Old bones and thin spaces

Written earlier this week while on Iona in Scotland

Bleached rib bones, longer than my own leg, lay out in the dusk light. A collection of what once was inside—holding lungs, and heart, and those organs of life. Now, bones lie piled outside the shed here in Iona next to the place I ‘retreat’ in. It feels curious to imagine the body they once belonged to.

Our bones hold us together, don’t they? They are the structure on which we hang skin and sinew. And they outlive those other, softer, more mortal parts of ourselves. When did this whale die, I wonder? When did its huge, bulking body wash up on the shores here in Iona—a vessel no longer carrying life? What stories do its bones tell us?

Sat around a table tonight, on the first day of a retreat in the Western Isles of Scotland, we spoke about values—and about what ‘co-creation’ might mean. One of my fellow journeyers mentioned our ancestors, and how what has passed is part of that generational dialogue. I loved that idea. And it brings me back to those bones.

When we are ‘old bones’ lying on the ground, do our memories seep into the soil? Are the whale bones part of our co-creation now? Do those bones sing songs that shift the cadence of our own conversation? Or do we simply pick up from where our ancestors left off? Our whale ancestors, our human ancestors—those who are now land, they are bones, they are territory.

I feel sad that the whale, once so vast and graceful in the ocean, is reduced to a pile of bones. And how strange that I should be here, having a conversation with myself about her bones—her ribs, a vertebra that was once part of the mast of her spine. Would this have saddened her too? Or is she, in fact, now simply part of the magic of this place? Are her bones a blessing, or are they just bones?

Would she recognise herself now, scattered and still, no longer swimming but resting under bracken and wind? She is now in pieces on a ‘Holy’ island. Would she be curious or reverent, or indifferent? Perhaps her presence is not lost, but diffused—into the salt of the air, the hush of the tide, the stories we tell when we think no one’s listening. Stories like this one

Is it abbeys, and nunneries, and Celtic crosses that make this holy ground? Or is it the bones of whales?