Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Scotland!

Off to Scotland shortly.  Exciting!  Haven't been there since I was a child so I'm more thrilled than I thought possible.

It's only for a month.  Keith wants to walk Hadrian's Wall, so ... well, I don't want to walk Hadrians Wall so I'm hoping to get a lift between stops and wait for him, while drinking tea and "grokking" the atmosphere in various sunshine-rich street cafes - please let there be sunshine - at each town where he intends to stay the night.

He also wants to walk the streets of the little town in Sunderland where his ancestors came from.  It'll be lots of hunting for their old family homes and exploring in graveyards looking for names.  I think I'll join him for this part. It sounds rather fun.  Oooh, and what if it turns out to be redolent and deeply felt for Keith? That would be wayyy-Jungian and exciting.  I do hope so. 

You know that his sister Janice took a tour of Alaska a few years ago and stopped off in some little Alaskan town - forgotten the name - that she inexplicably found very familiar on a deep, deep level and when she got home she asked about it, and it turned out that this was the very place where the Sunderland ancestors first migrated and lived for several decades before a family branched off to go to NZ.  Strange, right?  Although I do wonder if she was actually recalling near-forgotten photographs she'd seen as a child in the old ancestral photo albums.  That makes more sense, right?, although ...

... am thinking now about Margaret's friend who won first prize in a Queensland quilting competition - which was a free trip to the Quilting Museum somewhere in Germany - and that's where she found that her German ancestors had an entire wing of the museum devoted to centuries of her family's quilts.  Yup, her ancestors were THAT famous and she'd never been told; no one in her Australian family ever quilted, she herself had never quilted until the day she retired from teaching; always felt at a deep level that she wanted to, then did and discovered she had a gift for it ... and then discovered she came from a family that were, for a great many centuries, the most famous quilters in Germany.

Anyway, that's what's coming up shortly.  A wall hike across Scotland to Sunderland where we'll discover, among hopefully a great many other things, if there's anything to Jung's theory of "Ancestral Memory"! 

Hopefully, I'll be blogging it.  Yes, I know I've been very remiss lately, and that several holidays have remained unblogged, but this time I'll try to tell you all about it.  Fingers crossed!