Your Wee Bit Hill and Glen

I always forget what the air does to me here.

Not emotionally. Physically.

I step outside and my lungs seem to recognize it before the rest of me does. Cold, damp, salted by the Firth, carrying rain from somewhere beyond the hills. I breathe deeper. My shoulders drop. The noise in my head turns down.

The air feels like it belongs in my lungs.

Then there is the land.

Green folding into greener. Stone walls. Narrow roads. Hills that do not need to be mountains to make their presence known. Water appearing between houses and fields, then disappearing again. A wee bit hill and glen, and suddenly I remember something I have spent most of my life trying to explain.

I belong to this.

Indigenous peoples in Canada have been telling us this forever: land is not scenery. It is not merely property, a resource, or something pretty behind you in a photograph. Land is relationship. Memory. Medicine. Responsibility. It can hold a people, form a people, and call something out of them that cannot be reached anywhere else.

I listened to that in Canada, and it helped me understand Scotland.

I am a Celt. There may be some Pict in me too. I come from people rooted in this land long before any of us carried passports proving it. People shaped by this weather, these waters, these languages, and these glens. People who knew conquest, displacement, the loss of language, the clearing of communities, and the scattering of families across the world before colonization became a buzzword.

Scots also went out and helped colonize other people. We cannot tell one truth and hide from the other. We have been wounded by empire, and we have carried empire with us.

Both are part of the inheritance.

My family left Scotland when I was barely a year old. I grew up Canadian, and Canada is not some false life I am now rejecting. It formed me. It gave me education, vocation, friendship, heartbreak, and my son.

It became home.

But Scotland remained in my body.

In the accent that thickened when my mother was most herself. In songs sung too loudly. In football, faith, family stories, and the strange ache for places I could not properly remember.

Displacement does that.

The mind adapts. The body keeps an older map.

So I arrived exhausted, carrying too much luggage and even more uncertainty, and stepped into the Ayrshire air.

My body knew.

That does not mean Scotland owes me anything. Birth and blood do not excuse arrogance. Belonging is never ownership. It is relationship, and relationship carries obligations: to listen, to learn, to contribute, and to love the place as it is—not only as I carried it from across the Atlantic.

The land cannot solve my life.

But it reminds me that I am alive, that I was born on this land, and that I belong to it.

Today, the air entered my lungs like it had been waiting.

And for the first time in a long time, I breathed like I had come home.