An Island of One’s Own / Iona Datt Sharma
Image by Andrew Gray
I was raised in a tradition that seeks wild places. I am a Brahmin Hindu, and thus obliged by my strange, ancient religion to take the fourth age of life just for the wild. After being a child, a student, and a householder, the Hindu leaves their hearth and fireside to become a saanyasi, an ascetic, to renounce material things in favour of seeking the divine. Traditionally, this would be in the wilderness, perhaps an ashram in a remote location, removed from the city and the plains where so much of Indian life is centred. In the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic, the Pandava family lose a wager and are obliged to live in the forest for twelve years. This is known as aghyatvas, exile, but in the epic it is presented as a time of rest and preparation, of gaining wisdom by contemplation.
What’s there, in the forest of the mind? What do we seek there? Hinduism, otherwise a complex, contradictory non-doctrinal religion, has a surprisingly clear answer. The divine, for the Hindu, is in all things, but is inarticulable. It cannot be understood or experienced as a whole but only in its individual manifestations. (Hence the common misconception that Hinduism is polytheistic: in fact, each of the individual gods and goddesses represents an aspect of Brahman, the universal divine.) The Hindu is searching for liberation from this constrained life, for their soul’s spark of divinity to become one with what they cannot yet apprehend.
But the distant places bring us closer. Away from people, in places of solitude and beauty, the divinity in all things becomes more tenable, more apparent within the limits of the senses. Robert Macfarlane, in his phenomenal The Wild Places, writes of the peregrini, Celtic monks who between 500 and 1000 CE chose to take a similar path, whose ‘travels to these wild places reflected their longing to achieve correspondence between belief and place, between inner and outer landscapes.’
This is what I was looking for on Iona: peace within and without. You might say I went there to find myself.
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The funny thing is, it didn’t start out that way. I nearly didn’t go there at all.
Iona is a tiny bit of rock and greensward, sitting in turbulent water off the west coast of Scotland. It’s most famous for St Columba, who arrived there from Ireland in the sixth century CE and founded a monastery that lasted a thousand years. The abbey, now mostly a ruin, was re-established in the 1930s by a modern Christian sect, and it’s still a site of Christian pilgrimage. In Gaelic, the island’s name is Ì, or Eilean Idhe, or Ì Chaluim Chille, none of which signify anything beyond ‘island’ or ‘Columba’. Another historical name for the island seems to have been Ioua, perhaps an attempt by the mediaeval monk Adomnán to make the name fit into Latin grammar, and this was miscopied by a scribe in the thirteenth century. Thus the island’s modern, meaningless English name, the one I share: ‘Iona’.
My parents were drawn to Scotland’s remote places. So am I. But I had never seen Iona. In the autumn of 2018, during a period of savage personal uncertainty, I made a snap decision: the time had come to see a place my parents loved so much they named me after it. It would be a fun trip; perhaps it would be grounding. At the very least it had novelty value. My partner and I set out from Edinburgh towards the coast.
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To get to Iona, you go from Oban on the Argyll coast by ferry to Craignure, which is on the Isle of Mull, then drive thirty-five miles along dirt and single-track roads to Fionnphort, a tiny settlement at the tip of the peninsula, from which you take a second tiny ferry which chugs back and forth across the Sound. Looking at my notes from that journey, I’ve written: nuair a bha sinn a’ deanamh taistealachd (‘while we were on pilgrimage’ ) – or, observations while waiting for the AA man. And I didn’t have much time for my whimsical little trip. On the one day I could make the journey, I hit a sharp edge of gravel on the road between Craignure and Fionnphort and damaged a tyre. Along Glen More on the edge of Loch Sgridain is a harsh, unforgiving landscape, the ground reddish with dead bracken, and the mountains jagged slashes against the sky. The clouds were glowering in the dip of the pass; there was no phone signal. I was terrified.
My partner found a miniature repair kit in the boot of the car. Between us, we somehow made the journey down to the valley, single mile by single mile, watching the level of air in the tyre slip down to zero. In a tiny hamlet by the sea-loch, a kind couple in a lonely house let us use their phone and said we should have tea. I thanked them and walked out along the shoreline. It was mid-afternoon by then; too late to do anything but wait for the car to be repaired and then turn back. The mountains on the Ardmeanach peninsula were as lovely as any mountains anywhere. I was disappointed.
Two hours later, the AA mechanic arrived from Fionnphort. He looked at the tyre and said, yes he could fix it, but it would take a while. Rather than wait here, he said, why don’t you take a quick trip to the island while I do it? Ring me off the return ferry and I’ll pick you up.
I’d let go of the possibility of visiting the island that day. I looked at my partner; he looked back at me. Neither of us made the obvious remark about pilgrimage, about being tested. We said we would go to Iona.
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Iona is—forgive my vanity—impossibly, shatteringly lovely. The water is turquoise. The sand is white. The ruins of the abbey stick out like oversized snowdrops in the turf. Even the quotidian of it, the little houses lining the harbour, the school with its painted mural (‘Keep Iona Beautiful’), is too picturesque to bear. It’s tiny—four miles long and one mile wide, with one settlement and one ferry—which makes it wild, lonely, and intimate all at once. This is already the glorious west of Scotland—replete with bens and glens, enormous skies, pine and machair and the sea-crash of the north Atlantic—but even against that background, Iona glitters with internal light. I’m far from the only one to make pilgrimage there.
Perhaps for that reason, Iona is also the burial place of forty-six ancient kings. The graveyard, the Rèilig Odhrain, does not mark the graves; it’s a matter of faith that they’re there. In the precious hour between ferries, I walked around it slowly, breathing in the scent of the wildflowers and soft-cut turf. The ruins around the Abbey are covered in gorse and other sweet things. Everything there is low to the ground, in deference to the razing wind from the sea. Even the ruins, the new buildings, the Celtic stone crosses looking as though they grew there, don’t dare rise too far from the soil and rock.
Because of the wind there are no trees on Iona, but there may have been once. Another derivation for ‘Ioua’ could be a pre-Gaelic word meaning ‘yew-place’. Famously, yew trees are themselves wild things. In The Faded Map: Lost Kingdoms of Scotland, Alistair Moffat writes of a yew tree in a churchyard in Selborne, which was torn out by the roots in the winter of 1990 by a great storm. In being upended, the yew disinterred the dead. During its two thousand years in situ, its roots had curled around the bodies in the churchyard and carried them with it as they spread and grew. The skeletons came out with the corpse of the tree.
That story, and the Rèilig Odhrain itself, make me shiver. It’s the thought of unknowable things, things that happen in secret beneath your feet. But what is faith, if not that? Iona is not just rock and vegetation and a wind that can knock you over; there’s more to everything than what you can see.
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But really, what spiritual experience could you possibly have in one hour on a remote island, while you’re worrying about phone signal to call the mechanic?
None, but sometimes it’s not quite a spiritual experience that you’re seeking. Here’s another thing: the word ‘i’, without the accent, is also the Gaelic word for ‘she’ and sometimes ‘it’. My religious tradition teaches that the things of material life—trips away, sunny days, getting a puncture on a mountain road—should be endured or enjoyed in the knowledge they will one day be cast away. I sat under the rainbow-cut sky, picked up a handful of pebbles and shells, and took the opportunity to feel that immanence in advance. To be only it, only island; to be nothing propositional; nothing but the wild air. Not a spiritual experience, but the holy absence of one.
I did get through to the mechanic, in case you’re wondering. I also had time to get a fridge magnet from the gift shop.
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Something else Hinduism teaches: we live in the dark age of the world. In the Bhagavad Gita, likely composed in the second century BCE, the god Krishna remarks that the Kali Yuga, the age of strife and discord, in which the people move away from virtue in favour of greed and materialism, has already begun. The first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was, like me, raised a Brahmin Hindu, once decreed: ‘aram haraam hai’. Loosely translated, it means ‘rest is unholy’. In other words, in times of upheaval and strife, it is not open even to the devout to go and seek divinity in the wild spaces. There is too much work left to do.
There is a great deal of work left to do. I am worried about climate change and the extinction of the Gaelic language and about how tiny island communities will survive without European funding post-Brexit. I am worried about sand erosion and the destruction of the natural environment and that my hair is turning grey. I am worried about so many things.
Still. It’s been fourteen hundred years since Columba arrived there, and almost four decades since my parents first saw it, but Iona persists even in times of strife. George MacLeod, the founder of the modern religious community on Iona, called it ‘a thin place, where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual’. I’ve seen attempts to ascribe this beautiful thought to more mystical or romantic sources than a twentieth-century Glaswegian preacher, but no one has put it better since. I don’t think my parents gave me the name because of the spiritual element. I doubt that they, Hindu immigrants from the other side of the world, had ever heard of St Columba or Iona until their travels took them there.
But they chose to give me the name, and what comes with it: a clear, beautiful serenity that chimes within my own self, my own religious tradition. I went to Iona because it would be fun and I might get a fridge magnet with my name on, and found myself carried there as though on pilgrimage, by the kindness of strangers, to see great and beautiful things. An Ì, mo chridhe, a ghràidh, say the souvenir t-shirts, sentimentally: Iona, my heart, my love.
In my people’s way of thinking, even feeling and sentiment will be cast away as transitory. But in the meantime, there is Iona, my heart, a wild place to carry wherever I go. When I left the mechanic behind on the pier at Fionnphort, when I crossed the sound on the wee ferry, the sun came out. The sky turned a bright, flawless blue. A double rainbow arched over the island and seemed to be rising from the ruins of the abbey. After a perilous journey through thick fog came crystalline light and clear water. I wasn’t looking for miracles, but there you are.