August 15, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 93 – Tapselteerie Dreams

Last night was an awfully big adventure. Sometimes nights are like that. Short on sleep and long on dreams; dreams that skitter away in the process of waking, so quick as to leave me with the odd snapshot, and a depth of emotion I can’t necessarily fix into a shape.

Whenever I dream there are a couple of venues that consistently provide the backdrop for the drama. One, oddly, is a little corner flat in Glasgow, where I only lived for a short while after Tapselteerie and before moving back to the island. Those dreams are often good ones and I walk through the park or sip coffee in a busy café and there are no obvious lurkings of menace in any shadows.

The other and main venue is Tapselteerie, I know it is, although the stones and layout of it are often wildly wrong. For example, we had a roof over our heads there and walls and floors, the usual household structure, but in dreams, they are often shaky if not completely absent. When I am inside one of these dreams I am always looking for my children, which, for those of you who have read Island Wife, will not be a surprise at all. The stones are grey and cold, the plaster walls missing, and there is often sky overhead instead of a white ceiling.

In these dreams I always have to fly to save them, my children. I always know that I can fly, but each time I must find the courage to do it again. I have sat myself down to think deeper on that search for courage, once the morning comes and strong black coffee brings me in to land. Is it courage to take on the ‘saving’, I ask myself, or is the courage to fly again? And, if I know, as I do, that I can fly, why would I need courage? After all, I don’t need to think twice about walking, running, skipping, now do I?

And I find no answer to that.

One dream took me into the empty ruins of the place, cold it was and abandoned, the grey stone bared, the layout changed beyond my recognition, and yet I knew where I was. I was alone. The crunch of fallen debris under my bare feet echoed around me and I could feel my heart beating fast, hear my quick breathing. Looking up, I could see my children way up high, higher than Tapselteerie high, flattened against the walls, no ground for their feet. Each one was hooked to the wall by their clothing, and they just hung there, making no sound. Much younger and smaller than they are now, they looked like friends of the Artful Dodger, all raggedy and torn and grubby. There were no stairs, no structure, however skeletal, there to allow me to climb. There was only one way up.

I had to fly.

The resistance to just taking off, knowing I could, surprises me every time. It seems, in my remembering, to take a lot of wasted time, dithering about in the ruins of a broken house, when I could be up there gathering children off hooks. But I always do it.

Then, suddenly, I take a deep breath and lift and the feeling it wonderful, the process effortless.

Once, I met Shrattle (Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake), or his lookalike half way up, but he was balanced on a spindly ledge and quite without wings, so no threat to any of us. I lifted each child, light as a feather, off their pegs and into the sky, waking with that glorious light-hearted feeling that always follows flight.

Last night is already leaving me, the memories of the dream, but I do remember one thing. This time it was in colour. Never before has Tapselteerie shown herself in colour, and yet she had bucket loads of it. She gave me walls and ceilings and laughter and spiders and bats in the cellar. If I came down all those stairs, during a sleepless night to make tea, I had to remember to make light, because in the dark I would have ploughed into the huge migration of slugs from somewhere (I never knew where) to the wine cellar. Sometimes a dozen deep and many feet long, the army flowed in silence to wherever they were going. It was a marvel to behold and much less of one to land in the middle of it in bare feet. People said salt will kill them. We said, why would we kill them? We lived with a good number of wild creatures and managed to do so, in the main, without disasters, although the floor in the back hall always needed a wash of a morning.

Dreams I know have symbolism. Mine are often a chorus of many influences. My past, my fears, the book I’m reading, the present circumstances, the last thing I watched on television. Add to that something on my mind, a new truth learned and understood, a forthcoming event and so on. But whatever the graphics, however bizarre and unbelievable the storyline, the emotions of it linger longest, so, to a small degree I can understand what my imagination played out for me and why.

Tapselteerie looked just fine in colour. It may be 20 plus years since I moved inside her walls, heard her song and moved to her rhythm, but she is alive and well and with her own place in my heart.

August 13, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 92 On Writing

As you may know, it is essential to read, especially if you are a writer. I read avidly, even during the day sometimes, which would have had me thoroughly tutted at by Granny-at-the-gate. Reading is for pleasure and wifeys don’t do pleasure inside of working hours which numbered, in my recollection about 22 per day. But now I have less demands on my time by little or big people, although sometimes, just before collecting my book and settling into a chair, I do check the clock and feel a frisson of minor guilt. It is so much easier to busy up with faffing jobs that lift the dirt or fill the larder with goodly smells, leaving the me part of me just a bit skinnier.

When I am writing, I become lost in the story, as I am now. Nights are broken as I weave my web, and ideas come at the most inconvenient of times, when the night is dark as a cave and I know I should fight on to achieve my 6 hours of rest, but once the next idea comes, the something that might happen to someone, the how of it and its consequences gets a hold of me, then Lady Sleep leaves the room. Over the years I have worked with various top tips.

Get up and start writing. No thanks, its too cold downstairs.

Keep a pad beside the bed and write down your idea. Yes I do that sometimes, if the story is just a foetus without a name, but if I am well on with the tale and the tellers of it, I can just lie there and follow the thread. Often, almost always, a character takes me in a direction I never mapped out for them, and that aspect of story-telling has always surprised and delighted me. It is, as if, once named on a page, each character accepts an initial structure, quite quietly it seems, until he or she decides I’ve got it all wrong and should listen to what they have to say about themselves.

Yesterday, a woman took an action I would never have expected of her, with a confidence that never came from me. That action changed the whole course of the story and I sat back in my chair, fingers hovering over keys that had just become a jumble of confused letters. A moment or so earlier, I knew just how to write a sentence. I knew where he was going, what she would say, what they would do as a result. Now I stare down at a keyboard that is singing me, not the other way around. I have become a player in the greater game.

Some writers don’t like this state of affairs. Some painters, musicians, song-writers too. But for me, it is the time when I can, to a degree, let go of control, and enjoy learning about each character by listening to their guidance. I move wholly and completely into their world. I work to understand their feelings, often not my own, about what has happened to them. I endeavour to find empathy with choices I would never make, have never made, although I do wonder if that bit is quite true. If I have considered, even for one minute a choice of action not in sync with how I see myself, might that mean that I could do that thing in different circumstances?

When I am writing a story, I move into it. I have to, or nobody would believe in it and the book would be closed and sent to a charity shop, un-read. Good drama draws us in, involves us and we can emerge from a book feeling angry, upset or filled with a happiness that never came from the outside. We can love a character, or hate them, wish them joys or want to punch them in the tonsils, but we can never find them dull, for if we do, we won’t bother to read on because we just don’t care.

Once I have found my characters, and, believe me, I do find them, or they find me, more truthfully. These characters came to me in an ordinary moment when I wasn’t looking for them at all. Two people sharing lunch in a café, and the dynamic between them. It captivated me and the story began to tell me how it wanted to be written. I made notes, kept looking at it as I walked, worked, cooked, cleaned and gradually the protagonists revealed themselves. How they dress, laugh, eat. How they love, how they live, and how they wrote their past.

Then, one day, I know it is time to begin and not long after I do, there is a knock at the door and in they all come.

August 9, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 91 – Turn Turn Turn

To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn turn turn

and a time to every purpose under heaven.

As I went to pick some mint from where it sprouts between the stones of our drystone wall, I noticed that the new shoots had slowed down. In the ebullient abundance of full Summer, there is already the touch of autumn. Nothing that knows its stuff is pushing out too much in the way of new because each plant senses the time of dying and concentrates on keeping its roots strong. We still see the many greens of life in our gardens, the hedgerows, the fields, but there is a change afoot in the natural world, one we can forget to notice. The wild St John’s Wort has turned overnight, it seems, from wide mouthed buttery yellow blooms to an abundance of autumn fruit. Yesterday, buzzy bees dipped into its pool of nectar and today it is silent. Hazelnuts bow the branches and every day ripen a bit more. Rowan berries turn from blood to crimson in a few short days and there is a chill in the morning air.

In homes where only seasonable vegetables and fruit are eaten, the turning of life is presented on a daily dinner plate. My dad had a big veg garden, fruit cloches and trees, so we always ate according to the seasons and never thought a thing about it, although endless parsnips caused childish bother now and again. Fruits were preserved, jammed and chutneyed and I remember the steaming jars and the delicious taste of a ploughman’s lunch, or a generous spread of deep purple damson jam on an after-school slice of toast. As the seasons turned, Mother Nature provided the right foods for us to live well in body and mind. Now it is hard for anyone to remember what country we live in, never mind what season it is, and that confusion can look like lack, (try saying that without your foot tapping), and such confusion can prevent us living in the Now.

Did my own mother watch the seasons turn, make her plans accordingly? I do know she had a big ottoman chest to store our Scottish vests and big woolly jumpers by the end of Spring (Ne’er shed a cloot till May is oot) and our shorts and tees in the winter months, but I don’t know how she felt about it all. Did her heart sink a little as she noticed the slowing of growth in the mint bed I wonder, or see the damsons turning dark and plump and picture herself stoning pan-loads, whilst we children ran and played and never asked a single question? I will have to, now!

When we first moved to the island, we lived according to the seasons. Tourists decided that for us, in the main, although I was hungry to learn the language of the seasons, become part of the turning, engage with it and learn to love it, but it was comparatively easy for me, out here in a wild place. It must be very much more difficult living in a concrete-lined city that never sleeps – one that can create whatever money can buy and loudly enough to drown out nature’s gentle music.

I remember living for a short time in Glasgow and finding it very hard to find any balance to my own natural rhythm. I did enjoy Glasgow, mainly because the people are so wonderfully raw and honest and good-hearted, but it wasn’t the way for me to live. Blackbirds sang in the dead of night for starters, because of all the street lights and that really threw my sleep pattern out the ‘windy’. On the island, I wake with the birds and sleep when they do so my nights became days and I was sad for the blackbird and concerned for his singing career. I also found fences very upsetting. Ownership and fear of loss or trespass seemed to rule everyone’s life, and make each one lonely as a result. I used to have to hang my washing out on the communal ‘green’ on Wednesdays, even if it rained on Wednesdays and nobody hung their washing out there anyway, in case it was pinched.

Oh dearie me.

I believe we are out of kilter with ourselves when we ignore the heart beat of Nature and try to drown out her voice with electronic hums which, even put together, which they never are, cannot make a melody, let alone a harmony. If we want to live long and prosper we don’t follow money. I’m not saying we shouldn’t work for it, use it to make a good life for ourselves, of course we should, but it isn’t everything. After the tsunami, money lost its value overnight. That’s how fickle it is. But our natural world, now there is something worth looking after. Even after disaster, the earth can grow again, but she won’t if we don’t tend her garden, and care for her creatures and her people.

In Glasgow I waited half an hour for a bus. I was nervous and felt very ‘on show’ as the cars and bikes rolled by. Bus comes, I hold out a fiver and ask for one way to town. No change, he said, the driver, without looking at me. I don’t have any, I said, wishing the ground would take me down. Then off you get, he said.

Suddenly someone called from the back. Here you go hin! A wee woman in a plastic rain hat tottered up and shoved a pound coin in the driver’s face, like a punch. We both knew I wouldn’t see her again to pay it back.

August 7, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 90 – Mindfulness

I just walked down to the shore to cool off the little dog after a surprise afternoon of hot sunshine. I just hope it will come again tomorrow for our Island Show, although it will make the cows, horses and sheep overly hot in their judging pens. It is quite a sight, all those scrubbed beasts, polished to a high shine, captured together on a small field just above the shoreline. People, even now, are scrubbing and polishing and not just the beasts, but also the hens and cockerels, the dogs, the artwork and the produce, although I’m not sure you can polish a cauliflower. Judges from far afield are making their journey towards us, and families are planning a day out, making picnics, sorting sun cream and midge repellent and wondering when it will be best to arrive.

As we pushed through the tall bracken, the hazel scrub and all those wild flowers and grasses, I watched butterflies pirouette among the blooms. Red Admiral, Painted Lady (my sort of girl), spotty ones, white ones, blue ones, I paused to notice their fragile beauty. Well, actually their beauty isn’t fragile, but they are, and yet still they breed and multiply year after year to lift our hearts if our eyes are only looking. I watched two in a game of chase and laughed out loud as they tumbled into the dense foliage. Ladybirds, red ones and black ones with white spots, whizzed from leaf to leaf and overhead an eagle slid across the wide blue sky.

Arriving on the rocks, we startled a pair of curlews, who lifted into the warm air calling out in alarm. I hear them calling all the day, but rarely get this close. Perhaps they were feeding on the mussels, if, indeed they eat mussels. I can hear families of greylags chattering to each other and the sound of cockerels, not being polished, but just competing with each other as men always do. The echo of their calls bounce back at me, for there is a great echo here and it distorts sound so that sometimes one thing sounds like quite another. Two cormorants fly lazily overhead on their way out to sea and a lone canoeist moves along the coastline towards me, his bright turquoise paddles as vibrant as new paint in the sunlight. Behind me, the whin bushes pop their seeds in the heat, sounding like a boy in the bushes with his cap gun. The rowan is turning, the witch’s tree, and the red is the colour of new blood, although soon it will darken as each fruit matures and then it will heavy the branches, waiting for the redwings and thrushes to fill the sky with a whirl of wings and chatter as they fly in to garner Nature’s Autumn larder. The smell on the sea breeze is of seaweed, salt and within its invisible flow I can hear voices of others, from far-off lands, and it matters not one bit that I don’t understand it. It is enough to know it is there, and that I can take it with me, all of it, as I wander back home again a different woman.

In my younger days, caught up in the to-do lists of the day, I might not have given all this magical beauty its due attention, for it is not that they are all there that fills us up, but that we notice them, mindfully. These days I find myself stopping often to breathe it all in, to notice and to watch and to marvel at Mother Nature in all her abundant glory.

Last year at the Island Show, I watched those who had entered their animals to be judged. I felt the flanks of a highland heifer, her coat brushed and shining and it was as soft as baby hair under my fingers. As they are led around the ring, I could see the flat backs, the good distance between the back legs, the handsome heads and proud gait of each beast and I felt admiration for their owners. We never entered anything for the show in all our years here, but I honour those who do take the trouble and care enough to make the effort. Each judge takes time to make their choice of winner, and I honour them too. I stood to watch the iron worker creating his filigree rolls, effortlessly, ran my fingers over the mosaic on the mirror frames, all the while marvelling at the care and concentration that had gone into each and everything on show.

Mindfulness. People who care.

In a busy life it is easy to stay indoors. Not just inside the house but inside our small lives and never to reach out, take a risk, make an effort to do something different.

I once visited an old house on another island, a small one, not rich looking at all, until I walked inside. There, in every corner, lay beauty. The cushions were not new, but recovered by hand in an patchwork shout of colour. The table, old and wonky, was laden with jars of home-made jam beneath brightly coloured waxed material never bought in any shop. Hangings and drapes were made of blankets, to keep out the winter chill, and decorated with fabric paint and adorned with shells and driftwood bits and pieces so that drawing them at night meant music. Wherever I looked I saw effort and mindfulness. The owners had little cash to buy their furnishings, but it obviously didn’t stop them. It was a welcome in itself and one I won’t ever forget.

We can all make beauty, if we have a mind to, regardless, either of our circumstances or the government currently in power and it has nothing to do with whether or not we are ‘good’ at this or at that, and everything to do with effort.

August 6, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 89 Wav-er-ing

You know the thing where people ask……well is it THIS or is it THAT?

Well I think that question is limiting, for, although there is, indeed, a THIS and a THAT, there are miles of wasteland in between just waiting to be claimed.

I don’t mean that when asked, Would you like tea or coffee, you can step into this wasteland. I know people who do it, mostly women, and it drives me bonkers. I want to yell at them to make up their minds before the kettle water settles and begins to cool, and, by the way, I didn’t invite you for a week. I have dithered the same way myself, and the reason I believe it is mostly a woman thing, is because we have not allowed ourselves to be decisive. Decisive is for our men and we have no place being so outrageously forward.

I can hear the young women murmuring dissent. And hallelujah to that! But, I speak from my 60 yr old mind, one born in a time when those of us who decided to be ‘different’ from our fellow females, gained labels.

In a primary relationship – oh for goodness sake, let’s forget trendy counselling lingo and say it like it is – in a marriage (or equivalent) there is plenty of waste ground, and it is often wasted. All ground is waste ground until somebody develops it. When two strangers decide to hook up and stick, with almost no knowledge of what it will be like to live together, the initial period of time is often pregnant with gifts of demonstrated love. Tenderness and compassion, unselfish acts of generosity, use of the communal car, allowance for mistakes, dinner dates and thoughtful gifts may allow each one to think they had stepped on board the glory train headed for heaven. This is it. My soul mate. No effort required. Just magic.

And then real life, having been kept outside the door with the wellies and the dogs, sneaks back in and pulls up a chair. And thank goodness it does, because now we begin the work of learning how to share our own selfish life with another who, by the way, doesn’t agree with a whole lot of things we thought were without a single flaw, and therefore, the right way to be.

If this makes us unhappy, we now face the waste ground and, as I said before, it is not dangerously peppered with mines, as we may have been led to believe, but empty and fertile and longing to be claimed.

Tempting thought it might be to scurry back indoors, to allow the other to make the rules and therefore to define us by exerting a stronger desire to lead, we are doing the relationship no favours by folding like so much material. This, again, is more of a woman thing in my experience and it is not through lack of character that we fold, but because our natural longing is for peace. We think that, by becoming part of the wallpaper, we are achieving what our men want.

We are wrong. But how to change things?

Well, we don’t. Change things. We change ourselves.

One day we do something different, with gentle grace, no teeth, no claws, no accusations, no bitterness. We just quietly take action. I can’t tell anyone the what or the how, but I can promise it works, in time, albeit with many false starts and plenty of self-doubt.

I remember when I decided to go to art school. It was thoroughly inconvenient, not least because my interview was on Monday and the first class was on Wednesday. I had no spare cash, no car to drive the distance to college, and no pencil case. I spoke to a friend who knew of someone selling a little car, saw it and had just enough to buy it. By Wednesday morning I was ready. No, I wasn’t, I was terrified of everything. I drove the whole way in third gear and almost along the grass verge. But, as I claimed my own bit of wasteland, day by day, things changed. Resistance mellowed, confidence grew from its tiny seed, colour and movement, texture and composition, a new ritzy rhythm beat in my scared heart. And the wasteland is wasteland no more.

August 2, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 88 Flying High

I am just back from the Island Wife Book launch at Waterstone’s of Oban. Arriving off the 5pm ferry yesterday we arrived to such a wonderful welcome from Ian the manager and his lovely team who had laid out a table of drinks and nibbles and a room full of chairs, some of which were already filled with people, just waiting for me. A few, I knew, most I didn’t. There is a strange buzz about that. These people had planned to be there just to hear about me and my book. It is humbling. Gillian, from Hodder publishing was there too, full of twinkles and enthusiasm and utterly professional, as always.

I was introduced and then began to talk about how and why I wrote the book, my story. I want to say so much, all of it with a thankful heart, for it is one thing to live a life, and quite another to have it lifted into a new sky by my publisher Lisa Highton of Two Roads and all at Hodder and Stoughton. Then there is another step, when the book is printed and bound and then another when it turns into thousands of paperbacks, boxed and already being unpacked and displayed in bookshops all across the country. People who never knew me, do now, although I will only ever meet a few.

I read an extract from the book, the chapter called Isobel the Hen. Isobel was named after a wonderful friend whose impersonation of a hen laying a football made us laugh every time. She could also play the whistle and the guitar and did so often for me to sing to, after a long and busy day looking after guests, farm animals, cleaning cottages, taking visitors out to Puffin island (my name for it) or to watch for whales and dolphins. She came to us, as they all did, on a new breeze, rolling into our bonkers family life and joining it without a seam. After she left us, she took up flying (well, she would….) and sadly made a bad choice one day as she tried to gain height, and failed. She died in the pilot seat, which was where she would have been most happy. She loved the sea and she loved the sky. She taught me so many things. Her ability to laugh at life when hers had been far from easy, turned my spoilt little head, and she would always find the humour in whatever drudge we shared, with a sharp wit and an eye for mischief. She gave our guests naughty names, such as Lady Widebutt and Mr Puffnose and when two very small people from Ireland arrived, they became the Hobbits. I really had to fight to call them by their correct names, and often caught the wrong name behind clenched teeth, and only just in time.

I cannot say that my life has been a solo thing, that I am who I am because of me, because it wouldn’t be true. The people who came to visit us over all those years and who stayed, for a day or for months, even years, changed me. And it is the same now, in this new sky, as I lift on wings I never knew I had, with new horizons, new friends, and a new song in my heart.

I take nothing for granted. I am only so very happy that this book, my life, out there now in the world, can lift others as they catch sight of their own lives inside the pages, and believe that even if this life may be our only one, it is such a gift.

And it is teamwork. We are not alone, because we have each other and every one of us can fly.

August 1, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 87 Dancing on the Edge

Today I am dancing.

Yesterday my almost new microwave stopped waving back and I was momentarily arrested in my dance moves. Things should work, I said to myself, however cheap they might be, and this little machine was cheap. But, if something is created, and packaged and marketed, it should make no difference at all how much or how little it costs me. You get what you pay for was a comment from someone and I thought about that a bit, and then found my retort.

Piffle.

If I, in good faith, agree to a contract, which is what I do when I purchase a thing from another person or company or whatever…. inside that contract, written or not written is a promise. If I find a bargain, for want of a better word and buy it, am I risking disaster because it IS a bargain? I don’t think so.

Anyway, I contacted the seller who was extremely apologetic and who has already organised a replacement. So, they didn’t expect it to fail, this little, cheap microwave, now did they? And nor did I.

Moving on from things, to people………

In every area of my life, I make contracts with other people. It may be that I agreed to sell raffle tickets for the local agricultural show, or that I said I would pop in this week. I might have a pheasant called Robin who expects me to throw him grain of a morning, or a cousin who needs to hear my voice as she faces illness and fear. I can’t be everywhere at once, but I can be somewhere and I can organise myself quite easily to complete my contracts if I take my eyes off myself and point them out into the world.

I have said, in the past, I don’t have time. Now I wouldn’t allow those words out of my mouth, because it is nonsense. We all have the same 24 hours in a day. What I am really saying there is that I am too self-absorbed to take stock and reorganise myself.

When I was young, I danced every Saturday at a local dance school. Ballet, Modern, Character, Ballroom. I gained certificates, although heaven knows where they are now. It doesn’t matter. I know they once existed and that, apart from the bits I didn’t like, I loved to dance. As I moved through my life, my footwork got a bit rusty, but what I realised is that I can still dance in other ways. I can dance through a Saturday changeover, or when baking a cake, or when talking to a seller about a faulty microwave. Instead of dragging myself along, I can rise on my mental toes and hear the drumbeat of my heart as I move through the ordinary. Once I begin, my own voice lightens up, my laugh begins to rise and sparkle, and my eyes see only good things. And, as we all know, Good is always brighter and stronger than Bad.

Once I have practised this a bit, feeling, possibly, a tad foolish at first, I will find it more and more natural, until one day I find myself dancing on the edge of ordinariness with a wild music playing in my heart. Still feeding Robin the pheasant, still baking cakes, still making a call, or selling raffle tickets, but there is a difference and it is nothing to do with circumstances, and everything to do with the dance in me.

Years ago I had a dream that I would walk by a Waterstone’s window and see my book presented there. I hadn’t written a single word, nor chosen a story. Today that dream is in my hands. Today is the launch of the paperback of Island Wife, my story which will now be sold in big shops and small shops, ferries and visitor centres, both here and abroad, and you know the best thing about all of it?

That through reading my story, someone else may catch a glimpse of themself, and be inspired to put on their own dancing shoes.

July 31, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 86 A Big Stretch

In the early hours of this morning, I wake. It isn’t night and yet it isn’t day, not quite, although a weak light through the curtains tells me that it will be soon. I check my clock with my little torch. 3.30 am. In an hour, I will hear the sparrows in the creeper begin their chattering and the neighbours cockerels, sounding a little gagged from within the thin walls of their wooden huts, will begin to greet the morning.

I stretch and can feel the familiar cramp begin sort of half way down. This time, I let it come, but it rises too high and I am forced to shift and bend my knee until it ebbs away. I lie thinking of how I need to stretch, and not just my limbs, but my mind too.

As folk gain the weight of age, I notice many stop stretching. We’ve done our stretching, they say. Now we don’t do that any more. And they begin to compress and to rust.

Although our bodies have the most wonderful capacity to repair on a day to day basis, we do have to work harder to stretch, to keep supple, but we also must understand that our repair mechanism will never be as efficient as it was when we were 30, or even 50. And why should it? Bodies break down, of course they do. Not one of us can live for ever, and our own aging process is just the way it is, for us. Some are ‘lucky’ some are not, but we all must face it and accept it with grace.

However, and I always have plenty of howevers up my sleeve, this is not the same with our minds. These hidden computers can kick ass long after our bodies, and this is where we must sustain the stretch mechanism. We must oil it and work it, love and cherish it, make it new every morning, no matter what.

When I face something I don’t want to tackle, I am sorely tempted to push it away. Nobody would judge me for that, or even know, or perhaps, even care, but I would, and there’s the rub. Is it just me who thinks that to stretch is to reach, or, at least, to try? Not to stretch is not to know and then to wonder and then to regret. For me, anyway. I don’t want to waste a single moment.

As a young woman I thought I would live without effort. I don’t mean that life was without effort, quite the opposite in fact, but I spent no time bothering about my physical or mental demise. Nowadays, with two close friends gone too soon and too young, I understand both the fragility of life and its strength.

And its strength lies in my control to a great degree. Not by re-action to whatever life sends me, but by action. Not ‘waiting to see’ but watching and grabbing everything that comes along with a can-do attitude, even if, after trying, I can’t do.

I think, in answer to a recent question, this is how self-confidence grows. Not because I am brilliant at this, or at that, but because I gave everything, every single thing, my best shot, and each time I do, I feel good about me.

And then, if I miss the target completely, I can laugh at my failure, because nobody minds and nobody remembers it. What they remember is that I made that stretch.

July 28, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 85 – Coming Home

When I go anywhere I take me with me. Now I know that sounds, at best, numptyish, at worst psychotic, but I don’t mean it physically. It is obvious on a human level that I am pretty much stuck with me till death do us part. But the natural desire to escape my inner self, that part I cannot see, can sometimes overwhelm.

No-one admits to it of course. Well, it is possible to keep this tricky creature well and truly hidden, and for a whole lifetime if I so choose, which I do not. As I ‘open my heart’ to someone, I let them glimpse into my very soul. Sometimes it really helps. Sometimes I regret it. I can feel trampled.

As I skitter about the country on this new adventure, I can feel as light as a bird, catching a ride on the thermals, soaring through the clouds and into wide new skies, or I can feel like a desert tumbleweed with sand in my eyes till I’m blind.

What I have worked out is that it has less to do with whatever I meet on my journeys and everything to do with how I feel about me. Not in a ‘will I be good enough for them? sort of way, but more…’will I be good enough for me?

For it is always me who judges me, and my judge has a knife for a tongue. When I meet new people, they don’t hear my judge. In fact, if I was to tell them what she thinks of me, they would laugh out loud.

Now, if I, with all my confident energy, who can write, paint, sing and dance my life…..if I am still trying to co-ordinate the inside with the outside of me, in my final trimester, what on earth is it like for the rest of the world? And why is it we have this constant search for peace?

Well, I think it is what life is all about. I don’t think anyone has it sussed, lives a perfect life. I don’t believe in material wealth as the answer, nor academic brilliance. Most of us don’t remember those who made no impression on our lives, and remember clearly those who, through struggle, did something different, made something happen. These people, the ones we do remember had the same judge we all have. Some people call it the devil. Some people think it’s what they eat, or where they live, or who they live with, but I think we are all born with it all fankled up in our DNA and it’s quite impossible to hide from.

The good part of it tells us to be careful, to watch our step, to consider our actions. In balance this is all good. Out of balance, it becomes growing self-doubt, and, if we keep feeding it, it takes over our inner garden, rising high as weeds that eventually block out our sun.

What a waste.

Well….. I have said, What a waste to myself a million times and still crouched there behind the weeds, peering out at a passing crowd of confident others and snivelling into my pocket handkerchief.

Travelling through new lands I get time to think things through. I never thought anything through for decades as there was never more than five minutes available for such indulgence. But now, I can, and I do and its very exciting and encouraging, because I realise this.

It is never ever too late to begin again and I begin with one conscious decision.

To get on with it.

To thank the judge for her protective presence, but to take charge of her. To listen, but to respond with confidence. When she tuts and shakes her head and says in that ‘I know what’s best for you dear’ voice…..’You can’t do that. You never did it before and got it right. Just give up the idea and stay where you are…….’ I will stop, turn to her and say………

Just watch me!

And then I will spin on my sassy heel and step into my life.

July 24, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 84 – Surprises

So I come down to the South. Bears live here, and snakes, and dangerous people with sculduggery on their minds 24/7. Even with my intelligent 60 year old head fixed atop my human frame; even mindful of the fact that my imagination is more at home in Mordor than it ever is in the sleepy wolds of Great Snoring, I still hold onto the idea that a few miles south of Carlisle, everything goes to pot.

When I was a little girl I was terrified of the dark; couldn’t sleep, couldn’t close my eyes in case the bad things came to collect. And, of course, they were all after me. Not her, over there, or him, the other way, but me. Because why?

Heaven knows.

In my adult thinking, with the culture, of in-depth psychology infiltrating my every sideways glance, I imagine it is something to do with an overactive ego. An elevated sense of my own importance.

Well, phooey.

Anyway, the point is that I came here into a strange place, with no natural leaning towards geography (was expelled from the class I seem to remember) or road maps, I have found my way all the way from the island to the recording studio and not one step of this journey was without help. Oh, I didn’t stand at a crossroads and burst into tears. Indeed not. But, at each point, where I faltered and wondered, some kind person asked if they could help. More than that, they walked the mile with me.

From car ride to guide, frome breakfast to supper, every single step. I was not pushed or pulled. Just lovingly helped, and it looks to me like all these people do it naturally.

It is a gift. And I never knew it was there, till I stepped out and opened my eyes.