The Mary Chapel

Judy and I visited the Abbey early today and lit two candles in the Mary Chapel there. An extraordinary sense of peace and quiet pervades the place, punctuated now and then by the sound of birds twittering in the rafters.

Outside in the cloisters a host of starlings burbled and chortled away, their song sounding almost exotic and jungle like in that echoing place. Above our heads a flock of white doves flew in and out of the Abbey bell tower.

NIcholas

Just next door to the Argyll Hotel, the place where we met, there is a home with a beautiful garden. I have visited here a number of times, in spring, early summer and autumn and it has never ceased to delight me with its colours and textures and beauty.

It is all the more remarkable because shortly following my first visit to the island in 1998, the son of the woman whose garden this is, was killed; drowned with three other young men of Iona while returning in his boat from Mull on a bitterly cold winter’s night. This garden fronts onto the very sea where her child was lost to her and she gazes at his watery grave daily. Her husband is a sailor; he daily takes tours of tourists to Staffa and the islands to the north of Iona, no matter what the weather. But rather than abandoning her garden in her time of loss, she has worked to increase its impact. It sits exposed to the elements and speaks of strength unimaginable, it almost sings of magnificent grace. She has worked to place beauty between herself and what must be unbearable sorrow at times.

The hand-built wall of granite which surrounds it creates a barrier from brutal winds and seaspray that could damage the plants, but it is not high enough to block her view of the sea. It is a buffer, but not one that takes away her vision. In gazing at the flowers, the wall, and the sea that stretches for miles behind them, I am reminded that forgiveness, grief, healing…these take commitment, they take effort, one stone at a time…one moment at a time.

When I first arrived here, newly divorced, shattered, frightened and not quite knowing how I could go forward, her garden was less formed, her son was still alive, life, as yet, had not presented her with such excruciating pain. But following that agony and the choice to dig deeper, to live creatively, her garden has grown stronger and more defined in itself. This is also true of me.

Judy