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3x/month stories for humans seeking depth and meaning.

I'm Janelle Hardy and at some point you signed up for this weekly (ish) newsletter on memoir-writing, somatic (body) healing and stories. If you'd like to unsubscribe, just click the unsubscribe link at the bottom.

"Mommm!!" I shrieked. "How do I get out of this loop?!"

We'd just landed in Edindurgh, Scotland, fetched our rental car (a manual transmission Golf VW) and exited the airport to drive downtown to our hotel.

Except, instead of following the GPS map, I got caught in a figure-8 loop between two double lane roundabouts.

Although I'd learned to drive on a manual transmission in the middle of a Yukon winter, and I was ok with the challenge of learning drive on the wrong side (for me) of the highway, what I hadn't anticipated was double lane roundabouts.

Everytime I managed to exit one I somehow entered into the adjoining roundabout, and repeat, over and over and over.

A year and a half ago my mom and I were planning a trip to the city of Galway, in the Connemara region of Ireland, for a conference.

Since the Highlands and Hebridean Islands of Scotland were just next door, and this is where some of our ancestors are from, we tacked an extra 10 days onto the trip.

Visions of standing stones, ancient villages, singing and fiddling music, jokesters, Gaelic speakers and tribal affiliations filled our heads.

Mom's dad, Columbus, the youngest of 22, came from a diasporic Gaelic family and culture in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, but raised his family as far from them as possible, 7,000 kilometers, from the far southeastern part of Canada to the far northwestern part of Canada.

He didn't pass down his language, connection with family, community or much in the way of culture. What he did do was play his fiddle so his eight kids could get 'jiggy' (dance) and talk a lot about being Scottish.

So, two generations removed from Columbus, I grew up with those impressions (plus a little lore from some of my dad's side too).

The family mythos though? It was a direct channel from the Cape Breton MacKinnon clan.

Over the 10 days in Scotland I drove like a scalded maniac on the 'wrong' side of the road, with my mom, freshly out of a car accident, flinching, shrieking and gasping at the oncoming traffic and disorienting traffic rules.

Mom was particularly good at shocking me right when I was finally driving correctly, so we had to negotiate a strategy where she'd put her head between her knees and stare at the floor of the car in high-stress moments.

Her self-protective instinct was healthy, but, unfortunately for this road trip, calibrated by Canadian roads.

These traumatized, diasporic, clannish roots, they're powerful.

Neither grandpa Columbus, nor his ancestors for over almost two hundred years, had stepped foot on Scotland since being forcibly displaced during the Highland Clearances. But oh, we Canadian MacKinnons think we're Scottish, we do!

And so I, my family, and, I imagine, many of you and your families, long for the roots of cultural identity we only got whispers and tastes of.

For many of us, these longings span multiple threads of multiple cultures.

Hence, my mom and I and our visions of standing stones, ancient villages, singing and fiddling music, jokesters, Gaelic speakers and tribal affiliations.

Because ancestral points of connection happen through song, story, dance, touch and language. Through culture.

So it was that, in our heightened flight/flight/terror state, we zoomed up, around, over, down, back up, down and around as much of Gaelic Scotland as we could. Surprisingly, the least stressful roads were the single-track no-shoulder roads with regular, and visible, passing places (pullouts).

Delusion dreams of being ancestrally-embraced by long-lost 200-year past relatives aside (with less than 60,000 fluent gaelic speakers in Scotland and over eight million Gaels in the diaspora, starry-eyed ancestral orphans like us are a huge tourism industry) we had some great adventures.

We stood on land beloved by our ancestors. We visited the Calanais standing stones on the Isle of Lewis (and they showed me how to work with them energetically).

Ever the lover of bulletin boards, I spotted a poster for a local knitting group in the Calanais standing stones visitors centre, and brought my mom and her knitting there, where we soaked up the rowdy, bawdy, sassy style of local women who, truth be told, didn't do much knitting at all, but had us everyone howling in laughter for over an hour.

We stayed in a Blackhouse Village, in an ancestral-style stone-walled thatched roof village (updated with modern amenities like electricity and plumbing).

We zipped to the end of a road to a Scotch distillery for a tour (because I collect and use whiskies made of the lands I'm from to connect with ancestors), then, on our way back, realized there was a labyrinth at the top of a winding road.

Off I zoomed, along the cliff's edge, past a village, a random tea and art shoppe at the literal end of the road, walked past, beyond an abandoned military outpost, where we searched for this labyrinth (the map as incorrect) overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, until we found it and walked it (again, it pays to read bulletin boards at local shops).

There's also the fact that, right before our trip started, I discovered via DNA testing that we also had concrete and, until then unknown, Irish ancestry, from exactly the Connemara region we went to next!

There were so many more adventures involving textiles, ancient sites (like Carloway Broch, that beehive-shaped double-walled thermos style two-story, 2,000+ year old home we toured) and conversation and food and cancelled ferries and, and, and - mom, what did I miss?! 😅

But what we didn't get enough of, even so, were songs and stories.

We'd visited just before missed the summer festival season on the Isles of Lewis, Harris and Skye, or I'm sure we'd have had our fill.

So it is with such delight and personal hunger that I share this absolutely beautiful offering dreamt up and developed by Hanna Leigh:

Weaving Remembrance's Ancestral Songs and Stories of Scotland.

Eight weeks of song, story (and even an introduction to the Gaelic language (my grandfather Columbus' mother tongue)).

• Starts May 7th

​Click here to learn about Ancestral Songs and Stories of Scotland, then sign up ​

(*affiliate link)

xoxo,

Janelle

PS - interested in other forms of ancestral guidance? And/or Gaels, Highlanders and Celts aren't in your ancestral lineage? But maybe there's a thread of the Celt in you even so - as Irish comedian Dave Nihill says, everyone is a little bit Irish because 'we have shagged our way into all your family trees' 😂

I recommend practitioners trained in Ancestral Medicine as well as this 2023 Healing Through Writing Festival presenter, Jillian Gogo Walker. Or, buy the workshop bundle to get her As We Write Our Ancestors Listen workshop + more than 25 other fantastic writing and healing sessions.

* affiliate link means it's a referral link. This means if you sign up for this course, I'll receive a small percentage. This is a sweet and transparent way to market one's work by directing advertising and marketing money towards peers' cross-promotional shares, rather than into the pockets of facebook and google advertising.