I love the long shadows, when the sun drops down a peg or two to welcome in the evening. The change of light notices me things I never see in the daylight. Cobbles of ground, unseen for hours, suddenly become my focus. That line of stones, the lean of that tree, the way the land takes in the silhouettes and shows me leaves against a concrete wall or stripes created, just for now, from the picket fencing around the deck. All day long I was oblivious to all of this. This beauty. This snatches at my thinking that, now, thinks me.

They have gone out for a meeting, leaving me with a hot dog and four game-on cats. One of the aft-mentioned who knows fine well she must remain behind the wire curtain, never to wander alone in this land of predators, zipped like a fly between my feet and headed for the bush. I yelled, I grabbed her by the tail and she lashed back at me, claws finely tuned. Never, ps, grab a cat by its tail and think you are in control. You aren’t. She went and I, panicked, shaken, and…….oh no…..I had left the wire curtain open a touch in my dash for a feline tail and another had ventured out like a press photographer to get the best shot. It was ungainly, ugly and very scary. If that cat had gone, she wouldn’t have seen the night through and I, well I would have died a thousand deaths, unlike her one.

I was reassured. This cat, saved from the street will never run for the bush, nor the hills. All she did was to cower beneath the decking to re-organise her tail feathers. A few soothing calls from her saviours and she was back, safe and sound.

This evening, all creatures that should be inside are inside and those out there, well who knows? it is early yet, still light enough to see the long shadows, still early enough to watch a spotted bush snake glide across the wooden slats and over the edge into a darkling safety. Still early enough to watch a family of warthog trot comically across the path and to disappear into the bush. I always hear Eddie Murphy’s voice when seeing warthogs. Their trot is, well, comedy on legs. I wouldn’t want to mess with those tusks, nonetheless.

Each morning more green appears on the Acacia trees and today I walked beneath a full-blown Jacaranda and smelled the honey petal fragrance. I had to stop, to breathe it in, this Spring that isn’t Spring for me and yet it is. Travelling from one season on a trajectory of cold and ice into one that is just waking to the warmth of Spring is weird. It only took two days in a plane or two, no, three, encased in metal and aircon and other peoples’ exhalations of air, trusting, letting go, watching a movie, sipping coffee, wine, water, smiling, endlessly smiling, even if the smile lost its elevatory energy at times. And now I am good with spiders, snakes, whatever, because I am here, right now, watching the pond shadows lengthen and waiting, as we all are, for the absolute dark of an African night.

Today I saw a rhino flipped over beside a garage. Not a real one, I hasten to add. I doubt any real rhino is flippable. This one is life sized and constructed of wire, affixed to the ground with, well, something that wasn’t enough. Enough to hold it down as a huge gust of wind barrels through on its way to somewhere else, leaving whispered stories in our ears and collecting more along the way. Winds are rumour gatherers for sure.

The gusts yesterday twisted themselves into fists and punched hard when they came. The strangeness of intense heat combined with fat cotton clouds created by a mountain range never fails to puzzle me. Where the hellebore did that come from? It was just like that. Swim towels took off like petals and the plains sand filled our teeth. Books opened and pages threatened to rip and disappear leaving the avid reader unsure for all time as to whodunnit. The breeze of the storm to come (that’s a line from a Capercaillie song) only it didn’t. Come.

Nonetheless this rhino is all wonky chops beside the road, its precious horn stuck in the greenery, its latter end pointing to the stars. It thinked me of the close relationship between Create and Destroy. A warm breeze can soothe. So can a cool one. Wind dries the washing, carries the sun over acres of eager wheat, sends the leaves on the trees into a tremble of beauty, music and colour. It can lift the sea into diamond ripples or it can stir it up into 40ft waves that demand lives. It can flip a rhino.

And it is the same within each one of us. We can create or we can destroy and sometimes we have no idea how to control that dichotomy, that immense power. Those of us who admit to being creatives without any hope of not being creatives, even for five minutes, have a duty to self and to all the other selfs who share our world. We know just how destructive we can be when we turn away from our gift. With every gift given comes a duty. To abandon that clear sense of duty will lead many into the slough of despond because any self-confessed creative will, by definition, be extremely powerful, loaded with charisma and in the public eye, whether we like it or not. We don’t have to write a best seller (loathe the overuse of that term) nor paint a masterpiece, nor discover a new way to harness the wind. We might live in a cave and never go out, but be sure that many folk will know exactly where that cave is situated. A self-confessed creative may try to hide but the thing is that there are hundreds if not thousands of other trainee creatives who need to learn from us. There is no option for bushel hiding of our light. It just isn’t allowed, not when we are the recipient of a gift. I didn’t ask for it. It drives me round the wahoo most of the time, but no matter how much duvet I pull over my head, someone will always pull it back.

When that creative gift is ignored for longer than an acceptable forty winks, it turns nasty. The best analogy for this dangerous state is manifested in Gollum. His gift, the ring, could have changed his life for the better had his heart been good. It wasn’t, and he didn’t and he ended up living deep underground and crunching on auks. It is not so different with we who live above ground and in the Now. I see it all around me and it makes me sad. Many of the loveliest of men and women I know, unborn creatives who were never encouraged to follow their hearts and who opted for a settle-for life, are deep in the dark and crunching on auks. Alcohol overuse, retreat from the world, living in incongruence, miserable and full of questions and regrets is not really a life at all. We think, mistakenly, that if we opt for a life that pleases others, makes them smile, this will be enough. It isn’t. It cannot be enough and it never will be because each heart has its own calling and there are more gifts unused than used. I hear people say, laughingly, in passing, There’s Not a Creative Bone in My Body. I snort and put them right, but, for many, it feels too late to go wild, to actually listen to all those messages from their hearts left unopened on the door mat. It makes me deeply sad. We only get one life, or that’s what I believe. I don’t fancy coming back as a rhino or a bluebottle anyway and the very thought of returning as a human makes me want to go straight to sleep.

I don’t think it is ever too late to listen to the guidance within. It takes practice, but so does everything else a person learns in a lifetime. Nobody knows how to make a perfect omelette without practice. We are happy to study and practice if it relates to our work but completely disinterested in practicing at being ourself. It’s bonkers, but true. However, bear this in mind. A creative flow, if left to flood the plains will only bring destruction in the end, and the creative flows through each and every one of us, regardless of parental or peer put downs. What do they know, after all? Are they me? Are they you?

Have a listen inside, ask the questions, and wait. I promise you answers will come from the best friend you will ever have.

Sounds dodgy, but only if I consider mind control as to be in someone else’s hands and not in my own. But the key, I am learning, is for me to control my mind all by myself. That way nobody else ever gets access. As a creative I am hyper sensitive to my own self-doubt, particularly when it is reflected in another person’s opinion clearly stated, sounding, at best, as a confirmation of my own lack, and, at worst, the truth, one I sincerely hoped was nothing of the sort.

A creative, and there are millions of us, may not realise that this is in their DNA, in their very heart and soul. If such a creature has had the crazy knocked into shape over decades, perhaps from childhood on, it is quite understandable that the process of natural development has been stopped with the dam of authority, each little trickle of escape allowed to dry up under the fierce sun of control. We think we are dangerous because that is what we have been repeatedly told. We are possessed by some evil genie, unable to guide ourselves, untrustworthy if left to our own devices, something we are rarely left to, if at all. No surprise, then, that we default into adulthood wearing all the wrong clothes, learning the wrong things, thinking conflicting thoughts and always exhausted at the fight of it all.

However, there is good news. If a creative can find just a teensy bit of self-love and build on it through careful and mindful study and research, it is entirely possible to regain the self. I know because, even at 66, I am doing just that. I have found a wonderful guide in Daily OM (Google it) and am discovering that the ‘naughty’ and ‘difficult’ child I was is still available to me and still looking for affirmation and support. I had learned long ago about the importance of re-loving that little girl and had brushed it away as so much nonsense. How on earth can re-loving a girl, long lost to me, bring me fulfilment and peace of mind? I think, as is so often the case, that I imagined it to be hippy fluff and candles and essential oils burning in grates with no real application for the now. I know, now, that it is simples. What I was doing was bringing the same critical assessment to the thought of such a process as had my parents, friends, teachers, husband and the rest of the world. But if I just let that little lonely girl walk into my mind whenever she wants, merely observing her, then all I want to do is play. In other words making it fun, light and fresh and spontaneous.

We take the world, ourselves, way too seriously, as if life is a test and as if it matters more than anything that we impress others, look good, sound like a success, know exactly where we are going. If I throw all of that out the window, how do I feel now? A bit like a weirdo at first. After all, here I stand on the inside of me having just chucked out everything I ever learned from the guides in my life. I stop and look around. There is no clutter holding me back from forward motion. But which way is forward? If I walk this way, is this forward, or it forward behind me, beside me?

I don’t know and saying I Don’t Know, doesn’t sound all that scary. Allowing myself to begin again might sound like that’s my last marble lost and it may well be true. But if all I need to do to free myself from the mind control of others, and, if I have never done this before, then I need to give it a go because it is high flipping time I found out who I really am beyond the reflection of myself in others’ eyes.

Sounds like delicious chaos to me. I am going to walk back along that river flow until I find my source, not the one I was told was mine, but the one that frees me once and for all, the one that lifts me in a burst of sunshine fun. It will have nothing to do with worldly success or worldly failure. It will bear no relation to my financial state, the shape of my body or the way I eat spaghetti. It won’t be aggressive, defensive or compliant. It will be kind and loving to others as I always want to be and as I believe I am deep inside my core. Instead of saying ‘I have no chance, I will now say something like I have no socks, or I have no bananas. Everything changes with one word.

But, first, it will be me learning to love me. Me and that little lonely girl.

This is how life is meant to be lived. Up with the sun, the sounds, the rise of life in the African Bush, and, then to bed when the almighty dark floats softly down like a mantle. Well, not quite then, to be honest because the dark time is for relaxing after all that fierce heat. That’s the time for conversation, for wine and food and music. It is also the time to hear the sounds of the night creatures, the predators. But, we are safe inside the wooden railings of the stoep, and there are candles and oil lamps flickering to say We Are Here, we humans, we of whom you are always afraid, unless, that is, we break the rules and decide to go for a walk into your domain, which, needless to say, we don’t. Not in the dark.

Spring is holding back. Around some of the homes, green shoots look almost unreal. Watered ahead of schedule, they bring giraffes loping through the acacia to browse and munch a piddling snack. Most of them stay beside the river for now, but one just wandered over here, it’s head higher than any tree, eyes on a small patch of green, one that was stripped in seconds.

Like the high walls of a fortress, the Blue Mountain range shoulders the clear blue sky. Ridges and lines of ancient sediment show me pinks, greys, terracottas and a peppering of low-lying trees. It looks like an easy climb from here but I know different. I could be lost forever and within minutes, not to mention flattened by heat exhaustion and baboons. But I can watch them from a safe place, see how the light changes their flanks as the sun lifts higher. A catch of crystal, a softening of green in new shadow, the dark pock marks along a ridge, caves where creatures rest and wait in expectation of a badly timed passing by. Badly timed for the passer by, I mean, not for the expector.

The floor of the bush is sand yellow and littered with stones and fallen thorns. Yesterday we walked the new puppy a short distance in what passes for shade and my eyes needed to warn my feet to go canny. Those thorns are long enough to go right through a foot and out the other side, however dead they appear to be. The car was like a furnace on our return and yet we had only been out of it for 20 minutes. I watered the house plants this morning, ebullient in their early growth and promising to burst into a storm of colour and density as the Spring moves ever closer. It feels weird, as it did last year, to have left a garden dying just two days ago, only to arrive in one about to be born, so connected am I with the natural process of a seasonal rise and fall. However, I have always been able to adapt and this sunshine sure helps. When I was packing, unpacking, packing and unpacking, it was very hard to think sunshine and warmth. Laying out shorts and swimwear, skimpy frocks and sandals just shivered me. I can’t tell you how many times I dressed, undressed, dressed again for the flights. I even idly wondered if there was a dress code for business class. My daughter put me right on that. Who cares Mum? she said and she was right. I saw many different assemblages of clothing on my fellow passengers and nobody looked at me or anyone else for that matter. Long journeys tense the calmest of us it seems and all we think about is ourself, about whether or not we will manage the fifteen miles between gates, be delayed enough to miss a connection or get sick on the plane. At 0400 in Dubai airport, we are all islands moving together and apart in a communal sea. Who, indeed, cares what anyone is wearing? But the foolery inside my head managed to bother about that until I almost missed my ferry.

No matter, I am here now and here long enough to re-root in the one country I would live as second choice. It bizarres me that this Africa, so rocking with corruption and fear, with huge warm hearts and welcomes regardless of colour or creed, could ever call to me the way she does when rain is in my blood, mizzle mist, stout boots and the familiar call of seabirds canting slight on a westerly breeze. But she does. Africa does. Somewhere in my veins there is a remembering, an ancient call home. I like that.

And for a few weeks I will watch Africa rise into her Springtime before returning to my little homespun bubble. And, I might just pack a thorn to burst it.

We all need to do that now and again, for there is a huge world out there if we just keep our eyes and our hearts open.

Right this minute I am sitting on a soft comfy chair in a vast expanse of lounge with a load of friendly staff being silent but vigilant in the peripheries and a seriously marvellous cold and hot buffet at the bows. The Ladies, alone, proffers facial creams, fragrances and enough room for a private shower, plus real towel and real flowers in the corner. I idly wonder if the Gents proffer the same.

I am, unbelievably, at the airport. Glasgow Airport. My first time in Business Class. I just know the whole experience will change my travel plans, my long haul travel plans, for ever. Not only was I collected by a delightful chauffeur in a grey Mercedes from the door, but, then, he saw me, all flaky and wrong-footed and everything shoved into a basket, through security, where, to my astonishment, I was not sent home with a report marked COULD DO BETTER.

After a couple of miles gently, and politely, gliding through an immovable concrete shoal of group travellers, I found myself walking into silence. These people went left. These, right, until there was just me with my overfilled basket and jump shoes looking like (yes I did) an ageing and displaced hippie. Finally, Emirates ~Lounge. The doors opened and my name was mentioned with a welcome. Flip me……..I showed my ID and that was that. No matter how much my basket overflowed I was welcome. The well-cooked food, the smiles, the space, the peace and comfort….well none of that I have ever experienced before and I am glad that, this time, I have.

I consider the word Traverse. It actually means ‘crossing’ like a rock face or something you need to cross but sideways, like a crab. If I think of caring for dementia as a traverse, it makes perfect sense. Although the strong rock face of a relationship, long term, is, well, strong and rock-faced, I now need to traverse it, like spiderwoman because otherwise I would fall into the cracks and be lost. I must keep versatile and adaptable. So I move to the outside of something I have always been deep in the inside of. It has felt like abandonment at times, that pulling backwards, that moving outside of the rock base, and, at times, I had no idea I was doing it, but, now, I see the sense of it. I want to survive this, and not because I can see a new life ahead, but because I can’t. And I need more wildlight for looking; a red dawn, a stomp of grumpy grey, a rise of snowhills, a lazy stretch of maybe clouds, a moonface, backlit, upsetting my sleep.

Tomorrow I will land in the bush, in Africa where my son will spin me round in his big strong arms and I will be safe as houses for two glorious months of crazy insects, colourful birds, a new tattoo and loads of warmth and space and reading and dance and music and Spring.

Bring it on Glasgow, for you and me…..we begin the traverse from here.

I can’t shut my suitcase. Most of what is in there is irrelevant. Sun cream, malaria stuff, tapestry wools, gifts and a few clothes. In fact, the clothes give the least resistance being soft and foldable. Laying things out on the bed for a few days prior to the panic pack has soothed me. It doesn’t look like much stretched over the length of a human plus width but now, now, I try to contain it, it becomes a monster. I sigh. I shout. I begin again. Chuck this, forget that, only one pair of shorts because I can wash shorts overnight and they will be dry in minutes. I can even leave them out overnight, but that wouldn’t be wise. Who knows what creature might huddle within a fold or a pocket? Creatures out there have stings and teeth and attitude. Ok, less frocks. I always wear the same one or two anyway, the ones that allow no body escapes which works well with the culture. I never saw any African escaping from a frock.

Back here, Autumn twiddles her fingers. The starboard shore of the loch shows me rocks and kelp rising into a well fertilised grass field and then on, up and up, to the felled forestry that leaves a landscape of ghosts, ridged, bland, dead, for now. Ben Mhor is a cloudhead, it’s sharp peak lost in what looks like Einstein’s hair.

The tide flows in, moving from flatwater, that in- between time when nothing moves at all, then bursting into action. I can see the waters flow, feel the fish slide in, know that the gulls will come, that a seal and an otter will become one with the flow, their eyes on supper.

David and Linda walked by just now and I beckoned them in. 50 years they have been coming without a single break. Once, in Tapseteerie days, they stayed with us and we became friends. This evening, the evening when I am travel-anxious and considerably less frocked up, we talked of birds and skies and other marvellous things and I am glad. A dip into what appeared as flatwater suddenly lifted into action because of their visit. It told me this.

In the real truth of life, we only ever need people. Things will follow, but things will only ever be things. People, on the other hand, are never ‘only’ anything.

The sea-loch is so still as to be a mirror to the sky. A loan of sheep wander along the very edge of the far shore showing their tapselteerie reflections so that they look like more than a loan. From here, they seem to be walking on water. Above them, banked in between the hills and following the high-rise hill road, a whispish mist leans against the hillsides, hiding bits. I can see so clearly how the ancients thought eerie. These mists can float over water when two colds meet, one greater than the other, arguing for place. I know that if I turn away, and then return, the sun will have played peacemaker and sent both back home to think again.

The day blooms into warmth and sunlight after rain. This time of year is almost fiction. One minute you know exactly who does what and then all it takes is for lunchtime to call and you look again and are left in wonder. Right now, it is almost time to cook supper and yet, and yet, the sun calls and the shadows are timely long and it seems rude to turn indoors. Everything shouts for just another minute of this glorious retreat, this promise of a red sunset, a red sea-loch, a lone seal lit up like a Christmas bauble and the twist of a turning tide.

But needs must. I am nearly packed for Africa and the broccoli needs cooking for himself by 6 sharp. I have laid out, packed, unpacked, packed again. Does anyone else do this? Will it be too heavy, will I have the right kit, should I just take one of everything? I have to return to the cold, remember, and that needs a wee consideration or two. Leaving everything I possibly can think of in place for my 2 month absence means diddly squat. I will have forgotten something.

And, then, I think this. The tide will still turn. The light will rise and it will fall. The rain will come and the sun will heal. And all of this whether I am here or not. Whether I am long dead or very much alive. Whether, weather, whether.

So, broccoli already late, I am heading out to watch the sun turn the sea crimson. I won’t be seeing her for a long time. She’ll be fine. She knows her way, my old friend.

I watch the sea. The sea is my friend. A lone gull floats by on a slip wind, calling to no-one I can see. The hills stand as they always have, silent, bedecked with the end game of summer, a clear rise and fall against the tissue paper sky. The water ruffles against the breeze and lays down flat once more. Flowers nod like wise old women, their heads still high, not ready, yet, for the fall. But we all know it’s coming. The sea looks cold today and even though I know it is always cold, it can still tell me different on a warm summer’s morning when a higher sun lifts a music from its salty face in hues and tones that will not return till next year. The garden birds have changed their diet, abandoning some of the feeders I had to fill twice a day not so long ago. The siskin and goldfinches have already gone and the swallows are preparing to leave, abandoning this sky for another where the sun bakes the ground to a sandy crust by 5 am. This is what I see and what I see is a fact. Anyone standing beside me will see the same thing. However, interwoven with this visual fact are my feelings about what I see, and my feelings are, in turn, driven by my storyline, my history, my incomplete bank of memories. Turning our backs on the sea, we might describe a different picture. It is thus when we look at ourselves, when we look at others, for you will see me one way and I will see me another way and that ‘another’ way will flip and somersault like a circus performer depending on my currency of feelings at any given moment. Any shifting moment.

Sometimes I can feel as tall and as solid as a pylon. At others as transient dust floating on a passing breeze, going nowhere in particular. I don’t know how this happens because if I look down I still see my human shape and beyond a change of trousers, I am still me, the me you see. But inside this form there could be a right flapdoodle going on, as if an entire migration of birds just clattered up from my gut and found themselves trapped. It is extremely uncomfortable at best and very tempting to push these feelings away in a mad rush to do something that takes my mind off me. However, I have learned that my feelings are gifts, the happy ones and the horrible ones. They come from nowhere, after all, catching me off guard every time. But they come for a reason. If I let the feelings flow through and around me, just notice them, name them even if I cannot explain them, they will teach me. If, as in the past, I lay the blame for them on another or swish them away, denying them further access, they just bury themselves until the next time they feel like flight.

So how I see you and how you see me show only one side of the whole. We can judge, often too quickly, another person and be almost entirely wrong. The ancient wise ones knew this eons ago. They studied their findings, wrote about them and left us guidelines by which we can live in a more balanced way, if we so choose. Or, we can spend money we don’t have, running endlessly from this shiny thing to the next until we really do become dust. We can run from feelings we don’t like by explaining them in relation to the world. I need to change my three-piece suite, that’s the problem. I always hated it anyway. When I change my job, my life will be perfect, as it will be when I leave school, move house, leave a relationship, have my hair dyed blue, lose weight, buy a puppy. Although doing these things can certainly lift a flagging soul, it isn’t a long term fix, even if we are certain it will be. Laying blame for our discomfort on another person, or thing is simply our way of avoiding a jolly good poke about inside – the chance to sort through our incomplete memories as we sort through old clothing for the charity shop. And to recognise that the way we remember something is only one side of the whole.

In the process of clearing out my mental cupboards, once I finally give in and get on with it, I find a cartload of junk. I am not right and you are not wrong. My storyline needs changing and the only way I can let that process come about is to really understand and accept that this view of mine is not yours, nor is yours mine, and it matters not one jot.

I remember one wise man telling me that the only calling we have in life is to first observe another, all others, and then to do whatever it takes to uphold their dignity. Although I liked what he said, very much, I didn’t really understand it, nor did I now how to live like that. Opinions flutter like birds inside my mouth and I am certain that I am right. But who on this goodly earth am I to think I can judge you on anything? What might I learn just by watching you in silence, allowing my feelings to flow and stilling my own storyline as I consider yours?

I call this love, pure love, something to strive for, something elusive and incomplete in all of us, but something, the thing, the only thing we can give without losing anything at all.

Even now, if and when I bake a cake, I look for a hovering child to lick out the mixer bowl. Those excited faces lined up, one adventurous child, perhaps, hefted onto the counter, legs dangling, arms in easy reach of first dibs. But nowadays there is no child to fill the gap in proceedings. Only me, and I don’t lick. It thinks me of how a practice, a process, can be so affixed into a mind that it defies the truth of Now. And it isn’t just cake bowl licking memories that can stop me in my tracks.

As time moves on bringing more wrinkles and less children I am often caught up in what once was and is no more. The whole process of letting go is natural and normal to us all and, yet, there are times when Time now collides with Time then and they become as one. It can happen as I notice my reaction to something someone says. I may feel a sharp gasp shoot down my gullet or a tear rising, the wind roar of it in my ears as its fingers reach back in time to grasp a moment, a memory and the feeling attached to it, one that hurt a thousand years ago and one that has not forgotten me.

Links to time past can take control of my adult self without ever asking my permission, nor caring whether or not I give it. It is as if I am not in charge at all. Although I know there is a wide space in between an involuntary response to such an encounter and my subsequent choice of action, I can get lost in the mist of it for a few moments. It’s a wasteland, my wasteland, a vast stretch of nothing and rocks. When the argument begins between how I feel and what I will do about this or that thing that just happened, I can feel like that bit of dropped-stitch knitting all squinty frayed and shapeless. My adult brain tells me to let it go, but my memoric child screams at me to fight back. To whom shall I listen?

Ideally, both. In recognising the attachment cord I can follow it back across the decades. I know this. Now what? The words that hurt a long time ago, perhaps regularly delivered, came from mouths long silenced in the sleep of death. They did not mean to hurt me, says the adult. Oh yes they did, says the child. However, in allowing myself to be controlled by this cord to the past, I am going nowhere, not learning, not moving forward. I hear wise people talk of forgiveness and compassion but those two calming friends are both out to lunch. What is left is anger and frustration. I can do nothing about the past, but I can do something about the now in my adult state, if I want to move forward, that is.

In seeking to achieve a happier more confident state my first sheet of homework must be on my self-worth. Had I been taught it as a child, given affirmation and time and support and encouragement I might not be so vulnerable to this particular attacker – the one that tells me I am not good enough by a long shot. I know people who enjoyed this as a child without them even mentioning it. I can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices, watch it in their reaction to whatever life sends them. Learning how to change is something most of the world doesn’t want to bother with. Instead, folk run from it. I did that too, once, when I thought that if I did more for other people without regard to self, I would suddenly be happy, be self-confident, strong in myself, in who I really am deep down at the core. It doesn’t work. But it takes a lot of courage to decide to study my innermost self, that murky depth of ‘not good enough’; all those critical voices I sought to bury for ever that refuse to stay buried for long. I must face them down and then, detach. But that is not the starting point. In order to reconnect with the criticised child, I must re-build her. For me to move forward she has to come with me. I cannot leave her back there in her struggle to be listened to and really heard. And I can learn it all in books and in studies if, that is, I have the courage to begin.

Maybe I’ll lick the bowl myself, next time.

Yesterday, as I sat in my garage, a shrew scooted along the wall and into a hole. This is not new, neither me sitting in the garage, nor an encounter with a shrew. I sit here because I can hide from anyone walking by whilst enjoying a wonderful view of sea-loch and faraway hills through the open maw of the garage. And, it’s usually raining. It also gets me out of the house for a minute or two, away from the cares of dementia, its insistent demands and worries whilst I sip my coffee and consider life, both specific and general. I can go into my imagination out here among the plant pots and the rusting implements, the fishing rods, long seized up, and the tins of old paint.

The shrew slinks at speed across the expanse of concrete floor. Hallo, I say quietly, so as not to blow its eardrums. It isn’t alone this time. A second shrew crosses the line. Aha, I say, you have a mate! This would explain the stripped leaves on my gladioli and those unearthed and nibbled hyacinth bulbs. Can we have a word about that, please? I don’t mind you living beside me but shouldn’t there be, even roughly drawn, a code of mannerly respect between us?

Nothing happens for a few seconds and then two more shrews appear. These two are smaller, less afeared of my presence and they are playful. I watch with a wide smile on my face as these two shrewlets gambol and chase each other, rising on their hind legs to bat at each other, then tumbling together just like exuberant children. I hardly breathe, wanting to see more, to feel the heart lift that bursts up like a surprise, something rare and precious, a few seconds of pure delight with the power to change my face from furrowed to as wide as a sunshine sky as my worries turn to dust.

It thinks me of what is important in life. They say it takes more muscles to frown than to smile and yet, how easy it is to choose the harder workout. Furrowed by whatever stuff goes on inside someone’s head, it is ‘normal’ for a face in repose to give out the wrong message. How many times have I commented on the faces of doom inside a passing car. Watching other faces in a queue or in a cafe, mouths downturned, eyebrows pulled into a single line, eyes fishlike, throats empty of laughter, I consciously lift my own features into just enough of a smile so as not to look like an escaped crazy and to remind myself to feel playful.

I think it is simples, the reason why we look so miserable half the time and it is all to do with the pictures inside our heads. If and when we allow all those things that tie us down to take charge, they will move in with the speed of a shrew, set up camp and start a family. You can revisit that head from time to time and wonder who turned the lights off. Well, you did. I did. The trick is to live with all the worries as just worries, all of which need putting on a list. Once listed and numbered each one can be addressed and marked “done’. Those that can’t be fixed should be let loose into a force 8 gale, preferably one that has no plans to change direction. These worries are too big for me to deal with and if I can’t deal with them through my own power then I have to accept and let go. As the list gets smaller, whilst I berate myself for not taking action sooner considering how simple it was to turn one all-consuming worry into a situation sorted, I find a smile. All that time wasted when I could have been in the garage talking to shrews or making conversation with the face of misery in a cafe, or even giving a huge grin to the faces of doom inside that passing car. It is amazing how dramatic a change can be initiated by the gift of a smile, and, once I have given that gift and returned to my worries, I find them hiding under the sofa, blinded by the new light inside my mind.

When I was a child, I thought like a child. Now I am a woman who still thinks like a child. I recommend it. It doesn’t solve all of the problems but it sure does give those facial muscles a rest.