Paws on Fair Isle: Skyelark’s Remote Island Ramble
Skyelark's Walkabouts
When the road becomes home: loving a place fully, then knowing when the sea, the wind, or life itself asks you to move again.
Arrivals, Departures, and the Art of Leaving Well
This island is about arrivals and departures. The curious come and go; the resilient stay. But eventually even staying teaches you how to leave differently. The real journey back begins when movement stops feeling like departure from home and starts becoming part of who you are.
Travelling is like flirting with life. It is like saying, I want to love you, but I have to go; this is just the way it is.
We count sheep, count on friends and family, and count on God to see us through the weather, the winds, and the day-to-day remains of the summer.
As we advance confidently in the direction of our dreams, we meet with a success unknown in common hours. Fair Isle remains to us other-worldly.
With all of our travels sailing around the world, I do not know why they call it planet Earth. It is made up of much more ocean.
When Travel Stops Being a Trip
Somewhere along the way, travel changes category. It stops being an interruption to ordinary life and becomes the ordinary rhythm itself.
Fair Isle sharpened that recognition. Arrivals mattered. Departures mattered. Weather could delay both. The Good Shepherd could appear on the horizon, a flight could vanish from the day, and still life continued—not as a failed schedule, but as the life that was actually happening.
Skyelark seemed to understand this before we did. A ferry, an aircraft, a new path, a strange field: none of it required an identity crisis. She travelled, assessed, adapted, and carried herself forward.
Eventually the distinction became obvious: she was no longer a dog who travelled. She was a traveller who happened to be a dog.
The road back does not always take you home. Sometimes it changes what home means.
Every New Place Carries the Last One With It
The geography reminds me of Alaska, Hawaii, the Arctic Circle, Norway and Scotland. New places do not erase the old ones. They wake up earlier versions of ourselves and ask what we are carrying forward.
Ecstasy is not doing your ordinary everyday routine. It is stepping into an alternative reality. Fair Isle can feel like that: familiar enough to inhabit, strange enough to wake you up.
The Case for New Places
All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
Every day, you have to go out of your mind in order to come to your senses. A fool, after all, who persists in his folly, becomes wise.
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we do not know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.
The wise traveler does not try to keep the first feeling alive by repeating the same route. The wise traveler keeps moving until perception becomes new again.
The Act of Rebirth
I stayed four months in Stockholm in 1995, with the obstacles, the fatigue, the ambiguity, and even the danger. In a practical way, it was the act of rebirth.
I dealt with completely new situations. The days passed more slowly, and most of the time, I did not even understand the language the people spoke.
It actually made me more accessible to others, because they helped me out in difficult situations. Nobody remains quite what they are when they recognize themselves.
The Hardest Thing to Do
The idea occurred to me in Sweden. At first it was only a vague question looming: what should I do? The answer began taking shape: nothing.
Doing nothing always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. It feels dangerous and subversive, especially for Americans trained to convert every moment into output.
It is a poor workman who blames his tool, and doing nothing is a powerful one. The time I enjoyed wasting in Sweden was not wasted time.
Nothing is the hardest thing to do. Infinite patience, however, brings immediate results.
The Walkabout Continues
The Island Becomes a Compass
The question is no longer how to leave Fair Isle. The question is how to carry it.
Weather becomes a teacher you recognize elsewhere. Remoteness becomes a measure of what you actually need. Silence becomes something you can enter instead of something you need to fill. And movement stops meaning that you have abandoned home.
That may be the secret of the walkabout: every place worth loving leaves you with a new instrument. You depart with more than photographs. You leave with a different calibration for enough, for attention, for risk, for belonging.
Fair Isle remains on the map. But it also travels with us.
Return does not require going backward. Sometimes the place you left becomes the compass for where you go next.
Travelling Changes the Traveler
From Stockholm to Fair Isle, from doing everything to doing nothing, from seeking new places to finding ourselves, the walkabout continues.
Travelling is not only about the places we go. It is about the people we become—and the parts of each place we learn to carry forward.
We have not been everywhere, but it is on our list. When you come to a fork in the road, take it.