Picture This: A Note from Bow Fiddle Rock

The May day is sunburnt and brisk along Moray’s cliffs. I soldier on gripped by the common cold, for there’s no time to curl inward beneath the blankets. I unspool myself along the coastal A-roads instead, diving down to pebbly beaches and skirting gorse-covered ridgelines: Whitehills, Findlater Castle, Cullen, Portknockie. Here, at the journey’s farthest reach, a faint path winds down the emerald turf to a tongue of rock and driftwood hushed by the North Sea’s sibilance. A primordial arches from the surf, groaning, its low tone hollow as a bone: Bow Fiddle Rock.

I can smell its salty breath and feel the vibration through the coast’s spine. It towers over a lone figure taking photographs or paying homage or begging to change the universe. This sand became sandstone baked into rock by the Earth’s heart, then heaved up and crumpled like a lost love letter between Avalonia and Laurentia. It has never been closer to the cosmos than right now, just like us, and then I think we’re all drafts, endlessly cut and edited, rewritten, revised, rebuilt. Art is never complete, never perfect, it is simply created and given, and by its imperfections begets more of itself.