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Island Blog – Daily Practice

Yesterday we walked around the high fence that keeps the Eaters away from the Edibles, aka, us.  When I arrived I was fearful of every step, especially when we saw the fence pulled up just high enough for an Eater to sneak inside.  But, yesterday, walking beside my big African son, I enjoyed it.  I had learned something over time, something I then had to take action over – that the Eaters are nocturnal and this is hot sunny daylight and I want to walk.

When I learn something new, about a place, about imagined danger, about a way forward, I have to take action.  I can, no longer, shiver on the spot, because I have new information.  Doing nothing with that new information is like stuffing a book back on the high library shelf and leaving it to gather dust. However, taking action is brave talk.  For starters, I have no idea what to do with this information.  I could discuss it with another, sounding hugely intelligent as I weave clever sentences together to form a thing that astoundeth, but that is just my way of avoiding doing anything myself.  It seems to me that a new understanding should stay quietly within as it incubates.  As days pass, hours and minutes, this incubation period will develop beyond itself showing me a way forward.  Birthing is inevitable, with or without my attention.  Just think on a baby borning.  It would be quite a feat to ignore this particular result, and just a little ungrateful, not to mention noisy.

So, ok, I have this new information.  I looked for it, let’s be clear, but now I have it, I would quite like to unlearn it.  Trouble is, that isn’t an option, not for any peace of mind to be forthcoming, for it will haunt me, now that I know the damn thing.  It might be new information but it most definitely relates to something I have let slip for too long.  I was fine with said slippage for maybe years, and I still have no idea where or how to initiate change.  A good part of me doesn’t want to anyway.  Life was bumbling along, wasn’t it, before I found this new understanding? Well, no, it clearly wasn’t or I would be merrily bouncing along like Tigger by now, instead of wandering lost through the wasteland of my soul.  In fact, all that angst and self-flagellation rises precisely because I am not living the way I really want to live.  I don’t mean location, or circumstance, but right inside me.

So who the hell is me?  Does anybody know?  If so, please tell me so I can follow your instructions from now on.  You will say I am all kinds of wonderful even if you observe me behaving in destructive ways, because that’s what we nice folk do for each other, thus letting me off my hook.  That avenue, although a very reassuring and flower-lined one, is claptrap, in a word.  In order for me to ‘get’ me and to make goodly changes, I am alone in my wasteland. And there are Eaters pushing up my fences.

Committing is a scary word.  It makes me accountable.  However, I have found that it is easy, and foolish, to decide on a 20 mile hike every morning at ten should I commit to a new fitness regime .  I would start on Monday, all gung ho and lycra-ed up, adrenaline pumping and with half a grapefruit in my jelly belly.  By Wednesday I would be sore and wheezing and by Friday disappointed in myself.  Instead of planning it out with due consideration for my previous unfitness I thought I could get from A to Z without the other letters bothering me. So, now I’m even more of a failure.  Might as well give up and sigh and pretend everything is fine by spending hard earned cash on bigger trousers.  No-one will mind after all.

But I will.

It might be facing down an addiction.  It might be squaring up to someone.  It might be a whole load of other things, but, whatever it is that ‘bothers’, the way forward is daily practice, carefully considered and in tiny increments.  And changing takes time.  However, the great news is this.  Once a person begins to head for Z, each letter becomes a helpmeet.  From the A position, it is impossible to see that, and even harder to believe it.  Admiring others who actually go to the shops in their lycra, have smiling faces, good skin, toned muscles, and thinking ‘It’s easy for her’, is both ridiculous and wrong.  She also had to work hard to look and to feel so good.  It’s the same with someone who has given up smoking or alcohol or chocolate for a long time and is finally free of an addiction.  They had to work too, they felt the same fears, they failed and began again perhaps many times over, but they got there in the end.  So can I.  So can you.  Daily practice is just what it says on the tin.  Daily.  Not now and then, not when I remember, not when it’s convenient, but Daily.

Why is that?  Because, my friends, there are always Eaters pushing up our fences, and the biggest of them all is Giving Up.  I have heard of a lion defeated because its intended prey fought back hard enough, and lived to see another day.  It isn’t that we fail to succeed that matters.  It’s that we give up trying.  Sometimes it takes gargantuan effort to keep the faith as hyenas circle, but nobody who got to Z did so on a short internal flight.  It takes daily commitment. Daily practice.

I’m up for it.

 

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Island Blog – Learnings

It’s already hothot here and the time is 06.30.  When the daily heat rises to around 40 degrees we know a storm is coming.  Storms here are like the best firework display ever.  Lightning cuts the sky into bits with striations of yellow fire, as if a Jedi master was out practicing with his light sabre.  The boom of a thunder drum is sudden and deafening and the kittens both dive for cover under something.  When I babysat them one stormy evening, that something was me, or, to be accurate, my dress.  I hunkered down to offer a reassuring cuddle, whence the smallest kitten dived under my dress and refused to come out.  It was excellent work for my calf and thigh muscles, balanced as I was in a crouch, and for some long I-can-do-this minutes.  The other one disappeared under the bed clothes.

It made me consider vulnerability.  I like that word, and what it means, now that I understand it as a goodly thing.  In accepted teaching we have a different take on the word, the condition.  We don’t like to look nor to appear vulnerable, and, yet, it is our very key to freedom.  It is the antithesis to weakness.  In order to manage whatever our lives demand of us, we work overly hard at not looking or sounding vulnerable.  We must appear strong and confident in all we do and say.  Our protective outer layer must be strengthened and repaired when it cracks or grows weary and we must never be open enough to show the real truth about us.  This is what we are taught from childhood.  After all, vulnerable people are on a list, aren’t they?  The homeless, the abused, the children, the mentally challenged, the old folks…..surely these are the vulnerables?  Yes, they are, but not in the way I mean.  In order for us, any of us, not on that list at all, to really get how a life could be lived to its very fullest, we need to learn to be vulnerable.

For starters it helps us to look with a greater compassion on the world, on other people.  By opening up our own truth, in letting it show and be heard, we let go of the armor plating and its tight constraints. After all, it is only ever by doing something ourselves, first, that we can look with genuine compassion on another.  A sort of Walk the Walk thing.  We can talk about compassion and the state of the world today till the cows come home, but, unless we actually make personal alterations through research and daily practice, we might as well howl at the moon and expect it to reply.  Secondly it makes a better person of a person.  As someone lets go of the fear-that-protects, the outer appearance, the language of confidence that (often) clearly does not tie up with the inside,then that someone becomes connected with an inner honesty which will turn a man or woman into a veritable giant.  Think, now, of someone, past or present, with whom you feel completely at ease – a person who you trust, aspire to be like, believe in.  I am betting that person was open and honest, vulnerable, in other words.  He or she didn’t have to look like a media celebrity or be able to move like Jagger on the dance floor.  That person just is.  Or was.

Fear is our ready guide through life, if we welcome it in.  However, we can be forgiven for thinking it is of huge value, for this is what we have learned from pretty much everyone bigger than us.  And, there are times we really need Fear to save us from death or disaster, but we make too much of a friend of it.  The media doesn’t help with its culture of bright lights and false reality, leading most of us into a destruction of comparison and disillusion.  If I don’t look like her or him, sound as good as that, speak with big long confusing words, win this prize, make that much money etc, then I am just boring old me.  Don’t believe any of that.  Bin it now.  It is a socking great fib.  Ordinary lives are what most of the world lives.  The salacious glamour is at best mildly entertaining and at worst a death sentence to those who will never be seen on the screen, never win the lottery, never walk the red carpet.  Like me.  Like you.

So how does learning to be vulnerable help me, clever clogs? It will open you like a flower.  It will turn an ‘ordinary’ life into an extraordinary one.  Not overnight, but eventually, with practice.  Speaking truthfully at a job interview?  Try it.  Making that connection with a ‘lost-in-technology’ child or grandchild just by being bold enough to feel vulnerable?  Try it. Speaking out (vulnerable)to a partner on a tricky subject, without anger (fear of the fallout)?  Try it. Befriending the most undeniably irritating work colleague (nobody likes him/her)?  Try it.

It is easy to be outwardly kind and compassionate to those with whom it is easy to be kind and compassionate.  Anyone can do that.  Nil Points.  Learning to be vulnerable requires no map or demographic.  It asks only that we take off our own armor and that we relocate the one thing in our minds that bothers us.  Something we so badly want to do but through fear have avoided, sometimes for years, a circumstance in which we feel frustrated, impotent, stuck.  Well, nobody is stuck, and this switch to being vulnerable requires no conversation.  It is a private shift, just me, only me, no committee meeting.

Be bold, that’s what I say.  Be vulnerable and find the freedom that comes only when the self-protection, the what-will-they-think-of-me armor is off.  You can feel a bit weird at first, as you would if you went to Tescos in your underpinnings, but so very quickly things change, because you are changing.  And, change is a scary thing.  However, if, like me, you are sick of living through fear and self-protection, then there is only one thing do, and it isn’t to apply for an X Factor audition or to change jobs or move house or to give a bunch of cash to charity.

It begins with you.

 

 

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Island Blog – Learning to Change

When I first arrived here I was a mess. I hadn’t realized just how much of a mess, but now that I reflect on the changes in me over these past 3 months, I can see clearly. Caring is exhausting. Not physically, because I am not shy of work. In fact I need that work or I would become a fat old lump of a woman. I love to dance through my day, my work, my chores, taking great pleasure in unloading a ton of firewood, outside in the elements, of which there are many on the island. I like to challenge my muscles and to reassure myself that I can still bend and stretch, not as I did when younger, of course not, but still strong in back, belly, legs and arms. I refuse to make old lady noises as I rise from a chair, even if I do find that grunt in my mouth at times.

It is the mental side of caring that takes its toll. We carers pretend to the world that we are fine-thank-you all the time, hiding the truth from everyone, including ourselves. But it doesn’t alter the fact that it is a very real part of our job. In order to manage, we keep going, as cheerfully as we can. We have to. Caring for someone in decline however has many sides to it. To know, every day, that we must present a cheery can-do attitude towards the one we care for is sometimes a big ask. What was, is no more. Two-way, in depth, conversations about the meaning of life will not arise again. There will be no more travel together and the biggest adventures will be a tootle to the local town, loaded up with walkers and wheelchairs and other caring aids. Driving needs to be slow and careful around every bend in order not to upset anyone. Parking is a blue card thing. Timing needs to be intelligently managed. We plan to leave at 10. At 9.30, a 30 minute warning. Again at 9.45 and so on. Any shopping requests must be aided and abetted and everything moves so very slowly. Anything heavy has to be lifted in and lifted back out again when home. There are no more dates or dances or folk over for dinner. These are either impossible or just upsetting and disorientating.

Grieving loss goes on. It’s a going on thing. Parking hopes and dreams doesn’t happen overnight, well, not for me, anyway. However, eventually, these things I may have hoped for, or even planned, do, thankfully, park themselves at the back of my mind. If the primary focus is on caring to the very best of my ability, which it most definitely is, then life is kindly and I thank life for that blessing. However, the not knowing of dementia is the hardest part. Learning to live in the moment, in the day, occupying the whole space of it as if it was all I had, is something I have had to research and then study well. Everything could change in a heartbeat – literally. But I am not dwelling on that, not giving it leg room under my table. Finding, or re-finding, joy can take a while and my ‘while’ has come to me out here, in Africa. I had left it too long to take myself away and into a place of healing. It was my mistake, leaving it too long, because it could have been possible long ago. My problem was me. I thought I had to be there, in charge of the one I care for, smoothing everything flat and safe. I was wrong. He is doing just fine without me there. He has carers a four times a day who know just what he needs. He looks forward to their visits. Our children come often to see him, so why didn’t I let go before? I just don’t know.

Out here I have learned much, read 35 books so far on various aspects of life, nature, mental well-being, love, thankfulness and how to be mindful of everything. 3 months is a long time, and not every carer can take such a break, but I could and did. That time has been well used, not a minute of it wasted and now I find I am stronger than before. I have let go of some unhealthy habits, some unhealthy anxieties, fears and thought processes. I don’t know where they’ve gone, but gone they have. Sleep is peaceful. Inner turmoil may still rise, but it does for all of us, carers and not carers alike. I have learned, again through much research, how to refurnish my mind, to redecorate it, to clean the filthy windows so that I can really see the majesty of life. Someone once said that it isn’t what you see that counts, it’s how you look. Eyes turned inward can be helpful for a mental spring clean but it is out there that lifts me.

Our minds have this annoying tendency to hang on to the negative. I don’t understand why that is, but it just is. It takes study and training to rewire a lazy brain. When I say ‘lazy’ I mean one that believes there is no hope or joy or future beyond whatever gloom I read in the news or hear from others. My brain was lazy when I came out here, defeated, exhausted, hopeless. I cannot imagine that now. I have watched and heard of many carers in my situation who can see no future. I get it. Who can see a future when the present is such an unknown? When I was encouraged to consider a future, I felt angry. It’s ok for you (I said) with your chance to make plans, move house, book dinner/a holiday. In other words, to take time for granted. I have had that all stolen from me. However, that way of thinking allowed to develop can only ever destroy and I have no plans to be destroyed. So, how do I elevate this cave thinking?

Books. Research. Study.

If we want something to change, we first have to change something. And, in the life of a carer, that something is me.

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Island Blog – Black and White

It all starts with the daylight, around 5 am.  I can see the sun through the curtains and it beckons me like a warm friend.  I just have to throw back the covers and leap out of bed because, well, because turning over for more sleep would be just rude.  Besides, I am a child in the mornings wherever I am, excited, full of bounce and way too much for most people.  Then there’s  the monkeys, bashing and crashing through the trees and sounding like distant thunder as they traverse the tin roof, careless of latent sleepers.  Babies clutched under maternal bellies, they swing like acrobats from branch to branch, sending down a sudden shower of last night’s rain onto my head as I walk.  I find them, again, around the kitchen, rifling through the bags of rubbish for a bit of old pizza or a crust of bread.  With tiny agile fingers, they pull apart a bin liner, discarding what they don’t want and fighting over what they do.  They don’t mind me, down here, watching them, although they are wary.

Around me graze the antelope, impala, nyala, bush buck, daker, also wary.  I sit quite still so as not to frighten them off as they browse the new shoots on the acacia, now plump with juicy foliage after all the rain.  I check around my feet for snakes.  All clear.  The groundsmen arrive for work and I greet them.  When I ask them how they are, they always say ‘I’m good, and you?’  There’s only answer to that.  If they are always ‘good’, arriving for another day’s work beneath a merciless sun, then so am I, on holiday with no agenda at all.  Some of the guides are up and a few volunteers straggle in for toast and coffee, each with a plan for the hours ahead, be it research, photography or to go out into the local community to work with the farmers or the school children.  I get to know their names, the volunteers who come for varying lengths of time and ask them about their lives back home.  Some are very young, some older and all have stories to tell and reasons for coming here.  Thrown together under one roof with a common cause makes friends of strangers pretty quickquick.

I work on my tapestries – fantasy landscapes with spectacular wools.  I weave a painting, with no initial plan, no idea how it will turn out and only knowing it’s done once I reach the top.  I might work on my current one for a whole morning, if the mood takes me, and when I feel myself stiffening up, I wander out to watch the multicolour of birds or the Skink (lizard) – I have named Cullen.  Cullen lives in the tree beside my little house and has become quite friendly.  Once, he ran over my foot as I sat in my doorway absorbing some sun.  He’s quite beautiful, with a light stripe down his back and shiny eyes.  However, there are more beautiful lizards than he, big tree iguanas, some speckled to blend with the tree bark and others with bright turquoise heads that don’t blend at all but, instead, catch the eye like a rainbow.

Last night I heard the lions roar.  I am getting the hang of the night sounds now and when I hear one, in the pitch of the night, I just have to go to the window.  It’s foolish, I know.  There is hardly going to be a leopard, or lion or hyena right there on the grass just waiting to say hi, but I still have to look.  Just nearby is a big five reserve and that is where they will be and where I will absolutely not be.  The high fence boundaries this plainsgame reserve (nothing that bites) and I can hear, but only imagine, what goes on as the night raiders waken hungry.   It’s quite a shivery thing, hearing the whoop of a hyena or the slow lazy lion call or the sawing grunt of a leopard.  Yesterday we found hyena scat inside the fence which did unnerve me somewhat, plus a bit of fence pushed up.  There were fragments of hair on the wire – leopard and hyena.  So, nobody walks out in the dark for obvious reasons.  We wake with the sun and when the sun sets, we might sit out awhile but we don’t walk into the dark cover of the bush, and we are always vigilantly torched up, watching for a flash of eyes caught in the beam.

Life on the island might feel a bit tame for a while.  I remember last time I came home and walked along the track and into the woods, and feeling momentarily unsure about sitting on a cluster of rocks.  I wouldn’t do that here.  It made me laugh at myself, but I still felt the hairs on my neck rise and a shiver go through me, even though it was chilly and wet and Scotland.  When I first arrived this time, in early November, I was scared of everything, including the monkeys.  That sounds ridiculous now.  It thinks me of that old saying, ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ to be honest, I never really understood it, but I do now.  Fear is a good thing if there is a real reason for it such as meeting danger on a path, but imagined fear is not healthy at all.  Research on that imagined fear is vital.  Once I know how to navigate my way around or through said imagined fear, the fear just melts away.  Sitting for the first time at the wheel of a car is terrifying.  What if I crash/turn over/hit someone/can’t stop? Imagined fear.  As I learn how to drive well, this fear goes away because through practice and study I grow more confident, although I am still cautious and vigilant for the rest of my driving days.

There is much written on overcoming fear and some of it is very helpful, although the tactics employed by ‘professionals’ can seem rather drastic to my way of thinking.  If I am scared of something, to the point of real terror, I know I need to do my homework, in order to understand just how the object of my fear really ticks.  Often I need to make myself do whatever I am scared of doing.  When I was sick, way back, I found it almost impossible to go down to the village shop.  I would panic, find breathing difficult, my legs turned to stone.  If I had to go to the mainland or into a crowd (anything over 3 people!) I was a mess.  Even now I might balk at putting myself out there, choosing instead to stay home and eat pasta and pesto, again, but I do know that fears multiply if not acknowledged and addressed.  I don’t beat myself up anymore.  I’m super kind to me.  I comfort, encourage gently and says things like “You are wonderful.  You can do this.  It’s ok.”  And before I know what’s happening I am out there, and the terrors have gone to bother someone else.

I think we all have imaginary fears, and some of them can be very real.  Paralyzing.  Stultifying.  Crippling. We walk between the dark and the light and it was always thus.  We cannot have only light.  We need the dark.  As long as it doesn’t turn us black inside.

Knowledge, Self-Love, and Good Books.   My answers to everything.

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Island Blog -The Wild Things

I like to wander through the canyons of my mind, where all the wild things are, just waiting.  They’ll welcome me back, I just know it, and we will re-friend, share memories, laugh, dance and sing enough together for me to garner the wildflowers in me and to plant them again.  This time I won’t let them die for lack of nourishment.  This time I shall call on all the gifts of Mother Nature, that life-giving water, that sunshine, those busy little insects, that space.  Sure, the weeds will grow, but they flower too and I’m not scared of weeds.

At the gate stands Genius Locus, the protective spirit of the place.  I must show her my credentials in order to gain access, for, too long, have I cluttered my mind with worldly tripe and noise and other unimportant things.  I had forgotten me and me doesn’t find that one bit amusing – in fact me is in a right strop about all this wasted time, and I don’t blame her. Wearing stout boots for this earthly walk is, indeed, sensible, but it is quite another thing to get stuck in the mud over and over again with a mouth full of wailing and a head full of depressing thoughts.  This protector works extremely hard to keep me centred,not just on my worldly walk but in complete balance with my otherness.  I’ve written much about otherness before, the unworldly, otherworldly connection to all that I cannot see, control or manipulate with my limited powers and sticky fingers; that omnipotent energy, available and free to all, so vast, so silent, so timeless and so essential to a life.  It isn’t taught to children at school, nor in the workplace.  I cannot buy it or contain it or gift it to another.  All I can do is tap its vital energy, invite it into my mind, body and soul, and then learn how to care for it as if it was a matter of life or death.  I don’t mean death death, as in, oops I’m off, but death whilst living. I must tend it, talk to it, ask questions, make it my friend, living in humility, without apology and in complete reverence.

I know there is a band of sniggerers who reckon that what we see is all there is.  I cannot imagine being that scared for a lifetime. If their belief is true, then everything would be down to me and my limitations.  Well, blow that for a bag of monkeys.  The yearning inside us is not for more success or a new house/relationship/sofa even if we long to believe that’s the truth.  It might mean we could fix life just like that.  We can’t.  This black hole is in every single one of us and it has a fine purpose could we but accept that.  It feels uncomfortable and randomly sad at times.  It powers up huge anger, desolation and an intense pining for a wider understanding of why we are here at all.

Many of us deny the black hole, or, at the very least, put the restless discomfort of it down to  last night’s Chinese take-away.  We deny it even to ourselves, even when, inside the dark folds of a dark and lonely night, we struggle to breathe as it looms ahead of us like a blood moon, only pitch black and with a huge magnetic pull.  We welcome the dawn like a saviour and then busy ourselves in filling the darkness inside with all the wrong things such as pretty wallpaper or lots of noise and colour.  For a short while this can work, but not for long.  It will have none of us.  Our attempts to avoid our black hole are always futile.  This darkness in all of us will be seen, whether we choose to look, or not.  And, not only seen, but heard, recognized and accepted.  It is, bottom line, essential for our balance, and we all like balance.  What we don’t like is anything dark.  However, those who have traversed Space will tell you that a black hole pulses with a compelling light show.  It is the same inside us.

The Genius Locus lets me in as I knew she would, and I begin to wander, to marvel at the vast expanse of wasteland, the canyons of my past rising into the sky.  I see what I have achieved, what has made me proud, what has made me ashamed, all the lessons I have learned.  This land is rich in minerals and cool clear water flows freely.  What it has lacked are human hands, my hands, to bring it all back to life. When I was a child, I was a dreamer and I am a dreamer still.  I can see, now, how to make this place inside me become a living balancer.  I found my way here through reading books, many books on the meaning of life and other animals.  In absorbing wise words from those who came before, who acknowledged their own black hole and who walked right into it, I have found the right trust to walk into my own.  In there lie all the answers, all the mistakes made, the regrets, the crimes.  All the things I wish I’d never said or done and all the wonderful things I had a part in, or initiated that changed another’s life for the better.

As I move deeper in, the wild things begin to appear.  One, then another, then another until they play around me like happy children, their sing-song voices lifting into the soft air.  They know I need to go back, as do I, in order to get on with whatever comes next, and whatever always does come.  But this re-connection with my wildness will both balance and strengthen me in ways the world can never do.  I need the world but not just the world.  I need my otherness too.

We all do.

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Island Blog – The Point

All of us seek meaning for our lives.  We’ve done it, as a species, for all of time.  We wonder ‘what’s the point of my life’ as we madly scrabble for something, or someone, to be that point.  Of course, as events, circumstances and people join us on our daily walk, or abandon us in the middle of nowhere, the point changes, shifts, fades or brightens.  This is Life, for nothing and no-one is forever.

Those, like me, who dedicate huge swathes of time in research on the meaning of life through words long written down by men and women so much wiser than I will ever be, people who ‘think too much’, (as was always written in my school reports) have found the answer.  Well, the answer might be too small a word for it because it is a vast thing and not a thing at all.

Involved and committed as we are to whatever culture or span of time within which we live and move and have our being, we can make the fatal error of being pointless.  Eyes down and legs running ever faster towards achievement, material wealth or one-upmanship will always leave us standing naked at the edge of the great River Styx wondering what just happened.  My life happened, that’s what, and bother, I missed it.  It happened without me, without my mindful awareness.  Oh, I launched a few lovely children, built an empire, discovered a new wonder drug; I’ve been a good friend and neighbour, kept a tidy garden, limited the amount of TV I watch (thus disallowing a deconstruct of my core values and beliefs…..is that a double negative?)  been kind to my family and other animals, kept cheerful regardless, welcomed strangers or change and so on tiddley pom, but what was the point of my little life that felt so big as I lived it?

I am.  I am the point.  So, why didn’t I get that as I leaped onto the daily hamster wheel?  Cultures teach us to be self-less, and I applaud that, but not to the exclusion of self.  The effort, time, thought and care we put into others is laudable.  It’s what our parents and teachers tell us to do, after all, but, if we deny ourselves the same set of goodly things, we are just hamsters, not humans.

The locus of our power lies not in work, or working harder, or running faster, learning new forms of human manipulation for increased financial gain, but in the silent contemplation of a single soul beside a gently flowing stream.  In other words leisure time, as priority, food for the imagination, a re-friending of the vast reaches of the natural world.  And not just for an hour or two, now and then, but, indeed, for a considerable amount of time.  Looking for meaning in the material world will never be enough, for we are so much more than the things we gather around us.

If we had this primary rule in place, the sickness queue wouldn’t be a queue at all.  Suicide, abuse, murder, addiction, broken relationships, all that pain could never take over as it so clearly has done, were we to study the art of self love.  Jesus, Buddha, Allah all knew it and tried to get the hamsters to look up and out beyond what we see and to really connect with the whole point of our lives.  They must be exasperated as they watch us all hurtle towards the dark.

However, it only takes a few to start a revolution and this one needs no weapons, nor military tactics.  It just needs more questing, reflective souls, readers who mindfully read to learn, to consider and to understand how simple life can be, how fulfilling, how healthy in body and mind.  In solitary study, in a gentle place, taking time just to stand under the stars, to lean against an old tree, to watch children at play or to walk into a sunset, we turn the world off.  Or, at least, its volume down.  We say yes to self and in valuing that self we find love.  Only then are we in a position to share that love.

That’s it?

Yep, that’s IT.

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Island Blog – Considering Trees

There’s a tree in the far far distance, right on the horizon, and it’s loud.  Much darker than all the rest, a pushy sort of tree, with a ‘here-I-am, move-over’ sort of attitude, it’s branches spread wide.  It catches my attention every time I check the skyline.  I know it must be a big tree because to cross the space between it and I would take some hours in a buckie.  If I were to stand beneath this tree, I would be dwarfed.  I’d also be an idiot.  Such a tree could easily shade an elephant party, a couple of postprandial lions or even a leopard (plus dead impala) reclining among the branches, not to mention boomslangs, which I would always rather not mention at all, even if they are very fetching green.

Back here, the rains have made the gardens sing, especially the trees.  Jacaranda blooms  are quite soaked, hanging down in necklaces of soft violet.  The Flamboyant Tree is full of monkeys, all ages of monkeyhood, leaping through the branches and sending down a flutter of blood red petals to pretty the ground.  Fig trees host a multicolour of birds and songs, calls and warnings and the flash of rainbow feathers caught in sunshine.  They swoop and scoot and flap fast or glide according to their type, from the slow flight of a lone crane to the dash of a tiny bird with a bright blue tumtum.  Termites fly in great numbers after the rains, their wings so delicate and fine and so short lived.  They only use these four perfect wings to get from one place to somewhere else, and then they just shrug them off leaving the ground covered the next morning.  You’d be forgiven for thinking mass murder.  Many, however, will become a meal for the swifts.  A wall of flying termites is a real come hither, after all.

I think about trees, about their different songs, shapes, strength and colours, how we need them, take them for granted, chop them down, drive nails into their flanks, turn them into paper.  Their shade is precious to us, protection from a sudden downfall, shelter from a cold wind.  When you sit with your back against a tree, it’s like being close to a really good friend, no need to talk, only sit. If you look up at the sky through the spread of branches, it’s like sitting in the safety of a mother’s arms.  Wandering among trees is a good thing to do; to notice the way one leans, if it leans at all;  to finger the bark, the scars, the place where a new limb begins, to trace the length as far as you can.  Touch the leaves and feel their texture, shiny perhaps, or emerald flat or curved and sinewy or delicate as air itself.  Walk around the tree, all the way round it.  Was it planted here or did it seed itself?  think of the years it took to get this strong, this tall, this wide. See the roots gnarl through the ground below it, rising like old crooked fingers to disappear into the bottom of the world. Consider the bugs living in the scarred bark, of the water rising beneath it to keep this huge creature alive, this home and host to many, this shelter from the elements, these arms that hold and protect and produce breathtaking beauty for our looking, nectar for the insects, pollen for posterity.

Or you could think about that bargain in the January Sales.

Meanwhile, in Africa, there is a sunset over the Loud Tree and me, just looking.