Edge, Solitude, Simplicity, Beauty

🏝️No man is an island but you can live on one of 500 in Scotland. Living on Fair Isle can awaken you from the slumber of almost living. It's a hard life here in many ways, and the only easy day was yesterday.

🌦️It is mostly about the weather. Normally, we live in a sheltered, delicate world, and we believe we are living. Then we come here to the Sub Arctic and this counterfeit life is exposed, and the default way of doing things and being don't quite sync up.

❄️We are exposed to the elements, the raw savage beauty Ah Yes—but it can kill you. There is danger everywhere, from the cliff edges that crumble to the gale force winds, and rain that comes uninvited but expected. Most of us spend our lives hibernating in cities, rural and urban. Can't do that here exactly in the same way.

😔Boredom is a kind of anorexia of the soul—so what is the remedy here? Part DOING and Part BEING but mostly being.

🚶‍♂️The symptoms of restlessness visit us all; this kind of pathological desire for productivity. Busyness is a decision here—and I cut the grass, paint the house, fix the fences... despite our home, our garden, our beautiful life, we are aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which we can only escape by travel, and the expectation that this is only a contract. After all, my two mantras: Nothing lasts forever, and Don't worry. It will change. come to mind.

🎭You can walk the PAINTED LINE as Al Pacino, my favorite actor, once described how it is going through the motions rather than taking risks. Babbit, the man who never did a thing he wanted in all his life, was the man who never followed his bliss as Joseph Campbell reminds us.

💡You can also have the privilege of being yourself and doing what is heartfelt as right and the true north for your inner GPS and intuition. Our solution these days is to pray, for our next best thing. To go where we can serve best. We got here that way. So far so good.

🏃‍♂️Motion Creates Emotion

💪There is life-saving power in movement—in simple walks, in breath. And Yes, even the extreme cold water immersions I take to give these easy activities a bit of shock and awe. As I swim in the icy Arctic waters, I wash away all the extravagances of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstance.

📸I have seen vacation photos that commodify the two-week getaways... In fact, I am guilty of taking such photos. The pictures I take here are effortless simplicity—this place is eternal, it overwhelms you, it is complete. Just point and shoot. The scenes are painted in natural light, and it always changes.

🌅Another day in paradise—so far, so good. This place has a strange way of showing you what really matters.

🌬️There's something about the wind here—it feels like it’s constantly reminding you to stay alert. In the city, you forget what it’s like to truly be aware of your surroundings.

🌍The connection you feel with nature here is intense. It's like everything around you is alive, but in a way that's much more real than the artificial life we tend to lead in cities.

🌌Sometimes, it takes stepping away from the world to realize how much you’ve been disconnected from it.