Picture This: The Queen’s View

The road to Loch Tummel hangs upon the hillside like a poem upon the lip. There is the warmth of fire on the hills in autumn. Gold and orange, copper and bronze, sloping upon green cleaving deep into the blue. Here at the eastern edge of the loch, the Queen’s View, where the mind and heart exult in harmony. Lambs call the ewes by the shore while November wind pirouettes on the water and draws the eye ever westward to brooding Schiehallion, Rannoch Moor, and Glencoe. The Queen in question was not Victoria, as she had assumed, but Isabella, the wife of Robert the Bruce, who stared west in that bright age and marveled at what was possible.

Past, present, future — an illusion. There is only what is and what is becoming. We are each one of us streaks upon the æther, astral staffs, every moment a note in a spooling melody. Can you not see the music in the waves and wind? And yet I cannot help but seek fermata before the Fairy Hill of the Caledonians and wonder when Maggie Moloch and the Broonie will shy from their exile. But the greatest, last obstacle is finding peace in allowing the moment to pass, the embers to turn black, for a thing is not complete until it ends.