Month: October 2024

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Island Blog – Denim Skin, and Off I Go

It’s weird, this feeling, as I literally plonk through the day, you know that plonk thing……..a one fingered kid before a keyboard, no clue of how to play. I had packed, unpacked, packed, unpacked, remembered, forgotten, remembered again, added, removed, placed, argued with space, all of it. My case rests now. I rest my case. My frocks are few, and tatty (never clocked that till folding them for packing) two pairs of shorts, a few tees (they were tee-shirts in my day) various other things like a cardy, the obvious underpinnings, not that they would dare risk underpinning me, and an old dress. Ah, my favourite. She is frail, long, beautiful and always commented on. I can see the sun damage on her denim skin, the loosening of seams, the hole which reminds me of that time, I leapt a fence in the dark, in a moment of wild, not wanting to be left behind, which I wasn’t. I patched that tear, tare, and love the story in this dress. I remember her as she remembers me, showing up again and again, and, the sassy minx, always inviting recognition.

The plonk thing. Back to that. I have to be prepared for this big travel, the flight thing, the squash of people all scared and stressed and fussing and taking up all the room. We are reduced to a serious invasion of personal space and for over 8 hours, in the dark, breathing recycled air. I get the fear. So, I was packed and unpacked etcetera, and then there was breakfast, lunch and a wood delivery and gifts from two friends, well-wishing, and then what? The mist out there is beautiful. I focus on the mist, on the tearlet glisten on nasturtium leaves, on the barely-there maple, on everything in the garden that is standing still. I look at those rigid stalks, actually, we had a chat as I went out barefoot just now, and I ask them how they feel after Wind Ashley or Whoever, when they were blown right over, wheeched from their roots, blinded, stripped and, basically, denied any chance of a ticket to the Species Survival Ball. They chuckled. No, seriously, they did! I heard it through my bare feet on the sniggering grass. It’s safe down there. They, the Long Tall Sallys know that this is how it is, that it may be again, may not, but, trust them, they will work a way, and will not just survive, but will flower magnificent next time Father Sun bothers his butt out of bed.

I am wistful about leaving here, the mist twisty and soft, the rain, a skin treatment. I leave my best friends, moments I will miss, in the street, in homes, in the village, on the island. I will not miss, wheelie bins flying like missiles, ferries cancelled, roads skid risks, the sharp coldsnatch of everything you touch outside of heating. I won’t miss the materialism of Christmas, the sales that elevate at this time of year, a begging, a siren, You Need This. I will miss the warm loving go of people here, the ready to help, the offering, the turning up. This is my place, my home, and I know it. When I set off, tomorrow, for the drive away,the beginning, I will feel elated, excited, and scared. I will check in, find my airport way, find my seat, say hallo, and then, if I could see it, which I won’t this time, over three hours of desert, more, of Africa coming in to say hallo, eventually. And I remember the sounds, the trill, the shrill the thrill of a sudden encounter with a very big wild creature who wasn’t backing down. I remember.

I won’t see them this visit. Different location. Different fun. Off I go.

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Island Blog – Misty, Clarity, Beyond the Veil

Dark morning – yes, of course, with this nonsensical time change thing. I watched the clock dilemmas, worked them out, poor confused things, as light annihilated the dark, blinding it. There’s a misty thing going on across the sea-loch, a sort of translucent mesh hiding the pines, the backsides of hills, a strip, moving, lifting, expanding, thinning. A bit like a bridal veil. I never had one of those, but they are pretty. You can see eyes, a vague facial shape, the red of a smile, if there is one, and there usually is.

The mist has retained her veil control, all day. I walked in it, not through it, noticed how, what was clear before, is more of a shimmy, a sort-of, a possible. The autumn colours, fallen or yet branch-held, were bright, as the artist in me might have made them so, with a good gloss medium over oils. Nature does it without any of that tiddleypom.

This evening, the sky is pinkling strips, reaching down, very soft pink. Gone now, the mist, the veil. Now clarity. It thinks me.

From the bridal veil to clarity. Take this lightly. I am no misery guts about relationships, but what I have learned over long time, is that if we look for another to fill the big darkness within, we will always be disappointed. It is up to each one of us to find that hole-filler within our own forgiveness of the past, of self, of whatever damaged us. That clarity will show us more than the backside of anything or anyone, and we will stand strong as one who can see beyond the veil, as the person we really are.

We can play misty a whole lifetime, or we can be brave and stand up and say, No More. I have no frickin idea who I am, but I do know who I am not. A good beginning, I would suggest.

I love the mist, to walk through it, the touch of its fingertips on my skin, the gathering of it on leaf fall. I also love clarity. I can do both. Beyond that contusion, I can heal.

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Island Blog – Itchy Knickers, Mary, There is Life

I send my mind out into the world, and pull it back quickquick. The thinks, the sheer expanse before my mindal eyes, the troubles I can’t even spell, rise into a swirling fog. Maybe a good thing. I know about the corruption in governments and want to smack all of the leaders. Did your mummy not teach you anything? In the pull back, I focus on the immediate, on where I am, on who I am, on this very minute. Oh, that’s easy. Let me think. Ah, instead of sinking into my current bog, let me find another someone who might love to hear what I I think of them. Avoid superlatives, an early lesson from my English teacher. It hesitates me. Superlatives are basically lazy speke. Amazing. Wonderful. Excellent. The Best. And so many more. They’re like uncontrolled dribble to one who considers how much spit goes into intelligent consideration. A little at a time, that’s how. And those superlatives can apply to a packet of crisps. Just saying. Hallo, I begin, You are just short of amazing. Let me find the word (that is just short of amazing). Doesn’t work.

I think that navigating a world where language and street rules change so fast has never been easy for me. I’m the girl, now woman, in the wrong kit. I remember arriving to a poetry challenge at school, all elecuted up, strong voiced and in itchy knickers (uniform), wondering, as I did, how the hell all those other ‘gels’ managed to look part of the landscape. I saw many smirks and although it irked me, I longed for whatever bonding they had with a) their itchy knickers and b) their ability to be an easy dot in the pattern. I could see the connection. And then, there was me, all tumbelshift and awkward. Or that is how I felt. The fact that I was chosen for the poetry rendition, that I came away with the silver poetry cup, meant zip, at the time.

In this time, the autumn of my life, I kind of get it, mainly because if I don’t get it now, what hope do I have of ever understanding the point of me? A rhetorical question. Looking back to that super lost, itchy-knickered girl, I smile. I have found my people, here, on the island, for sure, and that has settled me, given me place and point, to a degree. Perhaps, as my lovely wise sister-in-law told me, it isn’t wrong to feel out of kilter, as she may have done. Rest in peace Mary.

Sometimes I scrabble for purchase, when I see others step out in confidence and the furies rise in judgement against me. Their eyes are wild and bright, their confidence evident and overwhelming, but I’m a daughter of the moon and the tide, I (whine) tell them. I continue, itchy knickers and all, I feel everything, sense so much, notice every tiny shift in this breaking world. I don’t know how to explain anything, have no shape nor map to guide me, but I feel it, see it, hear it, all of it.

I remember Mary saying to me, once, way back when she was vibrantly alive and wise as Merlin, that I would have been in danger when any girl or woman who sensed moon change, tidal shifts, changes in nature around them, people becoming irritable, a slip slide into anger, a rise in the river, was doomed if she spoke out, or was noticed noticing. I am thankful that, nowadays, writers write about those who can see the beyond, and anyone can btw. We just have too much noise and too little belief in our skills.

On the cusp of a flight to Africa, I watch the skies, the moontide, the chat in the clouds, the copper comment, the wild shapes. I see the raindrops held on branches, like showing off as the sinksun sequins and sparkles. I see the straggle of shrubs, climbers browning, the flood in my garage. I feel the rainwater, the hill rain under my bare feet, the chill of concrete. I feed the woodburner. There is life and I feel every moment.

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Island Blog – Ordinary Life

There’s still a lot of waggle and shiver going on here. Shrubs slewed sideways, drunk on the gale, tree limbs felled by it. It wonders me, that felling thing. Obviously the fallen were already showing an inner weakness, unseen by me, or anyone else, for that matter, but known by the tree. The limbs fall higgle piggle, downing others who, or is it whom, were probably astonished at the invasion of their space, and who(m) were not ready to fall off their perches quite then. There are always innocent victims. The shrubs, well, they had to go. When you are already stemmed up to three feets, you don’t lookd good at all, collapsed like a load of young vicarious hopefuls at a hen night, blooms bashed, squashed. I am so glad I never had a hen night. The thought of one of those sads me. Just to think that any about-to-be ‘bride’ is already missing her freedom makes no sense to me at all.

I went today for lunch with a wonderful friend. It is the last week of this fabulous cafe being open for the so-called summer. I love my friends, our meets and chats and laughs. From our ordinary lives, we lift into an hour or two of random, when anything can happen and everything can be said. And then, we part, and return to our own ordinary lives but with our thoughts changed, shifted, eased, recognised. A powerful time. We all have troubles, but in the talking of them, in the sharing, even in the not sharing, just that connectivity is dynamic and changing. I come home along a road (track) that dips and dives, the sides deep enough to sink a mini, watching a waspish sun-god pushing (I can see it) against cloud bullies, his light diamonds sparkling on the surface of an incoming tide, all salt and salmon hope. And I am home.

I walk beneath shiver trees, gold and red, or what’s left of all that spectacular. We never enjoy the autumn colours as others do in places where the gales have no room to flex their full span, nor expand their blow. Our leaves are stripped quickquick here. It thinks me a bit. We have trees here. At least we saw a bit of autumn colour. I have been to islands where no trees can grow, and not far from here. And I am thankful for the glimpse of such beauty. The sky is a wild grey bonkers, clouds shifting sideways, wind pitching like a bowler. Kids barrel noisy home from school. Folk walk by. Ordinary life.

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Island Blog – Bejabers, Cludgie, Coorie Doon

It’s wild here. The tidal rise took fishing boats level, no, above the pier last night, challenging their keels, and the road flooded, fishermen, coastguards, police and firemen out all hours to save their boats, their means of income, their passion. Parking would have been interesting. My mini would have been challenged, her sump drunk on seawater. But, for all the danger warnings and over dramatisation of this whole who-haa in the News, we islanders get on with it. We have met this before, and oftentimes. I read the panic in the media and I snort. After all, we have been aware of a climate change for a long time, and pretending it won’t affect us is mindless stupidity. I am very thankful for all that I have already experienced on this westerly outscape and for decades, for it has brained me up, big time. We know, here, when it is safe to go out, when we might drive to the ‘toon’ for food supplies, how prepared we must be for (dire and dangerous)weather shifts, for autumn and winter moons, for gales and haphazards and everything in between. I know folk here roll their eyes at the loss of Common Sense, but it isn’t common and that’s not the people’s fault. It’s the denial, the pretence, the invitation to get lost in an instant fix, as if fairyland actually exists, as if by denying change we can stop change.

Today was wildish. I went out to clear up the fallen. Thank you, I said to those big-ass yellow things I never could name, but which entertained a load of bees, and for weeks, to the forsythia tree, felled because it grew too tall, to the maple, now almost stripped of leaves. Thankyou, because you stood tall for as long as you could, until the punch of power decked you. I cleared a coup of oak, a three-fingered limb, from the track. Touching it, hauling it out of the way for others, I felt the latent thrum of life and death. I’m cool with life/death. I’ve seen life and death, and there are different emotions attatched to each one, I am so glad I have done so. A lamb, an ewe, a calf, a horse, a parent, a husband. I started small there, you can tell.

So, when the bejabers are sucked out of me, and others at times, maybe gales, heavy rain, death, loss, frightened responses to scans, and other shit, it thinks me of people. On the island, we are many and strong, and from all sorts of places. Voices, accents, lifestyles come together before a whoopass island fire, warming, welcoming, a coorie doon.

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Island Blog – Whipskittle

So there I am, all whipskittled in the ferment of some dodgy brew, pushing on, not seeing anything much to left or right, just the forward thingy into mist and fog and sludge. I like the forward thing, just saying. Backwards, oh, seen that, see that, way too much. It seems it leads to an old and disappointed state, and I will not go there. I know, it is clear, to me, anyway, that, at 71, oh please let’s not go with the nonsense of the world….. we are old and that is that, no matter what social media or the current culture slams into our faces, making us feel like we should what…….dress as 50 year olds? Pretend we aren’t who we are? No. Thank. You.

Moving on (hopefully). Today I took my whipskittle to a wiser one. We talked, easy, for over an hour, in an island place, the waves smashing the rocks, the birds wheeling, the garden bobbing and cowing against another rising gale, the sun slipping out for a quick reassurance, cloud consumed in seconds. You had to be looking, and there’s a thing. I have to look, all of the time. Could be the face of the kindly driver who allowed for me to reverse fecking scary feet arse up to the sky for quite a few coils. He smiled and waved and I couldn’t help my wave of thankfulness, a lot for his kindness, but more that I hadn’t fallen off the cliff, which I really could have done, all the way down to the crash of the Wild Atlantic and the basking sharks, sadly missing this year. I love this place, the risk of the it, the dynamics, the wild and the crazy. T’is in my blood.

She talked with me, the wiser one. For me, she is. And I think that when I am whipskittled, I would always seek out a wiser one. She asked me, who are you? I confounded myself at that. And we talked on. I honestly think that I can get stuck in who I was. But, widowed and all the rest, I am not the same. Who am I? I don’t think I have ever been brave enough to ask that question. What I do know is that I am fecking tired of whipskittle, much as I love the word.

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Island Blog – My Thinks Think Me

Today I walked, a little, into Tapselteerie, treading on memories. It wasn’t easy, body feeling clumpy and awkward, as if I was just learning this walking thing. I haven’t walked for many days, holding in, holding myself safe behind the stone walls, looking out but not going there. My maple tree is stunning, rain heavy, sun-kissed as this Autumn upsy downsy plays out hour by hour. A smur rolls in from the land, covering the hills, the sheep in the field, blanking out the landscape, but I walk out anyway. Even my boots feel odd on my feet, but I go. A robin sings its autumn song, so different from the spring Come-to-me melody, and I feel a settle in my gut. My garden is a spraggle of stalks that once exploded with wild rose, willow, forsythia, apple blossoms and more. Rest, my friends, I whisper as I climb the hill to my compost bin. I want to do the same. Leggy, bare, shifting in the wind, adapting to the incoming cold, accepting. What better way to live, knowing that they have flowered their very best, and now will sleep in the knowing of it. Humans, or at least I, don’t find that so easy to do.

I hear other life ongoing as I almost stumble over ground I know so very well. Seabirds, oystercatchers, the slidecall of curlews, the voices of many birds feasting on nuts and berries, high up in the trees, and I stop to look up. I can only catch the flit of them, but I know they are there as I am down here, and that is enough. Back home (very short walk), I try to congratulate myself for going out at all but it doesn’t come easy, brilliant as I am at harshly judging myself. I don’t think I am alone in this. I purposefully notice the brave roses, still thrusting out buds, still determined to flower. I watch a wee bumble bee burrowing into a bloom. Bumbles, the first and the last bee, always, even in the iceslice of spring and the crumple of summer, bumbles bumble on. Many are solitary, no friends to warm them, so I get it.

Listening, as I do, a lot, to an audio book today, something caught my attention. It was on the theme of choosing who you want around you, your five. They say you can count on one hand who are the ones you want around you, whom you trust, who would be there for you et lala. This number may not include immediate family, and that always tripped me up, heretofore. But today, in the aftermath of a challenge, I got it, I could feel it and it felt ok, albeit awkward. It also reassurred me. So, I can choose who I want as my close five, those whom I respect, understand, around whom I feel completely free to be myself? I could feel the tumbledown stairs thing as Appearances, Learned Patterns, Family Expectations, all smudged my sudden clarity, like a smur, a blocking, a confusion, a familiar landscape invisiblising. I could just see all those I have felt I had to fit in with, taking on a million different shapes, denying my own voice, and for so very long.

I’ll think on this, although, if I am honest, my thinks think me more than I do them.

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Island Blog – A Fallow Dear

All creatives have times when they just cannot be arsed to create. These times are extremely uncomfortable to say the least, or I find it so. All those words, in my case, or all those lonely tubes of paint and mediums, brushes upright and dry as my father’s wit, or that piece of craft work, so compelling, so exciting and for so long, now barely touched or looked at. It is as if something inside has died, and sometimes, that is exactly what has occurred. Something has, indeed, died, or someone, and that someone took all the colours and the buzz with them when they did. It could be bad news, or a health scare or even the builders in making noise and causing a long disruption and a load of mess. It could also be nothing much more than boredom, the realisation that life has turned grey and heavy and dull, and the result will be a new birthing, I know this, new ideas, new hope, new horizons.

I know, of course, that everything changes, this too shall pass, and all other platitudinal infuriations, but that doesn’t help in the discomfort of apathy and disconnection and sludge. Even a body feels too big for its boots, heavy and ungainly, and a mind slows to snail pace. It can be a dangerous time of self-examination, of criticism, doubts and other unhelpful bollix, but even striving to not-think requires just too much effort. Just rest, they say, take time out, be kind to yourself. My eyes roll. I don’t want to do any of those things. I want to wake exuberant and planning mischief, longing to set-to with whatever project I was working merrily on, not a few weeks ago. However, having gone through this fallow slump a gazillion times before in my long life, I know it will, eventually, pass. I also know that, although my conscious mind is cold porridge, my unconscious mind is still ticking away, garnering ideas, planning a resurgence, focussed and functional. I am just tired is all, bored is all, fed up and fed down. This period of drag has a purpose and, oh yes, I will understand just what that purpose is once the lights come on again, when all will be illuminated, revealed and understood. Or so I tell myself.

So what to do in the meantime, whilst I wait, miserably, to relocate my natural energy? In order to rest I need to feel good about myself, this self who is currently a pain in the backside. I wash the bathroom floor. Oh well done, what an achievement, not. I make soup that tastes like pond sludge, wash some clothes, even hand wash a jersey for goodness sake. Is there no end to my resilience and fortitude and determination? What a star I am! But, in fallow times, I don’t actually feel those words, no matter how much I speak them out, hear them spoken by another, and if I don’t ‘feel’ them they mean nothing. I am still failing. It thinks me.

We all have fallow times, all of us and it is important to recognise, acknowledge and allow such times, because to enter the swamp of inner judgement is always destructive. Besides, those judgements roll off the tongues of past critics, often from childhood or early youth. I can hear them now. J has too vivid an imagination, is moody, unpredictable, irresponsible, wears too much eye-liner, is a terrible show-off and so on. Although these judgements don’t affect me now, the negative theme stands strong, its accusing forefinger wagging right under my nose. If you hadn’t done that, or chosen this, or gone there, or allowed that to happen, you wouldn’t feel like this. It is your punishment for past sins, in fact not so very far in the past. I silence those voices as soon as they speak. They are not helpful. This is just a fallow time is all, not a punishment, not forever, not here to bring me down and keep me there. In fact, it is a dear thing, a helpmeet, because my body and mind are both damn tired and bored and fed up and grey. Next time, when I feel it coming, this shutdown beyond my control, I will take a long holiday in the sunshine.

Africa sounds like a plan.

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Island Blog – Cacoethes Scribendi

I believe many of us have this condition. It’s not like cancer or a chronic disease and doesn’t hurt the body much, but mostly, the brain, and we all have one of those. However, the urge to write can play havoc with every other part of a living soul, itchy fingers, running feet, sweats, chills and a strong desire to escape from a perfectly ordinary confabulatory experience because you just have to get this down; what she said, what his body language told you, how the atmosphere shifted from a warm fuzzy into an arctic abandonment. And, if you don’t get gone, or cannot, or if the whole being gone thing would turn everyone else there into statues, you will lose capture. I’ve been in that oh damnit to hell place many times before, but even if I followed my own advice and had a wee notebook concealed somewhere about my person, I doubt I would have pulled it out, because the invasion of an interrupta femina (allow me, latin scholars) pulling out her quill and slate would, I am sure, have had the same upsetting effect. This situation is rather constipating.

So, to be able to remember and to retain the lift and twist, the moments before and just after the ‘noticing’ is a giant skill. Not only do I want to remember the words, the way they swirled and ebbed, lapsed and spiked, but I also want to remember how the whole whatsit made me feel, and that is the part which slides away like mist, because there will have been a resolution, or a stop, or a happening, and all of those are as round as a full stop. How fickle is my mind, how easily does it move on to the next moment and the next? I believe distractions are my problem. Someone says something unrelevant to the time I just left, with all its vitally connected feelings and emotions, and it is as if I have let them all go, some forever.

I find the same with memories. I can vividly recall the events, according, I know, to my perception. I know who said what and to whom. I know how I felt about it, the rachet resulting from that human encounter, the lift, the slump, the delight, the fear, but the depth of these feelings have become splat over time, levelled like sand on a beach, flat, a straight line. It isn’t the truth at all because, back then, I was purple with rage, set to take somebody’s head off, my feet ready to run, to save, to murder. Well, maybe not that, but nearly. So, to relocate the feelings around a memory, even if that memory is minutes back or decades, is, as I have said, a giant skill. I could make it up, guessing here and there, and sound quite plausible, although I have an issue with those two words conjoining. You are either plausible or you’re not. There is no ‘quite’ about it. I find the same with pretty amazing, or slightly curious, or vaguely interested. Such placid nonsense. You are, or you aren’t. I digress.

As I write a bigger piece of work, I am going back into memories. I scribble over many of them, my pen helping me to dilute my astute; to cave in, untrusting of self, reminding myself that my brain may well have added, subtracted, divided and multiplied; that others will not (I absolutely know that) have seen this and that through my eyes, my experience, and here’s a thing for anyone who has the guts to write their story. Nobody knows how you felt when you saw what you saw. Nobody knows how you felt, and for so long, about your life. The thought of speaking that out, of owning it, of sharing it, is very scary. However, and nonetheless (can’t resist lovely words) if you don’t tell, if you don’t risk judgement or rejection, if you don’t step out into the unknown, how will anyone ever know how life has been for you? And, in this stiff upper lip bollix that thrives in this country, a country, I might remind you, which once owned half the world and is now feeling rather skinny and alone, we need brave voices to speak out, better, to write.

If you want to write, never think nobody cares, or wants to know. We need you to speak out. Begin.