A Journey from Dubai to Tobermory
A Journey from Dubai to Tobermory
On reframing the remote, the insignificant and the systems of power
Hello friend,
Welcome or welcome back. Thank you for being here.
I am excited to take you on a recent journey with me from Dubai to Tobermory (on the Island of Mull in the Scottish Hebrides). It was a journey that took over twenty-four hours, five forms of transport and which uplifted me from a modern urban hub which always feels a bit unfamiliar, to a place and people I have known since I was born.
I find these sudden changes of place always bring up ideas and today’s essay explores some of what I found with my feet were rooted back in Scottish soil.
The world changes when you lay places out next to each other.
Place to place. It is disorientating.
Hot desert beside a rainy summer. In less than a day, my surroundings change from urban desert landscapes to blue-grey waves lapping at the shore.
I sneeze and cough as I walk up the track into the glen with my aunt. All that city air caught in my chest.
Home, it is safe to let it go.
Previously, when I returned home from time abroad, I entered dark months of depression. There is something about home, which means my body does not need to try. But in not trying, all the things that have not felt safe bubble up and out.
I sneeze. I am safe.
We walk past sheep and Highland cows, coastline and the crumbling shapes of long-abandoned homes. My eyes are still adjusting to the colours. I don’t mind the rain.
We look at what remains from the homes of communities who lived here, cleared out 100s of years ago. Replaced by sheep.
“Clearances is too sanitised a word,” my aunt says.
I agree.
Cleared sounds like a healthy Marie Kondo tidy-up, when really people were dragged, manipulated, burnt, chased, threatened, terrorised away from their land.
Around the world I have worked with communities, experiencing the same patterns a few centuries later: oppressors are rarely creative.
Our own knowledge is generations deep, we have a different relationship with it. Confused, because it hasn’t entirely become undone.
I got to choose to leave my home country, it was an opportunity. I got to be lucky to travel the world rather than be forced to. And I was, lucky. But I also know their uprooting became our inherited loss.
An ex of mine didn’t want to visit this island when he came to Scotland for the first (and only) time.
“El culo del mundo,” he called it. (There are many reasons we are exes).
In my eyes, this remote part of my country is not a forgotten backwater.
Seeing the world through his frame, it can be easy to cast away places and people; assume them unimportant or romantise them into only poetry.
Coming from Dubai, after hours of train and boat travel, I see the way this place could look both insignificant.
I also see what my country has, that the world is seeking: water, community, temperate climates, softness.
That culo del mundo is the centre of the world for someone. It always was.
I have spent most of my adult life in places people deem insignificant. Spending time with people who can appear unimportant: farmers, remote rural communities, minority groups.
Places with closed borders and restricted access. Places at the ends of long bus rides, or bumpy trips on 4 by 4s and sometimes donkey rides. Places where there were no hotels and people would move their children out of a room for me to sleep on their beds. Or communities in geographical centres that were isolated for other reasons.
Not the corridors of power: the hidden pockets.
Those people did often have dominion over a small piece of land, a place in an, often fraught, community. But ownership doesn’t free us from the systems of the modern world or systems of power that dismiss our rights.
Powerless, we pray for rain, or without healthcare, we pray for healing, at the market we pray for good prices.
From the vantage point of powerlessness, fate seems a compelling place to stay.
I have believed in fate, unable to control the world playing out in my body and life. I had to trust there was a power greater than me.
Yet, my time working in these places has made clear the real influences on our lives. We know it is demand, not fate that decides markets. We have factual evidence of how global warming impacts weather systems. We know that prices are set in ways that value certain skills, not others, and benefit certain people in the long supply chains. We know how men’s chosen behaviours can play out in women’s lives. We know that our systems are easier to navigate according to your gender, race, class, ethnicity, neurotypically and trauma history. We know the names of the men who forced Scottish communities from their land. We know the names of the (mostly) men who are currently making decisions to prioritise profit and power over planet.
Convincing ourselves that the universe or God decides our lives allows further injustice and further suffering. We are not all deciders of others’ fate, but we do all have our spaces of dominion, we do all have power and sway, choices we can make. We also have the power to decide to see things clearly.
When the landowning men in Mull chose more profitable sheep over the homes and culture of the crofting communities, they knew what they were doing.
When I look at Scotland these days, I wonder, in a world with a changing climate and over-strained capitalist system, will we realise the power of these remote hard to reach places? Will we protect ourselves from the new demands and power grabs that will come? Do we have the means to?
I can see why places where people congregate seem important. I also know that the semblance of doing things and changing something can hide what matters.
It can hide the listening and tending needed to find the wisdom to shape a new way. It can hide the gathering of strength, needed to unpack and change those historic systems.
Influencing the world doesn’t only come from being in the corridors of power. It also comes from a community with nature, with familiar people and with the harder-to-reach parts of ourselves.
It comes from the roots and grows.
Travel with Me
Thank you for being here, friend. I appreciate you signing up and taking the time to go on this journey home with me. Tell me:
What stories or history are you reminded of when you come home after time away?
Do you worry about the impact of the climate crisis on your community?
What stories do you have about journeying to remote places?
Catriona, thank you for your fascinating descriptions about your
thoughts and insights traveling between desert and temperate isle. You have a riveting writing style.
A few months ago, I did have the experience of camping in the Utah desert and then returning to my hot, humid home in Missouri, or Misery, as I sometimes refer to it. I’m not a native to these parts, but a northerner. I spend quite a bit of time in the west, so I’m very aware of the contrast between that arid environment and my humid, jungle like home. However, since I have been driving instead of flying these past years, I’ve been noticing just how gradual the change is from Midwest to western US states. In fact, I’ve been spending a lot of time camping in the national parks, and I have internalized a 3 dimensional topographical map of the western states. It’s a beautiful undulating landscape of changing hues and textures that I’ve been fortunate to create in my mind. I love to travel.
I love the way you close... how important the often overlooked power of connection with nature, community and our inner self is. Beautiful essay, thank you!