The fog around Arthur’s seat wasn’t thick and it didn’t obscure any part of the hill by resting on the top or reclining around the bottom by the lochs. It was more like a gossamer cloth revealing just enough of the shape of the hill and its various hues to invoke one’s imagination. Nature’s fan dance created interest as the fog moved around the park, revealing glimpses of images before hiding them again. The parking lot near Holyrood Park was quite empty. It seemed like a good time to explore more of the area without having to share it with the, you know, tourists.

I managed the actual climbing part of the park on the one morning, two days ago, when the clouds parted for us patient photographers with sub-standard climbing shoes. Now it was time to wander around a bit, stopping by St. Margaret’s loch to see the swans and then walking along Queen’s Drive with an occasional detour up a trail. Nothing too strenuous or too far from the madding crowd. So what was the difficulty? The problem was that I was stricken with a slight cold and had used those two days to catch up on my reading. Along with Arthur Conan Doyle, I read the local history of Arthur’s Seat. Bad idea.

Let me fill you in on some of the more colorful history. I’m not sure why, but fog seems to go hand-in-hand with the Victorian novel. Not that all of this history revolved around the Victorian era. It just fit the template for my highly-evolved imagination. What is it that people say? There’s nothing there in the dark that isn’t there in the daylight? Well that isn’t quite true, is it?

Anyone studying British modern history has heard of Burke and Hare, two men who traded in their canal building skills to provide bodies to Dr. John Knox for his Edinburgh anatomy lectures. There were religious and legal restrictions on autopsies, making bodies scarce for anatomy classes. Knox needed more and didn’t ask too many questions about how Burke and Hare happened upon so many available cadavers. From 1827-1828, Burke and Hare managed to “find” bodies by smothering their victims and then selling the bodies to the school. Hare turned King’s Evidence against Burke, who was convicted and hanged in 1829. I can’t say that any of these bodies were “found” around Arthur’s Seat, but a couple of boys in 1836 discovered seventeen miniature coffins in a cave along Arthur’s Seat. The number, which corresponds to Burke and Hare’s victims, was initially attributed to witchcraft, but now there’s some speculation that it was a memorial to the victims of Burke and Hare. Some of those coffins are displayed in the National Museum of Scotland.

Then there’s the story of the doctor who married and within a few weeks decided he had made a mistake. He attempted to pay others to help him get rid of the wife. The doctor’s first scheme involved paying someone to provide enough evidence against his wife that met the requirements of divorce. When this failed he hired his brother to poison his wife. The brother failed as well, so the doctor took his wife for a walk to Duddingston (a village accessed from the park). When alone, he happened to find a knife he had borrowed and stabbed her to death. The cairn marking the spot of her death was moved, so I’m not sure where along the way it happened. I can tell you that my thoughts were on that woman and her murder as I walked along the road to Duddingston.

And I don’t need to say much about a menacing hound and the fog. Dogs are rarely kept on a leash in Holyrood Park, so it is always likely one might encounter a hound. There’s Murder Acre and Hangman’s Craig and possibly some unexpected and not quite explained deaths from “accidental” falls. Might I happen upon a ghostly pair dueling in the mist? It is good that I hadn’t read much more. My heart was beyond its aerobic threshold. Ghostly fingers tickled my spine. And then I saw them as the fog lifted. Tour buses filled with Germans and Americans rolled by and stopped so their occupants could jump out for a quick picture of Edinburgh from above.

I resisted the urge to look back. Who knows what I might have seen following me as the fog dissipated.

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Horses and I share an on and off relationship. I get on and they toss me off. It began when I was twelve and a Shetland Pony, called Bluey, didn’t like it when my friend hit him with a thorn twig to encourage him to move forward. He moved all right — once he was rid of me. I fell like two inches or maybe even a little more and landed on my right arm. When I stood up, my arm was swinging in the space between my elbow and shoulder. That’s when I knew there was no love lost between me and horses of any kind.

After a mad rush from the town emergency room to Pocatello for a larger hospital and a specialist and after two weeks in traction, then who knows how long in a cast, and finally a physical therapy routine that generally required that I walk the hospital corridors with a bucket of rocks, I tried to get on a horse again. This was a bigger horse, so when it projected me over its head, I had more time to think about how to land. I ended up with a bruised tailbone, but no breaks. And thus began the dreaded phrase I would hear through the years, “But he/she is normally so gentle!”

The guides at Glacier Park put me on the slowest, dullest nag. This was a horse that was more docile than the ones they placed my children on. This horse was so ingrained in the tourist caravan that it might have been made of plastic and swaying in gentle motion as if it were on a merry-go-round. It decided to stop and eat. “You must be firm with your horse,” the guide instructed. “Pull her head up so she knows she cannot eat”. I yanked her head up. She turned her head with an “are you kidding me” kind of look and proceeded to rub me off on a tree. That’s pretty much how the rest of the ride went.

So when I realized the annual Riding of the Marches involved 270+ horses, not bicycles, I wondered why I was sitting on a concrete wall near the Scottish Parliament waiting to greet the procession. What can I say? I’m a sucker for pageantry. And I had my escape route planned – just a dive into the pool behind me and I could hug the wall and avoid any errant hooves. Scottish horses appear to have better manners than their American cousins. But, then again, I was holding to our agreement. I don’t get on and they don’t buck me off.

According to the website EdinburghGuide.com, the first record of The Riding of the Marches was in 1579, with riders covering the common land of the city. It continued until 1718. The website, calendarcustoms.com, explains the ride was also a commemoration to the Flodden Wall, built after the defeat of King James IV in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden where 10,000 Scotsmen died, including the king. In 2009, the Edinburgh March Riding Association (EMRA) reinstated the event as a charity re-enactment of the ride. This year’s ride supports the veterans organization Poppyscotland and commemorates the outbreak of World War I, when, according to edinburghspotlight.com, 6000 horsemen and 35,000 horses died in the conflict. Over 300 riders and horses were scheduled to participate this year.

A number of riders did not make it to the Royal Mile finish and I’m guessing under 200 passed by the Parliament, yet it was still quite moving to see the different riding clubs joining together with poppies attached to the horses and on the rider’s lapels. People cheered and clapped as the riders passed by, not unlike the entrance of the Tour de France into Paris, even though it was more subdued. Hikers climbing to Arthur’s Seat stopped along the trail to watch as the horses entered Holyrood Park. I sat next to a Scottish family and the young kilt-clad girls beside me said they were more excited to see the horses than they were to see Mickey Mouse. They told me about their own riding event coming up. They will parade and perform in costumes, the oldest dressing up as “the mean cat”.

I forgot, as promised in my last post, to look for Queen Elizabeths today. I certainly forgot to look for yellow butterflies. But, of course, I didn’t expect to see around 200 horses clip-clopping along the Royal Mile.

The old adage, or at least a take-off, is “you see what you want to see”. This can also apply to our life experience. So if we expect certain outcomes, we will attract those outcomes. For instance, if I want a better job, I might decide that it is impossible and look at all the reasons I cannot have that job. I won’t get a better job, because I see myself failing. One suggestion for overcoming that mindset is to look for unusual things in our daily lives. Pam Grout in her popular book, E², suggests that we look for yellow butterflies, even in the dead of winter. Somehow, somewhere those yellow butterflies will appear fluttering past the window or maybe stamped on the side of a paper cup. The trick is to count them. By counting the appearances of yellow butterflies in a certain time period, it proves that if you look for yellow butterflies, you will find them. And this principle can be applied to daily living. I was a little skeptical about how yellow butterflies can make a significant impact on one’s life. That is until I walked along Fleet Street after visiting St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Men’s summer business attire in London’s financial district appears to be a light blue, long-sleeved shirt worn with black pants. Tie and jacket are optional. Groups of blue-shirted men escaped their buildings at the lunch hour forming a river of blue along the pavement on Fleet Street. Some of the men jazzed it up a bit with a pin-stripe or even a checkered pattern, while adhering to the blue color scheme. In awe of the obvious conformity to what is deemed proper business attire, I decided to give the yellow butterfly experiment a try. I would count the men I saw in pink shirts on Fleet Street from St. Paul’s to where Fleet turns into Strand – just a few blocks. The rules were simple. Obvious tourists did not count. It had to be men that looked like they were part of the financial scene and they must be wearing suit trousers, not jeans. Up to this point, I had not seen anything close to a pink oxford shirt.

It was the strangest thing. I began to see pink shirts everywhere. I counted ten men that fit my criteria in a couple of blocks. As I continued onto Strand, pink shirts outnumbered the blue shirts. Maybe there’s something to this. It is hard for most modern women to walk down a busy street without making some comparisons, so I thought about looking at other women in a different way. Instead of noticing all the pulled-together, high-heeled, long-legged women, I looked for women in dresses who wore trainers. And it worked again. Women in lovely dresses or mini-skirted teens or well-dressed eighty-year-old women were wearing socks and athletic shoes. It seems we can alter our vision of the world in very simple ways. Maybe that applies to our relationships as well. If we expect certain behaviors from our children or spouses, we often are proved right. If we meet strangers and form an immediate opinion of them, do we reinforce our own stereotypical prejudices?

The woman sitting next to me on the train, who was on her cell phone for the first hour into the trip, was not a rude, don’t-care person. She turned out to be making an unexpected trip to see her sister who was going through a bad time, but she had to leave her ailing mother and new grandson to go cheer up her sister. The taxi driver that ignored me for the first five minutes? He had an intercom in his taxi that didn’t work very well. We ended up having a nice chat about Las Vegas and Scotland.

I must add a word of caution here. Sometimes people are exactly as they seem. I found myself in real trouble in Paris and in Norwich when I ignored my intuition. Luckily, I was able to extricate myself from both situations without more than a roughing up. These were isolated situations and far from the normal experiences I have had, but there are times it is better to keep those first impressions, even if you are wrong. Now, I will always put up defenses when I see groups of young men. It is unfortunate, but necessary.

What about yellow butterflies when you want to attract financial success or maybe just that guy down the street? The Law of Attraction will work for us when we focus on the outcome, right? Just thinking of our desire will manifest its appearance? Wrong. I want to believe that deep, constant, focused thinking can bring things or people into my life. This is where we misuse the Law of Attraction. I saw pink shirts on the street because men were wearing them. I did not pull pink shirts out of the air and dress those men. I paid attention to my surroundings. The key to success in our life, however we define success, is more than thinking about it. We must see the opportunities around us that will help us attain that success. It is important to think about what we want in life, but the key is to focus on that desire and to look for the yellow butterflies. The Law of Attraction is not a passive activity. We need to see the outcome, but we also have to participate in attracting our desires. It might be a good idea to introduce yourself to the guy down the street or to apply for that high-paying job. Sometimes things appear to fall into our laps. And, yes, there are times you get something with no effort. The most likely scenario for a positive outcome when applying the Law of Attraction, though, is that focusing on your desire makes you more likely to act on opportunities to bring that desire into your life. Rhonda Byrne found the Secret, but it required work to produce the movie and write her book.

I’m far from reaching my life’s goals. There are some very personal and improbable things I want to attract into my life. Getting back to Oxford was once a dream. Did it happen because I thought about it hard enough? Yes, sort of. I thought about it, but then I looked at the ways I could make it happen. There were obstacles, yet I recognized the opportunities I had to overcome those obstacles. Taking this trip was the realization of a dream. But this journey was relatively easy to make happen. Some of my other dreams are not as tangible and look to be far from my reach. I hope I can learn to see the pink shirts and the yellow butterflies when I go after those dreams.

I’m in Edinburgh now. I’ve noticed kilts and bagpipes and overflowing tour buses. There are souvenir shops surrounded by whiskey bars and cashmere stores. My flat is just behind the Palace of Holyroodhouse and the flat’s garden border is Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat. Perhaps tomorrow I should change my perspective and count how many Queen Elizabeths I see walking along the Royal Mile…