Yonks ago I made a big pot of soup. Sweet Potato and Red Pepper. My old ma made it once when she came to stay, saying, what can I DO? This to a woman, her daughter, who copies her parrot fashion when anyone offers to help.

Nothing Ma, I said gently, removing the bread knife she waved about herself, the tea towel in her other hand. She wasn’t having any of it. Despite my response, she took herself off to the fridge for a rummage, returning with the ingredients she needed, and she set to work. By the time tummies rumbled, the soup was ready, gently simmered and whizzed to death. There was a happy warm joy around the kitchen table that lunchtime when the outside of things were mostly wet and windy.

The pot I had made was far too much to keep in the fridge, to keep from a fermentation process, one that has always driven me wild with fury. Quietly, and without a word of warning, something delicious just turns like a season. From salival anticipation to an olfactory recoil overnight. Everything does it, eventually. Even us. So, I froze it, the whole caboosh and forgot about it. This lunchtime I managed to finish it with help from a friend or two and felt like I had outsmarted it. Ha! I actually said to the bright orange mixture after a smell check today. Gotcha! I did, momentarily, wonder at the excitement levels in my life, recognising that to feel such elation, to do that little dance in front of my fridge, to thrill that I had won one over on a pot of soup probably means I don’t get out enough.

As I walked the small dog this afternoon just before yet another gale blasts the holy crunch out of our already sodden island in the middle of somewhere, I considered soup. I let the strands of a soup thinking process spread their fingers across all of life, never being the sort of woman who can just think one thought, like a soup one, and leave it at that. I walked alongside a friend for a bit, then off and up and away into the woods and along the shore line. The wind was already snatching at the trees, pulling off those already turned, and flighting them into a sky dance, trembling the grasses and pushing the bracken down across the path like an unruly fringe. I thought of all the different ingredients in a soup and in nature, in a season, in the turn of all seasons, inside a human heart, a person’s life. Each individual addition is of importance. Without one, the whole is compromised and, very possibly, rendered tasteless. A rotten red pepper in the soup or a lack of salt, of herbs, of pepper would change everything.

In my life, each decision, each choice, each direction or directive I select changes everything. A harsh word is like a rotten pepper. A bland face, set stoney with a mouth as downturned as a boiled prawn affects not only my soup but everyone else’s. Be careful what you say and how you say it, a wise old woman once said to me from inside my head, which is where she has made her home. She can really irritate me sometimes but no matter how I try to bash her on the head with my internal broom she has no intention of leaving. If I am experiencing a poor relationship with one day, she gives me no leeway for projecting blame, on anyone, of anything. She demands a perfect soup, made with love and without a rotten red pepper in sight. Before I even make the first journey downstairs of a morning, she requires me to check my credentials. By the time I reach the bottom I am usually in shape. During the day, someone else’s rotten pepper may be thrown in my face, but even then retaliation is disallowed. She is way too perfect for me to be honest and I do retaliate but she has taught me there are ok ways and not ok ways for such.

Once, way back as a young and angry wife, I lost it, completely. Himself had said something so utterly outrageous and in such a mocking and dismissive tone and with such authority and arrogance that, without a sensible thought in my head, I picked up the boiling soup pot, affixing the lid firmly with my trembling thumbs to throw it at him across the room. As I tipped the pot back over my head, hot soup burned my back. This didn’t stop me. I wanted him to feel this pain too. I hurled with all my strength and the result was spectacular. He dodged it, of course, but the far wall got the lot. Soup ran down in runnels. The table was coated in it, the vase of flowers re-coloured in an instant, all ornaments, cutlery, paperwork, chairs, stools and flooring ran red as if a giant had been stabbed right there in my kitchen and was bleeding out. He laughed at me (Himself, not the dying giant) and left the room. It took me days, weeks, to clear it up from the sprachle of it. I still don’t find it funny but my action did teach me the value of, not only soup (there was no lunch that day), but also that I seriously needed to practice my aim.

This afternoon I walked. The rain has finally stopped, for now, and the sun is warm beyond the cool wind. In pockets of windlessness I stop and stand. Just stand, and whilst I do this just standing thing, I look around me. This rock, upon which I live, drains easily, our blessing at times of extreme wet when, in other places, flash floods bulge against the feeble boundaries of our homeland, compromising good folk at the very least, rendering them homeless at worst.

I notice cornflowers in what used to be a dank, dark, confinement of poultry, the ground as black as a bog in a bad mood and about as useful a member of the eco system. The land, now cleared by new owners, has light enough to revive it and there has been a whole summer for this process to evolve. Cornflowers! I remember way back in Tapselteerie days, a snail mail bit of information coming to me. It could have been the newspaper, or perhaps conveyed over the CB radio (Lady Q, Lady Q, are you there?). I forget. But I do remember a heart slump when I heard that corncrakes need cornflowers and that cornflowers, like so many other wild species, are threatened by those who buy plots in romantic places, on a whim whilst on holiday, and then divorce.

There are two, no three plants. There are others there too, ones I cannot name, but these flowers must have hidden beneath the poultry bog for decades, just waiting for someone to lift the scrub and get shot of the birds and their flodden shelters and wire cages. I wanted to laugh out loud, and would have, had I not noticed the nice lads arrive back from their day out at the, now, holiday cottage with a view to die for. I waved instead and kept going. Along my walk I looked down at fallen birches, lady trees, exhausted after rainfall and foolishly light rooted. Allowing for the fact that these birches have grown spindly as starving models for some years, hooked only talon deep on a rocky hillside, I thanked them for growing at all. They are brave, plucky, and will have offered some bird a nest and the chance to fledge her young. Now, they will be dragged and chopped and stacked to warm the owners of the estate, perhaps telling stories, as they spit and flame up in the last throes of dying, to anyone with ears to hear. Knowing the owners and their intuitive little family, I have hope.

A walker, lost and looking for her husband plus dogs. He has gone in search of an otter sighting. I guide her to the two possible places, having established, first, the description of his journey to her. I know this place so well. Any landmark, once questioned and developed, will tell me where a visitor might have gone. Over 40 years loving this rocky peninsular, I may not have learned the google map or satellite or even the ordinance survey location of this quarry or that pier but if someone tells me of the place they really want to find, I can guide them. Dogwood, ceps, foxgloves, wild thyme, cicely, giant hogweed, scabious, thistle, harebells, campion, mountain arens, bog myrtle and heather all rise to say hallo and I say it back. Soon, but not yet, the cold will snatch. The snipe will lie in fallows of brushwood, the owls will hoot through the night and the light will fight the dark.

But not yet, not yet. Mother Nature will fold her skirts slowly. And, for now, I can enjoy brambles thrusting through pretty much everything with barbed fingers offering sweet delight; I can laugh at cornflowers that have found light after so much darkness; I can find a late poppy, red as blood and fragile as a woman’s heart and I can stand and watch them all, breathe them in as new breath, marvelling, once again, at the beauty of this gifted life.

Home alone, for another few days. To be home alone is always something full of space and the freedom to move any way I choose. I can play music through all the speakers, eat lunch at 11 am, stand at the window for as long as I choose and all without having to explain or justify. I can go off in the car all of a sudden and in any direction. I can write in peace, move furniture around, read all day long, if I so choose. Without the demands of caring, and, in my own little home, I can breathe freely. There are no hip hop happy carers bursting through the door to scatter pebbles of question and joke into the still waters of my thoughts. I hear no calls for help. I feel no sighs of resignation rise in my gut. I can think something all the way through to a conclusion, take action, complete the task, survey my handiwork, and all in silence.

It has taken gargantuan effort and the wisdom of the Dali Lama to arrange this week of Me. A natural resistance is just the beginning, but when someone really doesn’t either get that I need a break and not one that requires money and a packed up car, nor feel there is anything good at all about being deposited in a care home in the first place, gargantuan effort is required. I had honestly thought he would refuse last minute, but he didn’t, despite his obvious confusion around why any of this was happening at all. I remember reading, and being advised way back, that the only way to manage life as an unpaid dementia carer was to find a way to inhabit his world. I took it seriously, back then, and have worked hard to accommodate the lapses in memory, the rise of anger and frustration and resistance, projected at me, but having lived this way for almost a decade now, I have a little cynical goblin inside my head. He says this:- just hang on a minute, what about your world? What about your life? Are they saying that you no longer matter – that you need to bend your old body into an impossible shape, and for how much longer, hmmm?

He has a good point. It is a huge ask to vacate your own life for an unknown period of years. What happens to it once you have left it beside the path? Does someone else pinch it? Will you ever be able to find it again, remember the landmarks, the big old tree in whose shade you hid it? Of course the gurus of this world, and the hip hop happy carers and the cheery fixit friends you meet in the village will reassure you with the smooth chocolate of positive thinking, that all will be well in the end. I like to hear that and, even if, at times, I don’t believe it, I receive it. It tastes good for a few moments. But I know, as they do not, that I am changing too. Sometimes I fear that this change in me will grow roots like ground ivy, impossible to eradicate. Other times I eat the chocolate very slowly savouring it on my tongue and refusing to brush my teeth for hours afterwards. The swingle of it all is an emotional rollercoaster that keeps on going as if it has forgotten the way back to base. There has to be some damage and, at the very least, someone gets sick.

In the time I have to myself, I read, work my tapestry, and have just finished listening to a talking book, not through headphones that have to come off at every call for help or grab for my attention but free flow through all the speakers so that wherever I go, I remain inside the story. The book that has drawn me into a fantastic tale of True North and the people of the Sami with all their snow-covered history, their deep spirituality and respect for the spirits of the ancients is The Eye of the Reindeer by Eva Weaver and read by Anna Bentinck. A stunner of a story and one Anna reads so beautifully. I must confess, I will look for Anna as reader even before I check the book she is reading, so gifted is she at voices, emotion, of taking my hand to lead me deep into another world. For days I lost myself in the world of the Reindeer People, moving with them across the vast tundra and into the snowfields of Lapland. I sat around the fire each evening with them, my body tense, as the hungry wolf pack circled the corral. I sighed with relief when the herd arrived safely down from the high mountains, down to the shelter-woods, young calves at foot, as the bite of winter nipped at their ankles, or laughing with happiness when, at the first whiff of spring, the nomadic herders felt the drumbeat of a thousand hooves, the reindeer returning from their migration. I even tried reindeer cheese. Yuck, I thought, but then realised that in the face of no alternative, I would gain a taste for it. My heart lifted at joyous moments and cried at the cruelties man bestows on man or woman on woman.

Losing myself in a story of another life, one I will never lead and can only sneak inside using my imagination, I return changed. Back into my own home, my own life, standing on my own floors or sitting at my own fireside, I find a different way of seeing things. I hold this difference close to my heart for I know it is a kindly thing and one that will keep me safe. Maybe I can’t explain it. Maybe I can’t tell you exactly what or how this different way of seeing things will manifest in my life, but, then I don’t need to. It is just for me after all and, besides, words mean little if they end with a full stop. They need to become something that lives, a new song, a new drumbeat. Looking for answers to all those cried-out questions in a landscape I already know as well as I know my own garden is not going to take me anywhere. I can look till my eyes turn gibbous. I can read every word on how to care for dementia, aka, how to become a saint, and learn nothing more than that which I already know.

But, walking into a story, now that is quite a different thing. I don’t know how it works but it does. Learning of another life, one of hardship and friendship, of hopes dashed and dreams fulfilled, I can take stock. I can remind myself that there are as many ways to live as there are people in the world and that the one thing I can do, regardless of my circumstances, is to make a difference. To himself, to myself, to everyone I meet. I can go back for my bundle in the shade of the big old tree before anyone notices I am gone. Then, with a lighter foot, I can rejoin them, changed. I might look the same and sound the same, but I am neither. In my mind I am watching the silence of snowflake fall even thought the path I walk may be dry and dusty. I am staring deep into the eye of the reindeer and seeing the Sami people making rope from birch bark or clearing new snow so that their herd can eat the buried lichen and moss. I am here and not here at the same time.

And it is good to know that there is another book out there, just waiting for me to walk into and out again, bringing with me all the ingredients I need to make all the difference.

In the early hours of the morning, I often wake in a flap. All those things on that long list of to-do’s explode into my sleepy head. From sleepy head to sheer panic takes about ten seconds. The list stands before me like a bunch of druids with malicious intent. Maybe it’s more Klu Klux than druid but all I know is that they are chanting judgement and wearing shapeless floaty kit.

Once I come completely to, they begin to fade. Actually, I fade them with similar intent, equally forceful. I won’t tell you what words I speak out into this imaginary crowd of spooky gangsters as they aren’t ladylike. And I have learned that polite requests are like blowing into a hurricane, so I push through the cloaked rabble, silencing them actively and noisily. My initial desire to hide is thwarted, by me. Hiding just seems to give them permission to move in closer and they are quite close enough.

Going downstairs loses me most of them, and by the time coffee is brewing and I can inhale the sharp I-am-here smell, there are only whispers left. Now I can take action in the light of perspective, the light of morning. Someone once wrote that morning voices are very different to evening/night voices, and I agree. For starters, even I cannot stop the rain, the rain that, in turn, is stopping the guy coming to build a new base for my oil tank. This, in turn, is stopping me ordering a fill of oil, which, in turn, stops me lighting the range. This prevents the washing from drying overnight, which now takes four damp days to get anywhere near dry. This fret frets me a lot. I am due to leave for the African continent at the end of this month. What if it rains all through the days so that there will be no homely warm heartbeat in my little kitchen, that warmth that lifts into the bedrooms, that dries the washing, that offers an all day cuddle to us both?

Fret Two is that big load of wood sitting outside absorbing all this rain. I could tog up and barrow it into shelter but I am tired of being wet all the time. I feel like a frog. Boots are soaked and the rain is dissolving the garden into a mud bath. Fret Three is that garden. I had planned to have all the Autumn clearing done before I go. All those sick-to-the core-of-rain summer blooms flop wonkychops across the grass, bowed in defeat, their petals torn. The planters are paddling pools, the flowers floating now.

What makes me imagine that it will never stop raining, that the garden will look like a mangrove swamp by the time I get home again, that himself will freeze without the range, that his trousers and shirts will sprout mushrooms and that the faulty conservatory gutter will fall off from exhaustion? Well, they do. The Klu Klux Druid brotherhood, that’s who. Shall I listen to them, take them seriously? Or, shall I shut out the whispers, denounce them as fears without perspective or gravitas and just freefall into the nothing?

The nothing can be a good mate. And, all it requires is a shrug; that so-what that lifts me into a confidence in nothing at all. In shrugging, I accept the rain without fear. In short, I let go. I freefall. Practically, I can do quite a few things about the frets. I can consider, intelligently, backlit by morning thinking and sans the upstairs judges, a new list. If this month does have to swim to the end of itself, then I will make plans for alternative warmth. If the gutter does fall off, so what? If the washing won’t dry I will find another way. There are many who would give their right arm for my life, for whom my frets are hilarious nonsense.

I smile at that, shift my perspective into touch, and freefall.

Someone has pinched the outlands this morning. Looking out through the smurry rain it seems they have been lifted from the sea. I can still see a horizon but it is just a line where the ocean and the sky meet, quite without the lift and thrust of ancient rock, of the sgurr, the rounding and the stretch of other lands. Last night I watched the reassuring flash of two lights, their individual pulsing both hope and warning into a darkling canopy. No stars, no moon, no chance for sailors to find their way around this dangerous shore, the well-hidden cuts of solid basalt revealing only the tips of their noses, like someone you don’t know well, one who only reveals a little of who they are. The alarming bit is well concealed below their surface and you only know of it when your boat hits. Sometimes that hit is fatal, for a rock mountain has the upper hand. Unlike you, it remains steadfast and barely scratched. What you do about you is up to you.

The sea is vast and grey-flecked. White ruffs surround the rocks as each wave meets it and erupts in a mini tantrum. The ripples fall away to nothing, becoming a compliant part of the whole once again. As dawn rose like an eastern queen I heard a lorry, or thought I did. Yesterday was the ‘gathering’, for this is the time when lambs are stolen from their mothers and sent to market. And the noise they make about it can keep whole families awake. I remember, at Tapselteerie, feeling a huge weight of guilt, just knowing that the ones who had rented the farm cottages would get no sleep at all. The mothers, bereft as long as they can hear the frantic calling of their lambs, will be led out to another pasture and, by the time a few days have passed and their milk dried, their memories will be whitewashed. Such is the way of sheep.

Gulls fly snow white against the greys as the fog holds tight to the horizon. It’s a living dream, a daylight one, this fantasy before me. I know it isn’t the truth, but it looks pretty truthful to me right now.And, therein would lie my disaster were I to be a sailor out there believing that fog is the truth. It thinks me of friends, of my tribe. I thought that friends were my tribe but this is not necessarily true. Some are, some are not. This learning is freeing me and, from the response I have had re The Great Sadness blog, there are many who might want to find such a freedom. Although we may be continents apart, we know each other. We navigate the fog and the rocks of our lives like all good women do but deep deep inside the belly core of our bodies we know we don’t fit. It feels deeply uncomfortable, this scary knowledge, especially if we have travelled many miles, weary and footsore in search of our own tribe, not really believing in such otherworldly nonsense, but propelled forward nonetheless. At times we even laugh at ourselves, turning back into the safety of what and who we know. This should be enough…..well, shouldn’t it?

No. It isn’t, not for those of us who quest like explorers and who just can’t accept the fog. There are outlands beyond that veil. And the only way to see them, to make land, is to cast off. To set out alone in a small and sinkable boat and to point to the horizon, vigilant for rocks, believing no whitewash and, above all, trusting in the fire of that belly core.

And we can do all of this whilst remaining exactly where we are. For now.

There is a duck on a pond beside my cottage-for-a-week. I know the pond. It was constructed some years ago for the snow geese to find, when they travelled away from their island without people. The weed is growing and I can only see a small amount of spring-fed pond now. But there is enough of it for one duck to land in each evening when she knows the night raiders are waking up. The pond is her safety as the cloak of night covers our land like a great big eyepatch.

She shouldn’t be alone, however. She has mislaid her mate somewhere along the way and, as ducks mate for life, I am sad for her. Now she must be super vigilant because nobody has her back and there is always danger for a duck whether up in the sky or down here in the pond. I watch a hooded crow dive at her, taunting, and she plunges her head into the water and throws it up at him, once, twice, when he returns to taunt some more. As the night slows in I watch her watching, her head tipping and turning as she paddles away from the edge to circle the midwater, the safer bit.

In the early morning, she lifts and flies to wherever she flies to. In search of food perhaps; in search of her mate, perhaps. I wonder how long she has been alone. Did she raise ducklings this year, teach them how to quack, to swim, to nuzzle their beaks in the grass, or in the water, for a tasty stalk of green? And did they all survive? Have they flown into their own futures now? I will never know for I don’t speak duck, and, besides, I could never get near enough to enjoy a shared conversation. She is understandably way too jumpy to trust anyone.

I don’t see a snow goose here and there used to be plenty of them. Big proud geese, paper white and rare, threatened, shot at for trophy or Christmas lunch. I remember one, once, flew in on a spring breeze, all alone, to land in the sea-loch below our house. It stood out a mile against the resident greylags and their tiny fluffball goslings. Bereaved, like the duck, he made friends with the greylags and became a sort of big brother to them. When they all decided to cross the loch beneath a scatter of hungry blackback gulls, who would happily pluck a gosling mid paddle, the snow goose led them like a fatherly general. Solicitous and watchful, he set forth as five or six familial lines followed him. He made the apex as the triangle of parents and young traversed the expanse of saltwater. From time to time the snow goose would turn back to tidy up a sprachling family, nudging them once again into formation. Tipping his head to the sky, he watched for danger. I saw him repeat this journey a few times until strong flight feathers cobbled the gosling bodies and the blackbacks left in search of a softer snack. Come Autumn and he was gone. The young geese had gone, the rich green grass had gone and the old folks who remained snuggled into the lee of the bay for shelter.

He returned twice more over two more Springs to repeat his payitforward kindness. He may have lost his mate but not his instinct to protect. I haven’t seen him for years now but I will never forget how I felt as I watched him lead like a kindly light, strong in the face of danger. I remember whispering….This is a quality I want to find in myself.

It may seem like I have way too much to say out here on this clifftop. And it is true, I do. Out here I can think a whole thought all the way through, chew it over, shift it a bit this way or that, develop it without a single otherly demand or call for action to trip me up. Of course, I know this will not be sustainable, not once this week of freedom draws to a close. I will return to duty as I always do, eventually. We all do. Life is not a long holiday from Life. Life is a casserole of colour and texture, full of soft sweetness and tough chewy bits and not an always-full glass of champagne. Trust me, that would be unpleasant in the end. Hangover, indigestion, hunger for something solid inside an ordinary belly will always have us move towards the fridge and the oven and, besides, after one or two glasses of bubbly it turns to acid inside a mouth, melts the lippy, taints the breath and falls you over.

However whenever I am away, alone with my developing thoughts and no trip ups, I often discover a new ingredient for the casserole of Life. Aha! I say to myself. That’s IT! This is the little something I can take home with me, this Aha that will change everything. And it does for the few days I remember it as IT. But, in a short while, this amazing answer to everything loses its centre stage talent and slips back into the chorus line. Even though I know this will happen, I always hope it won’t, that this time I finally get it, got it. I know enough now to smile at that. I know enough to be able to seek, find, employ, feel the hope, the epiphanal excitement, and to let it be what it will be. After all, playing Capercaillie and listening to that angel voice of Karen Mathieson on a loop for hours and hours will drive himself crazy within a short time. Can you turn that down? Can you wear headphones? Yes, yes, yes.

But how do I say those yesses? Do they spoke out like knives into the distance between us or do they float from my smiling mouth like butterflies? Well, both, actually. It depends on how I am feeling at the time and there’s the key. If I decide how I am feeling then I am free to smile out butterflies. Sometimes, though, in the face of the rising fretful demands from a person with dementia, I can flick a knife with astonishing accuracy. Something snaps in me and I appear to be at the mercy of it in the way I respond. But, I remind myself, I am human and tired of all this walking on broken glass and, besides, how hard is it to say I’m Sorry for Stabbing You? It isn’t hard at all.

It thinks me of the times in my life when I believed I had found The Solution to Everything only to discover it was just one and could not stand alone – not in a life of change, and Life is on a right bender of change just now, more than it ever was. Instead I take this great idea as one colour in my tapestry, one ingredient in the casserole, that extra little something that effects enough change to lift the whole thing. It is no longer bland with too much grey and not enough pzazz. I just pzazzed it. And, next time I get to inhabit a solo space, could be a week, could be a walk, could be a moment or two, I will work quickly. My fingers will rummage, my mind will open, my eyes, ears, and I will wait for another ‘it’ to appear like magic, like a sudden butterfly, like a red sun just before the sea snuffs it out, the one that pinks my window and has me hurtling, in a gasp to the door. This is my best shot. And, when I go back into the sad fretful frustration of dementia I will take it with me to add to our conjoined life.

And it will make all the difference.

I’m watching the ocean. There is a load of it to watch, even if I am only seeing a big bowl of salty soup with brushstroke islands in the distance. Some of them long and flat with the odd bump and others rising like fists into the tissue paper sky. Like a punch. Around their edges the moontide shoves water up their basalt/granite flanks and their flanks shove it back like a Get off Me woman thing. Over and over again this goes on as if it is a war between the ultimate limits, old rocks and old sea. Both are dangerous when roused. But, as neither wins, the war just repeats like a treadwynd, an endless cyclical process, circle circle circle, until we both dizzy.

I see the tipple grasses list this way and that as the clouds have no idea where to go next. I watched the same ones this morning, as dawn yawned and lit her lamp and they were going that way. Now, they’re going this way. Must be exhausting to be a cloud unless you get the chance to off your load over someone just lighting up their barby. That could be fun, if you like that sort of thing. The whatsit reeds are going brown at the tips, as is the bracken, but nobody minds that happening. It’s been weeks since I could walk to the fairy woods because the bracken is my height and loaded with ticks and I am so not bothering with that. Besides, it is rather discombobulating to be placing my feet into such a darkness. Although I know the path, this confoundment of bracken creates a jungle that has my imagination spiralling loops.

Behind the tissue paper, the lamp is lit so that sun glow pervades the grey and startles it into a canopy of white hope. I am wishing the clouds, now One Cloud (probably conceding defeat with all this cantering across the sky for hours) would just relax and let go. That might mean I could watch Sky instead of all these shades of grey. Fingers of rather lovely resistance frond across the earthly ceiling, linking fingers as the bullying wind goes off to bother someone else. It thinks me of women. Women and their ocean tears. Women who send a son off to war; Women who care for sickness within the family, the street, the community; Women who fight for bread in a daylong queue; Women who sing their rebellion, write it, demand it, walk for it, run for it, sew it into stories that might hang on walls, might not. Women who seek red, the blood of red, the call and the fist of red, a woman’s colour for her whole life. She had to grow to love it because, once, she was princess pink, if she was lucky. Or, is it lucky?

I watch the softening sky, the grey fingers interlaced, the distant blue of the land so many miles away. I watch the ocean and I wonder……how much of this salt is your own, Ocean, and how much of it are the tears of women?

Sometimes, no, often, words come to me and I can find no obvious reason, nor a tangible link to the thoughts I was thoughting just before the random word shot into my head. This word has such a powerful thrust that I just have to whisper it out of my mouth. At other times, when I am alone as opposed to standing in an always silent supermarket queue, I may speak it out, shout it even. If I am in the middle of Somewhere, like on a cliff or at the very edge of a spit of rock, when the next step would drown me in minutes, I can blast out the word and watch it scoot away on the wind or into the ever-open beak of a Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Of course, I am crazy. Or genius. I flit between the two depending on whom is in charge of me at the time, angel or harpy. However, if I was genius, surely I would know why this word cometh unbidden, and be able to fit it neatly into the order inside my head? I am already chuckling at the ‘order’ word. Obviously there is more chaos than order and much as I might wish I had the same brain as my old ma who would refuse a cup of coffee if it was proffered before 11 o’clock on the dot, I do not.

When I find a portico I feel an urge to go through it and into the whispers. There is something wonderful about a doorway that isn’t because there is no door. No chance to get shut in, or out, nor to shut another in or out. There is no privacy, no Go Away, only an open welcome, often a lot more than one welcome for porticos tend to stand together, unlike the singularity of doors, or a door. We all have a few, but they don’t line up like sentries and are usually placed where walls run out of puff, allowing access or denial of access. They are also great for a tantrum slam, unlike porticos where slamming is not an option. Considerably more complex than a portico and sharply delineated, a door is not an open mouth. I prefer the roundness of the arch, the come hither of such a gentle shape and I love walking into the whispers.

In life without winged words, sentences are thrown together to oblige, deny, accommodate, order, comply and for myriad other ordinary usage. Would you like coffee? for example. Not till 11 o’clock. But that’s five minutes away! I know that. Well you can make your own then. Charming!

But my winged words open up new worlds, even if they do cometh unbidden, unsought. They think me, lead me over there instead of down the usual plodpath. Some say my subconscious is working all the time, some say I’m plain bonkers. The truth is I am both and at the same time but, and but again, if these random words are a gift to me then they are asking to be spoken out. They want a story, a point, the chance to get a breath of air and to fly awhile, even if J Livingston S gets them first. So much of life is loud and noisome, so little room for the whispers from the past, from the future to be really heard. When I went to a city recently and battled my way through a station crowd, feeling like a cow as I followed the arrows and fitted in between the barriers with all the other obedient cattle, I couldn’t hear a single thing from inside my head. Outside of me it was either high volume tannoy information that nobody heard anyway and which needed a considerably more efficient sound system, or a people shouting at each other via their mobile phones. How can they live like this, I wondered, such noise pollution and every single day? I would rather step into the Atlantic with lead boots. I doubt anyone can find an original word inside that chaos, settling, instead for a repeat of what someone else said, preferably on TV or wrote in some magazine, preferably a glossy about half-dressed celebrities. And, yet, there are brilliant authors who do just that, and they can find words and make them fly a whole lot better than I ever could. Must be a mental yogic thing, that ability to shut out the noise from the inside of it. People, it seems, can find the porticos and the whispers among the flashing lights, the going nowhere rush and the complete lack of still silence that makes a city life.

I am just so thankful I live in the middle of Somewhere where words just appear without prior permission, flitting through the silence and into the chaos of my head, one that shuts up immediately as if royalty just walked in. I like that I can take each one and give them freedom for a little while before they fall away again back into a book, just a word in line. One day, someone else will open that book and another word will fly high into the big sky. It might land softly in a new mind and it might change something, or someone, make them rethink, make them want to wander through the gentle arch and into the whispers.