Month: November 2019

by

Island Blog – Caricatures

Once I clock it, I am doomed. So are the animals I’m watching. Once I see the collective arses of multiple zebra jigging away into the bush, kicking up their heels and making both dust and high pitched winny, and the joker in my pack tickles my visceral sensibility, all I can hear is the voice of Eddie Murphy as Donkey to Shrek the Ogre. That face is on every zebra with all the expressions and those giggleworthy lines; the quick quick trotting, the way a yawn rolls around those fulsome lips showing the rank and file of yellowstone teeth. The inflation of nostrils too big, surely for that face and the attitude, that confident trot of attitude and the ability to bounce back from everything. Of course, this is not how it is for zebra. Being a zebra is a serious business in a game reserve and jigging away is probably more about not being forced to stay for dinner than it is a playful gad across the dry sands.

I see those bobbing birds from The Night Garden, the ones that sing (and bob) as the programme bids us all, and the little children, and Upsy Daisy, the TingleWingles, all those endless noisy children without legs and finally Iggle Piggle whose disappearance over the waves always brings a tear to my eyes, Goodnight. I see them here in Africa, bobbing. Their song is clearly the original but adroitly purloined for the bit part birds in the Night Garden. When I watch seagulls, hear them together, they all say Mine, Mine, Mine. I can never hear those sounds without finding myself looking for Nemo. Is this just me, I wonder, at times when I wonder about the wiring in my brain, or do others see the comedic in nature? Trees can talk, even door knockers, and I can’t stand before one without losing myself in the Labyrinth. The brilliance of the writers of such movies tells much of their research. So many of the characteristics of our well loved Disney, Pixar, and all the others are sentiently based on the real thing, but, when I hear the original, having seen the movie, I am entranced.

When Winnie the Pooh was delivered sporting an American accent, I confess to being a right stick in the mud. Now, I don’t even notice it, being captivated by the Pooh himself, the expressions on his face, his Tao, his wonderfully laid back honeyed life. I suspect there isn’t much of the original bear in his construct and it would be a big mistake to even consider such, were I to encounter a big brown in Canada. However, I am not totally stupid nor am I planning a trip to Canada. Baloo however, is certainly the right shape and size, but, again, not based on the real thing. I’m not going to India either.

A lone giraffe came for water this morning but too soon for me to have filled up the water thingy. I cursed myself, stood, shame-faced as it sniffed both barrels and looked straight at me, neck inclined to one side, as if to say “SERIOUSLY?’ I found myself saying Sorry, and It Won’t Happen Again. It stayed looking at me. There was an essay full of incriminating lines to get through as it locked eyes with me and shimmied its fulsome lips. Then it ambled away without a backward glance. I thought…..now, if I was a writer for the silver screen, I would have made copious notes, caught the attitude, heard the words, written them down and made something marvellous, simply by close observation of the real thing, doing its real thing in Nature. I thought of the long walk to water it would now need to make, ploughing through all those Eddie Murphys on the way.

I suspect that sensible people might tut at my disrespect for animals and their foibles. I might be (have been) corrected and steered politely back to the right page in The World Of Animals in order to remind myself of their true qualities. However, it bothers me not. My joker, who sees a caricature where zoologists see the original, is still part of the pack, no matter how many times she gets left out of the dealings.

And, these animals could well be looking at me in the same way.

by

Island Blog – Alone and Together

This morning I see one bushbuck, one giraffe, one warthog. The bushbuck, nervous, ears twitching for sounds of danger comes to the water hole. He has probably been tossed out of the family group, the herd, if, indeed, there is a herd, and is alone in this vast terrain. He will be seeking another group, a mate, the chance to clack antlers with a rival in order to earn his place. The giraffe looked at first like a movement of tree trunks as I could only see his legs but as he slowly wandered onto the track he was caught in silhouette against the rise of the African sun. He looked back at me through velvet eyes as I looked at him, then turned to lope away, all speckles and sand and alone. The warthog is a grumpy old bugger. Yesterday, as I walked the pup around the house, he started forward and I took off like lightening. Nobody wants to meet the front end of one of those horned-up wild pigs. His vision is poor but his temper is rich and his sense of smell very strong. It was the pup he didn’t like, being a natural wimp around humans, for which I am always grateful. I lifted the pup over the rails of the stoep and arrived shortly after in what must have looked like a very ungraceful half-somersault, my dress up around my ears and my sandals all wonky-chops.

It thinks me of wandering alone. Although I know full well how precious are community, family, friends and other social encounters and relationships, I also know we all walk alone through this life. Each one of is an intricate tangle of nature, nurture, experience, choices, personality and character. We also all look different, which if you think about it is quite a miraculous feat of engineering. Even as one of identical twins, the word identical is an overstatement. Deep inside both will have an unique pattern, no matter how the outside is designed. One can sing, the other can’t hold middle C without slippage; one finds this joke hilarious, the other puzzles to find more than a polite smile; one loves eggs done this way, the other, that. And so on.

When we were five young children and travelling north for our Scottish summer break, our mum had us knitted and kitted in matching jumpers. We could choose the style but not the colour. Yellow, one year, blue the next and so on, always in bright primary colours. We had to wear them for the journey. Mum said that it was so she could find us in places like York Station or on Princes St, Edinburgh as we skittered like excited monkeys through the crowds of moving feet, eyes level with a thousand navels and worse, even more handbags that could deliver a mighty head clonk if we weren’t paying attention. I don’t think we looked after each other much, being intent on our own agendas and deeply fed up of being One Of Five. Although I didn’t visit the same knitted uniform on my kids I do remember those wild times such as boarding the right train intact as a family, or shopping in a mall where, quite frankly, havoc could be wrought at any moment and always by One Of My Five.

I see that the world thinks in terms of numbers now. We are number this on a plane, at work, in school, in a theatre, the tube, the office and it saddens me because we are not numbers, we are individual people, no two alike. We are Just One among many other Just Ones, linked through culture, our job, our street, out village, our church, our market, our orchestra, our singing group and more. But I is not always We. Paying attention to the ‘I’ is something we may have forgotten altogether, such is the pressure of group thinking. We may also have forgotten how to nurture and nourish and listen to the I. In this fast moving world of apps and social media, advertising, subliminal or overt, competition, addiction, poverty growing disproportionate to wealth, corruption and the general malaise of apathy and defeat around Big Brother and his Nanny State, we (no, I) must remember what it is to be unique among millions. I must stop running and think for myself. This might take a while because, if I am honest, it is easier to go with current worldly thinking, which has a strong and powerfully persuasive voice but which is really relieving us, ever so slowly, of our own unique voices. I might wonder what it is I do think. I might come up blank, at first. I might not know where to begin following my own inner voice, once I can hear it again. I might find myself stopping to talk with a street beggar and feeling deeply conspicuous. (it gets easier with practice). I always wanted to, to give, to show respect, but none of my friends do and if I have ever faltered beside such a sad picture of a human life, I would feel a firm hand on my elbow, guiding me away, and a bright schoolmarm voice in my ear suggesting ‘Coffee?’

We travel alone, and yet together. We need each other for friendship and so much more……..but it is our prime duty to respect our own unique individuality, to relocate that inner guiding voice and then to take appropriate action, because every single one of us is here for a purpose, one purpose per living soul. It is our job to work that one out. Alone.

by

Island Blog – Seed Pods, A Hawk and Me

Today there is a breeze – a welcome one, even if it is already 27 degrees out beyond the cooling thatch of the stoep where fierce old Father Sun is warming up for a ten degree elevation. Little brown seedpods scurry across the velt as if chasing each other. The big stones, left behind as the bushland erodes even more, show me their shoulders, rounded from a thousand years of ocean turmoil. These huge stones have stories to tell. I remember years ago flying in a tiny plane, not much bigger than a swan, through the fjords of Iceland, heading north to where the houses run out and only the ice tundra remains. The sharp toothed mountains reared into the blue sky like pointing fingers, young still, in the lives of mountains, unlike their Scottish cousins whose stories go way further back. These mountains, these teenagers, could still fell a man (and a plane the size of a swan) just by falling out with the sky, thus creating a synaptic flu. And, as with we humans, one person with flu affects everything and everyone else.

As I sipped my coffee and watched for a giraffe visit, I heard a guinea fowl. The distinctive sound is not usually heard in solo, for guinea fowl, those comical hen-like birds travel in groups, all talking at once. The singular sound alerted me and soon I saw, first, the bird running at a surprising lick between the still-bare trees followed by what I thought was another fowl in flight. the guinea fowl lifted into the air somewhat clumsily, still yelling its head off, still alone but for its follower. Ah……not another fowl but a hawk! The chase was lost to my view and I had no phone with me to capture such a sight, nor would I have had the time to focus and press ‘video’. It all happened so fast – the large hen fowl, the smaller hawk in pursuit, an unlikely meet. Who knows? Not I, said the cat. Not I said the goose. And nor do I.

This all thinks me. The seed pods tippling along in the wind, powerless to change a single thing. The guinea fowl in the wrong place at the wrong time. The old round-shouldered stones and their younger cousins poking at the sky to trouble it as all teenagers will do around authority. In my days and weeks here I have studied and rested, read and watered the plants who could never wait a week for refreshment, not in this dry heat. Sometimes, and for no reason I can find, I am like a seed pod, trundling this way and that across some bare-assed tundra and the best I can do is to make little trundling noises as a bully wind decides where I go next. Someone might say something that reacts inside me like an axe-chop and all my anxieties rise to welcome the blow, confirming what I always feared, that I still haven’t got it right, whatever ‘it’ is. I might hold my ground (mindfully) but my rational mind has abandoned me and all I want to do is to hide in the dark of the broom cupboard with all the other old brooms whose bristles are more like whispers but which nobody quite got round to chucking on the bonfire.

Other days I am the guinea fowl in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can feel the terror and hear the hawk and a greater part of me just wants to give up and wait for the inevitable, however slow and unpleasant that would be. Funnily enough, I never feel like the hawk, not in such a chase. Even if I do know that hawks need food like all the rest of us and is not able to pop to Tescos for a weekly shop, I still prefer to envisage such a magnificent creature soaring over my head and enjoying the upthrust of thermals.

In my studies, I am learning both to ‘ground’ and to ‘elevate’ in my daily meditation (well, almost daily). It’s all done through imagination and I have plenty of that to spare, too much most of the time to be honest, and the imagery really does calm and restore me. But, and here’s my jagged toothed poke at the sky, I really do wonder at the efficacy of loading one wee woman with so much imagination whilst others seem to have just enough to live a normal and pleasant life. I think things nobody else thinks, or would admit to, perhaps. I go down into valleys and up the rocky mountains whilst others walk calmly along the road. I can see them. I can talk to them but I cannot walk that way it seems. My way (thank you God) is a daily bother about appropriate footwear for a terrain I did not choose and am quite unprepared for. Are there others like me out there, I wonder? Yes, I know there are and the reason I write all this in my blogs is not just to reach out to all you others who have to abseil slimy rock faces instead of take a wee donder along a road built by man and following the line of least resistance, but to know I am not the only one who fights life every single step of the way. It isn’t that I am unhappy with my lot, far far from it. I love my life, am in love with my life. I have the imagination to see far far into the void even if it terrifies the bejabers out of me. I can climb mountains in the wrong footwear if I have to. I have something extraordinary within (thank you God) even if I do wonder (and often) what on earth I am supposed to do with it all. I have envied, many times, the folk who just get on with life, who don’t think too much and who appear rarely, if ever, consumed by doubts, fears, anxieties and predatory hawks; those who see what is visible and who are not concerned with what is not. It looks like such a pleasant way to live, but I could not live that way however hard I tried. My inner nutcase is way too strong for me to conquer. I know. I’ve tried to kill it off since way back when. She, and it is obviously a she, so obstinate, so strong, so defiant, so stubborn and loud and ornery. No hiding in the broom cupboard for her, dammit. I have even tried to outwit her; wearing clothes that look like other people’s, or practising normal ways to live, to speak; voicing opinions that present me as #notme but it never lasts for long. I get the giggles. This me is this me. End of.

And here you are, my fellow crazies. I see you on your own rock face and I am waving from my own – in the wrong footwear with the hawk screeching in my ears and a bully wind buffeting my ass. Above all of us who take the path less travelled, if indeed you could call it a path at all, so invisible at times, so thrawn with roots and other trip-ups, is Father Sun, Mother Moon and a sky wide enough to hold all of us down whilst lifting all of us up.

And so it is.

by

Island Blog – A Day and The Beast

Some days I wake in an uncertain light. Oh, the light without is as normal but not the light within. It flickers on an off like a dodgy bulb, predicting eventual out-ness for ever. I rise quickly, wondering in my half sleep if the dodgy light is only here with me beneath the covers. Unfortunately not. Going through the ordinary process of washing, dressing, opening curtains and pulling back the covers to give the innocent bed a good airing, the uncertainty stays close. I cannot explain it, never could and now, with my ageing knowledge, I never will because it always, without exception, leads me down the path of self-beration. Or, is it self-beratement? Or self-berateness? None, or all of those?

Whatever I choose to name it, it is entirely itself. My inner judge who has been sleeping for a while now is really a slumbering beast with teeth and claws and is a tremendously accurate portrait painter. Before the first snarl I know what it is going to say and how it will say it. Accusations of failure, neglect, foolishness and downright sin are all in its mouth, just busting to breathe out poison darts on a swoosh of stale air. I no longer engage. The fact that these judgements are always the same without a trace of compassion or effective guidance have numbed me to their supposed power. In short, I have learned that it is not the beast that scares me at all, but only my own apparent determination to allow the beast room at all inside my head.

The tactics I have employed are most effective. If I, the carer of this inner beast keep caring for it, feeding it with attention and other nourishments, it will never leave me. Why would it? It is cosy in there, safe and most importantly, unchallenged by other kings and principles, beliefs and choices. It reigns, or reigned, supreme. Right, Mate, I tell it. I need to do some work on this, on you and on me. So I begin at the beginning, in childhood. I don’t trawl back through memories to find anything in particular for the memory is a fickle friend as the above makes clear. Instead I study, under guidance from an online course, how to love myself better. Actually, how to love myself at all, given that most of us don’t love ourselves anyway, me included. If I take the hand of my imagination and we go together into the fun of childhood, the play and the games, the innocence and the laughter, we find plenty of it. Remembering only the hard times is very unfair of me and not the whole truth by a long shot, but I am not alone in making this choice. Invariably when someone is asked about their childhood, they will recall the hard times, the tough mother, the absent father, the bullying at school, the spots, the fat, the teasing, the shame of being alive at all. Why? Well, I cannot answer that beyond saying that our default as humans is usually to see the worst, remember the worst, speak it out as if it was all we ever experienced.

Back home, rain threatens. In Africa, where people and animals die of thirst every day, rain promises. Same rain, different view of it. Simples. if I can take a day like yesterday feeling out of sorts, scratched and snarled at and just move gently through it, then it passes. If I can tell myself that I am a true survivor, a strong and beautiful woman who has lived her life to the full from the year dot, then the beast gets bored and goes back to sleep. If I can consider how to spend my time on such a day, outside my thoughts, reading, perhaps, sewing, asking questions of others who may well be very much in need of such attention, then the beast is ignored and neglected. Eventually, with practice and allowing no thoughts of self-criticism to arise, not even one, during such a day, the beast will leave the building. I know this, because I am practising just that.

And the days will be as they will be. I never know what a day will bring, but, by golly, I am ready, like a sharp witted warrior, and the ones that set out to bring me down are no match for me at all.