Fair Isle Today

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player...

Fair Isle is a lyrical reminder to break the momentum of busyness that fuels  the sadness of never understanding ourselves. It makes a place to sit down. So: Sit down. Be quiet…The impulse to create begins… in a tunnel of silence.

 

 Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy. It’s worth remembering, here, that “busy is a decision” — one we constantly make, and often to our own detriment.

 

Travel is an activity not an accomplishment, yet lately, because of the global pandemic, one of the great cruelties and great glories of  traveling nowadays is the wild discrepancy of timelines between vision and execution. When we dream up an itinerary , we invariably underestimate the amount of time and effort required to make it a reality. Our  Fair Isle return took 6 months!

 

Rather than a cognitive bug, perhaps this is the supreme coping mechanism of the pandemic mind — if we could see clearly the toil ahead at the outset of any travel plans, we might be too dispirited to begin, too reluctant to gamble between the heroic and the foolish, too paralyzed to walk the long and tenuous tightrope of hope and fear by which any worthwhile destination is reached.

 

So We are: HERE NOW.

Set in the middle of the North Atlantic, 38km (23mi) from  Shetland and 43km (27mi) from  Orkney, Fair Isle is as far away from civilization as it’s possible to get in the British Isles. Measuring barely five kilometers across and two kilometers wide, the island is home to a tiny permanent population of just 45 people. In fact, it’s the most remote inhabited place in the UK.









Comments