Skellig Michael – 586 AD

Remember when they brought you here in a bob of boat that lurched and swung beneath this barren whaleback in the sea. Then you started climbing rock by rock; tugged and tousled by the wind each step until at last you stood on top, held in the breathlessness of blown blue sky – the whole gusting wildness of this world out in the pounding of the seas.

Then the building began; the heaving up of boulder after boulder, balancing them together till you’d made a beehive you could creep inside. Dry, dark and deep: a cave of peace, a cocoon where three of you could sleep after the long prayers of the place they called the sanctuary. 

Just sometimes you came out bleary-eyed to stand at midnight in the silence  of a night left silver, stars like mist across the skies, that stillness reaching to the edges of the sea.  You knew for sure that something greater than all this  had made it beautiful, had breathed it into being.

Kenneth Steven