The Dead Have Been Seen Alive
Isle of Skye & Isle of Raasay
One day you’re walking to the market to buy veg for supper, and the next you’re climbing Dùn Cana on the Isle of Raasay, the wind whipping through your hair, old, old stories weeping through the rocks. You’re overlooking the Clearances1 when a Scotswoman, your guide, pulls out a book of poems and reads one for you in her lichtsome brogue, and that is when time disappears.
Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig’
The window is nailed and boarded
through which I saw the West
and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig,
a birch tree, and she has always been
between Inver and Milk Hollow,
here and there about Baile-Chuirn:
she is a birch, a hazel,
a straight, slender young rowan.
In Screapadal of my people
where Norman and Big Hector were,
their daughters and their sons are a wood
going up beside the stream.
Proud tonight the pine cocks
crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra,
straight their backs in the moonlight –
they are not the wood I love.
I will wait for the birch wood
until it comes up by the cairn,
until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice
will be under its shade.
If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig,
to the Sabbath of the dead,
where the people are frequenting,
every single generation gone.
They are still in Hallaig,
MacLeans and MacLeods,
all who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim:
the dead have been seen alive. . .2
Time is both the deer and the wood, 'Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig' and I am clinging to that green slope, ancestral threads holding this Gaelic-celled body to the crag while quantum shapes descend from the woman’s voice, which has become all voices, the pervious dead passing like the river over rock. The guide points her finger toward the east, Haillag in the distance, and says something about the ninety-four families, twelve townships having been dislocated to death, or cities, or immigration. I am minding time when time is out of mind, and the thinking slips.
We have come by ferry and by kissing gate to the mountain. I can track back to the moment when the guide said we are going up there, and my husband said, “we are not!” but that also happened in Iceland, and Banff, and that time we climbed up to see the stars hanging over the Kumbh Mela dawn, the dogs nipping at our legs in the dark.
I can track back to finding the guide, a friend telling us about these hikes in the rainy woods, how we’d sold our home and left our country(s) for months, relocating ourselves somewhere, (where was it?) and then the journey to the Inner Hebredes in the spring. His unknown father becoming the force that led us back to Norse and Gaelic ancestors, and now the haunting stillness. The emptiness falling all the way down to the sea. The land isn’t remote if, as the poet says, you can still hear your people calling you.
We had been roaming Skye for days in an ‘endless walk,’ around stark, dark spires of the Quiraing, into Iron Age brochs, Loch Coruisk—the Caludron of the Waters, Megalasaurus prints in ancient mud at An Corran, the eroded magma chamber of the Black Cuillin, sticking then sliding over basalt and gabbro in the drying rain, bogs forever, looking up to see iolaire sùil na grèineas – the eagle with the sunlit eye. Beinns, munros, cairns, sgùrrs, druims, a piper at the edge of the sea, steaming Cullen skink, a carrot cake in a hostel on a day that storms so hard we can’t see our hands in front of us. Tilda Swinton in a long wool coat in the Inverness airport, one tiny baggage carousel still while we imagined ourselves as otherworldly as she.
I know that I’m asking you to read something for which there isn’t a guidebook. But these were discursive days. Drenched in peregrinated dreams. Dewy and periphrastic, really beyond what I can language. A body turned to all forms of water, wet and efflorescence. I could tell it flat, like the deer in the wood, but Scotland took me to six-dimensional time. I could name all that I loved here, but I love it all. On Skye, on Raasay, I am already killed by love’s bullet.
What I’m Reading:
Loving Corrections, by adrienne maree brown. I love the plain-spokenness of this book, which is so fucking necessary in this chaotic time. This is from Brown’s Emergent Strategy Series, and if you haven’t heard of her work on belonging, right relationship, and holding collective power, you’re in for a thrill. This from the Righting Racism chapter—“If you’re a white person (or a man) this is a time for intentionally relinquishing power, or having it pulled out from under you. I know it seems fast and everywhere, but it’s not rapids, not a waterfall, not a tsunami...”
“Rendezvous” by Lidia Yuknavitch in BOMB Magazine. Holyhell, this story still moves me in all the best ways. I read it a month ago, and every day I still turn over one of the details in my memory, the lover’s crisp, white shirt, the easy declaration of having a partner and a lover, sentences like this—"Desire takes time and patience so that the flushed rush of it doesn’t destroy you.” If you’d like to understand time and experience in wavelike forms, and explore the interconnections of life, Lidia’s work is for you.
What I’m Watching:
A Deeper Intelligence Underneath Reality, with neuroscientist Donald Hoffman. Do you sense a theme here? “What we call the physical world is nothing but a headset inside consciousness.” I have to stop and breathe about every five minutes when I listen to Hoffman, he’s that liberating and jarring (to all my habitual modes.) This talk will undo you in the all the best (but not the easiest) possible ways.
Barbecue Showdown. My not-so-secret dream profession would be to become a Pitmaster. YES, I said it. Though I’d tend toward the vegetable side, my Kentucky DNA is happiest with my body inside smoke.
Normal People. This is a re-watch mostly for the sex scenes that are tender and explicit, but also for the themes of class, and getting caught up in our psychological snags. We started watching the series around our anniversary because we were these kids orbiting around each other, and this is one of a very few filmic portrayals that takes young love seriously. I think this series is better than the book by Sally Rooney, the more visual physicality is necessary to this story, and in my view, both the book and the series explore the erotic life as a force for honoring another, and for healing.
What I’m Doing:
My new work – My forthcoming book (Summer 2025) is American Bloodlines: Reckoning With Lynch Culture, a story about the last public execution in America, a legal lynching in Owensboro, Kentucky, where I was born. I’m also at work on a novel.
If you’re new here, my bio is below.
Consultations- After my partner forgot his life in a surgical accident, I moved toward writing as a form of being curious about his memoryless experience. I think narrative is liberatory. If you have a manuscript, an essay, or even notes to begin a project, I can meet your work where it is, protecting your vision and voice. Writers remark that my gift is looking deeply into the work, and then reflecting back what is moving through the piece. I believe in writing as mystery, a consciousness inseparable from the body and artmaking. I’ve got a few editing spots left for the year. I do manuscript consultations, query letters and book proposal development. Contact me here for more.
Sonya Lea’s memoir, Wondering Who You Are, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Wondering has won awards and garnered praise in a number of publications including Oprah Magazine, People, and the BBC, who named it a “top ten book.” Her essays have appeared in Salon, The Southern Review, Brevity, Guernica, Ms. Magazine, The Prentice Hall College Reader, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. Lea is the recipient of an Artist Trust Award, two Canada Council Awards, and a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. As a writer and marketing professional, Lea has been working with clients as a mentor and a freelance developmental editor since 2016. She teaches nonfiction at Corporeal Writing, Hugo House, and Imprint Books, and she developed a pilot project to teach writing to women veterans through the Red Badge Project. Lea also offers writing retreats throughout the Pacific Northwest and western Canada.
You can find Sonya at~
The podcast I did with my kid.
The Highland Clearances were the forced eviction of inhabitants of the Highlands and western islands of Scotland, beginning in the mid-to-late 18th century and continuing intermittently into the mid-19th century. The removals cleared the land of entire communities primarily to allow landlords to increase their income. This was the end of the run rig system, a form of shared grazing and communal farming, and the beginning of pastoral farming whereby larger farms paying higher rents were created. Farmers became crofters, then overcrowded markets resulted. Some landowners paid tenants an “assisted passage” to emigrate. emigrants settled in close communities on Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia (and later in Cape Breton), the Glengarry and Kingston areas of Ontario and the Carolinas of the American colonies. Canadian Gaelic was widely spoken for some two centuries.
Sorley MacLean, Hallaig and Other Poems, found also at www.sorleymaclean.org/english/poems_list.htm
Sonya thanks for the gorgeous photos and introduction to Sorley MacLean. I'm delighted to read of your enchantment on Skye,
" I could tell it flat, like the deer in the wood, but Scotland took me to six-dimensional time. I could name all that I loved here, but I love it all. On Skye, on Raasay, I am already killed by love’s bullet."
such a powerful statement. Thank you.