Author: judyfairbairns

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Island Blog – The Day Before and Hoodwinker Boots

Yesterday I was in the darkling woods, all day long. I could not lift into the light, got stuck among the trees, heard no birdsong, saw no sky. I haven’t had one of these days for a long while and it settled uncomfortably about me like a sodden jumper, cold and shivery. I sat with myself and we had a little chat about it. My mouth was overflowing with questions. Am I sick, going doolally? Am I selfish, thinking only of my own angst this day? Should I do something for someone else and would that guide me out of these tall dark sopping woods? Answer came there none. She just sat there, across the table from me, smiling slightly, her lips curved up at the edges, not smug, but knowing.

I get it, I said, my mouth now empty of whys and whats. It just is as it is. As I pondered my soggy state of mind, I realised something. She sees me doing this realising thingy and her lips curve even further up like she’s got an upside down rainbow on her face. He was my courage. That’s what unnerves me this darkling day. I remember him saying to me a thousand years ago that he was always surprised at my fear of pretty much everything. In my world, so he said, there were lions behind every bush and snakes crossing all my paths. There was fire outside all grates and thunder meant lightning and lightning would strike me down or strike someone I loved, like my horse. He was right. I knew it then despite my spirited rebuttal and subsequent flounce from the courtroom.

Over long time, like most of my adult life, I pinched his courage. He was afraid of nothing, if you discount my mother who terrified the pyjamas off him with her slick sharp tongue. I made a decent enough shape of it throughout the years, still terrified of all things but braver, bolder, more able to push through the fear in my hoodwinker boots. Even when he was fixed in a wheelchair, compromised almost completely, he was still my rock, he was there, I could see him and we could smile together, two upside down rainbows sharing a moment of reassurance and encouragement. Now he isn’t here anymore and although I would not wish him back, not as he was, not even as he was before the more recent ‘was’, I can still feel that catch in my breath as I stand before the enormity of living alone. Most of me loves the view, the space and the freedom. I don’t have to explain, justify or qualify my actions, my decisions anymore. I am not the first responder for requests, calls for help, for errands; I don’t have to clean toilets every hour or so; my washing machine is bored; I can sing along to Verdi’s Requiem in any key I like. I am free. And without purpose. And that is the truth of it. When a man has been the sole purpose for 49 years, a woman can be forgiven for wondering who the hell she is when he pops his clogs.

It is a good realisation. I look across at myself and say so and she agrees. Well done, she says. You got there. From such a new understanding grows a path, like a tree from a seed, only it won’t go straight up as a tree ought to, heading for the sky and poking the eyes out of the next door tree with busy branches, greedy for light. No. This path is like the yellow brick road and it’s right there ahead of you. Can you see it? Follow it and you will find new purpose, one you have never thought of before.

I can see it, the path, my path. Today I wake, still alone, but without the dark of yesterday dripping misery all about me and I am thankful. Now all that I have to do is to locate the whereabouts of my hoodwinker boots, Dorothy, The Tin Man and the Lion and then to start walking.

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Island Blog – Somewhere Else Rules

It’s a game, really, this life thing, living it – a game that has no rules, as if that bit of paper in 17 languages was forgotten by Mavis in Packaging, leaving us all to make rules up as we go along. Needless to say there are as many rules as there are people around the board; what is abundantly clear to this chap is a load of ballyhoo to her over there. The start is obvious however. First breath, a wail and that’s all of us at the gate under starters orders. Bang! Now life begins. Which path shall I take for there seems to be so many? Ah, I get it. No choice for now. I am being carried by someone who got here long before I did. They are my rule book, or so I learn. All I must do is obey, defer and not throw up on the carpet. I must not answer back even if the backhand comment is unfair, not true and cruelly delivered. It crashes into my ribcage, that string of words, delivered in that tone as it breaks through skin tissue and engraves itself onto bone as if I was a shard of scrimshaw. Such scars remain for life.

I grow and develop in this game, their game, their rules until I manage to leave home. Now I am free. At last! These internal wounds, this scarring will heal, I tell myself as I march off to Somewhere Else. In this place, the place of Somewhere Else, I find someone. He is strong, older than me, charismatic and available. He plays his game in a very different way and I am intrigued but still, without knowing it, obedient as a child even if I am adult enough, now, to throw up in appropriate places. But I not an adult am I? I inhabit an adult body, yes indeed, boobs and all, a wiggle to my arse and I’m a real pro at eyelash flutterments having practised long and hard in the mirror. I take on his rules. I don’t even notice I am doing this. It feels easy, pleasant almost, but I am mindlessly walking myself into a trap. Had I spent more time untangling the tangle inside myself prior to buying in to someone else’s game rules, I would have stepped consciously towards adulthood. But I did not know that. What I ‘knew’ was that men are better than women, that a woman’s place is in the home bringing up children and learning how to bake a marvellous eye catcher of a strawberry sponge even if her creative genius craves oil paints or ballet shoes or a quill or a lab for her experiments. Her eye level must always be below par because if she ever rose to par or, god forbid, above it, the world, as we know it, would crumble into dust. Men must be obeyed, deferred to and should never be put upon to investigate their own internal chaos. In short, men must be allowed to be themselves for the rest of their days, fully supported in this requirement by you, the woman. As for you, you are not allowed to be yourself from this day forth, in sickness and in health, till death do you part.

We clear now?

That’s what I learned in the first game and it is how I engaged with the next game, the one I found in Somewhere Else. I look back across the fields and oceans, the mountains and chasms, the wasteland and the glories of my life now that he is gone. Although I was always free to think, I didn’t. It was a dangerous thing to do, but now I can let thoughts rise without fear. I may have been ignorant of the rules, merely obeying them in the main, like a horse or a dog, but once I clocked what I had bought into I found ways around the rules. Actually I was quite clever and inventive. Perhaps he saw, perhaps he knew but as we never discussed things that didn’t directly relate to business management, I never did find out and now I never will.

And that is okay. All of it is okay. I did what I did and to look back in anger or regret is like unpicking a woolly; time consuming and, ultimately, shapeless. My life was not shapeless, our life was not shapeless. We collided and then fell apart over and over again for decades, wounding each other and then applying salve. We laughed and cried, felt lonely, lost, puzzled and furious, or filled with hope, belief and trust. I know, I know, it sounds lunatic, but that was how we played our game and I’m pretty certain it wasn’t an unusual marriage.

Now I have my own set of rules to consider and apply. I am free to make them up, anything I like, any direction I fancy. Why do I need rules at all? I did ask myself that recently and the answer is that we all need rules or we would live without boundaries, principles, modus operandi and la la. However, this set of rules must first be constructed within. Where is my boundary? What will I give and what am I happy to receive? Will I decide to learn courage enough to overcome my weaknesses or will I let them rule me? Will I re-locate my oils, my quill, my ballet shoes and my experiments, bring them into this new light and then work on developing them in my own game plan, the one that only I will play?

And that’s the point. My game, my rules. No matter who comes into my life from now on, I play by my rules. I don’t want you to take them on or even to agree with them. I am not interested in approval. What I am interested in, very interested in, is what lies ahead for me now in a new Somewhere Else.

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Island Blog – Free Thinking

Cicero said, way back in the day when men wore skirts and women bathed in milk, Our Thoughts Are Free. I’ve thought about that a lot. My thoughts seem to come to me unbidden and unsought, triggered by something I have seen, heard or read. Some rogue thoughts are dangerous as they push like an uncontrolled mob into my mind, each jostling for prime position. Prime position requires the loudest voice and that voice is always critical, angry, accusing. How strange. How infuriating. Does this seriously mean that, even at my age, I must needs deal with these uninvited guests? Must I catch them sneaking in through the doors and windows of my mind and fell them with my trusty thought-feller?

I must – and daily. Thoughts are things, or they can become things – things like a choice of action or the decision to develop them inside my mind, bringing in my own resident judge, jury and courtroom full of hissing hecklers. I have done this a thousand times in the past until now. Now I am learning to stop and notice each thought, critical or uplifting; to step away from myself and to watch, a sort of eagle eye view of things, of me and my current thought. If the thought connects with something from the past, a cruel comment, a rejection or a mocking, it grows legs. I watch it happen. Now I have a choice, me on the outside of me. Will I allow this to grow and develop or will I tell it that it does not serve me, is irrelevant to who I am now, and that it should scoot back to the past. Even then, if I am completely honest, it was a cruel put down, unnecessary, point scoring. It was only me not noticing and thus allowing it to feed something I had heard in my youth, an opinion I then adopted. ‘That colour does not suit you at all!’ This just as we are leaving for an evening out. Or, ‘Your bottom is getting fat.’ These cruel comments can lead to a lifetime’s self-obsession, turning a grown woman into a jibbering wreck at the very thought of an evening out with her burgeoning bottom and her wardrobe full of unsuitable colours.

Now I laugh at all of it, now that I can see that my thoughts are under my control and not one other soul, living or dead, can take command. I wonder what life might have been had I noticed all this before, as a younger woman. Might I have laughed such comments away and said ‘I’m driving tonight; move over, my fat bottom needs more room and, just for the record, I am going out to buy another dress in this exact colour. Ready to go now?’ What might the response have been had I disarmed the attack without aggression? I have tried it, as an older woman, being assertive, and it absolutely works a treat. There is no winner because there is no fight. When himself told me, in anger, “You are just like your mother!” thinking to confound me, I responded with a big smile. ‘What a compliment!’ I said. He was silenced.

This morning I woke to an eerie light. Moonglow on the mist, the sunrise red gold through the pines. I watched this moving landscape, this ever changing masterpiece, unframed, free to move, year by year, month by month, day by day and my mind filled with thoughts. One was that I must call the plumber because the thermostat is set too high on the water tank, followed by various others. I noticed, made a list to remind me, set them free and turned back to the morning. Stags bellow, birds sing, the golden kelp floats up and down with the tides, and the moon, circled by a rainbow ring is lingering yet. Blue sky pushes away the clouds, and off they fly to other lands, just memories.

I have many frocks in the colour that doesn’t suit me. It isn’t rebellion. There is no fight. I just love it, that’s all, and now my bottom can fit comfortably in a high chair. I did no work on it at all. I simply began to notice my thoughts, work out the ancient connection to the past, separate and release. I recommend the work. It frees me from anxious fretting, lack of self-confidence, control by another (kept alive by me) and the chance to really live the way I choose to live.

‘If I could start again a million miles away, I would keep myself. I would find a way. ‘ Johnny Cash

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Island Blog – Pas pour Moi

I wake with the sun, can feel the warmth and the promise of a new day ahead. Impatient, I leave first, walking from the apartment down the little hill towards the village. Bonjour Monsieur-dame, I greet an older couple coming towards me with bags of shopping. I can smell the baguette and see it too, peeping out as baguettes always do, refusing to fit in. She, Madame, appraises me, her eyes covering my body like a touch. She is, I know, looking for an inappropriate bare of skin. She won’t find it, for I know this old fashioned place and am respectful of its rules of thumb, its unwritten laws. She, naturally, is dressed for a winter’s day in Alaska, all in black and so buttoned up as to appear more like a seal than a woman. Her face, pinched into a critical catch tells me that her smiling Monsieur will be disappointed at my coverings and also that her life has not been an easy one.

The streets that wind through the village are cobbled, worn by thousands of feet over hundreds of years, smoother around the entrance to the cafes and bars where feet have scuffled and stopped, turned around or opened the door for refreshment and friendship. Picasso painted here, as did Matisse and Dali and it is to the painters I am bound. Through the archway and down to the rocky harbour I find them, placed like buskers and probably with their own pitches considered sacrosanct. Bonjour I say and more than once as I walk by with only a glance at their work. I know the rules. No artist wants to be gawped at and most certainly do not invite comment. as they apply oils to canvas, eyes on their subject. I look out to where the sun rises pinkly perfect over a calm and submissive sea. Around the curve of the natural harbour an old stone edifice stands sentry. Much of its face is gone but once it would have stood proud as Punch. This is the way in, it would have said to the fishermen and sailors seeking sanctuary.

On the edge of a spit of rock stands a woman in white. Her long dress floats a little in the warm morning breeze but nothing else of her moves. Her hand below a bonnet of white satin is shading her eyes as she looks out to sea. Searching for her husband, says a gruff smokers voice behind me. I am startled back to myself. How did he know I was English? Ah, Madame, he says, English always look English, no matter where they go. I am momentarily disappointed but concede he is probably right. She will not move all day, he continues. She is an art student and this is how she earns money for her studies. I smile and move closer to her. She doesn’t even blink. The heat, I think, the heat! Already, at 7.30 am it is 20 degrees and she has enough clothes on to kit up the whole cast of Hamlet.

I move towards my favourite cafe and sit outside beneath the shade of a tree, one I cannot identify. Cafe Madame? Our, mercie Monsieur. In moments he returns with a small coffee, black, thick and hot. Beside it he places a tiny shot glass of something and winks at me. For the heat, Madame, he says and swings away.

Later we swim. There is a storm gathering and the waves are restless and confused. Himself, snorkelled up, is ferreting about among the rocks whilst I sun myself on the stony beach. When he returns to me I can see something is wrong. He has lost his teeth, pulling them clean out along with the snorkel tube. Lost, he lisps at me. I roll my eyes and feel a small panic rise but the storm is closer now and the waves too high and mighty for a search. I resign myself to a toothless husband who doesn’t care one bit. For three days as the storm rages he orders omelette or scrambled eggs for dinner and thinks the whole thing hilarious. I smoulder across the table. It is, after all, one thing to lose all your teeth to the ocean and quite another to think it amusing, having no intention whatsoever of either organising a new set once we get home or to have any regard for the way I feel watching him lose food through floppy lips and talking like a drunk.

After the storm has moved away and the waves, their skirts still upskittled a bit, have calmed, I move into the water. Point at the place you lost them, I call back. He looks at me as he might a crazy woman and guides me. There! he says and turns back to his book. I duck beneath the water and there they are, sitting atop a rock, complete, waiting. Triumphant I lift them to the sky and call out to him. The whole beach looks up as if I had just found gold, which, in my opinion, I have.

We are the talk of our favourite restaurant. C’est impossible! They say and I am a Cheshire Cat. Pas pour moi, Monsieur, I reply. Pas pour moi.

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Island Blog – Mindful Boots

I can smell the frost as I awaken, even through the dark. It slips through the open window and tingles my nose. It is calm out there, no wind, no sounds of an earthly indigestion. I burrow into my warm duvet and listen, but not for long as I am always curious to open up a new morning, to invite it in and to marvel as my eyes widen at the beauty of it. Stags, baleful autumn moaners, challenge each other from somewhere deep inside the woods on the other side of the sea-loch, one that is quiet and settled. Mistwater sprites dance across its surface, lifting into the air before disappearing altogether and the grass yonder is almost white, sparkling crystals, unearthly.

Ice clouds pink in response to the sunrise whilst Ben Mhor rises into the sky, one that promises a clear sunshine day. Later, when the frost has succumbed to the burn of it, I will open the doors and remove a layer or two, to feel the warmth against my bare skin. These are glorious autumn days and I will love them for each of their minutes, knowing they will not last, as nothing ever does.

As each season gives way to the next, I feel a discomfort at first. It seems we go from skin out to skin in or the other way around. A thick cardigan becomes an old friend even if I haven’t given it a second glance for months. I feel the shiver of autumn or the rise of warmth in spring and feel irritated. Suddenly, it seems to me, more clothes or less are required and here was I pulling out the familiar, one that no longer cooperates with the weather. Well damnit! Now I have to think about what to wear, to clad my bones in something pretty (always) but appropriate. I am always resistant to ‘appropriate’ at first. And, then, over the following days, I find a new normal and wonder at my initial resistance to change.

Yesterday I lifted the very dead flowers from his grave. The sun shone bright and there was a friend at my side. I had thought I would feel something but I felt nothing at all. I am not a sentimental woman and he is dead and he is gone and there is nothing of him below the grass but old bones. The sheep scattered as we unlatched the gate and descended the hill, cautious of their slimy green leavings, moving our boots mindfully. It is a good way to move boots wherever it is we may go. It thinks me of life itself and the best way to live it. Traversing the distance between the gate and the grave we chatted of old ones, other ones who lie here, the characters, their quirks and scallywag games, their teasing, their strength of character and we laughed over shared memories.

Change will always come however hard we may try to fend it off. Returning home I make coffee and watch the view. I never tire of it for it is in a perpetual state of change as am I, as are we all. The key is to let go and follow it in mindful boots.

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Island Blog – Fog, Rapturelight and Higher Ground

There are days when I wake in a fog, one that can last all day. I stop moving and notice it, the fog, how it swirls around me, inside and out. The hills have disappeared and the sea-loch looks like it’s coming to the boil. I can’t see where I am going on days like these and I wander through the rooms doing a bit of this and straightening that right up to lunchtime. I am unfocused, muddled, unsure but not afraid, not as I would be on the M25 or as ‘on’ it as I can be when all vision is suddenly erased. Even the tail lights of the car ahead look like red biro dots. Pulling over is not an option. Where is ‘over’ anyway? It is terrifying how much we depend on 20/20 vision, both inside and out, and it thinks me.

These inside fogs seem random, disconnected, certainly from the sunshine clarity of the day before and the store I put by it. When I stop to notice my feelings there is no single line of truth. I madly try to hold on to this-is-what’s-wrong but it slips my grasp and skitters away into the murk. I swear I hear it chuckle. Over long time of study, of reading experiential wisdoms, of daily practice on inner pause and curious noticing, I know enough to know I know nothing at all and, bizarrely, this comforts me. After all, my grabbing onto ‘this-is-what’s-wrong’s has only ever fetched me up on the sharp-toothed rocks of uncertainty. The key is to stop bustling and to wait, much as I would do on the M25 were I able to pull over to safety. And, so I do.

Eventually the fog begins to lift. I watch the density thin, dissipating into powdery swirls that float around me, ghostly white but now translucent. Rapturelight. Windowless opacity is opening into an eye, one that can see, albeit through vaseline, for now, but there is such an elevating hope in that first glimpse that I almost cry out with joyful relief. It feels like the moment an awful pain eases or when you finally top the ridge, exhausted, hot and thirsty to discover an incredible view of the world down below, a vow in your mouth to never again take anything for granted. Of course, we all do. It’s natural. How human we all are!

When I am inside a fog I no longer expect me to clear it by turning from it, ignoring it or pretending it isn’t there, thus crashing blindly through the morning. Nowadays I just stop and wait for it to pass, for guidance to come in, guidance that can permeate any fog effortlessly. It always comes, eventually and much quicker than I expect. This is being vulnerable, having enough courage to be vulnerable, to be open to something far greater than I and to allow it to guide me. When we are sick, our body warns us. When we are heading down the wrong path we are also warned. Something makes us stop, a fog, a drastic change in circumstance, a loss, an uncomfortable encounter or just something someone says. We stop, arrested, frightened, lost. It is deeply scary, such a place, but only if we don’t pay attention to it. Just sitting in that deeply scary place may sound like the last thing anyone would want to do but it is key to healing, to finding new direction, to 20/20 vision.

We try to keep our lives in order, predictable, organised, rigidly planned. However, this is not what life has in mind, not at all. Learning to surf the waves, to look within when a fog descends upon us, to remain curious and patient will bring us a new way of seeing. It will bring us rapturelight.

And we will find our way to higher ground.

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Island Blog – Fractal Fracas

There are many F words that are ok falling out of a mouth and these two capture me, for they aptly describe my thoughts and feelings just now. As I wander along the sunlit track in a strappy frock and jack boots, I know my eyes are hungry. They dart like swallows over the ground, up through the leaf canopy that divides the sky, fractal like geometry. I watch the shapes, the movement as the breeze catches the leaves, which, I swear, tinkle. The Turning. Dappled ground leads my looking deep into the overblown rhododendrons making me wish I could drink and shrink, like Alice. Then I could just walk in to the darkling promise of adventure. What will I find in there? Spider, mice, birds, slow worms what? Small quiet things that hide a lot, I’m guessing. I wonder how deep I will go before the dark closes behind me. And that, my friends, is a life question.

It is a month since he died. Since then various and manifold emotions have barrelled me into the shrubbery. Along with the understandable sense of loss and emptiness tinged with a brief snatch of guilt at the moving on of his mobility aids (so quickly), what has made me stop in my tracks is that I am finally able to see who he really was. He was a pioneer, a forger of new paths, new businesses, new this new that and he was also the most complex and difficult man I ever met. He used to tell anyone who was listening that he was a simple man. At this, I snorted. He was far from simple. It thinks me.

We are all the result of our parental guidance/neglect/control, for sure. We also carry within our bodies any trauma our forbears have experienced, even if we cannot ever explain it, never mind know it is there at all. Then Life gets her grabby mitts on us and there is even more shaping and moulding. We meet troubles, challenges, disasters and loss during our adult lives, within which we are expected to be authoritative and decisive. Well, that’s a big ask, don’t you think? Most of us are children in adult bodies at such times, feeling the fear, the loss, the impotence in the face of an onslaught way bigger than we are, and, yet, we, standing taller than the rest are required to make it better.

Living all those years with a paragon of brilliance meant something. A lot of somethings. I know only too well how valuable I was. The gofer, the runner, the doer. To be a visionary, a dreamer, means nothing without a me. It didn’t mean I didn’t have my own dreams and visions, not at all, but it did mean, for me, for us, that my own plans took the back seat. Some of them got bored and left the building, many did not. I value their loyalty and thank them daily. Now, it seems I have a chance. I can unhook my wagon from his star and that feels fine. I can miss his presence and still remember all that he was, all the demands and difficulties, all the fun and the parties, the spontaneity of everything, the immediacy required for action.

This is what is real. This fractal fracas.

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Island Blog – Animation

This night my African son tells me he is going out for dinner with his wife and her folks. I know the place. Its all sand drives and security controlled, a sort of housing estate but without living too close to anyone else. In the mornings and evenings, they watch giraffe, zebra, warthog and a million rainbow birds who come by in their search for water and possible food. The local shop sells wild animal food pellets and, although none of the above agree with feeding wildlife, it is tempting. It means the animals stay awhile and I get that. Did it myself when I was there.

On the ‘estate’ that flanks a big croc busy river, lies Kruger park on the other side and fenced high. From viewpoints we can see elephants, leopard (if we are lucky), crocs, hippos, kudu, giraffe, zebra and so much more. It is quite intoxicating. They seem so near and so safe and yet not one of them is either. There are a few restaurants, all a big sandy drive away, and some offering eventide views of the big five coming for water, for it overlooks a freshwater pool (when there is rain, which is not often). Some restaurants are nestled in the bush, and the sounds of cracking branches and birdsong, like we never hear in the UK, interrupt and cause us to look here, or there for a catch of rainbow or the big butt of a rhino just minding her own business, for we are are on her territory.

It thinks me. It has been a very long time since I felt that flutter of anticipation, knowing I was going out for dinner; what dress to wear after a shower, what boots to wear, what perfume? Like an electric pulse but not one that hurts. If I knew in the morning, it fizzed me all day long. If, as was often the case with me and Popz, it was 30 minutes warning but nonetheless the electricity fizzled. He might say (way back in the day) What’s for supper? I might say Ah I don’t feel like cooking tonight and he would respond immediately with Let’s go out and I was hooked, line and sinker. We have…..had…. superb restaurants on the island, brilliant ambience and excellent chefs and I knew he was driving so I could just enjoy my wine. We went oft in the summer months. I loved that. Needless to say we didn’t go out (for some time) once he became compromised with what he could eat, the amount of voice ‘noise’ he could bear and the whole faff of driving out when he was really ready for bed. It happened like a season. Slow, gradual, almost not noticed.

Looking back I remember the wild times. The suddenness of action. Pick up your bed and walk, kind of thing. I got really good at looking marvellous in minutes. I can do it now, but now there is covid and fear and all restaurants closed and the ferry a threat and, although I thank this isolation time for the chance he and I had to re-connect as friends, I would choose it gone.

Once, on my chance for escape, when day time carers were enough for him, I took myself to Glasgow, to the river and to a flat on the quayside. It was a few minutes walk to about four excellent restaurants. In the morning I wandered out to choose my place for the evening meal, the lights, the buzz, the life. I had no problem at all booking a table for one.

I wonder if I will find this place again, this animation, this lift of independent life.

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Island Blog – This Day

This day I would like to wander through a wood. Looking up at the map of the sky, fragmented by the leaves of the canopy, and then down at the dappled light on the autumn ground, I see my boots, one step at a time. And I love them all over again, for they are my favourites despite the chunk ripped out of one of them by an excited puppy with razor teeth and fast legs for running away. I can see him now with my boot clamped in his jaws, looking back to see if the puffing shouter was keeping up. She wasn’t.

In the wood I look for fairy homes, little round holes in the tree moss and I whisper a hallo. It’s always best not to irate the fairies I find, so a polite acknowledgement of their whereabouts is quite enough. I hear the sound of a wind combing the pines, singing with them, perfect harmony. Beyond the wood the tide rushes in, funnelled through nip-tuck lines of granite and basalt, ancient and immovable. Butter yellow lichen coats the faces of these rocks, as if the sun just landed there for a while, for me to see. Bubble, burble, swish and tumble, the mussels cling on tight. There are hundreds of them and, at low tide, I can slither across the slipper rocks to garner a feast. Wild thyme still blooms, scabious too and the flash of blood shows me where the rowans grow, their shout for attention, their hallo to the sky.

After my wander, I know where I’m going. There is a delightful tapas bar down a skinny side street, tucked in between a second hand shop and someone’s front door. The patron is big and very Spanish and his welcoming warmth greets me as I push through the door. Tables line the wall and tapas dishes, the counter. Bright smiles, a proffered glass of dry white with olives and crusty bread Señora? Si, gracias. I wait for friends to join me, for I am a bit early. As I sit my eyes roam the walls. There is a big painting of the bull run through Pamplona streets, the festival colours bright and full of sunshine. A portrait of the patron’s wife, now deceased, fills a side wall. She is very beautiful and there’s a sass in her eyes. Her hair is tumble free and dark around elegant shoulders. He has spoken of her with me, probably with everyone, for she was his one true love.

After a long and merry lunch, I wander through the streets, watching little gardens pass by. Voices lift in the air around me, ordinary people talking ordinary things. Where did we park? What’s for dinner? Where’s Wally? And yet not one of them is ordinary for we are, each one of us, unique, with our own life to live and our own frustrations, our own dreams. Who will live that dream? Only the brave.

I find my way home. Opening the door I smell the familiar smells and I breathe them in. This is where I live, where I am entirely myself. I may be alone now but I know who I am. Softly I relinquish the ties that bind, hanging them over a chair like a well loved cardigan. I put on some music, Sibelius. The swan of Tuanela was his favourite. Sinking into a chair I watch the day fade into dusk and I am filled with memories and gratitude as the beautiful and evocative melodies flow through the room, through me.

It is good, this day. And all is well.

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Island Blog – Inspiradiation and Adventures

Days roll on, some good, some ok, some awful. Now that I have my independency I have no idea what to do with it. I know about baby steps and how to eat an elephant but the reality of being so thrown into empty space is not something I really understood, till now. Perhaps ‘understood’ is the wrong word because I don’t really understand it yet. Yesterday I crawled along with the hours, lost and jumpy, itching and pacing the silent rooms. I washed this, swept that, emptied something and filled another thing up. I sewed a bit whilst listening to a talking book, relieved to be inside someone else’s story, thus avoiding my own for an hour or so.

I know these days will keep coming as will the okay days and the good days. It is all part of grieving, I am told. When a person has been a part of ‘We’ for as long as he or she can remember, the longed for ‘I’ can feel like a stick of ice down a warm back. I know that I fought hard for my independency from day one of marriage, furious it was not offered as a personal freedom and eventually accepting that, in a traditional pairing, the wife is required to always play second fiddle. I remember himself saying to me, quite seriously, that I was allowed to make the small decisions in life whilst the big ones were his alone. I also remember searching his face for the joke in this and finding none.

Finding acceptance in such a situation was not a breeze for me. I have too much Amazon in me, too much feist, bite and suffragette to find this acceptable. Part of him loved this in me but not if it stood tall against him and his big decisions, implacable, square, solid. I often backed down, however, feeling stupid and pointless and full of impotent rage. Now, in the light of survival and with the emergence of kindness, companionship and history in the latter years, I know it was just the way it was, he was, we were.

I inhabit this new space like a wide eyed child. I am curious, interested, sometimes puzzled, sometimes lost, sometimes found but not by anyone else. Just by myself. Trusting in my own decisions, saying ‘I’ instead of ‘we’, moving independently and with confidence, feels okay. After all, who was it who played second fiddle so well for so long, developing his visions, walking them out, repairing door knobs and hurt children? Who was it who went the extra mile, worked all the hours, cared for endless guests and found 100 inventive ways to cook mince? Who was it who kept everyone warm, who made the calls, drove the miles, sorted the troubles out and had a ‘Yes we can’ attitude to pretty much everything?

Well, that was me. That was I. and there is is no ‘was’ about it. I am still that woman, one who now must turn to herself for answers. A new learning, a new day in the life of me. It smiles me. There is the smell of adventure on the wind and my nose is twitching. He taught me, despite his need to control everything, and, perhaps because of that need, that I did have my independency all along; that although I will miss his presence sorely inside this little island home, I am that strong Amazon and I will find those adventures he always looked for, found and loved. But, this time, they will be my adventures.