Month: January 2022

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Island Blog – Thoughts, Red Speeders and Me

Thoughts are always busy I find. My head is a freeway for them. Sometimes I fly above the chaos and stare down, mystified. How can one small head allow such mayhem? I mean, I am watching speeding, overtaking on the inside, collisions and fatal hesitations. It seems to me that all of these rushing thoughts want to get my attention, regardless of how much damage each one does in order to achieve it. If I focus on one, that red speeding one, the one that tells me about yet another failure or shortfall for which I am solely responsible while the rest blur into a rainbow mist. The red one won. I no longer notice the well behaved thoughts, the kindly ones, those driving carefully and with no intention of upsetting anyone else, especially me. Why are they so well behaved, enough that I don’t notice them much, if at all? They are the ones who are not out to pull me down but instead to build me up. Is it that I think them boring? Is it that I have not heard enough uplifting encouragement from the older humans in my life that I think it is ok to ignore these guys? Well, maybe but that is no authentic reason to be stuck in that belief, be it true or imagined. Hell no. I am a radiant, powerful human being who chooses to live life with joy and pleasure and I have met Joy. She’s a keeper.

I flick the red speeder away and decide to notice the good thoughts, the ones down there running on kindness and consideration, joy and pleasure, love and happiness. I watch them change gear a lot, slowing to allow another to overtake, pulling over for a big truck to pass, stopping often to allow a break for anyone else involved. There are many of them now that I look closely, as many as the speeders, the takers and the critics. It seems that what I choose to pay attention to is up to me and my vigilant looking, the picture below me, around me, within my head. Hush! I hiss, suddenly overwhelmed, and there is a slowing down, a hold up, a line of thoughts stuck bumper to bumper with no chance of moving ahead until I clear the blockage. The kindly thoughts just wait patiently, turning to make sure others are not scared or stressed. The red ones shout and yell, hit the wheel, swear and stomp about like fools achieving nothing and yet, and yet, these are the ones I believed in just a few moments ago; the pretenders, the nothings, the past voices that have been dead and therefore no threat for a long time now. Was I giving them the kiss of life? Eeuch! I am so stopping that and right now.

So how do I do that? Well, sadly it is not a one stop decision, although it is at the one stop part, but thereonafter it is a daily watchdog thingy. Whenever I notice a red speeding thought, one that tells me about my failings and my mistakes as if they define me and confine me and align me with hopelessness and haplessness, I will not give them focus, no matter how pretty they are, how alluring. It amazeballs me that I am so ready to tell myself how much I have failed and fail still, but I read that it is a common human condition, as common as the cold. Our brains are the most powerful thing known to man, more so than any amount of technology we know about now and any of it we will discover and develop in the future. We are so incredibly powerful. My doctor once said to me that physical disease is not our killer. Our brains are, or, rather, the way we let them control us instead of us controlling them. I think her wise even if the whole thingumajig of daily noticing of red speeders makes me yawn because, like everyone else, I want lovely things to happen to me just because I am a magnet for good and because I care about others and la la la. Nonetheless, we all have a job to do and never more than now as we tire of isolation and fear, of what the hell and where do we go now even if we are brave enough to do the ‘go’ thing?

I piddle about with upbeat courses, affirmations, mirilations and striations. I swither and dither on the edge of wastelands, of brokenness and lack looking out at the pretty lights in the distance, ones I haven’t walked towards for years. I swale and fail, I rise and fail, I falter and halter but by heck if by noticing my thoughts and taking over my lunatic brain until it gets my message, until it sees me standing on the dust path with my stop hand up, my focus on the kindly thoughts, the uplifting ones, the beige ones, then, I am going to stand. If I do it every day, every time I feel myself louded out by the naysayers then just maybe, the red speeders, the bully thoughts will see a radiant, powerful human being who chooses to live life with joy and pleasure, and will eventually feel lonely enough to book in for a respray.

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Island Blog – Day Enough

Sometimes there are days when everything seems possible and then from nowhere and for no reason arrives one that seriously does not want to be with me at all. I could barely get it out of bed. I had to wheech off the duvet and sing loudly in its ear to get any reaction at all. It wasn’t me feeling this way, no indeed, for I was all bounce and twinkle as usual, but the day itself lay heavy and disinterested in itself even with the prospect of mashed avocado and poached eggs for candlelit breakfast. Needless to say, a sad mood inside a home is going to affect all within those walls and I gradually found myself feeling listless and lost. I didn’t want to sew, nor alter a frock, nor any of the other time-filling things I employ these widow days, like wood chopping or stacking, garage floor sweeping, bird feeding, hoovering the carpets or cleaning the windows. I can make even those mundane tasks into a party. T’is my gift. I can chat to my new electric blue stick hoover with headlights and a wonderful base note in the key of B. I find my melody to match her base and off we go like ballerinas, scooting round corners and sucking up the drift, minding the spiders of course. She knows not to go there and her headlights make it so much easier. I tell Henry, as I return Blu to her spot in the dark cupboard under the stairs, that had he headlights and were he to let go of control by holding back his power instead of showing off by lifting newly laid carpets from their nail tracks, and if he smelled as fresh as she does, he would have more exciting excursions around our home. Chopping wood is my stress release. I don’t imagine anyone’s head on the block but simply see the challenge of this big ass half tree before me as one I am more than able to accept and complete successfully. I have a wonderful axe, t’is true and she and I have had many adventures in our time together.

But thanks to the Grumpy Day, I feel I am blowing into the wind, fully expecting it to say “oops’ and to turn around. I whacked up the tunes, made coffee, told myself to lift, lift and lift but the lift was out of order and no amount of poking at the buttons shifted the damn thing. I was slumped and furious at my slumping. So weak, so not like me, so lazy, so ungrateful, so pathetic. Then I remembered something my African son posted on his (Y)our Happy Place Facebook page just yesterday. I don’t remember the exact words but the message was to allow rest and revival rather than dashing into this new year with impossible goals that often lead to failure and self-flagellation. Well, I hadn’t set any goals beyond getting beyond all the fallout from a decade of dementia care followed by death, a process everybody tells me, helpfully, that can take years. But it was the ‘allowing’ thingy that stopped me beating myself up. I have never been good at allowing myself to ‘fail’ my high standards for self even as I am the best and warmest mother hug for anyone else who believes it for themselves. How riddickerluss is that.

The thing I do know about such days when nothing feels easy and all you can see out there is rain and mizzle and dark, is that they are not my fault. These days just come and there is only one way to get to the end of them and that’s to make them warm and welcome, knowing they are random and that everything about their gloom and slump is their stuff, not yours. I watched a movie, sat by the fire, watched the neighbour’s beautiful cat pad around my bird feeders and allowed myself many allowings Although I do feel a bit overwhelmed with all the positive thixotrons that invade social media, posted and re-posted, thus allowing people to say nothing from their own mouths, I do get it. Covid has locked us down too long and that hiding away has conflounced our equilibrium, upset our balance and challenged what we always understood as the pattern of our lives. We are all wide-eyed children now, wondering, peeking out, unsure and we don’t really know what to say next. When I say something next and out loud my dog barks. That is how silent life is when one goes and the other stays behind.

But, I digress. This day is almost gone. Actually it has because I made it some good sandwiches and a flask of tea and waved it off a few moments ago. It was a sad old thing for sure but I did dry off its jacket and boots and we did chat and I did make it very clear it is never welcome but that I will never turn it away and that made it smile. Which made me smile. And that was enough.

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Island Blog – Dynamic Fire

I love to learn new things. Being naturally curious and a once highly involved member of a debate group, I am never happier than when picking apart a so called truth or absolute. I am no academic but I can sniff out someone stuck inside their own pages and the match girl in me begins to itch. However, this itch thingy doesn’t mean I want to put anyone down, far from it, but I do want that ‘whoever’ to relax and to consider another perspective. It doesn’t always work I find. Learned absolutes and truths become a part of whoever’s infrastructure and my fiddling about with questions rattles the legs that hold them up. How many times have you heard “Well, I always do it this way, thought this way.’? Or said it yourself. I certainly have but the second I hear that stuck phrase slip through my lips, I pull in for a rethink. Where the hell did you come from? I ask the words that now founder embarrassed at my reaction, bumping into each other and changing places, skidding to an ungainly halt. I brush them onto the floor. Rearrange yourselves, I say, dismissively.

In the questioning of what others say and believe to be truths I must needs attend to my own truths and what I have discovered is that truths are truths for a while and then they need to rearrange themselves. The words Always and Never are goal posts in the life game of football or rugby or netball or whatever your game might be. They are not the field. The field is wide open, a space where anything can happen and everything can change. The players on that field are wild or half asleep, strong or weak, ready or not. The players are our everyday thoughts and feelings. However, scoring goal does not mean we win the game but only achieve a short term full stop with an accolade, and a roaring crowd and bells and whistles because everyone loves a winner. Apparently.

However, I am with the players, hot, tired, stretched, hopeful and most important of all, ready to change tactic or direction in a nanosecond. If one on that field is focussed on something that doesn’t demand an open mind then the whole team is compromised. It is no different inside a mind. There isn’t just one of us. There are many and each member of us is of value and importance. I get fed up with the noise inside my head, all of me talking at once and nobody letting a.n.other space to speak. Hush you eejits! I hissed at 3.45 am as they woke me to such a hullabaloo that even the wee dog lifted from her snores with a puzzled bark. It’s ok, darling, I soothed. It’s just me and me and me and me and me and me and so flipping on. But, once the daylight decided to become daylight, eventually, I could see that in my so called sleeping moments, my friends inside the head of this match girl, are sorting out latent thinks as yet unresolved. I could ask them to work only in the light but I know they are cathemeral and so my pleas would be pointless.

Back to conversations, to debates. I remember them, around a bar table, height and heighty, fun and fractious, confrontational when someone was losing the power to defend their ‘stuck’, because this whoever thought they were only strong within the old pages, pages that burn easy. In this crazy time, in this ‘stuckness’ we might remember we are field players; we might remember we are many others of ourself; we might think dynamically out of our own troubles, remembering that they are not nothing. They are visibly and actively something. They are not bad, nor wrong. They are real. However, with a little shimmy to the right or to the left of left, we will find ourself mid field, or way out there in the whatever it’s called and with a new perspective on the game, even perhaps with an eagle eye and a match girl with an itch at the ready.

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Island Blog – An Old Lady and This Day

Today I watched, on a Zoom meet, a woman of almost 90 and obviously quite the thing around the interworld. She, elegant and with the bright eyes of a bird, was clearly confident. She uses WhatsApp, Facebook and other apps with strange names, although she didn’t announce it in search of a Goodlordwelldonehowamazingyouare response. In fact I suspect she might have looked astonished had any of us shown our resistance or lack of interest in being thus in touch with cyber space. I thought on her life, about which I know absolutely nothing. She knew war and deprivation, loss and fear, possibly hunger and cold. She knew flappers and bombs, new jazz and silent movies. What things she has seen in her long lifetime, what things! And she is not confused, not at all, nor has she lost her beauty, that soft-lined old face with more laugh lines than wrinkles and not a whine in sight. I suspect she was fierce, could be fierce and might yet be fierce and that thinks me. In her days of simple but harsh life, she had to keep her humour and her resilience, her softness and her fight. She needed both heart and claws. I imagine she was decisive and direct, unfearful as we are now fearful to confront rudeness, untruth, injustice and wrongdoings. She looks pint sized but never let a pint sized woman kid you into thinking you are stronger, because you are not. It isn’t about size nor physical strength but about courage, passion and backbone. I wanted to sit at her feet to hear her stories. I just hope her young ask her for I do regret not asking enough for stories from my own old ones.

So an ordinary morning was flipped on its aspidistra. Just like that. An invite to a zoom, to meet women I don’t know turned into a whole day of thinks and mind flips, memories and chuckles. Ah, when we greet the day with open hearts, what delights and sights await our looking eyes! If we are looking, that is. I am always looking so that every incoming thing catches my eyes. Was I born with this? Perhaps, but that perhaps can get subsumed by lifely demands, lists, children, workloads and drudge until it becomes something you can’t really taste in a tired sandwich. I’ve been lost there too. But there is this thing in me that refuses not to live, to really live, even on shambolic tricksy days. I can feel low and full of self-pity and there’s a word or two on that. Self pity is everywhere inside us. It is an easy go-to when life happens, when life throws the shit our way and laughs in our faces. I tried resisting, I tried reasoning, I tried logic and denial and not one of them ever worked. Ok, I said. This is not working. Let us meet, my unwelcome visitor, across the table, my table, and discuss. I soon saw it, Self Pity, for what it is and, after a few direct questions, its voice became skinny against my inner core strength, my own self. It surprised me at first, and then as confidence grew, I took my power back. I am taking my power back, I had said in my best strong voice and it bent and cracked and crumbled until there was nobody but me at that table. It was a gasp for me because I never felt any inner core strength, nor power, but just ran into the fight with heart and claws and with no idea of the outcome. I bluffed, basically.

I wonder how many times that long-living woman did just that right out on the street of her life, within her home, along her neighbourhood. These days we fight with ourselves. In her day there was no such thinking. The tough survived, the weak did not, although I bet she helped a few. Back then, thinking was for the thinkers and not for we ordinary folks. We just pulled on our stockings and got on with it, with all of the ‘its’ day after day after day. Not a bad way to live. Although I do bow to the thinkers, they have, unintentionally, opened up a can of worms because many of us stay with the worms and forget to live, to dance, to fight for injustice, to laugh at disaster because we know what we can do in the face of it. Like her, like that old lady who changed my day and not just this one.

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Island Blog – To be a Mother and Saying Farewell

An eclectic role for sure, if such is possible and if say it is then it is. Although I’m about to lose a lot in the translation of such a word, let me play. When a woman becomes a mother she is about as lost as a goldfish in the ocean, barely able to breathe, exhausted and completely lost. She finds no others of her species, everyone else being salt-friendly and busy. However, with this new little one, she knows that it is she who must be eclectically “IT’ for……for….where did he go? Oh, there he is over there, chuffing away to a sea snail who is not all that interested, and if he was it would take him at least three days to turn around for a look. She hasn’t got three days to spare. She is on demand every moment of every day plus seconds of panic, of despair, of constant checking. She is wild now, thinking wide, way beyond her understanding of normal thinks, and nobody, not even dad, gets anywhere near even if he or they might have an awfully good suggestion. She is all Bugger Off and tail swipes. She is deadly. She is Mother.

When she considered this Mother thingy, she might be forgiven for thinking Disney. However, Disney was obviously never a mother. The sweet glory of an instant co-ordination between mother and child is, I am sorry to tell you, a load of tripe. This baby is everywhere but where he should be. This baby shrieks loud enough to call in the Whales and upset the Navy in their sonar missions. What is this? Naval Officer Jenkins might ask, his eyebrows lost in his fringe, quizzical and holding out the ear plug thing for his upline to hear. The whales, happily traversing 35 continents via the swirl and twist of oceans, stop and founder. Let me tell you, a founder among traversing whales can cause a tsunami 10,000 miles away, upsetting fisher boats and slopping Lady Merriweather’s gin all over the Captain of a luxury cruise ship, thus informing him that she is a secret drunk and that his trousers are in an embarrassing state. The butterfly effect, sort of.

This day my firstborn, taller than me by about half a mile, left again for his next shift as ship’s Captain and no matter his age and height, I am that goldfish mama again. When he is here, everything is wild again, everything is fun, anything is possible. His attitude to life is upbeat and can-do. I wonder who taught him that. Does he remember upsetting the Navy, the fishing boats and the whales with his baby screams, or me with his curiosity? I doubt it. But I remember. And now, when he is gone I go back there, back into that ocean, back to where it all began. Tomorrow another son departs and I swirl inside the loss of them even as I know I gain more just because I am their mother; because I am the only one they will ever have; because I have the memories of this shared time and those memories are enough, have to be enough.

It isn’t that I want to be ‘IT’ anymore. I don’t, but don’ting doesn’t stop the feelings, doesn’t weaken the bond. I never knew it would be like this. I doubt any mother does. But here it is and for us all. Confounded still, up and down with the whole gamut of role changing at every level all day and well into the darkling nights, still learning, still thinking eclectically, I am at the heart, a mother and one who will never not be. Not never. And, for all the sadness at saying farewell, it is enough. It has to be.

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Island Blog – Sid, Mary and Just One Tree

I am reading my favourite sort of book, a novel about human life with the natural world as a backdrop. I don’t mean the story of Sid and Mary who have a big garden and chickens, although they could indeed be the humans, providing one of them has a spiritual connection with nature in ways yet to be learned, understood and accepted. This story spans great swathes of time, from 1700 to 2000 and they connect through nature. The trees he (maybe Sid) planted as a young man, he now visits as an ancient wood, alive with stories, bursting into memories each time the trees throw out leaves of laughter for the sun to nourish. Many many suns, many springs, autumns and winters; many land battles never won by the land. Trees felled for no good reason, for Sid and Mary, perhaps, for their big garden, for their chicken run. Inside such a story, I am Alice. I move effortlessly from 1700 to 2000 along with those who make the storyline into a long rope, a connector. The writer makes it easy for me and I get it, so clever a scribe is she. To many this story would invoke a scoff. I don’t do fantasy, he or she might say and it is beyond my ken and my level of patience to attempt an explanation, the one that is so clear to me. It is no fantasy, merely an indication of our undoing. We have forgotten how to listen to the trees, lost the ears for stone stories, turned away from the rhythm of the sea, the cries of the winds, the percussive tap of the rains. But, for those who still want to believe that nature is not ‘out there’ but deep inside every soul, let me tell you this connection is only parked in some dark tunnel, and not lost at all. Nobody knows quite how to reconnect but all anyone has to do is to refuse the worldly chortlemongers and to whisper, I believe. Show me, talk to me, let me know you again.

I am no guru, no wind whisperer, nothing ‘weird’ at all, but simply a child of spirit who cannot and will not accept that nature is just there for us to manipulate and manage, to control and defy, to desecrate and deny. Nature is not about big gardens, nor chicken runs. Nature is a magnificent mother and we all know to our cost that to defy a mother is always dangerous in the long run. It thinks me. Although we humanoids are required to live in our worldly world, we can lose ourselves in the plastic. We can be too busy to study the extraordinariness of a beech tree growing out of a rock. I watched one this afternoon and for some time. I saw how the tiny beech shoot must have pushed into the light and been momentarily blinded, puzzled too, as it came out sideways. The sky should be above me, the ground beneath. That’s what I know, and yet I am slid out like a sardine from a tin and nothing makes sense. Hmmm. Ah, well, I know this too; my branches, once I manage to grow some, will need the light and so somehow I need to turn a corner, employing full belly strength in order to lift upwards. Might take some time, like years, but I am here now and there is no stopping me, even if I don’t make it. (Good attitude, beech).

When I study the belly of this twisted but upright fighter for light, I see the girth. It’s fat and strong but stopped short, telling me that beech baby made a decision once the turn upwards showed more struggle ahead. There are big pines on the bluff above her, already snatching light, ditto another massive beech; Mum, perhaps. So she wisely gave up on trunk height in favour of a three way split, for maximum photosynthesis and at the earliest possible moment. I stepped back a pace or two and smiled and bowed in respect. Survivor! I said out loud because you can say pretty much anything out loud around here and only the trees, stones and birds will hear you. I went on….thank you for calling out to me today. I walk past you every single day, in all weathers and for decades and only now have I heard your voice. Respect.

My two big strong sons leave in a couple of days. I will miss them both and for a long time. I will miss their strength, the way I feel small and safe inside their arms, the way they love me, the way they laugh at my daftness, my fears, my doubts and the way they show me I am stronger than I ever believed and someone they look up to. Well, no not that any more. Either I am shrinking which is probably true, or they grow taller as they fight their intelligent way through the shrieking, demanding, worldly world. But you know what I mean with the looking up to thingy.

We are here for such a short time and for the time we are here, we have a duty to not just our families but to our world, all of it. We can rant and do nothing, fret and wring our hands about the state of it, saying it’s too much. What can I do when there is so much corruption and destruction? I cannot save the rain forests, nor the whales, nor the starving, nor the abuse. And this is true. One person cannot. However one person can speak to someone homeless on the street. One person can recycle, stop buying plastic, pick up rubbish. And, as my African son says, one person can plant one tree.

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Island Blog – First Day and Ready

First day of a new year. It comes all by itself and with colours and hopes and something a bit desperate. Could, can this new year bring us something better than the last one? I get it but I am not a believer in the dissing of the past because the past makes us stronger, more resilient and, hopefully more open, more vulnerable and less defensive. In my long and observant life I have learned that fighting anything is not always a show of strength beyond the moment. Things happen to us and sometimes awful things. Defence is key inside the moments but wait a minute. Once we have defended, what then? Will we treasure the grudge like a Precious? When just one someone who has had the very worst of all experiences refuses to do that, and I hear about it, I am on my knees in awe and respect. This is how I want to live out my life, catching the light from their refusal to grudge. Not that I have a clue about their pain, their loss. No experience, no clue. However, their spirit leads me even if I have no idea who they are, have no details, no context. It doesn’t matter. This is how we learn from each other, from the whole team, all those others out there who live their lives as best they can. If, that is, we are outside of ourselves and looking.

The trees are loud this day and so is the tidal rip. Both are roaring, no, not both because I forgot the 3. 3 is the wind, that capricious jester just passing through much like my granddaughters this afternoon who managed to change the whole dynamics of the house layout with their hobby horses. Last night the jester laughed all night, whicking things, noising branches, louding the peace of my home and had me shaking my head in almost time, although it is a real artist who can know the percussive phrasing of a gusting wind. As I walked inside the hug of the woods, I heard the groans and the squeaks, the clicks and the moans. I heard the song in the pine needles, so high above me as to flip my eyeballs and the rest of me backwards as I used to be able to do about 100 years ago, right down the ground.

I notice puddles, a passing horse, a big foot print. I watch cones fall, hear them hit the wood floor, wonder what impact that has. Does that tiny sound echo through the ground? Do these massive 100 year old trees hear and does it begin a conversation? I see the stand water ripple up like it has its day, only this day and only when the jester barrels through. Where is he going, I ask? They shrug, the stand water, the puddles, the trees. We don’t know, they tell me. But it is so much fun when he comes.

May we live this way. Open, ready even if we have no frickin clue what we are ready for.