1. Achmelvich, Assynt

How far will I travel to learn what ‘home’ might mean?

How far will Scotland, wild, mighty Alba, beckon me?

I’m writing these words from the Minch – the choppy, windswept stretch of steel-blue sea that separates Skye and the mainland from the curving spine of the Outer Hebrides, the north Atlantic coast of Britain.

I’m on my way home from the Isle of Lewis, the latest in a series of explorations Em and I have been making lately, each taking us further north or west, to more and more dramatic landscapes and, crucially, coastlines.

2. Valtos, Isle of Lewis

On the one hand these trips have been about the simple joy of exploration. We are living, for some reason or another, on the Isle of Skye. What better way to make the most of these strange, brief years than by exploring the Highlands and Hebrides that cradle our famed island? Considering we can just about afford it, it feels almost rude not to – these lands and beaches are so incredibly rich and wild and tempting, everywhere calling “come look, come see …if only you can brave the weather.”

Yet this is also a different sort of journey; the internal kind. The kind of journey in which I’m attempting in some clumsy way to make my surroundings mirror where I want to go internally. I’m seeking a reflection of my psyche. Something in the landscape to let me know I’m seen, I’m witnessed, in this moment of transition. Something, perhaps, to tell me that it’s okay, that I belong. In pushing myself out to the Atlantic coast, in standing in gale force winds on the most northerly tip of the mainland, in plunging my feet into the freezing, unforgiving North Sea, I am attempting to physically discover and represent my own limits, my own edgelands. I’ve known for some time – well before the move to Skye – that there is a message for me here.

Have I uncovered it? Not yet – but enlightenment never was a switch that you could flip.

I know that it has to do with home. With kinship and connection.

With belonging.

Do I belong here? Could I belong here?

What does belonging truly feel like? What does it mean to belong to soil and sand, to commune with rock and river, to come home, again and again, to the land and sea you would call family, the land and sea that you know, I mean truly know, and that knows you?

And what does it mean not to belong?

What if this land rejects me, as I fear it may, as I fear it already has?

I feel that I’m rough-handling a tired old wound, one that I can never fully allow to heal. This land is not my own, this tongue so foreign, this way of life, if I’m truly honest, not the one I choose with a full heart. These tides don’t bring the waves I know. I struggle to find the plant-allies I recognise and love. I have stripped away the comfortable foundations of my selfhood, to see what sits beneath them.

A few years ago, visiting Skye for the first time, I wrote of “an unfamiliar, indifferent place.” I sensed the treeless, wind-battered land’s disregard for my safety, comfort or wellbeing, its utter disinterest in whether I could root here or not, and what I made of its crags and mountains, it’s beallachs, it’s glens. The west Highlands of Scotland did not appear as a playground or an adventure, nor as a challenge to overcome.

Simply, the land said “Come. Listen. Observe. Feel. And make of this what you will.”  In perhaps the way some of us are attracted to tough or unavailable lovers, I felt a masochistic tug and by January, was living in a caravan on a rocky beach on the Sound of Sleat.

Much has happened since then, but I could not tell you what it was.

The journey continues.

3. Callanish, Isle of Lewis

It is solstice. The heart, the apex, the balance-point of winter’s Deep Dark, it’s cold, bottomless nights. The domain of the Cailleach, the Atlantic storm, mist that shrouds like an army blanket, shooting stars, the midnight stag. A festival of darkness that carries at it’s core the promise of light, the reminder that all things pass in the endless cycle of seasons. All things change. All things are at once living and growing forth, and dying back and composting, there is no one without the other.

I’m curled in the observation lounge of this comfortable, modern ship, bound for Ullapool, Wester Ross. I have a hangover, the indulgent, almost-enjoyable kind in which one simply nestles down into a sickly daze with a mug of tea and allows onesself to simply be. Last night we danced our hearts out in Stornaway, and it was worth every pang of pain that shoots across my forehead now. Emma is sleeping beside me, I’ve just finished a chapter of my book. No-one is speaking, the people around me are dozing on each others’ shoulders, or gazing out of the window into the endless, darkening sea. Though the drizzle, past a tattered, dancing Scottish flag, across the swelling, turbulent water, I can see the mountains of Assynt, like shadows. Assynt is a wild, rocky, peaty place, visited just three weekends ago. It is odd to be returning so soon by sea. By the time we arrive it will be dark as night. From Ullapool we’ll make the three-hour drive back to Skye, to the holiday cottage we’re allowed to call home, for this winter at least.

4. Achmelvich, Assynt

Yesterday, Emma and I went to the west coast of Lewis, to the white, windswept beaches of Uig. We walked out across a huge, curving bay, cut in two by a wide river. The wind was strong and the rain was wild and the visibility was minimal. We traced the limits of that bay, from the tough, grassy dunes to the ocean’s turquoise, crashing edge, round to the peaty channel that brought an endless supply of water from the surrounding hills down, down into the sea. The wind was so strong you’d think it was flowing the other way, back up into the mountains. We talked – or we tried to, or we walked in silence, occasionally letting out a ‘whoo-oooop!’ to be yanked away in the wind.

We were utterly, utterly drenched. Jeans so wet I could barely bend my knee to walk, rain channelled down through my socks, filling my boots, hat plastered to my skull, ungloved hands red raw, wrinkled in soaking pockets.

5. Uig Bay, Lewis

So much water.

So much water.

Despite having spent the years prior to these living on a boat, despite spending ten years in the Yorkshire Pennines, a land of rivers and canals, reservoirs and rain, despite spending my teens and twenties in love with moist, mossy, mid-Wales (a land that truly does call me ‘home’), I’ve never felt the presence of water in my life the way I do now. An omnipresent force, always in view, around every turn a coast, a beach, a loch, a river or a stream. Constantly pouring from the sky, oozing from the earth, even in darkness the sound of the sea looms loud as I stand outside the door of our cottage, looking for the moon or the stars.

6. Stoer Point, Assynt

I have almost zero water in my natal chart. Odd, for a tarot reader, but water has never been ‘my element’. I have too much respect – no, let’s call it fear – for its intangible, unstoppable, uncontrollable force. It’s weight. It’s unfathomable depths.

I remember the nightmares I had the first time I moved my canal boat, the sight and sound and spray of so many thousands of tons of water pouring endlessly through immense locks built in the industrial revolution. Slip on the decking and you could easily be killed, broken in two by the current that sucked you through ancient, time-honoured gate panels. Man thought he had harnessed the power of water there, but, just as any time man thinks he has conquered nature, it was an illusion. We were at the mercy of that water. My dreams knew that.

I’m not afraid of water, but I’m in awe of it’s power, power that demands respect and surrender. I’m not afraid of emotions or the deep-rooted energies that come swirling up from the depths of me, but I recognise their power and I respect them. For much of this year I have been pushing away this power, afraid of where its currents might take me. Now, as winter grips my island home, I feel ready.

I surrender.

7. Dunnet Head, Caithness

So off we go, Em and I, north and north. North-east, with the bikes, to the most northerly point on the mainland UK – Dunnet Head – where we gazed out into the mist and to Orkney, the Vikings’ route to Britain.

Battling against the gale, up and up that winding road, struggling to stay on two wheels, I felt myself reach that inner edge well before I reached the cliff. That old recognisable feeling of anger and frustration, of ‘I just can’t do this’, of ‘I’m turning back’. I raised my gaze to see Em, stronger, more determined than I, up ahead. I surrendered to the inevetability of this task. I pushed my legs forwards and down, over and over, another time, then another, knowing no other option. Something small broke inside.

Caithness is a land of big skies and peat-bogs, breeze-block bungalows and abandoned farms, ‘the lowlands beyond the highlands’, this lost last county, the final – or first – corner of this sceptered isle. I feel both desolation and pride here, both despair and gratitude, both an intense loneliness and a feeling of safety. The space between these things is blurry and brings tears.

Then later, north west, to the remote mountains of Assynt, where some of the harshest land I’ve ever encountered is being made available to hardy would-be crofters. Then further, west across the Minch to Lewis, to the Atlantic coast, to thousands of miles of ocean, storms and emptiness.

Edges. Limits. Weather that challenges every assumption.

Surrender.

8. Emma on the boat to Harris

Where am I going with this? Ach, I don’t know. I really don’t. I just know that it feels right to end the year this way, after so much stillness, to burst into action, movement, further north, ever closer to my edge.