The Rearing Up and the Letting Go

Skye in August — where the land gives back the self 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Jim Kroft

Aug 23, 2025

“Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go.”
Anaïs Nin, Diary I

Sun 17th Aug ‘25 — Isle of Skye

There is an epidemic of vans on Skye, each jostling for position around its weary circumference.

Tonight, though, I have a miracle spot. By me, the sea ripples against the shore, so close, I could kiss it.

Arcing round the isle, I’ve witnessed a symphony of colours.

The land draws the mist in from the sea as if through a syringe, veiling the coast, then dispersing it as quickly as it came — but not before pulling apart the sunlight and scattering it in a million uneven shards across the land.

All of this plays itself out — not only around me, but within me too.

Pieces of the past emerge, linger, then dissolve as quickly as they came, whispers of memory hovering before me, but which I can let go.

This is the meaning, I think, of this day; the rearing up & the letting go.

We are not born to be dominated by what we have been.

Skye invites all of you because it beseeches you to leave a part of you behind. In taking something from you, it gives you back yourself.

As all the world fills itself up, it is so freeing — to empty.

Monday 18th Aug — Garrafad

Yes, that’s it.
The gravity of life is pulling me back.
I try to resist, not for wanting to abandon all I must return to it, but because I am clinging to the land I was born in.
It is within me more than it ever was, and in leaving, I leave a part of myself.
Yes, duty calls — even if to rush through this landscape is to unwittingly slight it.

Tuesday 19th August, Staffin Isle

“I hardly ever sit still without being haunted by the undone and the unkept.” — May Sarton

My God, I have so completely let part of myself — the part of myself Mary Sarton alludes to — go.

For this time; untroubled by my usual doings & strivings.

All I want to do is to find myself emptied, evoked & electrified by the shape-shifting landscape before me.

Somehow, what it is to love and what it is to exist merge.

Like lichen, clinging to the rocks, just wanting to be.

Today I peered back in time, marvelling at the fossilised footprint of a Megalosaurus — calmly imprinted into the rock for all of 165 million years.

It made me ponder our brief stay here.

I so desperately don’t want to join it yet, want to remain in this, the heart of life.

Yes, there is a journey every living being passes through.

Maybe I have thought of it too much.

Part of me has accustomed to what life is: its temporariness, its fragility, its defiance. I will be back with the supreme being before I know it, but damn, it causes me to grasp again — just as I was letting go.

I think of life back in Berlin.

The creative life I live is about grasping & creating, aspiring & pushing — yes; wanting something.

I know that the I beyond this I is the “I” I inhabit today — heightened in the noticing of things, carrying the love of those I have known, and — knowing, to the bottom of me — that I am most alive when gazing at the sky-thrust of the starling.

Dizzy me, little fellow — plot your diagonals!
My eyes draw mazes from them.
You hold the coordinates, and whatever the numbers command, their equations I will follow.

Wednesday 20th August

A creative superpower? The ability to get down to it. What I’ve enjoyed on this trip though, is letting it go. It’s not chosen procrastination, it’s commitment to being itself.

“Consistency, consistency, consistency, consistency!” they bark.
No sir.
Living, first, always.

I tasted the wilderness. Its voice thrummed through me like a canonical wind, tripping a hidden valve and releasing all that had been pent up.

Thursday 21st August

Funny, how we live with our own assumptions about our lives.
Each cottage on Skye speaks to me, and in the evening, when the light comes on, I see my own potential unlived lives playing out before me.
“What if?”, they ask.
And I sit there, midge-bitten, ruminating.

Friday 22nd August

Sorry world, couldn’t bring myself to open the laptop — again.

I know we are meant to keep ourselves available, but sorry, no. The digital eclipses any connection to an inner discourse. It’s the most convenient shield. We swap what matters most for the noise of the world, then convince ourselves we are living just because we are always full.

Busy, but busy for what?

If the price of success is forgetting to be — that is — what to do once we have it; then for what do we aspire? I am most alive when I am empty; a canvas upon which the world can paint its colours.