return

Because I am fond of words and believe in them as spells - as meaning holders/makers - when I write the name of this piece in my notes - return - I start to read and think about all the ways this word has meaning for me.

A return journey, retracing steps taken decades and lifetimes ago. Returning to homelands. Returning to versions of myself. Returning the gifts given to me, of stability, health, healing, support, accountability, presence, water. Re-turning the wheel of the seasons, making room for growth, change.

I also look up the etymology of the word, because this practice has been gifted to me by my dad, and I love the imagery and understanding that comes when I look to where something (a word, an idea, myself) comes from.

Turn: Turning around an axis, turned on a lathe.

Re: Again.

I am transported to the world and wheel cards of the tarot: XXI and X, moments of change, soul creation. I slip into a stream, a whole lineage of thought opens, and I'm singing the byrds and holding gathered stones, and remembering that Alanis Obomsawin was born at an eclipse moment. (I've been listening to all of my records that are organised under A, in search of another beginning, making bread while listening to Bush Lady.)

In 1997 my family moved from Melrose, Scotland (Alba) to the ancestral and unceded shared lands of xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples, on the Northshore of so-called Vancouver. It was a hard transition for me, which in many ways has shaped my life. I was alien. I didn't get/fit the culture. I longed for the moss and heather and friendship of my life in Scotland. I chameleoned as best I could. I made my way back for a few months that same year, as an insistent 13 yr old, as a sort of exchange student, and spent the summer with my then bestie and her family. But I was already changed, already not at home, an outsider there too.

Three winters ago I burned a wreath I had made that insistent summer of 1997, from sheep fleece, hawk feather, straw bale twine, clam and limpet shell all gathered on the Isle of Mull. In the coals of that same fire I cast beads, made from grey river clay foraged on Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ ocean shores. A spell to hold the memory while releasing the medicine worked, to link places and time, for release and return.

This summer I quit my job and went back to Scotland for six weeks. Almost 30yrs later I finally felt invited and ready to choose this path of return. I was unsure what I would find, and prepared to encounter the dreamt up nostalgia-memories of a child, painted in comparison and longing, exaggerated in grief and loss, from a time of shaken understanding of my essential self. I expected my memories to be false.

What I found was a return to, a re-encounter with, and a re-integration of 13yr old me and those memories. The heather, the moss, the belonging, the dancing, the music, and this embodied knowledge of place, had stayed in me, were true. In my dreams and in my longing, in the mind/heart-scape I have so often walked of Scottish house, fields, river, hills, and trees. In my buried grief.

I still know them, those places. They still know me. Time hasn’t stood still, of course. Across the oceans between I have changed. And also, remained unchanged. 

My cultural identity is wrapped up in my experiences of change and transplantedness, of loss and longing for ancestral lands, of white settler identity in so-called canada. I have come to understand all of this, in as far as I understand it at this moment, in this current way, because I have been asked as a white settler, by Indigenous peoples I have been in circle with, to call in my own ancestors. In doing this, to then understand my own pathway here to this moment and place, and to deeply consider how I benefit from the ongoing violence of colonisation. And then, to go further: to consider how - and act so that - I might be a part of dismantling that colonial system within myself and in the world. A process of mapping multi-generational experience. Necessary for my preparations toward return. A part of the liberatory and healing justice oriented life and world I am practicing toward.

I do know, both from accessing counselling and being witnessed in long form friendships, that 13 yr old me learned some survival mechanisms and behaviours in the multi-fold loss experience of leaving Scotland. That many of those adaptations no longer serve me; in truth they hold me back and do harm. I have been unlearning slowly, by practicing other ways. I don't need to count every sheet of paper in a package to be prepared. I can be different and be celebrated. I can ask for what I need and be loved. I can leave. I can stay. I’m finding ways to not banish that version of myself - sweet 13yr old me (or sweet 20yr/33yr/40yr old me etc.) who is still a part of me and always will be. I am finding ways to honour their knowledge and their ways of being, so that I may hold them more freely, and dance with them too.

I find my Scottish identity has been here all along, buried and distrusted, tucked away for safety in some secret cupboard in the mind-palace of my memories. I realize I have been shaped all along by these formational experiences of identity and connection to land. I realize, re-feel, the trauma of that disconnection, and the grief of that loss and longing, once again.

Weeping in a garden in the Downtown Eastside, at a memorial for a beloved community member, in 2023, I lose my ability to speak any coherence. A friend sits beside me, offers a hand to hold, asks me what he can do. I nod that this is enough, this besideness. Later, when I name my grief, he asks me what it is for. I feel unsure. I know it is felt in the ongoing and preventable loss of life, of loved ones, in the concurrent drug policy and housing crises; in the criminalisation of people experiencing poverty and of people who use drugs; the long and violent shadow of colonisation; and the seeming vastness of the multi-generational healing and redistribution needed to bring return to connection, interconnection, balance and safety, for all. We both know this. And we also both know something is missing. Where else did/does this grief reside? In experiences of rupture without repair? In what I wish (impossibly) I had always known? In witnessing the devastation of extraction/oppression/occupation? Yes.

In 2026, driving from Glasgow to Mallaig, I weep in the glens. I remember the loss of being pulled from this place by family dynamics and choices beyond my 13yr old comprehension or inclusion. In Edinburgh, I weep in the playhouse, listening to stories of Scottish language and identity, of a common tongue; I'm hearing my experience in a room I did not expect to. On the Isle of Eigg, on Bute, and around the red sandstone of Glasgow, I weep.

I also spring through the purple heather hills. I sit in fireweed bloom patches. I call to the cows and they come slowly over. I run my hand over oily sheep fleece rubbed off onto pasture fences, blowing ragged in the salt wind. I close my eyes in the sphagnum moss, and rest. I fling my socks off and dance into the running burn, peaty water welcoming me. I face the ocean, I climb up to eyries, and crawl deep into caves. I find bones and shells, I watch gannets and geese, I sing with the wind’s music. I keen. I am with the cailleach, ancient felt connection, and hear them calling me.

I return to the felt knowledge that I have been looking for the old woman, the cailleach, all this time. I have been following deer trails hoping to see them, and I have been catching glimpses. In friendships, poetry and song, in land based organising, and in my late bloomer emotional/relational education and subsequent opening to loving. The connection to land/mother/they/she.

Deer trail: <<< systems change, resistance, queering, return >>>
A trophic cascade opening possibilities; finding food security/systems; a downtown eastside community garden; practicing loving as spiritual growth, re-wilding, weaving and decolonising governance; deepening into settler solidarity with Indigenous food sovereignty; finding matrilineal organising and buffalo returns; learning from Indigenous resistance (Kanehsatake, Wet’suwet’en, Musqueam, Haida); seeking out my own Irish ancestry; learning little bits of Gaeilge; accepting invitation back to Scotland.

Deer trail <<< magic/spirit/focus/grief/presence >>>
Early beginnings of understanding death with help from the golden compass; the connection of language to spells, to magic, to shadow, and to healing in earthsea cycle; the challenge offered by baba yaga; the move to speak truth and feel with octavia butler; theory and practice flowing together in leanne betasamosake simpson; collapsing linearity and being in the moment under the spell of the sensuous; knowing caves, rivers, trees through poetic prose with robert mcfarlane; moving with the keening songs of ròis; immersing in tales of the cailleach - wheel turner, world builder.

Along and around these paths, these crossing deer trails, retracing, getting lost, and returning, I have found my way back. I feel the invitation to return again, this time sourced from within me. Through music, reading, supporting, organising. In offering my own gifts in a gesturing towards reciprocity which I will forever move to deepen. Return to tend together, to harvest where there is relationship, to weave, move and wail.

Another spell then, in closing: I am a commitment to honouring the call of return, to finding my beginning again, and to integrating all the many cycles I have made. I am a weaver, linking back to the ancestors of my own lineage of blood, holding up and sharing the lineages of thought and practice that have informed me. I am becoming a good ancestor to the decolonial world I will be a part of emerging.

P.S. A note on including all these links in my writing: 

I am working through hyperlinks, on a practice of non-academic citation making. I do this to honour the lineages of thought, theory, radical practice, music, art and poetry that I am referring to, often indirectly. I know my thoughts and knowledge weave back to these writers, thinkers, artists, and organisers. Many of them Black and Indigenous femmes who I feel especially important to acknowledge.  Where the connection feels especially poignant, where I am using language or sharing a concept I learned directly from someone else, I am making a link. Sometimes not to a piece of their work, nor an exact source/line, but at least to a place where you might learn more about them and explore their bodies of work.