There has been a lot of talk lately about high-frequency energies flowing into Scotland. Before I heard anything about that, I booked a trip to Edinburgh to celebrate my birthday, not because I wanted to seek out ley lines or energy vortexes but because I just wanted to explore Edinburgh. I made no plans other than which hotel stay in, and trusted that once I was there I would be guided perfectly.
I visited all the usual fun and interesting sights around Old Town and New Town Edinburgh, and ventured outside the city to places like the infamous Rosslyn Chapel.
But the big energy hit came in the most unlikely of places: a haunted pub.
I had asked the hotel concierge to recommend something different than the usual touristy sights; something local and unique. She said, "It's going to sound weird, but you should check out the Banshee Labyrinth. It's a haunted underground pub, but it's also really special in ways you just have to experience to understand."
I decided to go there on my birthday to make it all the more memorable because they were doing karaoke that night and who wouldn't want to turn 63 doing karaoke with strangers in a haunted underground Scottish pub?
The place was indeed a labyrinth of dark dungeonous rooms, complete with horror movie posters and grim things in corners like guillotines and tools of torture. Decor-wise it was not my kind of place AT ALL, but it also had a tongue-in-cheek kind of feel and a bartender named Connor who put a beer on the counter when I walked in. "A wee ghost musta put this here for ye,” he said. “So I can't charge ye for it, now can I?"
I wasn't in the place for three minutes before someone invited me into the cinema room, where usually they play B-rated movies but that night they were doing an open mic program called "Diary Confidential" where grown adults read real things they wrote as kids. Karaoke hadn't started yet, so I figured I could listen to something fun for a bit while I waited.
And...oh my God the poignancy. The innocence and angst. The beauty and confusion. The piercing truths about how the world tells us what to think and how to look and act and feel when we are young and impressionable.
One 40-year-old man who grew up in Nova Scotia read an essay he was assigned in school at age 12 with this instruction: "Your friend Nick's father just found out he has AIDS. Write a 5-paragraph essay on why you should or should not stay friends with Nick." Periodically in the reading he interjected comments on what he was trying to sort through as a 12-year-old boy who was forced to think about things in ways that were much more complicated than they were in his head. Someone had proposed the idea of a problem where he couldn’t see one, so he had to be taught how to see things in those conflict-and-judgement terms. He understood this very clearly looking back on this essay years later when he realized he was bisexual.
A 40+-year-old woman named Laura read her diary entries from when she was 11. Back then her young heart pondered so deeply the innate goodness of famous young men like River Phoenix, and the powerful example of strength that little girls had in famous women like Courtney Love. She dreamed of being "helpfully" famous like them -- not just "laura" famous but LAURA! famous. Laura had prefaced her reading by saying she was used to being on stage as a stripper, so this performance format was a little different for her. Knowing that and then listening to her 11-year-old heart pour her dreams out with such hopeful sincerity was deeply affecting.
Throughout each reading, the small audience gathered in that tiny underground cinema was so encouraging; laughing, clapping and yes-ing with every line. It was a moving show of support for both the performers and the truths their innocence spoke about our world. It made the raw messiness of human life so real, so relatable, so deeply sweet and touching. I didn't need to go to karaoke after that; my heart was so full I walked back to my hotel in tears feeling so blessed to have been given such an unexpectedly perfect birthday gift.
That evening affected me far more deeply than any cathedral or ley line or storied countryside site could have. The voice of Love echoed loudly in a dark room under the streets of Edinburgh. It flowed from the lips of fallible humans, and heralded itself in the clap of beer-sloshing hands. In that former dungeon, the mirror of distortion through which we have been taught to perceive ourselves became clear glass.
This clarity did not happen because we were standing in a mystical church or hiking along energy grids. It happened because we were sitting in a pub listening to Love tell us The Divine Story of Reclamation. From the perspective of the innate innocence that is within us here and now, not just in our youth, it was clear that the stories that measure the continuum of our life are the very stepping stones that lead us to realize Divine truth. With laser precision, the perspective of innocence showed us that The Divine reclaims us through our humanness, not in spite of it.
Spiritual awakening has never been about trying to escape our messy humanness. It is about realizing The Divine has been expressing as a human that forgot it was Divine — and thus, the messiness. The voice of pure Love, speaking from the perspective of pure innocence, is the clarifying high-frequency energy we seek in ley lines and vortexes and total solar eclipses. While these places and experiences can indeed catalyze transformation, so too can the most human of places and experiences. Even a haunted dungeonous pub in Scotland.