July 4, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 73 – To Give or not to Give

I learned recently of a man who gave his wife a lovely piece of jewellery.

And then left her.

She kept it for some years, eventually making the decision to sell it.

Of course, any beauty it ever had was lost way back when it no longer spoke of love and giving, but more, perhaps of duty and guilt.

It made me think of what really is beautiful to our eyes, and not for a moment, but for always, and the answer is that it has little to do with eyes and everything to do with heart.

Gifts are often given to alleviate guilt, to fill in that huge empty void, so often an unwelcome part of a relationship, the place where communication forgot to settle and make into a home.

I don’t know how to love you the way you want, so I will buy you this, once I’ve checked the price tag and been suitably impressed. I won’t even be sure you will like the gift, but you won’t be able to show anything other than delight, once you realise how much it cost me. After that, I can go back to not communicating with you for another year.

Phew!

Lovely gifts are always free. We never remember the gifts that were bought and paid for, unless they directly reflect the level of communicated love we receive from the giver. If this giver always criticises and grumbles at us, then suddenly presents us with a pretty gift they just know we will love to wear, but have never worn before, what on earth do we believe of them?

Confused, no dot or com.

So each time I put it on it feels awkward for it is not something I ever wear nor ever have worn so why…….

Aha! I get it. This is what you would like me to like, so that you can like me better, because, then, I’ll be more like you, not me!

No longer confused, although I do wonder if I’m really here at all.

The giving of gifts is a free offering, without expectation of anything. Not even a thank you letter.

Otherwise, it is just control. Of course, I am excited to give whatever it is I am giving you. It could be my time, my smile, my kind words, my whole life, but I must remind myself that, unless I give these and many more similar gifts, freely, I am not giving at all, but taking.

So what do I do when my giving is not received as such? When it is, at best, unnoticed, at worst, rejected? Do I keep giving, fighting back the hurt and resentment that curdles my belly, or do I stop altogether and be true to myself?

Many have pondered this one but only a handful ever managed to get it right. I don’t mean a handful this year or even this century, but ever in the whole history of time. A handful.

For those who seek this blissful state of giving without expectation, there is a huge and lucrative business out there just waiting to welcome us in. There are ‘Find Yourself’ workshops, group therapy sessions, counsellors and psychiatrists all trained and qualified in this method and that method and many, including myself, have benefited from their wisdom and guidance. But there is no quick fix answer that works across the board.

I think it is a daily journey, as long as we are seeking a better way to love. And never giving up.

July 1, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 72 – Back to the Future

I’ve been digging. Not in the garden, which, this year is doing without me. First, I announced I was no longer the Little Weed Weeder. No, not true. First I looked out across the brown shrubs and trunks of winter resisting furiously the spring urge to spring, and not surprisingly, as the sky was still the colour of ice and the wind sharp enough to cut through fast food packaging. Although part of me longed for the warmth, there is a price to pay for warmth I have found and it arrives overnight in wide seas of determined green, growing more determined as the days follow the nights. I had gravel outside the door a month ago. Not any longer. Now it is a wondrous display of dandelions, plantains, campion and thistles. Much softer underfoot.

That’s when I made my announcement.

Yesterday I did waiver eversoslightly when Guilt nudged my elbow and made me take a good look at the sloppy trollope I have become.

No, I said, No….go away (or words to that effect) – for I have a book to write, a new one and if I start following your fat batty guilt as I have done for centuries, I will find my gravel but lose my raison d’etre, and, having only just found it, I don’t plan to do that.

Back to my digging.

In boxes, cupboards, drawers and the like, I am finding trinkets and gewgaws from 200 years ago and marvelling at the quality of materials and workmanship. These things may be cracked or damaged, and they all smell funny, but they still work, still open and close as they did at first and that is a lot more than can be said of pretty much anything for sale on our high streets today. I am careful how I word that bit for there are indeed exceptionally high standards of workmanship spread right across the material world, but the attitude of care and accompanying skills in crafting each item as an individual piece is no longer something we expect.

As I find each piece, I can tell you nothing about it. Chaps no longer keep a personalised manicure set bound in leather, each piece resting in a nest of soft blue velvet. For a start, it is cumbersome, and would probably make his hand luggage too heavy. For the ladies, a weighty and heavily ornate ladies make-up mirror. Something else to dust and polish and blow that for a lark. Leather bound snuff boxes, cigarette cases, monogrammed and silvered up enough for royalty, silver lighters, personal ash trays, also monogrammed, for waistcoat pockets or handbags. Nobody smokes anymore and those who do have packets in pockets and hide round stony cold corners. There would be little interest in the sporting of flashy pointers towards the habit they would dearly love to break.

And so on and on.

So, what to do with it all? Do we, as Keepers of the Past, keep it? And for what? Our ikea children?

I don’t think so. I think we should hold the stories and tell them into the ears of the children who want to know. After all, not everyone is interested in great granny’s trinkets, having never even met the old girl. And then, I think we should clear our attics, empty our veneered cabinets of decorative cups and quaintly useless fal-de-lal, and move them on. Otherwise, trust me, when we are pushing up the daisies, some poor soul will have that awful job of clearing it all out in a volatile atmosphere of ignorance, guilt and sentimentality. In my own role as Clearer Out, I struggled a lot. Not with the clearing, for we could hardly breathe in this little place for lumpy trinkets and I could hardly wait for the new wheelie bins to be delivered- but with the familial tussle over letting anything go, as if, in doing so, we would threw out granny’s memory as well.

What we need to learn is to let go of things that do not take us forward in our lives. So many of us, including this sloppy trollope, waste our precious days in general maintenance, allowing our God given gifts to float away into the recesses of our minds like clouds. Come the day we lie, wondering what on earth we have achieved in our life, we just know we didn’t get it right. Oh we may have polished, and labelled, looked after and managed, but did we create something completely new? Did we say Poo to all that grey mind-numbing drudge and turn towards doing what we know we love, even if we don’t yet know how to make it work? Did we risk? Did we clear out the ‘granny junk’, still remembering her sparkle, her wisdom, her humour, those things that changed us and made us who we are, or did we store it in the loft, in mice-chewed boxes, moaning every time we had to dust or polish things we hate looking at?

Letting go is not easy for most. And yet, it is the only way to clear space for the new and I do not mean substitute material trinkets.

I mean space. Emptiness. Nothing. Patience.

One day, an idea will come. Let it settle.

Then begin.

June 25, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 71 – Letting Go

Yesterday I took some washing up to the line like a good island wife, in a stout breeze.

That is not an article of island clothing, by the way, but, instead, a good wind for drying things.

As I climbed up the little mosaic-ed garden steps, a bush erupted beside me. I knew from the sound effects that this was a Blackbird Hoo-ha, at which Blackbirds are pretty good. They can make one out of nothing with their alarm calls, causing an island wife to drop her laundry basket, tipping her husband’s undergarments into a flowerbed and requiring her to wash them all over again.

I stood still, my back against the wall, my husband’s undergarments safely within the confines of the basket, and waited for the drama to unfold. For a few seconds, I and the blackbird family listened for each other, neither of us daring to make a sound. I knew they would give in first, through their natural curiosity and also because time is of the essence for them. Not so for me. I could linger here all morning without a shred of embarrassment or guilt, but, then, I don’t have to learn to fly in order to keep a hold of my life.

Or do I?

Anyway, the male jumped out of the bush first, which is quite proper for a Father Protector, and he locked eyeballs with me and said something rather sharp and double syllabled. I looked away, knowing that this removed me as a confrontational threat, and waited some more. He chirruped at the bush and out bounced three youngsters – all bigger than their dad, followed by a rather ruffled mother

After a few aviation tips, he told them to get on with it, and led the way, landing on the apex of the roof. Eventually they followed, but not without giving dad a whole load of lip about this flying thing and his overly high expectations of them.

This morning I noticed them all around the compost bin, which has overflowed with an excitement of worms, thus providing the family with three good meals a day plus healthy snacks. How wonderful it is, I thought to myself, that this adult pair are likely to have pitched their nest around this very spot precisely because of the overflowing compost bin and the excitement of worms. I wonder if we are clever with our own nest pitching – considering what is best for the family, and, then, moving if we find a danger too close at hand. I doubt it somehow, not with all that mortgage angst and debts and work commitments, although none of that makes it right to be living in the wrong place.

At my little grand-daughter’s naming ceremony, the words for her, in poetry, promises and songs, offered gifts and wisdom and freedom. She must learn from her parents, her guides and then be free to take that learning and shape it her own way. We all want this and yet few of us get it or give it, not really. Through our own fear, we try to keep hold, of our children, our friends. How many of us ever listen to someone, anyone, announce their new plan, a completely bonkers and impossible one, in our opinion and make no comment whatsoever? No word of caution, no opinion, saying something like this:-

Wow! That sounds incredible? How will you achieve that do you think?

And then listen and learn and encourage and only ever give opinion if asked.

Bet you can’t do it. We are all jailors of someone in order to feel free.

June 24, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 70 – Life is a simple thing

fig: http://favim.com

It’s all about breathing in and out for decades, something that happens to us quite naturally. We can take no credit for this and it’s not complicated, until it stops, of course, or struggles to continue. All we have to do, as out heart beats and our lungs fill and empty a thousand times a day, is to get on with living.

Ah, you might say. That’s the rub. My life is so much harder than just breathing in and out and getting on with things. My circumstances, you see…..well, life is not simple at all.

Yes, I say, it is. It may not be easy, but it is simple, and then I draw back in case I get swiped, because why?

Because people love to complicate things, all things and especially their own things.

I know people who have come through cancer and people who have not come through. I am not one of them. Therefore my life is a breeze.

I know people who have lost a child. I have not. Therefore my life is a breeze.

I know someone disabled, paralised, in prison,bereaved,destitute and hungry.

I am none of them. Therefore….etc

At Jenny’s funeral yesterday, I listened to the tributes. I counted 250 at least in the church. I caught the sparkle of a woman who refused to moan, although, believe me, she had plenty of reason to. In fact, she had absolutely no time at all for moaners.

On the way to the church, down winding country lanes, I saw a land rover parked in a driveway. Across the top of the windscreen the words in bold black said this:-

ONE LIFE. LIVE IT.

Jenny did.

Short or long it is the same for us all, as far as we know, although one friend whose family are fisherfolk, plans to return as a crack shot seagull.

Whatever our piddling ailments, our list of miniature disasters, we were born with laughter in our hearts and we all know it.

We might consider laughing more and particularly at ourselves.

June 21, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 69 – Aground

There’s a ship in our harbour aground on the rocks, a big and very stuck ship. It was on its way from Belfast to Sweden with a load of timber. I don’t know what will happen to it, or the timber, or the waters in the harbour, but I do know that it matters to me when anything bad happens at sea, because the next part usually involves one of my men.

In the early days of living on the island there was no lifeboat, and the local seamen became auxiliary coastguards. I remember not infrequent calls, especially during the summer months when every loon with a dream of the wild ocean waves, took to the sea without a clue of tidal rips, wind direction or the rise and fall of the tides. Add to all that ‘complicata’, those dodgy times when the wind argues with the direction of the tide, creating a real stooshie, when your little craft, so safe, (you thought) begins to screw tail in the boiling soup and runs the very real risk of tipping right over if one big wave comes at you sideways on. Then there are those razor sharp rocks just below the surface. You can’t afford to marvel at the wonderful views anywhere near land, because land is not where you think it is. Land goes on into the sea and says nothing much. It just blows a few bubbles that can look dead cute if you don’t check your chart.

I’m not saying the skipper of this massive hulk didn’t check his or her charts. With a ship that big, stopping at all must be planned a mile away, and turning round quickly at the last minute when bubbles reveal their teeth is quite out of the question.

Anyway, back to what I was saying about my men. The old sea dog had to turn around quick sharp often after a tourist trip to the islands, or out to watch for whales, if a call came through on the radio. Out he would go, spotlight on the waves, if it was a darkling time of day, to search for a dingy, or worse, a person in the black soup. It is hard enough to find a huge whale in the sea, never mind a little person with only a head showing. He has towed sailing boats off beaches and rocks and stayed to reassure folk who had to wait for the lifeboat to arrive from the mainland. He has helped people be airlifted out, and seen many back into safety. Now we do have a lifeboat on the island, one with big twin engines, and our son is deputy cox and sometimes the whole cox. When a storm rises like a bully and when the wind roars and the night is black as a witch, I wonder what he might be called out to do. There have been some really tough times, but the team is tight and experienced and they know the rocks like teeth just under the surface of the sea, of old. But still, we women and our imaginations can take the facts and spin our spin and hardly sleep a wink for the pictures in our fluffy little heads.

The sea is a wild thing- unpredictable and demanding respect. Nobody can be her master and nor they ever will be.

June 19, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 68 – Songs for the Girls

fig via: futureengagedeliver.com

I wrote a song for Jenny and one day I will sing it out, perhaps after the funeral. And then I wrote another for my little grand-daughter, the youngest thus far whose naming ceremony is being celebrated the weekend after.

How life organises these things I cannot say, but she always does and it makes a sort of sense. It’s not about one life replacing another, but more that the sharp-edged void created in a heart, when someone dies can be softened by a new life. These two girls will never know each other; will never come together except in my heart, and that is something rather wonderful and quite uniquely precious.

When I write my songs, or create my paintings, or lampshades or cushions or whatever, I work for one person. I think of who they are and what colours they wear and what stories lie in their eyes, and I work to honour and recognise them all. This is why I won’t create a production line, nor paint the same, but in blue, to match the furnishings. Every single piece of work is a one-off.

Much like a life.

The song for Jenny celebrates her as a woman of the sea, of the world and now, of the beyond, wherever that is. The words are taken from a well-known poem and personalised, and I don’t suppose anyone will mind, because they will hear what they want to hear and think what they want to think about Jenny as they take it all in. The music will lift them and pull on their heart strings and someone may well recognise parts of other melodies and other phrasing from a different song for there is nothing new under the sun.

And yet, everything is always new when someone catches a thing and forges it again in the fires of their heart.

The song for my granddaughter is different in that the words are all mine, and the melody pinched from a couple of other musicians who won’t know and wouldn’t mind anyway. We are not talking chart topper here. The words had to be bespoke, just for her, and with respect paid to her mum and her dad and the fabulous crazy wild people they are, and all those attributes now handed on to one little girl. It’s light-hearted and fun and will bring smiles to all the faces watching me stand and deliver.

We are all unique, but it is a rare bird that can fly alone into a busy sky, with its own song to sing, certain that just by singing it, everything is new.

June 14, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 67 – Arriving too early

Soon I will be leaving the island for my long journey south to Jenny’s funeral. I enjoy journeys, especially by train and especially the first part when we travel through the wild bracken and the bonny purple heather. Bracken is the name for our land’s plague, although it redeems itself considerably once amber-dead, enough, even, to feature in sentimental songs about leaving and losing love.

The second part of the journey will be in the air, zipping through clouds with barely enough time to knock back an orange juice and certainly not enough time to prise open the hygienic packaging and free the currant scone.

Or, indeed, to re-locate myself.

Half an hour ago I was in Scotland, and now I am in England. Countries shouldn’t be crossed so quickly, as if they were hardly there at all. There is no time to absorb the change, the process, to consider a new culture, a new way to hold my fork.

This sudden way of travel may be convenient, but I wonder if it’s all it says it is. In any part of our growing and learning, our minds and bodies need time to sort ourselves out, to slowly absorb a new way, to consider what we do or don’t like about it, and to decide how and who we shall be in context. To travel too fast through a state of change, finds us leaving our self behind. We may understand at a logical level what it is we undertake, but unless we have allowed time (and that length of time is not something we can set in stone) for our senses, emotions, body and heart to join us, we will ultimately fall in the poo. No change works if only based on logic. Not a single one, and not at any age or level of brilliance or intelligence. It is, quite simply, un-rushable, a journey into change.

So how do we do this change thing, considering the fact that everything is speeding up in every area of life and we are failures if we can’t keep up? And there are so many of us who can’t keep up and when we find ourselves at the bottom of the pit, with nowhere to go, worn out and broken, we fall ill. But I don’t think there is a collective solution to this, I think it will take each one of us, on our own, to decide to look away from the world and its empty promises of success and beauty, and look for something higher. We know it’s there when things happen we can’t explain, like a coincidence. We might need to employ our imaginations a bit more, develop eyes that really see the natural extraordinariness of our world and a thankful heart, all day long, for what we do have, instead of wanting what we don’t.

My little grand-daughter has just returned from a family camping holiday. Each day they visited somewhere new with a picnic and the sunshine overhead. One day they went to a safari park, another to the river, another through the hills to a lochan for a swim and so on.

I asked her what animals she had seen, and which was her favourite, expecting her eyes to light up and her mouth to fill with names like Elephant! Lion! Giraffe!

Tadpoles, she said and the whole room lit up with her smile.

June 12, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 66 – Animal Magic

I can be with someone, out walking for example, and I can spot a bird I don’t recognise, singing like a choirboy, right beside me on a fence. I stop, feel my heart rise to the skies, gasp in wonder, stop to watch and listen.

Look at that! I whisper, but there’s nobody to hear me. ‘Someone’ is completely uninterested and marching on apace. Initially I feel disappointed, then sorry for their blindness, then understanding. Some of us feel akin to the natural world, others, my dear, don’t give a damn, but there is a place in between those two that interests me – the place we can all find ourselves at times – locked up inside our own circular thoughts so completely, it is nigh on impossible to see beyond the skull because eyeballs have flipped and are pointing in.

It’s not a good place to stay. I’ve been there many times, and it’s ok to flip/check/flip back, because we all need to re-locate our inner list of rules and regs from time to time, but it is most unsafe to flip/lock/remain. Thinking too much about the very small inside of our very small life can turn a goldfish into a great white within hours.

When I was in flip/lock/remain, I remember I would notice animals wherever I went, only they were all dead. I counted 6 deer corpses in Glen Coe, once, plus dead sheep, lambs and even a dog, hit by a car. By the time we arrived I had mascara everywhere and a red nose, and could not explain why it hurt so much. Now I understand that, at a deep level, emotions are rising and bringing with them the chance to let them go for ever. We bury things we don’t even know we bury, and then, a small thing can be the trigger that flips us back to look outside ourselves again.

The series Islands on the Edge, recently shown on tv was superbly put together and clear in its message that we and animals can and must learn to live together in harmony. That doesn’t mean we’re the chiefs and they’re mere Indians. Good harmonies require humility and more listening than talking, as any singer or musician will tell you. We may be in a rush to get home, but this road was built right through an ancient deer path, a lay line. It is not the deer who cross our path, but we, theirs. Do we consider that I wonder, in flip/lock/remain with deadlines and headlines and mobiles on loudspeaker?

When I travelled last to Glasgow from Oban on the train, there were many of us, mostly tourists. The queue was a long slow snake and tempers frayed. Inside, where the head, neck and shoulders of the snake, twitched and tutted and puffed and muttered, I couldn’t see the ceiling for blue smoke and half-finished complaints. Outside was mildly happier as most had already bought their tickets and those who hadn’t were young and munching snacks and wired to music equipment. The man behind the single ticket booth was calm and soft-spoken but he can’t have missed what was going on and I was glad there was a safety grill between him and the snake. I bought my ticket and we shared a chuckle and still the train sat waiting. It wouldn’t go without you, I wanted to say to the hot squat of visitors, some perched on cases, others leaning against the recycling bins and most of them down at the mouth.

Suddenly a duck, a female, waddled out from under the Jurassic park gates, there, obviously, for crowd control, and came right up to my foot. Hallo, I said, bobbing down, and held out my hand. She pecked it, sharply, and I burst out laughing, looking round to share the complete craziness of a confident duck waddling into a crowd at a train station. Nobody even smiled from behind their blank faces.

Flip/lock/remain, I thought. I was still duck-chuckling as I took my seat, so very happy to be alive.

June 10, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 65 – Follow me follow

Yesterday, the Bee Father decided to investigate all his hives. It’s the time for swarming, he tells me and I remember one of those not so long ago; a great blackening of the back garden and the Sun quite peely-wally behind a thousand whizzing bees. I heard the noise first and went up the garden stets, well, two of them, or maybe just one. It was mightily clear to me that the cup of coffee awaiting me on the table was going to go lonely cold for I, sure as hector, was not taking one more step into that melee. I could have disappeared completely and would likely have swatted and begun a war. The swarm finally cuddled up with the New Queen on a bough of larch, bringing it at least two foot closer to the ground. The solid ball hung there in a perfect shape until the BF climbed up to unhook the ball and drop it into a cardboard box and covering it with a piece of white cotton.

Whilst he worked high above me among the lofty Soldier Pines, where the sun dapples the wild orchids and the bees live in harmony and peace, I could hear a marked rise in the tonal buzz.

We are not enjoying this, all of us, it tells me, for we buzz as one.

After the BF had gone right through 3 hives, discovering all was well, that there were not too many queen cells growing new queens to generate a swarm or two, down he came, quite bridal in his white and veil, to sit and eat a quiet lunch with me. I had carried up an array of dishes, bits of this leftover and that leftover with salad. For a few moments, all was peaceful munching, until She appeared.

She is a Follower, one of those female worker bees, set the task of making sure any unwelcome visitor goes a very long way away. Whilst he sat quite still, she bumped against his face and his head, never landing. After a few minutes, he got up and walked slowly down to the cool of the garage, thus planning to let her know he was leaving. He came back without her but it was only minutes later and she was back, bumping her warning against his face, head and neck. She came nowhere near me and I was right beside him. I watched him never swat (fatal) and sit calmly, waiting for her to get bored or decide her point is made or whatever it was she wanted to tell him in no uncertain terms.

3 more times he walked away, waited a little and returned. 3 more times she found him. By now I’d had enough of this lurching lunch and removed myself indoors. The little bee had popped over to check me out, but I was spooked by her right in my face. I don’t mind once or twice, but she was just too persistent.

Much later in the day, after another hive was checked, the dog walked, church over and thoughts of supper in my mind, we went back up to sip a glass of wine in the warm evening sun.

Within seconds she was back and bumping round and round his head.

I think it’s that aftershave I put on this morning, he said, as we re-settled inside, but we both know the real truth.

Charisma.

June 6, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 64 – Square Rainbows

This morning I set off along the single track road from my little stone built home in warm sunshine. My task today is to help paint the school shed in a small (but vital) island primary school. The head teacher had already talked with me about what she would like the shed to look like, using as decoration, all the beach litter the children had collected since last summer. Each time there is a high tide or a high wind, the beaches are covered with flotsam and jetsam, some of it intriguing, some disgusting. Obviously the disgusting bits are appropriately disposed of, but the colourful bits of plastic and rope and twine, shells and bones, and all those things careless folk toss overboard, all are gathered, cleaned and stored for the Grand Shed Occasion.

Which is now. Well, the beginning of it is now. It may take some time to assemble, not least because little children have attention spans extremely short but sweet and by the way, not one of them can stand still without fidgeting.

We walked them around the brown slatted shed, and asked them how they would like to see the end result. We fed them the odd line as they began heading off into Disneyworld, just to reel them in a bit, but not too much. We explained the deck chair stripe idea and the starburst of plastic milk bottle tops on one side; the butterflies and daisies on one end, to compliment the big tubs of wild flowers already established to encourage butterflies. We said that once the stripes were finished, they could play with spatter paint, flicking brush loads (well, not LOADS) against the wall. The boys arms were already flexing and they did have to question whether we really meant it. Their mouths formed a WOW.

Throwing paint at the wall…..like THIS????

Can I use a gun? asked one boy.

Er……I think brushes this time, we told him and there was a chorused ‘Awwwww’ with that sweep up at the tail of it, as if we just might say…….Ok then, why not?

We plan a sort of mural on the side nearest the road, to impress the tourists. Deck chairs, they thought. We could stick one on the wall! chirruped one girl.

Not with PVA, I said, sorry, but you can paint one on. I could hear my voice go all dinky winky but she was no fool, and lost interest immediately. She decided, instead, to paint a square rainbow.

Excellent.

A pair of swallows chattered at me as I worked. Birds on the wire with plans for nest building arrested. Sorry I said, but I’ll be gone soon and there’s plenty of daylight left. A pair of lapwings serenaded me from the seaward field, and sparrows dived in and out from the eaves; everyone so very busy.

It’s good to be busy, among little fidgets, in the sunshine with a salt wind blowing my heart around.

Oh, and a square rainbow about to appear.