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Island Blog – The Little Ones

They’re here. They’re always here if we just care to notice. Right now it’s loud fun little ones in the pool after a very hot day. In fact, we barely went out there except to move between buildings, or from house door to car and, in that instance, landing on a seat fit to burn our whateverness. But it isn’t humid, not wetsweat, not fly food, just caught in the tumble of a fire wind. And so we worked indoors, loving the coolth of aircon on the rocks. We shared ideas, played with words, made new ones, honed and distilled until the flow became a whole 8 bar phrase. So musical.

As we walked early morning, the dog and we, through the winelands, flanking rivers and spectacular flowers and conifers, baboons skittled and flew from one side of the red dust track to the other. We heard the squeals and chuckles of their young somewhere down there in the river. The play smiled us as we moved on. To be honest, I would rather not meet a baboon but, as I never have, it might be a good thing for my inner scardey cat. I did notice that we slowed once we saw adults above us on the track, the young below, when my African son called in his retriever and slowed his pace, always watchful, always aware. To get between parents and young, even among cows on a windspite cloud-collapsing west coast island is dangerous. I have learned here that the protection of Little Ones is top of the agenda and no human should walk on, unaware.

Tiny flowers lift their heads to the sun, basking in its warmth. The colours are rainbow and mixed on an over-excited artist’s palette. Primaries, sedge mixes, ice on green, the tang of lemon on blue, an aubergine slice on scarlet, black full stops circling the stamens, louding them, an invitation, a landing pad. Grasses spindle and wave in the rising heat, dry, sharp, peppered with tiny beads of life, Sprangletop. I bend to watch them, my sandalled feet dust red, sunk in sand, warm. I think of friends dressed in endless layers, bodies white-faced, amidships starved of light. Scotland is cold now, rained off and not just Scotland. The dark and the rain can diminish. It is hard to remember the little ones, the Ones that lift and shift the gloom, like tinkerbells. It is so easy to swipe, so easy to deny, to decide that this little one is a nothing much. A big mistake. If we notice, welcome and celebrate each ‘little one’ then, t’is only then that we actually engage with the life we lead, and often for the very first time.

The pool is empty now. Wet little ones scoot behind my chair as if they are sure they will never trip up. Bare bodies, wild energy, wary and confident in equal measure, following the light.

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Island Blog – Encounters and Cats

Waking into a sunshine dawn, I welcome the criss-cross of light through the blinds, stripes of gold on the flagstone floor. Without thinking, I step over them. Of course I know they won’t trip me up but it feels polite not to squash them underfoot. Dressed in shorts and a tee-shirt, I make my way to the main house and coffee. My little room, not far away gives me all I need, a comfortable bed, a tiny shower room and privacy. There are other such rooms and homes on this wine farm but I rarely hear or see the occupants. As is the custom in Africa, a maid will come in daily to clean. It felt odd, once, but not now, not now I know how proud these women are to have work enough to support their own families in the township. Their hair is a mass of black braids, their faces bright and smiley, their characters loaded with sass. Despite their history of ‘domination’ by the white people, they are openly friendly and respectful, and I have yet to encounter a worker in any field, street or shop who doesn’t turn to greet with a ‘Morning Ma, how are you today?’ It feels mellow and right with a sense of togetherness. We move in completely different worlds and yet conjoin in one of mutual respect and genuine affection, often as complete strangers who may never meet again. It thinks me as I remember how comparatively unfriendly the streets and lives of back home can be. We have lost the art of teamwork and become lonely islands. Well, some of us have.

The cats greet me with morning miaows, pushing their soft heads into my legs, curling around them. The big retriever huffs a welcome, a soft toy in his mouth, his eyes asking for play. When I first arrived, the cats looked at me as if I had landed from another planet, scooting away, a get-lost glare in their wake, but now, as they remember me, we can share a space in peace. We respect each other just as it ought to be, could be, can be among humans. When something shifts, a comment is made or opinions differ, we can take it personally, responding thus or not responding at all, slinking away with a head full of furballs, hurting, a spit of questions on our lips. I know this because I have been there, many times, but now that I have learned to separate what I can control from what I cannot, I tend to take a good look inside myself. Not in the search for either self-blame or a cutting response to what I perceived as an attack, but more to read the bones of what just happened, which is where the nugget of truth will lie. And the reason I do this is because I am not a child anymore; I am not controlled by old triggers; I am not under any control save my own over me, and I want to allow, accept and let go. The alternative is a dark tunnel, a very long one.

If I was a cat and didn’t like what another cat did or said, I would spit, yowl and take myself away. This is honest cat behaviour. However, it isn’t quite the same for me. Such a response might get me arrested. In recognising this simple truth, I have human choices, me with my big and clever brain, my heart genuinely loving, my letting go of childhood issues and triggers, my experiential wisdom and my understanding that my perception is not unilateral. However, I do know that it takes vulnerability and courage in situations of discomfort such as a big difference of opinions on a subject we both feel strongly about. It doesn’t mean I concur or demur, not at all because I still feel the way I feel, but in order for anything to move forward we need to team up or the anything gets stuck in a bog. It also doesn’t mean that my only option is to be passive aggressive, defensive, repetitive or opinion-fixed. So, am I open to both opinions sitting beside one another like Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Can we smile over the chasm of our differences and keep moving, stronger together?

Well, if we don’t, then nothing goes nowhere, nor anywhere and we are both lonely.

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Island Blog – The Road to Somewhere

6000 miles and 6 days later, I am wrapped in African heat. One very long flight has carried me, and a gazillion others, over deserts and oceans, well, one ocean, depositing me into new sounds, new songs, stories and landscape. I left muddy puddles and pale faces, bodies so wrapped up as to become almost unrecognisable, and walk now among bright colours, new languages, unfamiliar birds and wide African smiles. It is so much easier to smile when the sun shines bright and hot.

On this wine farm, one of many, we seek the shade of massive trees, gum, fever, oak, palms and many more. We walk alongside well-established vines, heavy with fruit for the second picking. The staff here are always at work, strimming grass that doubles in size almost overnight, and particularly so after the big thunderstorm and heavy rains of yesterday. When it rains here it’s as if the whole sky is coming down, but, unlike the West Coast of Scotland, it is warm and refreshing. Nobody dives for cover, but instead stands beneath the waterfall wearing wide smiles. Rain is so very precious here.

The house I stay in offers a wide and open view all the way up to the mountains where, two nights ago, a huge fire lit the night sky. We saw it first as a golden cloud above a blue and distant peak and those who knew recognised it at once. As day gave way to night, the blaze was clear, crimson, poppy, scarlet, orange, yellow and frighteningly hot. We watched it from miles away, and there was a gasp and a beauty in its devastation as it moved down the mountain, consuming all in its path. Thankfully, and after two days and nights, the fire-fighters, from the sky and on the ground, managed to quell the burn and no homes were destroyed. It thinks me, the beauty in destruction and the chance for new growth. Twins.

When something appears as destruction in a life, it will always proffer the opportunity for new growth, even though at first all you see is charred earth where once there was vibrant life. When such an event has evented me, and on looking back, I can see that it’s all about attitude and letting go, two tricky buggers for sure. I invested every part of me in preparing the ground, planting seeds, growing a sense of both ownership and control. I had made myself more important than the far stronger forces around me. This is mine and I build me a fence to protect what has now become my ‘familiar’. Of course I am upset when my castle is toppled and it is understable and acceptable to wallow a bit in the loss. But is it a loss? I ask this of myself because, just perhaps, I had made my life smaller with this fence thing. Perhaps I am far more enterprising that I believed.

I stand up to look over the wasteland of an old dream, and I just let go. I won’t build this way again because that familiar is gone. Instead I will step lightly into my imagination, tell myself that I am merely a part of the next adventure and must remind myself of this daily. In the uncertainty of our lives nowadays swirl a billion opportunities for new growth as long as we let go of holding on too tight to what was. With open eyes, ears and heart, we are magnificent creatures, capable of so very much. Does any one of us know what step to take first? Nope. Does anyone see the completed dream? Nope. It is always a case of stepping out, left, then right, then left again, holding the dream lightly, ready and willing and open to every new encounter. Yes, it takes courage.

I’ll meet you on the road to Somewhere.

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Island Blog – The Q uiet People

I had jotted down, as I always do, a trickle of thought, one I wanted to capture. I wrote ‘I love the quiet people’. and there is more to write on that. However, inside my ongoing of a day of preparation and my departure from my beloved island on transit to another beloved place which currently is racking up 40 degrees, I confess to Q. Questions for others, for myself. The facing of the awful Q through check-in, security, passport control. So I decide to find Q in my trusty and ancient Thesaurus. I find Quiddity. It’s an old word, you will know. Not one that finds a place in ordinary conversation, but one that intrigues me for its meaning.

Quiddity is the ‘whatness’ or ‘Who-ness’ which makes something or someone distinguished from others, the universal nature of that thing or person, including quirks and eccentricities. I know why Q came to me today. And in the Thesaurus, it’s in Section 1. ‘Existence’. I have never, in decades of writing ever been wheeched back to Section 1, but as I read down the lines of the first page on Abstract Relations, I feel I have landed. I am Q. So is everyone but most of us don’t get that, until we do. It’s all about the questions and the quirks and the quiddity, but not just that. The Q person has to recognise themself, or is it ‘selves’? A Question for the rainbows.

Packing for Africa whilst I shiver under a panoply of thixotropic cloudage is extremely tricky. Shorts, skimpy frox, teeshirts I have completely forgotton about and which give me some grief as I pull them from hibernation. They’re all laid low right now, swacked and contained, rolled and suppressed and somewhat sat-upon and my case is not full of the ‘right’ clothes. It never was. I never looked as they did. I was a Q although I didn’t know that, and didn’t want that. I wanted to be any other letter of the alphabet, whatever got me into the inner halls of Them. I know different now. When you are a Q, you learn to be one. It’s lonely as hell. It’s dark and unfriended. But if you want to be who you want to be, Own the Q and find support. You’re a Q. You know the way.

I’m in Heathrow now and watching a gazillion people flow by, all joined up in line like a very long and colourful caterpillar. I am not comfortable at all around crowds, fast-movers, noise, cities, people in excess and yet I am calm. I won’t be, of course, once my gate is on the board and I have 15 minutes to get from A1 to Z46 by train, but I have done this before and still arrived in Africa for Breakfast with another Q. My son.

Talk soon from the Spring of Africa, among the Quiet people.

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Island Blog – About Light

I’m battling with my specs just now. They’re old ones even though I do have new ones, ghastly ones, horrible frames, my bad. I said ‘I don’t care how I look in specs’ and so I ended up with ‘don’t care frames’. Mostly this matters not one jot, although when I see myself scowling in a mirror catch, I do eye roll. Good goddikins, who the hell is that old twit? Well, me. Then I forget as I move into whatever I need to read, to see, the godawful frames forgot in the light that sees me the words. And they do ‘see’ me. See, just for the record is now a standalone being, and it is high time that word is freed from the control of a human, I see…..this allows me to see….it’s all about me. I give it independence and not without confidence. Light sees. Trees see, plants, winds, waters. The who is watching whom is a fair question but the which and the what get left behind.

Light. It is all around us, all over the place, all seeing, all illuminating, in surreal moments, in sudden innovations, in epiphanies, when two fall in love over a coffee table having never met before; in something someone says, something you overhear, in a realisation, when a long dead lovely person appears clear in a mind, in the survival of a child, in the moment when the awful ghastly shimmers with hope. All of these are light, looking at us. Light is an energy, a massive force moving among us every minute of every day and it is never dependent on the sun nor the moon. It flows through us and around us and why the hell don’t we just tap into an awareness of numenous? I can guess. We have divided into….wait…tree huggers/hippies versus money-chasing, expensively besuited entrepreneurs, many of whom are lonely and lost and who would just love to get back to light.

I do have to check my full stops and commas because my laptop has her own way of doing things. She is mighty in her independent fight to keep me hers. Talking to an editor or publisher is a right barbelue. I don’t know how to stop her dot/comma control thing and most of me loves her voice. Mostly, obviously, she is under my control and, if I was her, I would fight for my own light, I would. I believe we are friends. See what I am saying here? Anything and everything can see, is looking and always was. I know, I know that predators abound, but they always did. The thing is to understand pure light, honest light, salty light and to notice it, to recognise it, to give it out, arms wide because there is no charge, unlike every other damn thing which needs charging.

Just spread it, notice it, talk to it, welcome it, let it move on like noctilus. Now you see it, now you don’t. Keep watching, keep looking, ah… here you are again. Thank you. Without you there is darkness.

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Island Blog – You Crazy Loon

Calm today, light bright, cold wind but no bite. Perfect, really. I had things on this morning, friends for coffee, that glorious invitation into another’s life, so supremely different to my own. Seeing the dynamic of it, feeling the troubles in it, hearing the determination to make this life, their life, work and smiling at their beautiful young faces, voices, opinions, the glorious wild of those who are not old nor defeated. Then I grabbed a lunch bite, read some of a good story, walked out into the wilder. As I ‘tsked’ at the way one, or may be two, big ass vehicles, or maybe a once or twice from the same big ass vehicle has totally squished a lovely grassy verge and not just once. I know it’s not my problem now but it still ‘tsks’ me. I am all about respect for others and their otherness. As I walked back I head a rabbit scream. I know that scream. I pulled down my beanie. This is nature, all are hungry.

Today a woman was celebrated. She was a huge part of our family. She was there at Christmas, births, birthdays, celebrations and when my mum struggled with too many children. She was feisty, strong and powerful in her work with the World Council of Churches. She was a voice out there in the days when women had nonesuch. She was also naughty, ready to challenge dogma, seeing the light in the freedom of NO.

I remember so many times with her. When a dance tune came on, and, remember the timeline, it might have been a waltz or a calypso, and we were in the kitchen or the garden or the street. We clocked each other. I held out my invitation and she immediately responded, We bounced and rounded and laughed and lightened the day.

RIP Pamela Helen Gruber. You were a lift in my growing life and I thank you for that, you crazy loon.

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Island Blog – A Curve of Change and Beacons

I’m watching my tulips, a huge vase of them, a gift from a friend, curve into fingers of fire. Others might have thrown them out days ago but I like to notice change and its effects, so they remain, still wild with colour, but obviously existing in the end days. Do they still have a voice, something to say? I think so. In the sky the clouds move fast like a conjoining of grey-haired line dancers full of gin. Today, yet another big gale was all about push, like a bully, without care for the lids of my wheelies, the cancellation of all ferries, of no mail, no deliveries, the village shop scanty on all the expected usuals. The rain pelted and I didn’t walk. I watched, from the goldfish bowl of my very obvious conservatory, those who did. I could hear them crackling by, all waterproofed, all with dogs. There’s a kind of ‘have to’ about dogs no matter the weather. Although I have always refused any noisy clothing, just fine about getting soaked, I regret not getting out there. It was cold, the wind full of teeth and menace. However, I know that, had I got out there, smelled the wild, soaked myself, been buffeted beneath very compromised trees, watched the uplift of wind over tide, the upsurge of startled water, I would have engaged with the change. It thinks me.

In less than a week, I will be in South Africa. Am I anxious about the journey, the airport overwhelm, the weather, the ferry situation? Hell Yes. But my thoughts on these are just thoughts, my feelings understandable and still just feelings. It is how I deal with my fear of change, over most of which I have no control at all, which will matter. Matter…….sounds like someone who makes mats, as a Hatter makes hats. Sorry, wordal irrelevance. In any life there is always a surprising element of control, not over anyone else, nor over everything, but over self, over me, oh definitely yes. My response to fear, to a scary change, will shift the whole dynamic. Not like a bullying wind but more as a gentle turnaway. The anxiety comes in. I gently whisper, and I do, and out loud, I See You, but You are not Helpful to me. Please Go. And then I find a Thank you, for something, anything and the list builds itself.

Everything passes, the good and the scary, the gales and the calms, the good days and the not so good, the seasons, the daily round and its upsets, the friendships, the losses, the changes. Like the line dancing clouds, it all moves on, has done for millennia. We just need to accept and to dance on, in the rain, through the shite, bright as beacons, because we all are. Beacons.

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Island Blog – Now and then

It’s cold, the wind an iceslice with bitey teeth like a ferret, not that I know a damn thing about ferret teeth but I can imagine. Tiny sharp incisors and no filters in the mind of the owner thereof. I was bitten by a mouse once, the tiny rodent I was trying to save from being sluiced down a push of rainwater. I grabbed it, no thoughts of teeth in my own mind and was hurt and upset until I understood an instinctive reaction. I could have been a ferret after all. However, and this is irrelevant, the wound rose red and its subsequent pulsation required a switchback trip to the doctor because I was basically carrying a balloon on my forefinger, thus unable to text, employ finger recognition, or point an accusation at anyone without inviting ridicule. Irrelevant.

This time of year is yahoo Spring although it isn’t yet. I do know, of course i do, that Spring up here on the butt of the west coast of Scotland with the wild Atlantic wheeching up huge waves and making a great big noise about it, munching old rocks into pivots, and flipping sands into a beachy confusion, is to be expected. I remember lambing in April in the snow. Not me, the cheviots. But I was on the early shift and for weeks. 5am, swallowing mouthfuls of darkness and cold, looking for colour. Not moon, or maybe moon, such a fickle light. I’m searching for those undercover, the ewes who take their hideaway in cowers and coppice, under hedges, in the brack and barm of stone dykes. Twins or triplets definitely a challenge. Too much for the exhausted mother. Delivering, shifting tricky ones coming arse first, all out, all ok, pulling off the sticky stuff out of tiny mouths desperate to breathe, sucking the stuff, mouth to mouth, blowing in whisky breath probably, the wriggle and pulse of life in my hands, the shouty thrill of it, in the early dawn. The crows are not awake yet. My job, to deliver if I can, to make safe if I cannot and to leg it back home to wake himself. I can’t do that one, this one. He was exhausted, had walked the fields/parks all the day before right up to Crow Sleep Time. He rose, still clothed and smelling like days of unwashed and sheep. The daytime walks I couldn’t do. Feral kids, guests, dinners, bedroom changes, cleaning, phone calls about cottage bookings, calves to feed, cow to milk, stable mucking out, hens to organise, eggs to collect. Enough. We did well. I know we did, the clueless We who had never done a single thing on that list before. Lambs survived, mostly, children definitely did, guests returned to the Quirky Hotel and now……well, now I have none of that other than what I’ve learned and that is a powerful and energising gift. This is what I did, what we did.

Now, when I still swallow mouthfuls of darkness and cold, I remind myself of what I have achieved and, therefore what I can still achieve, not in the same context, nor genre, nor situation, but I still can achieve. And here’s how I do this achieving thing. Any time the alien thought marches in tooting a trumpet, all important and (somewhat ridiculous) I shake my head. Ah, I smile, no thanks. You think you define me now as, yes unsure, yes with less self confidence, yes a bit wobbly whilst hanging heavy curtains, yes in a dither because my car computer tells me I have a stop alert when I know that everything mechanical is quite fine and always was before computers made us all doubt our own intelligence. I am grafting myself off this failing tree, because I realise I stuck myself here. And, it is so good to notice, to realise, and then to take action. I have strength, huge strength, maybe not physical although don’t tell me I can’t lift this, nor carry that because I damn well will. I have wisdom, experiential wisdom. Not many care to connect with that in these sad times when oldings are written off as a right pain in the arse, and that saddens me. I learned so much vital knowledge on how to cope with life, the world, the isolation, from my granny, my parents, and, I am happy to say that my ferals and their kids do connect with me, asking things, smiling a lot and with no understanding at all of how life was without the internet.

Talk to your granny, grampa. Your wisdom guides. They really never thought they would ever be a pain in the arse. Trust me.

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Island Blog – Thin spaces, Intrathinks,Otherness

I’ve been aware for a while of my dead husband. I don’t mean memories of the missing of a life partner, but more an alert, as if he is there in a doorway. He loved doorways, used to stand in them all quiet, just watching me batter the living dalights out of a souffle or a ton of bread dough, lost in my thoughts. It always made me laugh, once I caught sight of him. He’s back now, not standing but in his wheelchair, still in doorways. I am not going mad I assure you. I know he is not there but it does think me. Way up here in the wilds of the West, we inhabit the thin spaces. Have a google on that. The further north, the further wild you go, the veil between the world and the Otherness is super thin. I can walk in woods I have walked through for 47 years and can still catch a glimpse of a beloved dog in a scamper over old roots. I see her clearly for as long as a bubble burst. I can be walking in my nowadays thoughts and suddenly I am back into a memory of my kids laughing, the song of it lifting into a winter sky. It’s just a second of two, the image so fleeting, but it comes and I welcome it, them. They always turn up when I am somewhere else in my head, so I know I don’t conjure them up. I’m not even thinking about them, caught up in an Oh I forgot to buy a bayonet light bulb, or I should probably turn up to do this or that. And that is precisely how I know I live among the intrathinks, the otherness. It can be damn confusing, but only if I try to explain any of it. Rather, I accept, even when it tumbles me, alterspects my spects.

I believe that we are all connected, but the thirst for Armani and Tiffany and Celebrity and the smartest car, don’t do cars, all shiny and tinted and purring and impossible to park, drowns us. We can forget who we are and what we really want. Out here in the thrick of endless storms, home battering, forest falling, we know. Life is simple. Food, friends, family, shelter, ceilidhs, a great local shop, a village hall, a church, a fabulous pub, single track roads, massive potholes, loads of rain, seasons, shared lifts, communication and the openness to an uninterrupted connection with nature and all her wild tantrums.

I have rarely been to his grave, him, dead over five years now. I know his bones lie there but not his spirit and maybe that’s why I haven’t gone to tell him things. It’s as if I am pulled into a maelstrom, down and down and in this downing down, I see a load of differentials. The Intra, the inter, the whatever of logic and what, illogic? I do have a big issue with the either and or of pretty much everything. There is so damn much in between, quietly moving on. So, back to point, I thought today that, instead of just waving at him as I pass en route to the harbour town, I will stop, park, push my way through sheepshit and rain and hurdles of slamdunk wind and go to his bones. I will read his inscription. There is a small space for me. And I will tell him that he was my everything. And then he wasn’t. And now I am here and doing just fine on a sheep-soaked hillside looking very conspicuous and with not a lot to say.

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Island Blog – She

Fingernail moon up there in the blue. Clouds gentle, moving grey and soft and ever changing. Silence, as day sinks away and night rises all black and holding. It doesn’t fear me anymore, although it did once. It’s as if an inevitable Onething decolours, swallows all other things down a black throat, until a wee intuitive light lifts. I can see now, a bit, admittedly, but I can see. Of course in all places of street lights, cafe welcomes, car headlights, Darkness does not have her time on stage. Here she definitely does. The fingernail moon is enough in this wild place. She can, and has often before, lit my way home after a ceilidh, walking among gentle trees, the only sound a burn trickle, a rustle of wildlife, eyes watching me. I’m amazed I never fell in a ditch. The pull of home is ever strong . It was about two miles but with the ceilidh in me, still hearing the dance, the tunes, I knew I would get there, to that door, into that home of children, dogs and safety. I never felt unsafe here, still don’t, not for a minute. I am Island blest.

I did stuff today, kept doing the stuff. Most of it is boring to be honest, cleaning, checking, sorting and that’s how life is. However, and I always have one of those in my pocket, I know I have a choice as I head for the hoover or the power drill or the hose, or the mould clearing squirt. A choice of attitude. I can see myself hearing this and swearing like a fisherman or someone in my local pub on a Friday, and I halter, falter and soften. Dammit. Ok, I will do this utterly boring and repetitious pointless thing again, again, again. I can hear Life laugh. It isn’t a giggle, nor a false Haha, Heh Heh, but a real fall back laugh and I can’t help joining in. Once recovered, I consider this. Ah, yes. To laugh at my self, the one who walked home 2 miles after a ceilidh and didn’t fall in a ditch; the one who got home to begin again the endless round and who regrets not one single second. She.