Author: judyfairbairns

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Island Blog – Lightcast

The clouds are curved like greying lips, white mountains frothing up at their backs. Light, always strong, pushes through in slits and slants and sudden glories, whole and holding the sky for just a few moments. Further back the blue is stern and cold, sullen and persistent. To my right, seaward, the grey carpet threatens. More hail? More soggy snow that lumps to the ground only to melt into an unattractive slosh? But it is all fur coat and no nickers and comes to nothing. A comment unheard or ignored by most, like a swagger. I watch the sky, gulls white against the grey, lifting, luffing, tilting the breeze above the sea-loch, now calming down from the full moon rise and diminish. Must be restful for the saltwater, the times in between new and full moons, when the snitchy witchy fingers rile the waters up, rile us up.

My walk today was soggy. I notice big paw prints in the mud and remember the wolf prints I saw from the cable car in the Alps. I almost laugh. Big here is not big there. Wolf prints are huge and pronounced. Captured in the snow, they show me every part of the pad, the claws sinking deep, clear and almost musical. I think about this. Do the individual ‘fingers’ lower at different times……the outside first, then the next and so on or is it a solid and uniform punch to the ground? As I walk, I consider my own toes inside my own boots. For me, it is a rounding from little toe to big, but almost instantaneous, happening in a few seconds and without my conscious connection. It kind of changes how I walk, thinking this way. The dog prints are slurry, slipped and shifted by the bog and the mud, slewed and stretched into unreality.

The bracken still talls copper aside the track. It is amazing how strong those stalks are. I remember gathering them with a friend, every day, in the cold and snow-wet, as bedding for her dairy cow, their only source of milk, living as they did a great distance from help, or milk. We gathered in armfuls and tramped the hill ground to the stall that was the cow’s nightlay, laying out the bracken until the layer was thick enough for a bed. It took both of us a daylight. As I left I wondered how she managed it on her own. But she was tough and determined and loved her cow so I guess she managed. No lorry would deliver straw or hay, not down that precipitous fall of a track, the length of it, the fall away just there and the drop over 60 feet. When they moved, the furniture van came so far and then stopped. No chance, they said. So, they shifted their lovely furniture from van to tractor bed and had to hump and shift and position each piece by themselves. As I already said, my friend was tough. There was a light in her that no arrogant grey could snuff out. Salut Jenny.

Light thinks me. It is a constant. It is there when it chooses. No dark can ever defeat it. Once light is cast, darkness defers and retreats. It is the same in a person, in a nightmare, in the dark reaches of a night. Light will always win. Always. However, we can seek light in things that are not of us. In various and ‘ya-di-ya’ instant lifts, like buying more stuff. We can find it, momentarily in a new relationship, in the trust of it, in a something or a someone and that could well be real. Or it could be the dark, kidding us. Because we, as humans, and particularly now in this covid restraint, are hungry for light, any lights we can make a mistake. I tell myself this….remember who you are, who you have invested in, whom you have learned to be and when that lightcast comes at you, in whatever form, pause and then pause again.

Then decide.

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Island Blog – Buzzard One

Earlier in the Summer, there was a young buzzard that wheeled and crash landed in trees, all a-feather and gripping talons and noise, floundering, gathering itself together as if nobody had taught it how. I marvelled it didn’t flip 180 degrees at times and considered how interesting and how bizarre the world would look like when upside down and hanging on to a tree. I remember it. Not as a buzzard, but as a child, upside down, held fast by my knees, on our metal climbing frame at the end of the garden, far enough away from the adults so as not to cause them noise. It was beside the hut, that place where apples and onions sat on wooden slats to keep them air-flowed and individual. Individual, it seemed, was critical to survival. As it is, now, for this buzzard, as it is for me and for you.

In the world of buzzard, the parents have flown. Or, is it that the mother and son/daughter have flown, or the father with a ditto combo? Who knows? The buzzard does not speak to me. However, I can report that it no longer lands all a-feather and with no speed control. In fact, it is mellow and effortless in the air, lifting and luffing with the capricious winds and the bend and flex of the sea-blown trees, as if it had learned their language and can now speak it easy. It leaves me behind. I can only watch it lift and luff and spread its glorious wings to protect it from both the ground and the sky. I watch the way its feathers flex to deflect and to catch the wind. Flowing down from the hill on which I live, it will meet catch-winds, sideways blasts, warm air rising and cold air pulling down and it adapts to that with barely a murmur, without a sound.

Where did that sound go? It mewled and mewled every day in the early Summer. Was it calling for mummy or was it asserting its dominance in the reign of the sky, taking its place, demanding it? The mewling sounded so plaintive, so pathetic and yet my ears don’t know what they hear around animals. I cannot speak their language. And, yet, it teaches me. And I learn this; that life lives herself on, moving from an old body to a younger one, and that is it life herself that teaches. We all have to crash land, all a-feather in our lives and, some of us many times, as things change and as what we knew as fact crumbled into dust. Now, this magnificent creature is silent. I watch it every day for it seems to want to stay and that tells me this is the young one sticking with what it knows, what is familiar. It flies low. It flies just above me in the trees as I walk, just watching. It might stay there, watching me, watching it, if the noisy terrier didn’t chase it along the track, barking as if barks would scare it away.

It thinks me. Barks, wind, lift and luff, life and being alone. I’m ok with all of it for it reminds me of me. If I can do all of the above and still hold on to who I am and what the world is, then I have all that I need. If, in my grounded mind, which, btw, has never been all that grounded, can move through the air, through the change and the moods of wind, sky, tide and tree-stops with. conscious grace, always learning, always adapting now matter how old I am, then I am akin with the universe. I know that I know nothing. I know that I must always be open and ready to learn. My old ma would have sniffed at such nonsense. In that generation the telling was that you learned, then accepted and fixed. I think, like the wild things, that my generation is different, more aware, more ready to live mindfully. And I celebrate that. I may be alone, as many are (or feel) alone, but this does not take our strength from us. In fact, it might just make us wilder, more questing, more adventurous.

The mewling buzzard is silent now. Not subdued, not at all, but living completely, in itself, in this world, as it is and as the world is right now. I’m in.

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Island Blog – Life, Death and Corsets

I thought it would get better, exponentially, as if I had a sore toe, with rest and chicken broth and good nursing care. But this is not a sore toe. This is a yawning maw of days ahead, learning, reluctantly, to begin a new life. Did anyone think this through? If I was 25 again, wiry and with skin that actually fitted my bones, then possibly the prospect of ‘beginning a new life’ might just have sounded like fun. Now, it just feels scary. We get so set in our ways, do we not, even without clocking that this is happening, until it stops, dead, and the future is anyone’s guess.

As a body ages, we deal with it. We harrumph into bigger knickers and aggressive support bras and cover up bits that we used to show off, quite the thing. Our frocks lengthen. Old knees are a bit ‘witchy’ after all. Make up takes longer to apply and should only happen at all in full daylight and with a magnifying mirror. I have seen some shockers out there in my time, orange tipped noses and the face stopping at the jaw as if it wasn’t part of the neck at all, apples on cheeks and lips leaking towards the nose. A wearer of jeans will note that her bottom is sinking. She might need a belt, but that can become a hazard too as it fights mightily to keep a connection between buttocks and the middle bit we used to call a waist. It is so depressing to accept we need either a larger size, or, worse, old woman jeans with legs wide at the top and enough room in the upper part for most of a weekly shop. Fingers look like twigs or sausages and there is no going back.

All of this laughs me. I have no problem at all about ageing. In fact, I am rather proud of it, to have got this far, to be able to bear witness to such an extraordinary change. Animals don’t do it this way. Dogs or cats might get thinner, show some white hairs, but the rest, the wild things or even the not wild things, like sheep or cows just slow down and then stop, dead. I have been gifted the chance to wonder at the conflict between my body and my mind. As a ‘bereaved’ I know that the fears I have are all about my bodily capability and never my mind. My mind is strong and capable, versatile and inventive, but my body may not be able to follow my lead. Ah, I say to myself, I don’t like that. The answer comes back, What are you going to do about it? (Why does she always ask me that irritating question?) I round on her and ask her direct. She says nothing. Just throws me a wry smile like she knows everything and I don’t, which is probably the truth of it.

So it is just us, we humanoids who notice and wail about ageing, or deny it altogether. If I say to someone (is there anyone left out there?) that I am old, they flap like birds in a stramash and witter at me that I am not old, that I am as old as I think, that there are years left in me. That sort of twaddle. I like being old, I say. It means I have really lived and better, survived when so many others have not. There are my peers and younger, good strong loving impossible individuals who fell at a fence. Characters, warm-blooded feisty and hopeless at life as most of us are, getting it wrong more than right, full of regrets and defiance, energy and exhaustion, and yet they forged their trails when they found themselves in a position of responsibility for others, living out that life out in colour and rage and joy and fear and were quite marvellous at the whole thing.

Being stilled is sobering. From a huge and impossible presence in another’s life, in others’ lives, to a flatbed, to pale and cold, to gone. It will take longtime to accommodate that thought, never mind allow it to move its long stay luggage in. Hard, indeed, initially, to remember the actually there person who now is not. But he was always there, like, forever, through my this and through my that, knowing my faults (!) and my successes and very probably highly opinionated about both.

So, now it’s up to me. Me and myself and she is doing a grand job with her snorting and her opinions and her wry smile. She keeps me right and, don’t tell her, I am glad of her company. We are 2 in 1 even if I baulk at the thought of it. I spend much time working on exponentiation. It keeps my mind bright whilst she swans around all febrile and wispy and lifting those eyebrows to the clouds. She hasn’t aged, you see. She is forever young and full of beans and quite infuriating as a result but I do tap her energy as my skin fights to escape my skeleton and I am in danger of a skin puddle.

I remember my first corset, so excited I was, shopping with my ma in the lingerie department of a shiny store. It was so white, with little roses in just the right places and stretchy enough not to constrict my breathing. Ma told me she was not so lucky. Hers had 25 hooks you could never see in the dark and if you got one wrong you yawled sideways for the whole day. The world of corsetry was kinder in my day. I do remember wondering why I needed one at all. What was wrong with my wonky body anyway? I was shushed and marched on. It was the way of things.

Isn’t life always just the way of things? Death too?

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Island Blog – Kicks, Tracks, a Grandson and a Wolf

I remember, once whilst feeding the calves turnips I had pushed and argued with, until the old cutter conceded and obliged those frozen rounds into long shards, being kicked in the thigh. I was walking behind the long line of twitching butts, never a good plan around such creatures, and the blow send me backwards into the muck. Stunned, at first, I smiled despite the shout of pain and was up on my feet again in a nanosecond, before the urinary wet absorbed me completely. It was my fault, my mistake. I had gone too close, talking to these young things as if they were my own young things who would never have lashed out in such a way. Had they done so, the reprobation might have pushed them right back to touch. It taught me caution and a respect for animals who, whilst they generally might comply, still have boundaries.

Today the sky is light and blue, the sunset pinking the hills beyond the sea-loch, darkening them in a pen line I had never managed to achieve on canvas. It just always looked like a pen line and nothing like the real thing. We have had no rain this day, the first for many weeks and everything changes on such a day. The temperature is lower, the likelihood of frost more likely and the light everywhere is sharper, clearer, more defined. The sea-loch is striated with lines of salt water invasion as the incoming tide makes her name known. The fresh water resists and the result is a tapestry of arguments, beautiful in conflict, sea froth a puzzled creature caught up in a battle not its own. Bubbles of creamy lift form eloquent shapes above the melee and the gulls cry our their endless argument with pretty much everything.

As I walked along the track I heard birdsong, a rapture of it and something I haven’t heard for a long time. Even though it is a winter song now, it is still a heart lift. I watched them flip and dart through the skinny purple limbs of the silver birch with her witches fingers and decided I would cut some for a winter vase, maybe with twinkly-winkly lights, only, that is, if I can finally get some that aren’t cold green despite their warm light promise. Maybe I will and maybe not. They look so stunning just where they are as I duck down and squint through them to the sky beyond. Horse hoof prints mud the track, dipping it enough for me to know they have been here before me. It thinks me.

I oft look for tracks. Had I been a different soul in a different time, my work would have been tracking. Not for gain or destruction but just for interest. Every time I walk here, on a track I know so well, traversed by people and dogs I know so well, I still notice everything. A broken branch, leaves of a tree that isn’t here, where the land falters after rain and when it rises again; where the deer move over a drystone wall, following a leyline, one that has been in place for generations, regardless of human boundary settings. Nosing into the woods, I find a broken stem, a pinch of coarse hair on a branch. Deer moving, moving whilst I sleep, secret, ancient.

When I went to the Alps last February with family, there were two of us who didn’t want to ski. Me and my grandson, the only grandson among nine granddaughters. He and I love books and curiosity. So, whilst the others spent ages pulling themselves into all kinds of warm kit and heading off, we read, or talked. At lunchtime, we agreed to meet them at the top for lunch. Neither of us fancied the lift. All that swinging and shouting and noise. I don’t like that one. He said. I looked at it, all grey and full of people in full voice. Nor me, I replied. We were silent for a bit, me thinking, How the heck do I get him up there? Then he said, pointing to the little red bubble, But I would go up in that one.

It was small and quiet. As we lifted up and up and up, I looked down. Look, Oran……Wolf tracks! He was captivated. When we arrived in the noise and scatter and speakers and bars and noise, I said, with no conviction and surely anticipating a great belly laugh of disdain, We saw wolf tracks on the mountain on our way up, big there were, massive, and on virgin snow! The response surprised me. Oh, yes, they said. There are wolves up here.

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Island Blog – Rest and be Thankful

It is 4pm, or it was when I thought to write this. Then two lovely men delivered me a huge double glazed window and quite entertained me with their efforts and genuine smiles. It lifted my spirits, even if it was pitch black out there and they were two hours late. Yawning like a giant the evening feels like a big black hole, and, yet, I am warm, well lit with twinkly winkly lights and fat church candles on pedestals. I have good food, a merry little log burner and, now, a huge double glazed window for the fitting. We are all safe. You will guess there is a ‘but’ and here it comes.

I notice, these days of early widowhood, the shock of sudden absence. Oh, I am still here and so it Poppy dog, although she is not the whole shilling these days. Grieving, perhaps. I don’t question her, nor she me. We just abide in this strange new world of silence. This silence is fillable, of course, with music, talking books, lovely delivery men, the postie and passers by, people I know and could have rushed out to hug, would have. Can not now. We communicate through arm flapping and blown kisses and they are gone. I turn back. To the kitchen, to the log burner, to the Poppy dog, to good food for one and the evening yawns on.

I think back to all the times I was irritated, scratchy, demanding my own space, yelling for the kids to stop yelling, throwing out barking dogs into the night for a cool down and completely engaged with a life I did not appreciate enough. Now I realise how precious that time was; now I realise, moving on through the years as children left home, one by one until there was just me and just him, how precious that was too. My dad once said to me, as we chatted while he packed for another long haul trip to sort rich men’s chickens, usually in the desert, that it was quite something to be in that place. He questioned the rightness of it. We met and fell in love, he said. We brought forth children (he was a man for uptown wordage) and then got on with life. As they grew wings and flew away we found ourselves staring at each other and thinking…..remind me…….who are you? I had no experience to lean on and probably didn’t get it, but I do now and I did as that time came for me. When the ones who kept us together with all their teenage opinions and rights and that passion to change the world, left, it was just us and we were strangers. We had both gone through things together and many things alone. This will not be breaking news to any who recognise this awkward place of reconnecting, or not. Over those turbulent and demanding years it is inevitable that a couple will pull apart, pull together and pull apart again. We change according to our circumstances and circumstances alter facts. I was this young woman, he was that young man and then kids blew the whole dynamic to powder and shrouds. We lost ourselves to them, on both sides of the bed.

Now I sit here in the early dark (by 3.30 pm here) and consider it all. I can do this now with yawning evenings and so many days ahead of just me and just Poppy. I took the time with him for granted, those latter days when he was always here and so was I. Do you think I could shift this planter to a better place for wind protection? Can I go for a walk now (looking at those burgeoning rain clouds) or should I wait? He would check the sky and say, You have ten minutes, or, if you wait for five, this shower will clear and give you twenty. Shall we play scrabble, eat this, watch that, talk about this child, or that? It was like nothing, like breathing. It came and went as a natural part of a naturally shared day. Now it is just me and Poppy and she doesn’t play scrabble, nor care much what I eat or watch and has a similar diffidence to incoming rain. But it isn’t just someone missing. It is the historical other part of me, the one who, for all his faults and failures that infuriated me, the ones I commented on, sulked at, stomped around in, in loud boots and all to no avail, it is he who is missing and there are times the silence is so loud I am deafened.

I don’t want him back. Poor soul at the end, he had had enough and chose to go. But the yawning evening speaks volumes about all I took for granted, all that bothered me at surface level, all I had no idea I would miss so much some day. So, my point is this. If anyone out there stops to think about how lucky they are to have a someone, even an infuriating someone who shares their history, then it might be time to recognise that, to be thankful and, better to speak it out. When I ranted on about himself to my old mum, years ago and once she was widowed, she rounded on me. At least you know he is coming home, she said.

I rest my case.

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Island Blog – Coming out, Irony and Eye rolling

‘Coming out’ means something in contemporary language, I know, and I don’t mean it that way. However, the process of coming out, of walking into the spotlight and of facing down the imagined and, perhaps, very real reactions this coming out may bring is what I am doing.

Since a long time I have self-medicated with red wine, too much of it. I had good reason, I told myself, as I pushed on through a difficult marriage and then dementia caring, but that good reason has lost its truth. To continue to self medicate when the husband is gone, along with any caring demands, is just lunacy. I don’t want it any more. I don’t want the guilt, regret and sheer terror each morning after a bad sleep full of nightmares. So, I have reached out to an addictions counsellor and our work is beginning. Although I am 67 and old (in my opinion) it doesn’t mean life is now a slow slip down the slope, not at all. There is another book in me, after all, more songs perhaps. I haven’t sat down at my piano for ages. It sits there, open-mouthed, ebony and ivory and beckoning. Why on earth not? Well, I am guessing that this self-absorption is taking over my mind on a daily basis. How blissful might it be to just get the heck on with life, with Life? I imagine wonderful, freeing, energising, peaceful.

I write this because I am betting there are many folk out there caught in a similar trap. Addictions come in many shapes and sizes. Drinking, drug use, running, over-eating or eating disorders, spending money, and many more. It isn’t anything to be ashamed of because every single one of these is birthed from a deep inner pain, one that may well date back to childhood. At first, it feels great. At second it creeps silently in to claim more territory and before you know what’s happened, you cease to exist without it, cannot imagine a day without this addiction. However, the great news is that there is help out there, gentle, empathetic, intelligent guidance and support. Hallelujah!

I don’t feel shame writing this. Living covertly, unauthentically, is crippling and there comes a time to stand in that spotlight, to come out, not to shock others but to admit to being human and caught in a trap. So here I am. I know that once a person has the courage to admit, to speak out and to lay themselves bare, the healing has already begun, even if there appears to be no way ahead. This is faith. Faith in self, in life, in the power of experienced guidance and in believing that, no matter how old a person is, there is plenty more to achieve in this single glorious life. And, just maybe, someone else will read this and know that they, too, can claim back the ground if they can just find the courage to come out.

My son, Ruari, has just won the Spectator’s Innovative Entrepreneur of the Year for Scotland and Northern Ireland with his work on encouraging and supporting people (of all ages) who want to stop drinking too much; to turn their lives around. Check him out at http://www.oneyearnobeer.com.

The eyes of my brain are rolling with the irony.

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Island Blog – Eating Crow and the Saltbreaker

This morning opens wide, unfractured by rain, rain we have enjoyed for what feels like weeks, although it is probably only days. Funny that, how much heavy rains weigh on a soul. The ground is soft and boggy, the puddles digging the ground deep as if a mighty spoon had dipped at random into the earth, tasting it, and leaving we-with-legs at a disadvantage. In among the trees, the stand-water is peaty brown and clear but for the drowning mosses, a vibrant green for now. Coppery beech leaves and sienna needles lay on their backs looking up. I see the sky in the gaps between, the arms of the overhanging trees, bare now, skeletal. On the track the puddles are the colour of milky coffee and blank, saying nothing much. The road mix does that when so rudely rained upon, releasing the concrete from the concrete bits and, then sulking. Jumping in these scooped out holes can be risky. I have lost half a small child before now and had to carry her home soaked and wailing in fury at this assault on her trusting young self.

Along the shore the freshwater springs bubble in excitement. They love heavy rain, as do the burns that slip over old rocks, tumbling into a wild froth as they plash into deep pools. Under the track, over the track and down the track this clear clean life-giving water flows with confidence, pausing only to navigate a fallen branch. I wade in to remove it and am rewarded with the music of uninterrupted water flow. I think on the endlessness of such a flow on the island and it gives me comfort. I tell myself that the turning of the world, the rise and fall of the tides, the lift and glow of Father Sun and Mother Moon all contrive to assure me that no matter what goes on for me, for the rest of us living out our lives, all these are magnificent constants. For all my sins and mistakes, for all my errors of judgement, my flapdoodles, my panics, doubts and fears, the earth keeps on keeping on. And I am instantly at peace. After all, can I add one day to the rest of my life by worrying about it? Obviously not! I am surely better to engage with the magnificence of life, reminding myself by walking out into its ever-changing beauty, regardless of the weather, paying focussed attention to every single thing I see; being curious; stopping to really look and to notice how I feel about what I see.

There is a crow in my garden. It entertains me daily as it heralds its appearance with flaps and caws. First it lands on the fence and looks rather stunning against the cloud-shift sky. It eyes me, black jet, and obviously decides I am no threat. Then it performs a loop and twist until it (just) manages to duck under the roof of the bird table, landing clumsily among the spread of songbird seed. It’s songbird seed, I tell it through my window, not crow seed. In fact, I thought crows favoured carrion and rubbish from dustbins. Not songbird seed. It ignores me and scoops up beakfuls of what does not belong to it, quite without guilt. I wonder what it’s like to be without guilt? I have no idea, being more than ready to feel it most of the time. Eating crow. It thinks me. The past is, well, past and I can do diddly squat about it beyond giving it my appreciation and gratitude. It did, after all, get me this far. It made me who I am and I am mostly okay with I Am. But, and here’s the rap, I must be consciously aware all of the time, of the power of inner heavy rain and drowning puddles. This is my work. This is my purpose. I am that purpose and from me will come many wonderful things as long as I am vigilant and curious, grateful and looking up and out, always ready to learn.

When saltwater meets fresh they work together. Saltwater is dense, heavy and a pushy creature; freshwater, bubbling spring water from deep deep down inside the earth is lighter but an equal to its cousin. Fresh water dilutes salinity, floats on top of the mighty ocean, reflecting the sky, bringing in nutrients and stories, creating more. The saltbreaker. I like that, this synergy, this endless, boundless wealth of water, and it reminds me that all of this is living inside me too. The ebb and flow of days, the wax and wane of the moon, the golden glow of an inner sun, the healing rain and the odd crow.

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Island Blog – Looking through Windows

My impatience, during this ‘grieving’ thing, oft gets the better of me. Why am I not sorted yet? After all, I knew he was going to die earlier than he might have done because dementia grabbed him by the throat. Why do my emotions swing like an overly excited pendulum, from an inner darkness to the bright light of freedom and opportunity, not once a day, not twice, but non flaming stop?

‘Ah, you humans……..don’t you know that your time is not my Time? My Time is a very different creature, one unfettered by schedules and earthly dates. You expect things to fit in with your plans but this is not how life works’. And that is that, apparently. I know it has only been just over 3 months. I know that those who have gone before me will say it will take 12 to 18 months to re-locate myself, not least because the last time I knew myself was almost 50 years ago; that time when I could say “I’ without being sternly reminded that ‘I’ is now ‘We’ and that most of that ‘We’ was on his terms of employment. To be honest, the ‘I’ I was back then was a strange creature, lost in Wonderland, curious, yes, but scared of my own shadow, unlike Alice. Understandable, then, that the promise of safety and shelter beneath the ‘We’ umbrella drew me in and out of that sharp, cold teenage rain. But now I am required to find myself again.

I didn’t think I was lost, not really. Despite the rollercoaster of marriage, children and rules, I knew who I was. I was a wife and a mother. I was cook and cleaner, business gofer, facilitator of others’ dreams and goals, full of sparkle and energy and quite able (a lot of the time) to ignore any inner cries for escape. Now all those memories face me through each window. Hallo, they say, noses pressed to the glass. We are all still here, you know, Mrs, not Mrs anymore. I don’t want them peering in at all. I don’t want to look out upon them all tattered and gnarled and persistent, jigging with that glee that thinks me of bullies. I could close the curtains, t’is true, but that doesn’t mean they go away. I could ignore them but, well, ditto. Apparently I just have to let them have their day and to keep walking down this new path.

I remember, well, looking through windows and wishing I could fly south with the geese. I would even have accepted ‘north’ in the darkest of times, but I am a grounded woman and we tend not to be flyers, Mary Poppins notwithstanding. However, inside a mind, the opportunities are endless. I know now that the worst failures and the best adventures happen inside a mind. In there, all choices and decisions are made. Right argues with wrong, downs argue with ups and light dances with dark. It doesn’t really matter what physically happens inside a life if the inner windows are kept clean and clear. Demons, bullies, failures, regrets come to us all and it is up to each one of us as to how we empower or disempower them. On the side of Light, we have the same choices. Although nobody can sustain a positive outlook on everything and everyone all of the time, it is possible to develop a strong reserve of endorphins so that, when the demons dance and cackle through the windows of a mind, a person can just watch without attachment or engagement.

Especially if those windows are triple glazed.

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Island Blog – How to see Rain

In the rain, an ever present presence in an island life, things look brighter, not so much through a window, when it just looks dreich and dull and unappealing, but out in it and engaged with it. No waterproof keeps all of the rain out for rain is a pushy wee so-and-so. It gets down a neck, into a boot, up a skirt and even manages to defy the velcro go-away fixing at my wrists. Once rain is in, I can feel a sense of acceptance. Ok, so you win…..let’s walk, shall we? Splash, squish, slop and try to avoid the grabbing fingers of bramble thorns and flopped over bracken. It amazeballs me how much water a skinny flopped over branch can retain and how generous it is at sharing said water.

It has rained, now, for many days. November seems doomed as a mostly wet month. I wonder if November is okay with that? You have to accept it, I say, because that is the only way to be marvellous even if you feel like you are drowning. I know you would rather be May or June, but those spots are taken. You have the name you have been given and the place you must inhabit. Think yourself lucky you aren’t February. I would hate to be February, or January for that matter. A lucky escape, I say.

This attitude is one I adopt for myself. In life, a life that can throw all manner of tiddleypom at a person, that person still has a choice. If I actually look at the extraordinary beauty of rain, drifting like a murmuration across the sea-loch, my heart lifts. When I stop to look at the brilliance of apple green moss or the diamond droplets on a field spider web I see perfect art, natural art, Mother Nature’s achievements. I stop noticing the ingress of rain, its initial shiver down my neck or up my frock and think instead on how my body warms the droplets almost instantly. Then I remember this water falls from the sky, from purity, from ice melt and from far far away. Who knows where this drop of sky water came from, sucked up from an ocean perhaps or from flatwater in, say, Iceland or Alaska. Maybe, before it came to me it had listened to someone speaking out their dream, their hope and longing, their prayer for guidance. Maybe there is a deal more to this droplet than first I thought. I could be absorbing something magical, someone’s story, a someone I will never meet. How completely marvellous is that!

I stop beneath a fat old gentleman of a beech tree and see his bark shine as if it was drenched in olive oil. The hole left by a branch that began itself but never finished is full of water, sky water, stories and dreams from far away. A little finch lands on its lip and drinks. I watch it dip and tip back its perfect head for a few seconds until it notices me and scoots into the sky. I think of the gift of rain. I remember, well, the intensity of drought in Africa where the ground is dry all the way to the centre of the earth, where rivers evaporate and the wild ones die and I am thankful to be here in this November, on this rocky island in a warm home on this wet day where I can choose how to see rain.

by

Island Blog – Curiosity, Mother Nature and the Joy of Sparrows

I walk this day along the track I know so well. And, yet, do I really, when each day shows me change, the change that Mother Nature brings with an enthusiasm I aspire? I watch the apple green of ground moss and the stone moss that covers each ancient story stone along the old dyke, like elvish hats. Above me silver lichen clings to the plane trees, their trunks giraffe necked and just as tall. Further on and I see the old dried blood colour of blackthorn branches, bare but for the thorns. Further still and there is the old beech giant, politely fallen some years ago and just above the track, beautiful in death, cracked, the host to spectacular tree fungi. The track beneath my feet is all beech leaves and larch needles, copper and ochre, golden and the green that says it will hang on for as long as it can.

In the fairy woods I gasp at the brilliance of tree moss, the way it fingers its way up the trunks of beech and oak, covering them like a glove and shining out new beauty into the season that some people think is the dying. It is, for some, but not for that life that thrives at such a time, through rains and gales and the menopausal flush of sudden shifts in temperature. Moving into the fairy woods I am pulled into the land of Hobbit. I can almost hear the apocalyptic horses pounding over the soft peaty ground, almost want to hid behind a giant luff of overgrowth, brambles, tree stumps, thornbush. I don’t, of course. I just pause in wonder.

There are no birds today. Not even the jays with their ice-cutter voices; no geese overhead, no songbirds. There is peace and an autumn silence. The track is muddied and puddled. I see the sky in those puddles. Hallo sky, I say. I smile at the faithful evergreen fir trees, the Douglas fir, the old Scots Pines that know the sky well. Of course they do. They almost touch it. And as I walk and as I watch and notice and pause and muse, I learn. I know I always will. There is always more for me, for us, to learn, if we can remain curious about our world, which, of course, is not ours at all, but just one we are so privileged to be living in. My belief is in that privilege and I do not take it lightly. Every single thing or person I see and notice teaches me.

I remember, when living in Glasgow and thereabouts for a couple of years, wondering how on earth I would survive for a week, let alone years, in such a concrete centre of noise and shout and traffic and fear. I decided. That’s what I did. And, thus, I walked the streets with the same curiosity. I sat in a park and watched families and their games; I stood beneath a tree confined by pavement and road and watched a blue tit pick off the new buds that would have become leaves. I learned that the tree knows this will happen, that hungry birds will pinch first growth and that they accommodate just that by sending out more than one first growth, the second of the first developing much faster into a leaf? Mother Nature is a wise old girl, for sure.

Now I am glad to back here on the island, where things are slower and peaceful and allowed to do their thing. The wind can batter, the rain soak, the track change daily and, as long as I can keep my curiosity alive and well, there will never be a day when there isn’t something out there that is worth an investigation, like the joy of sparrows as I returned home. Hidden within the depths of a rhododendron bush, they chipped and twittered at me as I passed. I don’t know how many were in there but I wished them well. Keep safe, little ones, I said. There are tawny owls and sparrow hawks about this autumn and we, we in this world, we need you.

‘The Nightingale one day was listening to a Shepherd’s skilful notes on his flageolet, and following them with his voice; the Sparrow who had been watching them for some time, at last broke out, saying, “How provoked I am to see a bird so learned as you are take lessons as if you were a novice, when you must know that the song of the Nightingale was heard with pleasure and admiration long before any instrument of music bad existence, and that it is yourself who are the teacher!”—” However that may be,” said the Nightingale, “if this Shepherd has learnt from me, I may now learn from him—he tries to imitate the capricious variations of my voice, and I may gain much if I can copy his scientific manner of arranging them; and I hope you know that even the voice of a Nightingale might be improved by rule.”

Application

When the man of genius disdains to study, let him remember with the Nightingale in the Fable, that the greatest talents are those most capable of being improved by studious application’. Aesop’s Fable