Author: judyfairbairns

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Island Blog – A Forest and Thinks

Outside it is still dark and will be for a while yet. There is no mangata, no moon reflection on the ice to sparkle rainbows at me, for the ice is all but gone. Just like that. All that effort over many crisp, cold days, melted in minutes. Today the sea-loch will popple once again with an irritation of raindrops and the wind, rising now, will lift its skin with pox. I light the lights and bellow the fire into life. I watch the lick of flames around the chunks of wood and I remember the forest. Hallo forest. Thank you for gifting me this instant (well, almost) warmth, for cheering my eyes with your dance of gold, of blood and amber, for your constancy. You will merry away the day as you reduce each log to charcoal, an artist’s tool and, in the right hand, transformative.

There are only doors, walls and windows in between the out and the in. I can inhabit both and I do. I am fortunate to have that freedom of movement, I know this. The ground beneath my feet is warm in here, and my bare toes connect and notice. I will need footwear out there, as I move into the rising light, and it will rise eventually for the dark is dazzled by any sun, however weak or clouded. I will work today on a new tapestry landscape, feel my way from the bottom up, choosing colours at what might appear to be random but is far from that. My quiet subconscious is always at work, for my good or bad, she is constantly seeking resolution. I am glad she is quiet for there is enough yammering jibber-jabber going on at the surface of my mind, as if there were about 60 mouthy chatterboxes inside my head. You should learn from the forest I tell them when it becomes deafening. A forest stands still and rooted, all together and each one alone. Sibilance with the wind and rain is about as much noise as a forest makes for it is bird-less and cannot wave its arms about like you are all doing.

It thinks me of us, of we humans, and our talking together. Competitive chatter, voices rising to dominate the space, sucking all the air out of other mouths, or perhaps quiet, contemplative reflection, even silence whilst together. All are possible and timely. There is a time for lightweight banter and a time for a soft exchange of thoughts. There is a time for a voice to elevate when the wind or rain of a situation irritates someone into pox, and a time to stand silent, to observe, to speak not. The trouble is it can be hard to get this right, driven as we are, by external forces and by our own internal dialogue. I have learned, sometimes painfully, that it helps to take a step back from myself when I dither on the periphery. To speak my mind or not to speak my mind. Ok, I say to myself, let us step back and merely observe. It isn’t easy when the blood, gold and amber of the situation is burning me. I can feel it scalding my eyeballs and my heart is on fire, but I hold my ground, rooted, like a tree in the forest. It takes practice and, to be honest, I haven’t had to do this forest thing for months and nor have you, I imagine, if you are as isolated as I am. In the olden days, when I enjoyed encounters with people on a daily basis, thought nothing of meeting a friend for lunch or of dropping in on my family, I took it all for granted. I appreciated it, for sure, was thankful for all of it, but I didn’t really understand that this freedom of movement could be taken away from me, and…. Just. Like. That.

So, once I/we get back among each other, will we be full of our own babble or will we have gleaned, from this time of lack, a precious lesson, one that will make us better listeners, more comfortable with a shared silence, less desperate to have our say, have our voice heard, fight our corner, demand our rights? It is up to each one of us, of course. It will take work to effect a change and not everyone believes in such work. But for those who do, think on this. A world, a street, a home wherein each voice is given space, is listened to and taken seriously. I suspect many of us have felt un-heard and disregarded but are we to perpetuate that which made us miserable?

The forest falls but it can grow again. We, on the other hand, cannot.

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Island Blog – So Last Year

I notice that, since the first lockdown, little buds of hopefulness are emerging. Enterprising folk have taken on study and are now elevating the robots of Facebook and Twitter, and us. Although it can occasionally be quite marvellous to know what someone is cooking for supper, it does become a little dull over time. I have been a little dull over time myself, I must confess, taking a photo of a plateful of colour and texture in the sure knowledge that this will bring me likes and comments and schmooze. There are daily postings of children playing, of old granny’s birthday cake alight and looking dangerous when I find myself hoping that the old girl has enough puff residing in her lungs to avoid conflagration, and of colourful and textured dinners. Many update their profile picture and if I know them, I can see the effort and time they took to look particularly wonderful or hilarious or warm and smiling.

Enterprising people are finding things positive to spread hope among us, folk who, previously, might have worked at something quite different but who have realised that posting positive on a daily basis requires effort, demands regular tasking and stands alone in the fight against gloom and disbelief. I gloom and disbelieve too. Writing down my resolutions makes me snort at times. Who am I to think I can actually achieve this busy page of A4, and for a whole year? Each resolution requires breaking down into particles and I am not overly fond of particles being a woman who likes the finished work of art, the job done overnight. But there is a chasm, nay, a continent, in between me writing down my determinations and them inhabiting my mind, body and soul. When it thinks me, I can see that what I want is instant conversion to this new faith in myself, in life, in the world. I don’t want to do the work at all, even knowing that I must.

Becoming who I aspire to become is going to take me into the fog of inner change. I cannot see who I will be, nor where I should go. I cannot see anything at all and the fog is cold and damp and is making my eyeballs soggy. I cannot even see the path ahead. Who wants this? It would be so much easier to turn around and to head for home again, back to what I was but didn’t like much, to where the simple routine was both simple and lonely, where I can check my mobile for tweets and posts on other people’s dinners, children and fired-up grannies. But if I want to change, as I do, if I want to elevate myself from the ditherment and loneliness, that lack of hope and faith, of self-belief, then I must not turn around. Instead I must look at that flipping sheet of A4 and deconstruct each aspiration into those irritating particles. Although it seems a bit unfair that the year has to begin with a January when a May would be so much more pleasant, it might mean that it is I, myself, who needs to add the colour and texture so lacking in Nature. Thinking thus, I find I can respond to bright happy pictures that others post with a smile. I can see how they are also inside this January, have their own aspirations and change lists, are also walking through the soggy fog and yet still manage to find colour and texture to share. I can read the positive words scribed by those enterprising folk who used to do something quite different. From mechanic to coach. From HR to author. Well, why not? We need these people who have lifted themselves for our benefit and whose commitment to positivity and the promotion thereof gifts us a daily sprinkle of magic dust. Sometimes I mutter a Go Away with all your positive stuff. I am weak and weary, isolated, lonely and can see no end to any of it. But, I sneak back later for a peek and find that the daily attention I pay to my fog trek does lift me a little. On a regular basis, this ‘little’ can develop and grow. The fog can clear just enough for me to see my feet, feet I had forgotten were there, and it smiles me. That smile sends a message to my brain; my brain sends it on to my body and I straighten a bit; my body goes wild with it, pulsing it through my blood and all that messy stuff inside me and before I know what’s happening, a little song rolls into my mouth. I sing it into the fog.

On days when the fog is too much, I don’t, any longer, berate myself. I don’t say ‘See…..I knew you couldn’t keep this up, you big loser!’ I just stay home and cosy. The fog will wait for me, after all and if I really want to become who I can become then this trek is going to be worth the effort, an effort that oft feels pointless. Even on stay home and cosy days I hold on to the colour and texture, the positive and the elevating, and I silence the cynic for she is no longer relevant to me, to anyone, and particularly now when the whole world is in disarray and turmoil. Who I was, that woman afraid of everything and quite without the belief that she is worth any level of preservation, never mind development, is so last year.

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Island Blog – Arrested

I remember one winter when the ice was added to nightly, and fixated itself on the job in hand, the taming of the flow of water, from fresh spring to confoundment, from easy movement to an arrest. It worked well for our pleasure. Kids, labradors and even parents scooted on feet or backsides right across a freshwater loch that could have sunk any one of us at a whim and the light was dipping, even then. The scuff of new frost shot up our trouser legs and under our jackets and fingernails. It hurt like hell but the laughter thawed the hurt, as did the shared laughter. It doesn’t happen this way now. Is it that the ice is not longer a jailor, or is it that we are so threaded with fear that we never scoot anywhere much, least across what might be an illusion?

Today I noticed how much more frozen were the grasses and the trees. Yesterday it was like the First Night of a show, a promise and full of hope for a duration of weeks but with no surety. Frost, tiptoed into her place, delicate and fragile, ever looking to her back. Rain can come any day here, without a warning. Rain flips the clouds, warms them like a mother with intent until they cannot but spill their load over our land. She has done this for decades, centuries, arresting us, because when rain comes it never comes for a moment of delight and refreshment, but for days and weeks, like a jailor. We have to change our clothing, our boots, our timings. We play happy around her. We pretend we are fine with all this rain, sogging our land, our gardens and out woodpiles, but we feel the wet of her, the insulting slap of her minions against our face and the way they insinuate themselves into our bins and paths and up our skirts.

Now, we have Big Lockdown once more and the fear is back. Who, what, when, shall we, should we…..? All of that. The weather matters. In this frostdown, we can play like kids scooting across frozen freshwater lochs without fear; we can remind ourselves of past times when this threat lay not over our heads and we had no jailor. But life goes on and we know what we know now and it is not as it was. Lambing comes, markets must open, growers must grow or we will not find any grab on to the circle of life we know and understand. Our voices are quiet now. Muffled, unsure. Mine too. The constants in which we trusted are floating away. When I see, as I did this day, a fallen tree breaking a fence, I got it. I thought, nothing is permanent and this is exactly what we don’t want to see. I study it. It is a deer fence. Quite pointless in this place. Deer have no boundaries. Then I looked at the fallen tree, an ancient larch, possibly over 100 years old. Timely old soul. You just decided you had had enough. Respect. Sorry about the fence but it is far from pretty and old and possibly rotting.

Walking today, I could see that the delicate fingers of frost and ice had become determined. The grasses were thicker with frost, their stem bodies more assertive, catching more sun rainbows. The tablecloths of open space showed me milieu and yet I knew there were was a rebel of individuals standing there in triumph against Winter’s rages. And yet we concede to what we know and trust. And so I did. and so I understand. We cannot fight this jailor, this arresting, but as we walk through our days, confounded, altered, scared and angry, we can still remember who we were before and how we might grow beyond this prison. ice

I know. I know. Get lost with all positive talk. I agree. But, as I scratch my head and look at my wrinkles, I still think there is a light and bright out there and it just might be be up to those of us who can still, albeit mentally, scoot across a loch in the dying light, just once, just for now.

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Island Blog – Ice, Clarity and Skeletons

An ice-white day, from start to finish. When I awoke at 3.30 a.m. I walked out, barefoot, in search of the Aurora. She wasn’t playing, not yet. But if we are graced with such weather again, maybe next month, she will dance in the skies behind my home and I will watch her as my bare toes meld with the earth. I recall, well, coming outside from a robust and loudly musical ceilidh, to see her dance her lights across the stars, and for quite some time, until my mouth threatened to freeze wide open and my toes grew chilblains I wouldn’t meet till the morning. I will never forget that night. March 3rd 1993. Funny how dates can stick when others flounder grey and insubstantial within the soup of memory, like slime.

I walked the whole round today. I have avoided it for days, maintaining to myself that I am always tired and, thus, justified in my short walk which isn’t a walk at all, not really. Some of my friends, my sisters, my brother, speak most jauntily of a mere 7 miles and twice a day, and, whilst they cover this ground in my mind, I am left slouched and idle in my 20 minute trudge through a ‘not-walk’. So, this day, this ice day, this day of clarity when Ben Mhor, so clear and so near, looks like the whole mountain might suddenly appear in my kitchen, I decide not to agree with my trudge self, but, instead, to walk on. And, I am glad of it. I could feel the eyeball searing cold of the Atlantic hit me as I curved myself around the apex, even though there was not a stitch of wind, nothing even enough to shimmy a leaf. I paused, often, to really look. Striations of ice lay on the stand water, water that will, possibly, give birth to tadpoles in the Spring, whereas now it just reflects the sky in rainbow connections. The trees, skeletal and defying identification for I am great with leaves and considerably less great with bark and shape, lean over me like big sisters, strong and well rooted. The ground is caramel with fallen beech leaves, glowing eerily in the light of the sinking sun, sienna with a touch of ochre. The track is puckered with ridges of frozen mud, elevated by boot trudge, by the hooves of horses, the snatch-track of bikes and I feel a peaceful calm run through me. My pace is timpani inside the silence. A jay screeches, a woodpecker cuts the silence and I watch it lift and flip away. Ravens, their voices so confident, commenting on the day, black and slow in flight, flap lazily through the blue. Lady Larch, the queen of the woods, catches all the orange of the last sun. In a human world, she would be a model. She is certainly tall enough.

A constellation of star moss lines the track on my homeward walk. I stop to marvel at the frost-bright crowns each stem wears upon its head. On the track, the grey stones have grown an old man’s stubble, white with light, but, unlike an old man’s stubble, it melts beneath my fingers rendering the stones an immediate ordinary. I come back through my little wonky chops gate. The latch no longer meets its docking. T’is a winter thing. Come Spring, it will happily click shut again, but, for now, I must needs elevate one side of the gate in order to connect with the other. Inside the fire yet burns and as merrily as it always does, the smile of welcome; welcome home. I make tea and press play on my talking book, resuming my place as observer to another’s taut and well paced story. My story is not well paced. It is only in the re-telling of a story that any well-pacing can be brought to bear, as if distance from the drama matters. And, I concede, it does matter. In the thick of the drama, however undramatic this drama may be, everything is sharp, frozen even, and with no recourse to sensibility. On the other side of any story, the eyes of the observer are essential, even if the observer is she who lived through that story, or he for that matter.

Veg roasted, candles lit, fire encouraged into a new and warmer flame, I am content. I have walked further this day. I have watched ice halo star moss; I have laughed at my ignorance of trees without leaves and stood beneath those massive skeletons in awe. I saw the Atlantic buffet, albeit kindly, the basalt and granite shoreline; I studied the ice diamonds on the track, one I walked today. Walking on diamonds.

Every girls dream.

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Island Blog – What have you done?

These are my thinks on the aforesaid. It is a tendency of ours to focus and to rest on what was wrong, what we did wrong (if we are honest) as we reflect on the past year. Oh, we will, naturally, blame covid and isolation and limitation and deprivation, but once we are done with all that tiddelypom, we find ourselves confounded. There is nowhere else to go but to ourselves. We have this irritating thingy-whatsit inside us that whings like a drone above our thinking, looking at us from the eagle eye and in a most infuriating and revealing way. This eye sees us like we never never would wish to see ourselves.

And so. How do we walk the same terrain, for some of us pavements, for others of us, tracks and wilderness, find something about ourselves that makes us ok about who we are, or who we have been over this time of limitation, isolation and confoundment? The shouty media is all about elevation and the celebration of those who have done this elevation thing. We all admire them. They have marked our cards. They have caused us tears and smiles. But, what of we, who have just been…..we?

What I did this day, with some homework a few days before (hate homework) was this. I decided to make five points of personal success this past year. Oh, there are many more than five, but I found it interesting that that ‘five things challenge’ afforded me such disarray. I find myself easily locating my crimes, real or not but real to me. If someone challenged me to speak out the things I feel I have done well this past year, I would founder. How normal am I. I watch so may good people defect such an acknowledgement. I’m doing it too. And yet, and yet, I know what I have done. And, so do you.

My five things.

I came back from Africa so Popz wasn’t alone as he was the year before, cold and without me.

I was with him with the greatest respect and love throughout covid, and happily.

I found my words again. I had thought them lost.

I found my safe place in this home

I am learning who I am . Can ‘t say again, because I am not who I ever was.

Can you write your five things of achievement? Oh yes. You so can.

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Island Blog – Day One, Lucky Us

And so it begins. With this day. The only one we can ever be sure of, those of us who awaken into the morning of it. How shall we spend it, I wonder? For those of us of a merry disposition, the options are endless, for no matter our current limitations, we will see each moment unfold as an opportunity to smile. Even if the wood won’t split or the poached eggs slip off the spatula to land with a hot splat on the floor, spreading into a lake of liquid gold quite disproportionate to that of their polite containment in the poaching pan, even then a smile can be lifted to the face of one whose disposition is a merry one. But what of those who cannot find such merriment, at these times or, indeed, at any time? It must mean that life always feels cumbersome at best, vindictive at worst. I am sad for such people because I know that not one of us is born for such a life. Babies do bawl, yes, once the air hits their lungs but who is surprised at that? From that moment they are ready for anything, trusting and malleable and ready to learn whatever they are taught.

In my family, the teaching was not that the world owed us our lives, indeed not. If we wanted something we learned to work towards it and not to whine pleas through wobbling lips. We were taught to ‘get on with it’ should life throw us a curve ball and I am glad of it. This tuition, that sometimes felt cold and dismissive, gave us the chance to look to and then to develop our own aptitudes. When things went horribly wrong, and once the initial shock and panic had calmed a little, we found, and still find, ourselves looking this way and that for a way through, one that would, will, make everything better, if not best, once again. Damage is done and I would not argue with that, but to have a source of what is currently known as a Can Do attitude, is a much sought after blessing. I know this when I encounter souls who have no idea what to do next, and I am often surprised at the way they sink back in acceptance and defeat. I can make no sense of it, until I think it through, reminding myself of the look on their stricken faces, the paralysis in their bodies, the whimper of fear in their voices. They are not unable to find a way through, but simply were never taught how to dig the tunnel or scale the wall. Here is my chance to lend a hand. Here is my chance to offer support and encouragement to someone who did not benefit from the lessons I have learned from childhood. I have no idea of the constraints of their own, nor the joys nor the pains of it and I probably never will, but I can bring to them my merry disposition, my smile of encouragement, my shoulder to lean on.

Now that we are all, like it or not, landed in a new year, we can consider the gifts that we alone can bring to bear on a broken, yet beautiful, world. We can lift our eyes from our own piddling little life and offer ourselves to another in friendship, respect and recognition. No matter what colour, creed or disposition; no matter funds in the bank or a begging bowl; no matter that we live in a home with a view or inside a cardboard box in a shop doorway. What matters is this. We have made a massive balls up of collective living for long enough. We, whoever we are and wherever we lay our hats, are a collective. We may not be able to change the world, may not even believe that whatever efforts we make along that line are going to make one jot of difference, but we would be wrong in that thinking. Think pebble and ripples.

This year will be what we make it. A merry disposition is learnable, at any age. Life is not out to get us and nor does the world owe us a living. We are that Living.

Lucky us.

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Island Blog – Step Out of the Ordinary

Well, here we are……it all begins again…..or does it? To me this sounds like we are in Groundhog Year. But, but, but, no year is the same as the one past, not least because we move into it with more wrinkles, or less, more confidence, or less, more enthusiasm, or less. Whichever what way we approach a new year, a new chance for change, we are not the same people who left the old one. We have lost something, someone, or gained something and someone. We have moved house, changed jobs, learned something new, as I have. I have learned that this pair of spectacles work best in the kitchen for my mobile phone, whereas these ones with stronger lenses, resting in their red case in the sitting room, work best for my laptop and for lighting candles.

Over the years I have met what I saw as cynicism about things like birthdays, Christmas and the new year. We don’t acknowledge them, I heard say and I thought how very sad that is. For me, any chance of celebration is a chance to bring magic into a sad old world that might just say, as a new year approaches, Oh here we go again, in a maudlin sort of voice. I cannot, will not do this, not ever. If life is not about celebration then what the heck is it all about? We spend endless days inside the Januarys and Februarys of Ordinary. Surely we can rise and sparkle a few times a year? Or is it that we don’t have any sparkle left? Well, I have something to say about that. Sparkle, people, comes from inside us, from our child heart. Expecting it to come from outside of ourselves may well be the problem. If you want sparkle, then sparkle.

I wish you all the happiest and most marvellous 2021. I wish that you find your sparkle, even feeling foolish in doing so, regardless of being laughed at or mocked or rejected. Sparkle, people. This world needs the sparklers. We all have a part to play in this new year. What part will you play? Same old cynic or someone, however old, who can find the magic and bring it to the grey streets? We, who know what I am saying are precious. Be foolish, be fun, be spontaneous.

And very happy new year to you all.

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Island Blog – As Am I

As I wander through this grieving process, I know that a deal of that grieving is for myself. That might sound weird. I don’t consciously grieve for himself. Our life together was never on a clear wide road where we could see the views and the way ahead. It was more a stumble through the tangle woods, where sky is visible only through a knit of branches, the views, although yearned for, scarcely wide enough to be thus named. One of us always seemed to be trying to lose the other one, and, yet, afraid of exactly that.

This is the time of year to find snail shells. I think about the life that curled within those shells once, before even snails began to move more slowly, too slowly to avoid the hungry and vigilant thrush. I wonder if this snail was a happy snail, blissfully slithering across the ground, a living creature with eyes at the end of its tentacles, with a liver, a kidney, lungs and a heart. I know it has a memory, of sorts, one that will tell it where it has been and whether or not it would be wise to go there again. Such a tiny creature to be so well assembled. I found one, once, on the shore. It was almost bright pink, or, certainly, pinker than the ones I might find in my garden. Perhaps, I thought, it has eaten something down here, and, over an extended period of time that has elevated it from the other run of the mill snails, become a hybrid or royalty. It was certainly something to take back home and to put on display.

Each day wanders along as it will and I consider my feelings, notice them. The one that most surprises me is anger. I am angry for my past. This, I tell myself, and roundly, is surely the road to madness, for who can do a thing to change their past? But, I say, turning my head to look back, all that stumbling through the tangle woods seems like such a lunatic way to live a marriage. Who would ever choose this when just up there lies the clear wide road with views and visibility and service stations every 50 miles or less? I’m not sure we choose it. What we do is choose each other and then find ourselves in a Somewhere we would not have chosen, had we been availed of consequence. Too late, mate.

The anger I feel is busy with criticisms, mostly of me. I am almost word perfect in criticising me, as my friends tell me. This anger is like a catherine wheel that shoots off a post and spirals dangerously close to whoever stands too near. Children for example. Why did I not do this for this one when………Why did I not take action for this one then……Why did I accept this, or that, or this again and again and again? Oh, I know that this sort of self-flagellation will only ever hurt myself but it keeps a-coming, like Christmas and Fridays and lunchtime. At a sensible and logical level, it makes sense to dispel with such…..what….self-indulgence? Put like that I am right with you, but feelings will arise no matter how much logic and sensibility I bring to the table and this anger keeps on arising until I want to bash it over the head with a mallet just to silence it. I know there are others, unlike me, who can address life in general in a way most perfunctory. Their logic is king over their feelings. They can decide to deal with things in a way that never, ever, allows them to indulge in any collapse into confusion. Why would they? It would be (and I agree) a complete waste of time and just might mean they miss the start of Countdown. But I cannot seem to be that way. I am the one who scrambles and scrapes over sharp rocks and who slips down every crevasse, who flounders in the power of an incoming tide and who cannot sleep as the gibbous moon fills to her fullness, lighting up the sky like a super trooper on steroids.

As I walk today, the ground is icy. One degree the whole day long and the temperature will drop this clear wide night. Frost will sparkle on the ground, diamonds, twinkling. The woods are silent. No birds. The branches of the trees hold ice particles at the very tips of their fingers, droplets of water halted and frozen, natural jewels, catching the slow pinking of the sunset and making tiny rainbows. Deeper in, the silence is all around me. I hear only the scrunch of my boots and the rush of an incoming tide. The woods are mysterious, elegiac and waiting.

As am I.

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Island Blog – Shape Shift, Jump and Dream

I woke this morning with thoughts of a lowly nature, aka, negative. Although I find the way our culture always veers from one extreme to another, from superb to ghastly, from white to black without any noticement of the myriad greys betwixt and between, infuriating, I cannot easily find said greys between negative and positive. Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that your light is either on or it’s off and were you to affix your wires wrongly, you might explode.

So, back to the negative thoughts. I am unworthy of joy, of any good thing coming to me; I am not God’s favourite wee girl; I do not deserve to be happy. That sort of negativity. On rising into my frocks and warm woolly jumper (positive word, for one cannot jump much when feeling un-jumpworthy), I considered my thinking. We humans have approximately 6000 thoughts each day. If, I mused, each thought was worth, say, £1, then by close of play this night, I will have earned myself £6,000, whether negative or positive in construction. It is quite a thought, and that’s another £1 in the bag. However, this amount of cash in my mental bank account does not determine my level of happiness nor my sense of well-being (another phrase I detest). So, how might I both earn the cash and update my bank of happiness? Let’s break it down.

I have one egg left. Negatively speaking. But at least I have one egg left. Positive update. My pile of logs is outside and it’s raining. But I have logs and a waterproof jacket. I am not feeling like sewing today. I have sewing to occupy my hours. My audio book is about to finish and I have used my free credit for this month. I have access to many more, some of them free.

I am sure you are getting this. As I turn around my thinking, I begin to feel much better. Just look at how lucky I am, how blest, how filled with abundance in my life! I even feel like a wee jump or two, and all I have done is to re-arrange my thoughts, to shape shift them. It is the easiest thing in the world to do, this inner flipping, but I must be vigilant and diligent and on the ball with myself in order to avoid the claggy bog. And I want to avoid it. Life is short (another detestable cliche) and I wish my own life to mean something to me, not just to other people. For most of this short life I have made others my priority. Now there is just me and it would be so easy to fall into despair and pointlessness. I will not do it. It becomes a game. A thought comes in, earning me cash. I look it straight in the eye. You do not serve me, I say out loud to no-one there. I shall flip you. And, thus I earn another £1.

Today I plan to apply for a renewal on my passport. On reading the instructions online, I discover that the photo of this old girl must be taken with no background at all, no pictures, plants or shadows. A cursory glance around my rooms tells me the photo won’t be taken here. And, there’s another thing. My photo must be captured from 5 feet away. Now even I will find it hard to be 5 feet away from myself. Well, dammit, she says, negatively. So, plan B must involve another person who could easily stand 5 feet away from me. I can remove pictures from a blank wall, not smile, not look away, stand absolutely still and wait for the click. However miserable I look in this stand-still-don’t-smile photo, the image will not stop my thinking. All the while I will be adding cash to my inner bank as I travel back to Africa, or to Spain, or to wherever the heck I choose. I will be walking on board, showing my blank face to some official, endeavouring, as I always do, to make him or her smile and failing as I always do. I will come through passport control with anticipation butterflying beneath my ribcage, my eyes searching for that well-loved face, anticipating that bear hug. This time will come again, one day, and I just earned myself another bunch of cash.

Meanwhile, I will continue to shape-shift my thoughts. I will listen to audio books whilst I sew and jump and dream of the lands of Faraway where we can all be our own selves once again, when we can look up into the wide open sky and know we got through this, not by doing nothing, but by doing absolutely everything we could possibly do in the most positive of ways.

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Island Blog – Up to Me

Morning has broken on this beautiful island and I am ready for the day. I write down all my sins of yesterday, something I do in order to release them. I see them fall away into the earth as neutral energy. Any actions I regret, thoughts that don’t serve me and, in particular, any poor-little-me conversations with my inner self, are all dealt with pre the boiled egg. It has become a habit. Once a habit is formed, it begins to trust in me and grows roots whilst pushing up a bit of green to catch any sunlight that might just be available in between hail showers. Life is like this, I think. I may be alone with nobody now to correct the trim of my sails with a raised eyebrow or a ‘shush’ or a ‘do you mind if I tell you something’ pre-cursor to criticism, but I am still responsible for my behaviour at all times. I yawn. It was so much easier when the judge lived with me (not that he always donned his wig and banged his gavel) to live in a well-established state of defence and defiance. Now that all of me is down to, well, all of me, I can spin a bit on my axis, if I am honest.

When everything, every moment, is my own choice, I no longer have to fight. I longed for that back when the naughty step grew flat and submissive beneath my butt. My voice does not rise in a whine and nor does my wordsmithing brain need to find big long words to justify or explain myself, as I sought to confound him with eloquence and delivery. Arguing with myself takes longer, seeing as both of us are wordsmithing away with equal power and a shared determination not to lose the battle, and it seems pointless anyway, because I know what I am going to say and what the impact of it will be and so does she. It’s like playing scrabble with myself.

Once I have written down my sins and before delivering them, mindfully, back into the earth as neutral energy, I eat the bit of paper. Biro tastes better than felt tip pen, I have discovered, even if it does turn my tongue black. The symbolism amuses me. Eat your sins, swallow, digest and let them go. Then decide not to sin again. Roger that, I say, even as I know that I must stick to my habit forming programme if I wish to avoid falling into the same sinship today. To be honest, my ‘sins’ are more like errors of judgement but I use the ‘sin’ word because it fits me like a crown, or it used to. Believing that you never quite get it right for decades makes it harder to budge such a belief, for it has big strong roots and a good ear for triggers. The cadence of a voice can flip doodle me; certain words or the catch of a sideways look; a silence; a less than welcome ‘Welcome!’ And these are fed by my incredible imagination, one that scoots me from Alice to the Wicked Witch of the West in a heartbeat. I hear what I think I want to hear even if I never want to hear it again.

What to do?, I ask myself, but she is as clueless as me and just sits there looking like a spare part, her face vacant. Well, someone needs to think this through and that’ll be me and so I write down everything from my thoughts, through to my ‘sins’, and on beyond to my goals and aspirations. Then I jot down the ‘how to’ of each and I’m already rolling my eyes at all that homework. But homework always was and is the key to change as I discovered by not doing it when at school. When Penny or Liz or Melanie charged forth in History or Maths or even Latin, with smug smiles and a pat on the head from Teacher, I was sent to the naughty step. What I didn’t seem to understand is that being a rebel is all very well providing you have a cause, and know clearly what that cause is, the how to and what and why of it. I have learned since those days that homework is essential, whatever life I choose to live, that daily practice (yawn) is the key to that door into a new place, and the only one. I honestly believed that something or someone would come to save me, make me happy and free of sins, but, of course, this is just a fairytale and never happens to nobody, including me.

So, once again, and with renewed energy, I start stepping through the morning, the hail stones, the beauty of this sea-girt land. I notice everything (excluding the un-hoovered carpet which is an exception to all rules) mindfully. I notice how I feel and what I think. I notice what tries to push me forward into action. Will it serve me, make me feel good about me, ease my troubled conscience? If t’is a no, then no it shall be, even though it is much harder to stay strong when there is only me and myself watching.

The naughty step is lonely now. I feel a bit sorry for it and sit on it now and again whilst I read from a book on self-improvement or happiness or self-control for we are long time friends. Then I look up and I smile out into the empty room, remembering that if it is to be, it is now entirely and exclusively up to me.