sat down in that natural chair of stone and rock. The sensation was so extraordinary: a combination of fear of death, the fear of falling down a cliff, but perhaps most of all the fear of not knowing what might happen. I didn’t know what was underneath the cliff (I would need to go to the edge and see), I didn’t know if there was any support underneath all that stone, I didn’t know if I could climb up again if I would fall. I thought of my wife and daughter and the newspaper writing about a lost husband and father that ventured in nature and was never found again, since I really was in a corner where nobody saw me and it was quite desolate.
I sat there and breathed through the fear and anxieties, emptied my mind from the voices trying to keep me safe, I made them flow away into the earth and searched for the beauty of this place. The power of nature. The primordial existence of stones, rock and ocean. These immensely large beings that surrounded me. I started to look with different eyes and tried to not make it about me, but about this place. The energy shifted, my body felt strong, empowered, enlarged. It was a nice experiment, and still, safety told me to just go to the car :)
The fear didn’t stick. No shivers and tremors like it sometimes happens after a fearful event. This is how emotional processing can be, how shifting of perception can be, and the art of just experiencing what you feel and what is being triggered in you physically, mentally and emotionally. A part of me imagined being a Viking, 1000 years before, and being tested in my survival, jumping from that cliff and climbing back up. I would be terrified, and yet, I couldn’t see any reason why I wouldn’t do it. If I would have to.
Unstan Chambered Cairn, Orkney, Scotland
After lunch I went to look for one last spot. A place where I could say goodbye before the ferrytrip back to the mainland and the journey home. I found an ancient cairn, a place where people once buried their ancestors and held ceremony to honour them.
After paying my respects to the place and visiting it on the inside, I sat down next to it, with a view on the Ring of Brodgar on the other side of the lake. I said my prayers and thanked the place, the ancestors of this place, the current community, the stones and their wisdom, and the lineage and stars that have guided me during this trip.
I found again the information on how Earth is a place that has a continuous exchange of energy and information with places in the cosmos. Imagine cosmic shamans out there, tracking the energy of our earth and all of life here, the field of the human species and all aspects that are trackable, all aspects of life that they can sense from space, that you yourself sense in the moments of your life and how all those aspects of life are represented in the stones of the Ring of Brodgar.
Sardinia Expedition
4-10 August
Sardinia Expedition 2024