How can those of us born in America, whose parents and their parents too. (etc.) were born here, have such visceral feelings for the words and song above? Why do we embrace Robert Burns as a kindred spirit when he declares:

Twelve years ago, before I discovered my family's Scottish heritage or clan affiliation, I traveled to the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland. While there, I had a strong sense that I had come home to the place I was made for, and I knew from the first that I would return there as often as possible. Now I ask you, who else would love all that dreary mist and rain, except the crazy descendant of contrary Highlanders ?!

But how does it happen that we know? Why is our heart in the Highlands wherever we go? How can it happen that home is able to mean much more than the place where we were born or the place we now live? Here are a few random thoughts that I hope will open further conversation.

It took over 50,000 generations of ancestors to produce you and me. In his book Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, author Carl Sagan makes an argument for the purpose of our individual lives being simply to house and pass on genetic messages to the next generation in a sort of several million year long relay race into the future. This gives a different twist to our clan slogan "MacGregor despite them will flourish forever," don't you think? Still, his theory forgets that there are also extra genetic messages that we transmit from generation to generation, otherwise called traditions. Tradition includes not just the passing down of values but also stories, tastes, recipes, names, etc. All of this being enhanced by the natural tendency of the children in each subsequent generation to imitate and model the minutest habits of their parents. This can all happen so unconsciously that we don't even realize how strongly our ancestors are influencing or lives. Perhaps Tennyson was thinking of something like that when he wrote:

Even if we have no conscious memory of those "forgotten ancestors" 50,000 generations long, we still carry their genetic and extra-genetic reflections or echoes within us.

R. J. Stewart, a scholar of the Scottish tradition, has a perspective that leads itself to another explanation of the ways asked above. He says in a book about the traditions hidden in the old Scottish Ballads called The Underword Initiation that "the land and our ancestors are one." It took me awhile before I caught the flash and spark packed within that statement. Yes, they're one with the land because the land is where their lives were shaped and grown. It is where they were ultimately buried and through the centuries have become part of the soil. In a certain sense, our true home is wherever great numbers of our ancestor have lived and been buried. Large numbers of dead equal great numbers of years where generations of ancestors lived, bred, and adapted themselves to a particular climate and an environment both social and physical. Home is in part that specific environment we have been most adapted for. For the MacGregors, the Scottish Highlands were our home for almost a thousand years (according to what I've read). That means about 33 generations of our ancestors have lived and been buried there. If I compare that to my family who came to America in 1682, that's just 10 generations here. No wonder Scotland is still in my blood and in yours as well.

Over the years we have lost more than some of our ancestors' depth of feeling and thought concerning home. Maybe you have heard the explanation for the words of Loch Lomond, " You'll take the high road and I'll take the low road and I'll be in Scotland before ye." Home was considered so powerful a magnet by our ancestors that they believed that their souls would travel through the earth to it upon death. Like the tides and gravity, its natural power of attraction would draw them home however far away they roamed. I think the old Scot proverb" The evening brings all home" expresses well this old faith. Whether evening means the end of a single day or the end of a person's life, we will always return to where we belong. Where there is home there is comfort, respite, and welcome. In the animal kingdom, the homing instinct is one of the strongest drives, guiding and driving the likes of salmon and monarch butterflies thousands of miles against great obstacles home. Why should it be any less developed in ourselves?

Home is much more than a house, it is our own sacred ground. When we get there we can't help but feel it, all the ancestors voices in our blood sing in harmony. To appreciate this is to realize in a small way how much of a greater mystery and wonder life and our own lives are. Perhaps in some complex, convoluted, quantum physical, genetic, or purely poetic way, whenever our emotions arise over our homelands we are experiencing the approval, elation, the resounding and echoing welcome of our ancestors. For some reason, evidenced by the vast number of Scottish songs and poems with place names in them or about going home to Caledonia, the Scots seem to have an especially magnificent and well developed homing sense. That's why most of us will probably be going to the next Highland games, looking to buy those new Children of the Mist T-shirts.

Sincerely,

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