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Kathleen Jamie Biography

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“…I grew to appreciate the company of people who listen to the world. They don’t feel the need to talk all the while. They were alert to bird-cries, waves sucking on rocks, a rope frittering against a mast.”

Nature Silence Company Talking Scotland Birds Waves

Book:Findings

Source: Findings

“Knowing birds is like being fluent in a foreign language, or adept with a musical instrument.”

Language Nature Music Scotland Birds

Book:Findings

Source: Findings

“[…on a Corncrake call…] Fairy music is said to do this; to lead a man on in his confusion and drunkenness, to start, then stop, then begin again from another place, ever luring him on. This was not a beautiful music, it has to be said; hardly the art of fairies. Mind you, it could be a goblin carpenter, sawing away at his little workbench, if you’d had a few too many at the island disco and were of a fanciful mind.”

Nature Music Scotland Outdoors Fairy Music Bird Call Corcrake Call

Book:Findings

Source: Findings

“A friend said to me – we were talking about our stage in life, when we suddenly discover that we are the grown-ups, with children and parents, and even grandparents to tend to, not to mention our pupils, patients or clients or employers – that we spend so much time dealing with it all, there is scarcely time to feel. I walked up the silent road, wondering if I couldn’t reconcile myself again to the idea of the Sabbath, to the day of dreary silence and mutton broth I’d known as a child, if we couldn’t close the shops and still the traffic and institute a modern, churchless day of contemplation and rest; and if it would help at all.”

Life Children Time Nature Responsibility Parents Sunday Sabbath Grandparents Grown Up

Book:Findings

Source: Findings

“We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities—the hallmarks of civilisation.”

Civilization Museums

Book:Sightlines

Source: Sightlines

“When I want to know a thing, I resort to books and feel strangely exposed without books to fall back on, as though standing on a ledge.”

Reading Nature Knowledge Books Scotland

Book:Findings

Source: Findings

“Fancy – day after day of summer sunshine, in April. The house grows dusty and neglected because we spend so much time outdoors.”

Nature Summer Sunshine Scotland April Outdoors

Book:Findings

Source: Findings

“Coll would be a heavenly place to be a child. There are beaches and boats, everyone knows you, it’s the kind of place you leave the door open. If you’re on the island, it’s know. If you catch the ferry to the mainland, well, that’s known about too. Should you have a mishap and require the air ambulance, a helicopter will have you in a Glasgow hospital in twenty minutes, by which time the island will have learned of your fate. A mere thirteen miles of single-track road separates ‘the unspoiled end’ from ‘God’s own country’. There are local land feuds, a limited supply of fresh water, and no high school. In effect, the children leave home when they are an unfledged eleven, to travel as boarders to the secondary school in Oban. Higher education and jobs take them yet farther afield. It seems a price to pay for an apparently idyllic island life, to lose your children so young.”

Nature Childhood Scotland Outdoors Idyllic Coll

Book:Findings

Source: Findings

“Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?”

Writing Attentiveness

Book:Findings

Source: Findings

“No Orkney weather lasts long, and you can see new weather coming a long way off. There are frequent scraps of rainbow. And birds. At any point you can stop walking, or pull over and lower the car window and hear the cries of peewits and tremulous curlews.”

Nature Weather Rainbow Scotland Birds Outdoors Orkney Bird Calls

Book:Findings

Source: Findings

“…a short seven miles away is the Neolithic village called Skara Brae. There is preserved a huddle of roofless huts, dug half underground into midden and sand dune. There, you can marvel at the domestic normality, that late Stone Age people had beds and cupboards and neighbours and beads. You can feel both their presence, their day-to-day lives, and their utter absence. It’s a good place to go. It re-calibrates your sense of time.”

Nature History Adventure Travel Ruins Neolithic Scoland Skara Brae

Book:Findings

Source: Findings

“Pity the dark: we're so concerned to overcome and banish it, it's crammed full of all that's devilish, like some grim cupboard under the stair. But dark is good. We are conceived and carried in darkness, are we not?”

Book:Findings

Source: Findings