Month: February 2025

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Island Blog – Quick Light, Quick Dark

When I write a blog about stuff and things and thoughts and whatevers, I am cautious. Oh, yes, I do boundary swipe, shift wordings, alter the cations of things, I am guilty of all of those so called crimes. However, as the languages around us change, challenge, and then become a part of of what we say out there on the street, in the grocery shop, between ourselves, I adapt. Sentences morph into new creatures, verbs become nouns, adverbs and adjectives (still well over employed) sprite their unspelling into sentences, or comments. T’is the way of now, and we had better get the hang of the new hang, or we just might end up without a single visitor. Just saying.

That aforeness is nothing to do with my theme. However, it might be. This is about a friend. My age, my friend from the age of 7 or thereabouts. Reluctant boots tapping up the metal steps and onto the school bus together, pulling back as the driver moved off too quick, steadying, moving to the back, or near as dammit, every single day. Fixing school packs, settling into gammy seats, talking, looking out, facing the day ahead, and then the coming home. We all had trouble in our hearts. She was a good student. I wasn’t. But we still stuck together. I met disapproval everywhere. She never did, but I knew and still know that she was as wild as I, but could control her wild, her language, her longing for freedom. I never asked her about that. We grew apart, over choices, over timelines, over hundreds of miles, but the connection doesn’t bother with any of that shit.

And now she has gone dark. I’m watching her. You went into the quick dark my darling. There is quick light awaiting you. If that is your choice.

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Island Blog – Someone or No-One?

This is something I performed once. It begs a performance. There is rhythm, rap, and begs a reading out loud.

Wherever you grow, bloom strong and petal wide, don’t hide but spread your colour, blue is it, or red, or butter yellow, white? Be right with it, your colour, it is yours alone. Hold your own, make it known, alone, not lonely. Only you know your ground. It may be rocky, maybe rich and soft, a mountainside, a beach path, garden, grey street, river bank. Give thanks for wherever you find yourself. Hold out your petals, reach and reach up to the light, breathe right. Your breath is life, in joy or strife, breathe on. In shade or sun, you are the one.

Make a difference. Have fun and look around you. Who grows beside, or over there? Another soul with hopeful roots just pushing through in fear, perhaps, delicate heart, easily broken by careless feet or the lash of punishing rain-words, to die in silence. Cry out in anger, but stand your ground. For those who stand will remember the ones who fall. All of them.

And share your light, your bright, your coloured heart, still beating like a drum on the battlefield, and there, don’t yield, but glow with life and, tender-fingered, lift a drooping head. Warm a faltering body. Say ‘I am here, and I will not leave you’. Share your mystery, your very soul. Hide nothing, let nothing cold you, hold you fixed in ice or fear, as if the end is near.

Notice every season, but not too much. Touch another, lift, don’t drift, for Time moves on, fleeing like a thief in the assault of misbelief, no crime committed in the touch. Some of us long for touch, not much to ask, small task, withdrawn through fear and that worldly slime, the snake of self-doubt, out with you, damn spot, you are not the true voice, my choice, I touch.

Hold each blooming moment, roots in the earth, head in the sky. Let pain go by, toss it to the wind, the changeling wind with stories on her back. And, remember this. Never miss the chance to lead another to the dance. Show your light. Be curious, like Alice, and leave your smile among the trees for the bees to honey up and sweeten. Reflect the sun, the rain, the moon. And do it soon, because you know that a winter of the soul will come, and, for some, it is already here. No matter your ground, make it better for your being there, nourishing, flourishing, sharing, caring, thankfully placed just where you need to be to learn something. Let laughter fill your throat and let it fly out like birds or butterflies to smile a flagging soul up and out of sadness, and to spin their own bitter into glitter. A million rainbows lie within you. Let them show, because you know, no matter the chatter, that you have the power to choose.

Am I someone, or no-one?

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Island Blog – So Who Am I?

Answering for myself, and honestly, I am reckless, spontaneous, loving, able to say sorry, aware, intuitive. I make endless mistakes, move too quick into situations, pull back too quick as well. I am naughty, looking always and everywhere for the chance of harmless mischief, wherein, I have noticed, only I ever get sent to the corner. How is it, I ask myself, that this still defines me at almost 72? I have no answer for that one. I think that, finally, I have come to terms with what seems to run like blood through my veins. I just can’t not be who I am.

Controlled, or so it seems, by these qualities, and as a youngster, I found myself often having to apologise for my, well, self, because in those days I heard, until it almost took me out, the rules by which it was acceptable to present oneself, and they just did not fit. Music began, my feet tapped into jig; someone said something and I was unable not to respond. I moved away from encounters, situations, circumstances feeling like a blue alien all the way up to when the rulebook annulled me. I remember that time, the compliance strangling me like a corset, and it was the same as a young wife. Oh, a lot of me was ‘acceptable’, until it wasn’t and the ‘wasn’t’ came from someone else. It was like living in a constant storm. Funny, is it not, that our past continues to trigger things in our present? However, and notwithstanding all that learning and behaving and feeling corseted on the way to strangulation, I now believe I have held on to me.

The wind is high tonight, red in the weather app, but that app isn’t promising 70mph gusts, as of last weekend, scary as hell. These gusts are coming in from the other direction, and at the most, 40mph. Piddling, really, in a land and history of a great deal of gusting. It thinks me. Sideswipes come at all of us throughout our lives, gusts which could, if we let them, take us down. I don’t like being down. So, what do we do to prepare for that which might come, and often does? Now that is a good question, a very good one. My belief is that we all have the power to stand, as a self, against any constrictive or blasting force outside of who we know we are. We cannot control the weather without, but we most definitely can control the weather within. No matter the corsetry constraints of youth and beyond, we know who we are. The hard part is stepping out in those boots. It’s worth it, I promise you, no matter the battle.