Postcards from the Pilgrimage

St. Ninian’s Cave

My dear friend Lee said in a recent email: “Trust the detours.”

When we were still on Iona, I received an email indicating that an upcoming concert was going to be canceled due to a delay in a charity visa. I was to perform at Universal Hall at the Findhorn Foundation.

This was a concert I was very excited about, because I was to debut an acoustic version of my new folk opera.

We decided we would not make the voyage all the way back up north, but would head south to the borderlands instead.

Not in a fanciful way whatsoever, I spent time with the map, and decided that we would go to Dumfries, in part because I found a deal for a place to stay on air bnb, in another part, because I’ve been working with integrating the old ways of intuition, with our current method… intelligence.

A balanced imaginal intuition led me there.

Just minutes after I had booked our place to stay in Dumfries, I opened a book in the Iona Abbey library that showed a map of the area we were heading into. And it became clear to me, through some sort of imaginal intervention I can’t explain, that I was to go to St Ninian’s Cave, the birthplace of Christianity in Scotland, and sit with a reconciling and deeply compassionate energy at the threshold between the old and new dispensations.

We are currently in a new birth canal. A new threshold. And it would seem that typical human energy at these turning points in history, is rigid. It builds barriers, in part to block the birth waters, but also, and perhaps especially, those bringing in the new, block the flow of the past expression… damming, (and damning) it too rigidly for all its failures and for its erosion and dysfunction. Conflating organic compression with oversimplification.

When I sat in silence in the cave, it became clear to me that there were beautiful mystical ideas flowing in the birth waters of Christianity. And… contrary to our current zeitgeist of anti-individuality, there was a place for developing toward individuation. A necessary step in the story.

And while there were differences, there was a synchronization in the animism of the Celts and the incarnation of Christ. Their inclination toward the Gospel of John, and Paul’s communication regarding a new expression beyond mosaic law to the Gauls in Galatians give us some glimpse into a natural evolutionary aspect to the transition that took place.

Also while I was sitting there in the cave, I saw the corrupt dysfunction show up in the rise of the individual, in the ushering in of the rational. The natural way in which the church merged into the power structure.

But for some reason, it was no longer a rigid feeling rising in my heart… where I would normally respond to the sensation by building a barrier between me and the sordid, mixed up package of the age of Christendom, I just sat with it, and even had the capacity to open enough to be an instrument for repair.

When I was sitting in the Iona library, it was clear that I was to go to that cave in order to tend to barriers, and turn them back into the thresholds they were meant to be. Not to make excuses, but to bring an organic reconciling capacity to all this complexity.

I was not meant to play a concert up at Universal Hall yet. I was to sit in this relatively obscure, now perhaps even unsexy place, where “some Christian dude” converted Picts, and hold space for integrality.

I asked for St Ninian’s blessing.

It may not mean anything. It may be that I am merely growing senile and my attraction to bringing rural heft and a more complex awareness of the dripping root systems of all ages, could just be the whim of a crazy lady.

But there has to be more to this than the relatively urbanized concept of contemplation engaging with “nature” as a sort of object to drive our cars to once in awhile. There has to be more to this than a progressive tendency toward exiling anything that doesn’t gel with one’s own agenda.

There has to be a way to open the barriers, to shape shift them into wilder openings, so the birth water of all time can flow with more ease through all ages.

With this kind of energy, we can hold space for those who might otherwise be wished out of the way.

Sitting in Ninian’s Cave was not simply a spiritual pilgrimage, it was a reckoning… it was a tentacular effort to surrender into a less simplified expectation of history, and recognize that if I can’t even dialogue with my own ancestral/spiritual heritage, if I can’t stand in the heat of the hard parts, and if I can’t bask in the beauty too, how can I have the necessary depth to live with our common humanity at the forefront of everything I do?

There were two stones that represented the sign for peace singing to me at the mouth of the cave. They will make their way to a set of standing stones tomorrow, and will sing a song of confession, but also of kindred beauty, and the part of me that is and will always be Druid, will receive the stones, and reconcile deeply painful places in my heart.