One day in April, 2003, I realize that I want to go to Iona, the “holy isle” off the Scottish coast famous as St. Columba’s residence in the sixth century. Within a few days, I plan the trip. I borrow a backpack and fill it and a small suitcase with sweater and sweatshirt, warm woolen jacket, flannel shirt, two dress shirts, a pair of blue jeans, and a pair of good pants. This in addition to the short coat I would wear en route. For reading material, I choose, after some hesitation, The Lives of the Saints (Brendan, Cuthbert and Wilfred), and The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling. Both books are small, lightweight, and likely to match my mood.
Wednesday, June 4, a friend takes me to the Charlottesville bus station for the long bus ride to Dulles airport. I begin snoozing as soon as the bus starts at 9 a.m., figuring it will be long hours before I get to sleep in a bed again..
At Dulles, the woman at the check-in desk advises me to take their 1 p.m. to Newark, as they are experiencing weather delays all up and down the east coast, and it would be better for me to be in Newark waiting than in Dulles. Good thinking. As it is, the 1 p.m. doesn’t get off the runway until 2 p.m.. Then up out of the grey clouds into the bright blue sky, and 35 minutes later back down into the same grey overcast we’d left, Departure for Scotland is scheduled 8:35 p.m.
Six hours is a long time to wait in an airport, although it does give one time to memorize the “security” announcements threatening to seize and destroy one’s unguarded luggage at the first opportunity. Also the no smoking announcements come every fifteen minutes. Six hours is a long time to wait in an airport.
The night before, Rita Warren had asked if she was picking up a bit of depression on my part. I said she was, and compared it to the apprehension I had had before I did my Gateway at The Monroe Institute in 1992, which my friend Kelly Neff had said was normal before a transformative experience.
Well, there I was with nothing pressing to do. Why not ask someone’s take on things? I wrote:
“For some years now, and increasingly in recent months, I have been in contact with what most would call past lives of mine. I don’t think of things quite that way anymore, but suffice it to say I have become aware of other lifetimes that are closely connected to mine. Being located outside time and space, these other lives are as “present tense” as mine. (We are all living in the eternal present, after all.) Of these other lives, the one who has shaped me most actively is a Welsh-born journalist, traveler, psychic investigator named David Poynter who lived from the 1870s to the 1930s. I am in contact with his spirit and he with mine, let’s put it that way. Since I learned the knack, I can contact him at will. In fact, in a TMI program in March, he came through on a tape recorder for the first time, which added a new dimension to our interaction.”
So here, sitting in Newark Airport (which, if you didn’t know it, is a smoke-free facility which promises to seize, damage or destroy your unattended luggage) I haul out my journal and ask him why the tension/depression/anxiety connected with the trip. “Why can’t I just do the trip as best I can and see what happens?”
“You are doing just that. Don’t be hard on yourself in an overbalancing way. But the other elements are there, too, we recognize
“Anxiety – lest plans not come through due to circumstances beyond your control.
“Depression – because you ask yourself `why am I doing this? I am not prepared, I am not even sure what I am doing, let alone why.’ You worry that you will go, return, and in between miss all your opportunities.
“Tension – because a good part of you knows better, a large part disagrees and both parts are waiting to see.”
Pretty good analysis, I’d say. Sitting unobtrusively on a bench against the wall in the waiting room, I play a TMI CD called “Catnapper” that lets you get a full sleep cycle in 30 minutes. It’s one of my favorites, and it works this time as always. I awaken refreshed. The terminal building is cold, and I am glad to be able to pull out a sweater from my backpack. Time passes, and the lounge very gradually fills. I spend some hours reading about the voyages of St. Brendan in The Lives of The Saints.
At nearly 7 p.m., I pull out my journal to ponder.
“Well, what am I to make of the voyages of St. Brendan? An otter who not only brings a fish, but firewood to cook it with! So much of it seems just Irish tall tales – and yet there is something at the root of it. That “something” is the character of St. Brendan himself. The tall tales mixed with the true tales – around him. So who was he really? His utter reliance on God shines through everything. But all their beliefs, their rituals, their world, really – it’s incomprehensible what it once must have meant. It doesn’t mean to us what it did to them. It can’t. And I was raised Catholic! I’m one of the few people left – or rather, my generation is – who can still remember even that shadow of the theology. But it wasn’t to us what it must have been to the people who wrote and read things like the life of St. Brendan. It’s almost inconceivable, now, that people could read that as non-fiction. I suspect there must have been a different sound to them – perhaps the difference between thinking humorous exaggeration straight fact. Yet there was more. They lived in a magical world, a world not shaped – cursed, I am tempted to say – by science as arbiter.”
My good friend Robert Clarke will explain to me how such tales are written, in effect, in code. Thus the otter carrying firewood is not meant to be a statement of fact but a metaphor. It makes a lot more sense when he explains it.
Finally we board, we taxi, we fly. New England, Nova Scotia, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, and then the British mainland pass beneath us while we eat, we snooze, and we eat again, working our way eastward through five time zones. Through much of the flight, as previously through much of the waiting time in the terminal, I am in a no-thought space, not sleeping, not waking. A weird feeling, to be moved from this quiet near-sleep state to a waking state by the small jolt of the wheels touching down. We land at 8:30 a.m. local time, and by 9:30 I am through passport control, have retrieved my luggage and gone through customs (no one there) and am waiting in a British Midlands line to get my boarding pass for the 9:45 to Manchester, England. The temperature is about 50, so I figure my packing was about right.