Here Comes The Sun
The Slumber of Almost Living
How Fair Isle Awakens You from Counterfeit Life
🌪️ The Weather Supremacy
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 come 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.
This isn't just about atmospheric conditions—it's about the fundamental difference between climate-controlled existence and life that requires daily negotiation with forces beyond your control. The weather here doesn't accommodate your schedule; your schedule accommodates the weather. This single shift in priority changes everything about how you think, plan, and value each moment of relative calm.
🧠 The Soul's Anorexia
"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.
The beautiful prison isn't Fair Isle—it's the human condition. But here, at least, the bars are made of horizon lines and weather patterns instead of traffic schedules and artificial deadlines. Here, restlessness reveals itself as what it actually is: the soul's protest against substituting motion for meaning.
The Two Mantras
These come to mind whenever the beautiful prison feels too beautiful or too prison-like.
🎭 The Painted Line vs. True North
You can walk the PAINTED LINE as Al Pacino, my favorite actor, once described—going through the motions rather than taking risks. Babbitt, 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.
The painted line is civilization's default path—safe, predictable, soul-destroying in its reliability. Fair Isle forces you off that line daily. Storm systems don't follow painted lines. Tide schedules ignore your quarterly goals. Here, you learn to navigate by true north instead of following the crowd.
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.
The cold water strips away everything that isn't essential—not just warmth, but pretense, distraction, the luxury of emotional complexity. When you're fighting hypothermia, you discover what happiness actually feels like: the simple, animal satisfaction of being warm, dry, and alive.
Motion in extreme conditions creates authentic emotion. Not the manufactured feelings of consumer culture, but the direct, undeniable truth of a body responding to real challenge. This is why vacation photos commodify while Fair Isle photos reveal—one captures what you want others to think you're experiencing, the other documents what you're actually feeling.
🌅 The Awakening Framework
Weather Truth
Let conditions dictate priorities instead of forcing control
True North GPS
Navigate by inner guidance rather than painted lines
Shock & Awe
Use extreme conditions to strip away non-essentials
Effortless Capture
Document truth rather than manufacture experiences
📸 The Effortless Truth
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.
Vacation photography tries to convince others (and yourself) that you're having experiences worthy of documentation. Fair Isle photography documents experiences so complete they would exist with or without the camera. The difference is profound: one manufactures meaning, the other discovers it.
When the landscape is eternal and overwhelming, you stop being a photographer trying to capture moments and become a witness to something that was beautiful long before you arrived and will be beautiful long after you leave. This humility transforms everything—not just how you take pictures, but how you live in the space between the pictures.
The complete story of awakening from the slumber of almost living, discovering what happiness feels like when stripped of civilization's extravagances, and learning to navigate by true north instead of painted lines.
Continue the Awakening Journey
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