A Month of Days

G’day folks, and welcome. 

We are meeting each other in a strange place just now, but I suppose that’s true of any moment in a life.

My name is Athena, and before I relocated to Scotland with a little savings and no real plan, I worked as a photographer in sunny Brisbane, Australia.

When I moved to the UK in the northern summer of 2021 much of the world was still seized by the pandemic. Sight unseen, I arrived with my mind fixed on hiking among wild Scottish hills and after a touristy week in London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow I bundled myself and my three bulging bags onto the bus for the long ride to the Isle of Skye. High on the west coast and nestled into the steep, green hills of a wide bay is the tiny village of Uig, and a little hostel called The Cowshed. It was there that I settled in as a volunteer cleaner with the intention of staying for the month of September.

Four weeks became nine.

I had fallen deep in love with the tempestuous weather, the glorious scenery, and the gorgeous people. I spent my free time hiking, swimming, baking. For 20 hours a week I cleaned and for the rest I explored, and made pictures, and wrote words. Between the local busses and my feet I trekked and saw whatever I could. When I finally left on Halloween morning after a pancake brunch the sky was grey and it was blowing a hoolie. My heart was full and it felt right to go.

But after a four month winter flirtation with Edinburgh city life, I came back. Back to Uig, back to The Cowshed. In the city I’d made great friends, worked three different jobs, rented a flat, caught Covid, and survived my first Northern Hemisphere winter. But the truth was that Skye had been playing on my mind. And because life works in truly outrageous ways, this time I was stepping through the door as the manager.  

Fast forward to 2024- missing plenty of juicy stories and two more winters- and with almost two and a half years on the clock, once again it’s time to go. This time it’s June slipping by in a haze of work shifts, peak tourism season stressors, gym sessions and all the various mundanities of this little life I’ve made. I finally feel on the cusp of finding community and creating routine away from work, with the promise of regaining the old joys which used to occupy my time. The awe I experience living in this place is very real, incredibly humbling, and as breathtaking today as the day I arrived. So much of me is not ready to leave.

But I’m treading water. This chapter has its foundations in uncertainty; being built upon a visa which makes my residency reliant on my work. Changing jobs would mean months of paperwork, uncertainty, and not inconsiderable expense. Burnout has blossomed in me a few times, and rather than wait for it to bloom and spoil these things I love I would rather pull it all up by the roots.

Three years ago in an unpublished post I asked myself the following;

Is curiosity enough? Enough in this new world of hard borders and uncertainty? Enough to have and to hold and to sustain me on the opposite side of the planet?

It was enough. Through every great challenge and heartache, through loneliness and salvation, through pouring rain and dusky night and gale force storm, from lemon-tinted sunrise to life affirming sunset, curiosity has always been enough. 

Sight unseen I’m headed off again, committed to publishing the words I write as I find my way along whatever path I discover as I go.

Come with me?

“You cannot be committed to both your dream and your comfort zone.”