“Break it open, like a rock,” she said and filled the room with her smile. “Get on with it.”
I felt inspired, overcome with emotion, and realised that which cannot be spoken can be written.

The first time I set foot in the Scottish Highlands, I cried. I was overwhelmed, for my heart had found something it had been screaming for since the beginning of time: some people will name it ‘Freedom’. ‘Peace’ is what I would like to call it.

That day, I made a pact with myself — I needed to live where I felt at one with myself and others. To be truly alone in this world, you need to disconnect. Disconnect from that which is and the people who are. A moment in between two waves crashing on the shore.

The further North you go, the more you sink into the skin that belongs to you, retreating to the roughest corners of your inner landscape and still unable to map them out. The landscape, which looks like nothing from this earth, the people feel warm, and the different shades of green cannot be found anywhere else. Salt on your tongue and in your hair, you find what you weren’t looking for.

‘Canis Lupus’ is Latin for ‘Wolf.’ I don’t know the Latin word for ‘human,’ since we seem to have lost the Wild within us. And still, it has been calling for me since I was a child: places that seemed too far to touch, too remote, and yet so close. Scotland was the only one that answered: the mountains, the lochs, the rivers, the forests. From the highest peak to the deepest sea — wilderness has got a different meaning here.

Nothing can be compared to a Golden Eagle circling the summit of the Munro which you have just climbed in the summer heat on the Isle of Mull with a group of friends, strangers a year ago. Or torrential rain as you are trying to make your way from Milgavie to Fort William on the West Highland Way, the second time, soaked to the bones and a smile on your face. Or a morning swim in the Moray Firth, in a place that will one day be yours to call home.

Scotland answered my call in every colour of the spectrum and with every song that there ever was to sing. The wild beauty that she is, a watchful mother over that which needs to be preserved.

A mother takes a walk at Findhorn Beach with her three children and their family dog. The youngest is tightly strapped to her chest, sleeping. A watchful hand on their back.

“Isla, don’t go too far in the water,” she says to the little girl holding her toy dinosaur. A few tears shed as Isla stubs her toes on the rocks; her older brother catches her. “Isla,” I whisper to myself as I continue to walk barefoot across the sand, water caressing my feet and a seal song in the distance.