River in Scotland

Continued from Glasgow Weekend - April 30 - part 1 Thank you so so much for joining me in holding Katie and her whole beautiful family in hands of light, and for praying for them in your own way. I hope we can help gently open the way for a miracle of healing for each and all of them.  I just finished eating a delicious coffee flavored crisp wafer cookie from Slovenia (where Natalie grew up) sent to her as part of a care package of Slovenian treats from her Mum. It tastes so so sweet, and I am glad to be breaking my sugar fast and receiving these gifts of love.  Natalie grew up on a small village in Slovenia and came to Edinburgh for university. Katie’s grew up in Glasgow, in neighborhoods where the gang culture was very much alive all around her. She was 5 when her Mum went to work in the pub where she still works and where Katie had worked. The owners of the pub were aunt and uncle to her and she came to know all the people who come to the pub as a kind of extended family. Natalie’s

Sunday April 30.     Glasgow.   Greetings, fellow wayfarers. Here I am on the airplane on my way to Heraklion, Crete. Sister Judy is also in the air in her long journey from Shell Beach CA to Los Ángeles to Newark to Athens to Heraklion. Chris is also in the air, having left Orcas yesterday for the ferry ride to the mainland, then the drive to Seattle. She got to the airport at 4am for an early morning departure this morning. I believe she and Judy will meet up in Newark, then fly the rest of the way together (I think they even managed to get seats together).  I will arrive Heraklion at 10:30pm tonight (8:30pm in Scotland - the time zone I’ve grown accustomed to in the past month). I will stay at a hotel near the airport then join them when they arrive Heraklion (2:30pm tomorrow).  We will meet up with the car rental driver from Frangokastello (on the southwest coast of Crete) who will drive us to Fata Morgana apartments where we will spend the next two weeks soaking up sun, relaxing,

Continued from Glasgow Weekend- Friday April 28-part 2 I have really been moved by the warmth and nurturance in this family. When I was a little girl, having someone lovingly brush and braid my hair was the epitome of nurturance. I have loved watching Lydia brush Natalie’s  hair and Katie braid Lydia’s hair.  Oops - it is Saturday morning and I just realized I never finished or ousted this! Watched a great Scottish comedy on TV with the Glasgow girls while nibbling a wonderful array of food - Katie lives go cook and loves to present food. She works as a beautician and obviously creating beauty is one of her great joys in life. Tomorrow (I mean today but I will probably not post a blog til tomorrow) we will visit Edinburgh as well as Lydia’s dance class and I hope Kate’s mother’s pub. I didn’t tell you yet that Kate’s mother works in a pub! And so has Kate! Now if that isn’t the perfect finishing touch for my whisky pilgrimage I don’t know what is or could be.  See you in Edinburgh, at

Continued from Glasgow Weekend - Friday April 28 - part 1 We went out to dinner last night at a “world buffet” - including Indian, Chinese, Italian and Scottish food and Sushi bar and I suspect others. It was the biggest buffet I have ever seen. Maybe this photo gives a hint of the scale and how many choices.  I was and am amazed that I could experience it with childlike wonder and awe rather than my usual sense in cities (when I’ve just come down from the quiet and solitude of the trail) that it’s all too much - too many people, too much noise and confusion.  I attribute the ease of transition in part to beginning my visit with a glass of good Scottish beer (to be followed after dinner with Prosecco). For all the villain using I have done of alcohol in my life, I now admit that as Leonard Cohen sings “When I turned my back on the devil, I turned my back on the angel too.” Yes. Alcohol is both muse and monster as I realized listening to Robby Burns.  But it wasn’t just devil-angel, mus

Friday, April 28. It’s Friday afternoon and I’ve had a lovely day in Glasgow after arriving yesterday afternoon. One of the loveliest parts has been writing my blog. The worst part is that the post, which was essentially finished, just disappeared. Gone. The app I use does this from time to time. Magically makes my posts disappear and I have to start all over again. It has definitely happened before but never when I’d written so much. So let’s see if I can write it again - my personal challenge is to enjoy writing it as much as I did the first time.  So let’s start with Katie and Natalie, two young women Chris and I met in Venice for about 10 minutes last spring and with whom we’ve exchanged texts several times since (which hadn’t mentioned that they have two kids - so I have the unexpected joy of meeting Kallum 8 and Lydia 10). Katie’s their birth mom but Natalie’s been co-parenting for over 5 years. The kids were at their weekly overnight with Katie’s mum Thursday so I didn’t meet t

Continued from  Speyside Way - Day 6 of 6 - complete! - Part 2 I found Buckie an interesting and attractive town, lots of old stone buildings. I walked right by my hotel because it didn’t occur to me that I would get to stay in such a dignified building with such gravitas. The inside is full of antiques - clocks, teddy bears, old paintings.  And here is the view of the sea at sunset from my window.  I watched it change colors for quite awhile and noticed that birds seemed to be watching it too, sometimes flying from place to place (like those high chimneys) as if to get a better vantage point. I thought how much they seemed to enjoy flying and watching he sunset. Surely the miracle this world’s joy and beauty is enough that I can accept the whole of it as a gift - even the horror and suffering? Tomorrow I make my way to Glasgow to be a guest of our new young friends Kate and Natalie and see Glasgow and Edinburgh. I’m sure city crowding and pace and stimulation will be a shock after all

Continued from  Speyside Way - Day 6 of 6 - complete! - Part 1 I was surprised as I approached the mouth of the river to see a swan. Then I noticed another too far away to get them in the same photo. Almost immediately as I thought that the swan started moving quite rapidly toward its mate (leaving a noticeable wake). Do you think it was the boys in the pub again? I don’t exactly believe in this stuff - I tend to dismiss it as woo woo, but it did seem as if that swan overheard my thoughts and simply wanted to make me happy. Sorry the pictures are fuzzy. I wasn’t very close to the swans.  At one point I was walking by a field of sheep and most of them were lying down, heavy and motionless on the earth like big white stones. As I walked by I found their stillness deeply calming and it occurred to me that counting sheep might work to put me to sleep if I counted sheep not running and jumping over a fence but lying on the ground so still that it looks as if they have always been there and

April 26 - Wednesday. AND Happy Birthday to Judy and Scott Malcolm! I walked from Fochabers to Buckie, official estimate 10 miles, my iPhone says 12.4. I have completed a total of 254 miles (by official estimates) in the last three weeks. My iPhone says 309 miles (that includes walking I did on rest days, extra walks to restaurants, getting lost or losing mittens and backtracking - you get the picture. ) Today started out sunny and stayed that way. I guess our whisky-drinking pranksters got the idea that they would have to do something different to surprise us. No back and forth today just sunny (a few brief interludes of going behind clouds) and blue sky. I loved the parts of the walk where I could see the river. The river seemed to be flowing fast and enthusiastically and I imagined asking her if she wasn’t a little bit scared about flowing into the ocean. The question didn’t even make sense to her. It was just where she happened to be flowing. But for me it was a metaphor for death

Continued from Speyside Way -Day 5 of 6 - part 2 Another theme of today’s walk was related to feeling uncomfortable about the B&B I stayed it. My room was very cold and I had a hard time getting in chilled (I believe I wrote about that - hike it wasn’t in the deleted part). In addition, the young woman who owns it seemed cold and unwelcoming to me. I kept mulling it over in my mind. Had I done something to put her off? She seemed warmer toward two men guests at breakfast. I began to wonder what it was like for her as a young mother and herself having been raised by parents who ran a B&B. I wonder about the fundamental insight of Freud’s Oedipal complex - for Freud it is very essential that it is about the son’s envy of the father and urge to destroy him in order to become the sole or at least the most beloved of the mother. I’ve spoken how the same dynamic can play out between siblings. But why not guests too? Suppose your parents are in the hospitality industry and they have t

Continued from Speyside Way - Day 5 of 6 - part 1 One of the recurrent thoughts today as I walked was what a privilege it is to walk outside and see the whole panorama of the sky and watch it change. I have to say I am not accustomed to the kind of rapid change those Scottish weather design jokers and whisky lovers create in the weather here. By the way, the wordle today (spoiler alert STOP NOW and go play Wordle if you haven’t done so today and you want to) was a word I have been thinking so often these last few days and yet somehow I managed not to guess it! I even list my winning streak and can you believe it the word was JOKER. Those same pranksters in the pub get to choose the wordle words. This is definite evidence of a conspiracy.  But being able to see the sky - how radically different it is in different directions and from moment to moment. Look at these two photos of the same picnic table at the same moment (well, a very close by moment) just looking in different directions.