I have never understood why I can almost hear the Atlantic coming into the rooms of my little world here at the heart of Highland Perthshire each early spring. There's no explanation for it, yet as far back as I can remember it has happened (or seemed so). There is something quite wonderful about the west coast of Scotland in the first days of the year: when light comes (and seldom it does) it seems to blow into the whole of the heart and sweep all else aside. There is a magnificence and a wonder that takes away your breath. The cold is the worst I have ever encountered (far worse than the Arctic cold which I have lived through; far easier because it is a dry, still cold). On the western edges of Scotland the cold is being swept against you as if by chariots and horses: it is relentless, hurting, fierce beyond words.
And then suddenly there is light: for one moment, and all is clear and beautiful: each rocky outcrop, each hillside, each shoreline.
And of course for me the tiny island of Iona is at the centre of it all. Often it is cut of for days at a time in January (and long beyond). But it is in my mind; I am back there, fighting my way to St Columba's Bay in the hope of finding green stones, or struggling over the last headland to the finest bay in the west, Port Ban.
out of that battered coast
and all the winter can throw
the days of flurrying snow
and the wind searching
the long and starless nights
high seas and the power gone
the spring comes suddenly
in the twirling of a lark
a torn blue sky and the light
here and there in fragments
the jewellery of flowers
reds and blues and golds
rising from among the rocks
year after faithful year
Can anyone dare to say
they do not believe in miracles?
(From Iona The Other Island, Kenneth Steven - Saint Andrew Press)
