Saturday marks one year since Scotland.
I keep turning that sentence over, because a year feels both impossibly long and like no time at all. I can still feel what it was like to be there. I can also feel how far I am from it now.
The trip
It was a soul sister trip, the kind you call the trip of a lifetime and mean it. It was a celebration of the first book being out in the world, and it was research for the second, which I was deep inside of at the time.
Both of those things were true at once. I was marking the end of one long effort while quietly collecting the beginnings of the next. I did not know then how much of that trip would end up on the page.
Home, in a place that isn’t
Scotland has always felt like home to me, in the few times I’ve been lucky enough to be there.
I can’t fully explain that, and I’ve stopped trying. I only know the feeling when I’m standing in it; a settling, a sense of arriving somewhere I already knew. It is the same quiet recognition I’ve written about in these posts, the pull toward places and practices that feel like remembering.
That is part of why it made sense to set so much of The Enigma there. The present-day story lives in Scotland, and I wrote it with the feeling of that land still close.
The bittersweet part
It is bittersweet to look back on something so idyllic and know I’m not there now. A trip like that is a gift, and the ache afterward is the price of having been given it.
I would go back tomorrow. I will say that plainly, because pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Some places hold a piece of you after you leave, and you carry the missing of it for a long time.
I treasure that trip. I always will.
What a year changes
What strikes me most is the distance between then and now.
A year ago, The Enigma was still something I was wrestling into shape. It was pages and notes and research, a book that didn’t exist yet except in my head and on my screen. Now it is in people’s hands. It sits on the table next to me at signings, and strangers pick it up and ask me about it.
The thing I was in the throes of is the thing people are reading.
I find that astonishing, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop. It is easy to forget, while you are inside the work, that the work eventually leaves your hands. A year ago I could not have pictured a reader holding it. Now I watch it happen.
The next one
Here is the part that makes me smile.
I am in the throes again. The next book is underway, and I am in the same place I was a year ago…deep inside something that doesn’t feel finished, wondering whether it will become what I hope.
Only this time, the past I’m researching is a place I can’t visit. Last year I could stand on the ground I was writing about. This time the ground is gone, and so is the world that stood on it. Neither I nor anyone else can walk there now. I can only follow the trail back as far as it goes.
I think that is why the work feels so alive. I’m not describing a place I’ve seen. I’m trying to find my way into one I can only reach by following the thread.
I suspect that a year from now I will look back at this season with the same mix of wonder and ache. The in-between never feels like a milestone while you are standing in it. It only looks like one later.
Saturday
On Saturday I’ll be at a book fair in Sanborn, New York, with both books on the table and the little friends who travel with me.
It feels right to spend the anniversary this way. The trip helped make this possible, and I get to mark it by doing the work it was meant to celebrate.
To the soul sister who shared that trip with me, thank you. I will treasure and cherish it always.
