July 14, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 79 On Waiting

There is something about waiting that can create an internal chaos.

Waiting for a train or a flight. Waiting for a day to come or a person.

Waiting for life to change, or start, or end. Waiting for seeds to grow, for my turn to come in or to go out. For guests to arrive or leave.

For a new baby. For test results.

That last one has to be the worst.

I knew a very old lady, once, who had been a maid all her working life. She was deeply proud of being a maid, and would make sure you got it right, the title right, if, perchance you got in a fankle over political correctness. This woman had no time for such malarky. Just say it like it is, she would say, wagging a bent finger under your nose. Maid is maid, however you try to say it.

She used to name certain days, waiting days. These days, for her, as a country girl, were usually connected with the weather. A waiting day meant the sky was shut, the wind all blown out, everything just standing there or hanging there……waiting. Of course, the weather matters a lot when your family are land workers, which hers were. Whether to plant, of plough, harvest or lay out in rows to dry, all dependant on the weather, and if the weather was waiting for something to happen, it never explained what. Could be rain. Could be there was a kick-ass gale in the planning, just off stage and hidden from human view. In her day, there was the wirless, but no fancy satellite information about high pressures over Iceland. Just the local yokel out with his moisture meter – or his eyes looking up and his own gut feeling.

On her waiting days, she would do something. Clean the silver (not her own) or pull out the beds for a good ‘doing’ or tidy handkerchief drawers, that sort of something. Anything, basically, to fill in the waiting time, and, in the doing of something, she might calm her own anxieties.

We can learn from her.

If, whilst waiting, we focus on what we are waiting for, knowing with perfect clarity that, in doing so, we make absolutely no difference to the thing, but only serve to discombobulate ourself into a right stooshie, we might consider a different approach. Of course, if the thing we wait for is scary and deeply buried in the underworld, such as the results of a medical test with an alarming set of possibles attached, we will be unable to erase it completely from our thinking. But the mind is quite easily led, I have found, and can be eased into a different place, at least for a little while.

I agree that giving the silver a clean, supposing we have any in the first place, or pulling out the beds for a good ‘doing’ are hardly exciting options, but that, I believe, is the key. Dullard tasks can soothe our brilliant and dangerous minds into a calm humdrum.

It doesn’t take the worry away. It doesn’t change the end result. But it does ease the path from breakfast to lunch, from hour to hour, from Monday to Friday. It won’t be a smooth one, nor easy, but when the demons trip us up and make us fall, the best we can do is get up and try again.

July 13, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 78 – Reality Check

I have sailed the seas in a ship made of diamonds

pearl coloured sails and the moonlight to guide

I have swum in the depths and played in the shallows

felt the child in my womb jump for joy in the night

but wherever I go, that’s where I’ll find me

there’s no running away.

For I always need to come home again

even if voices may beg me to stay.

When I write a song, I just let the words flow. Nonsense a lot of the time, but this doesn’t bother me. Nonsense never did. What bothers me is what the world calls reality.

If I set off into reality, to scrub a bathroom, say, or plunder the veg counter in the local shop, I can call it whatever I want. If it’s me, which I usually am, I will find faces among the brassicas and patterns in the legume basket. Bananas are definitely grammar (( as are the full stops of blueberries, although the mushy ones could be commas. In the bathroom, I can set up quite a rhythm with the loo brush around the bowl, and a serious counterpoint if I add the squirts of cleaner at just the right moment. Over at the basin, there is a splendid piece of art going on with shaving foam droplets and toothpaste in a lovely concave composition, one I almost don’t want to wipe away.

Downstairs, the new washing machine having finally laid down moorings (I found the spirit level), hums and sloshes and the washing powder tin on the shiny white top, thrums a little to itself. In the kitchen, I can whizz, chop, stir fry or simmer. The fridge, faulty, bless it, but still going, hums and burps and emits sudden gurgles, much like a happy baby. When the man of the house makes a sandwich, the floor takes on a wonderful speckle, that looks as if we had an early flurry of snow, and when the little dog laps her water, the spilled drops reflect the sunlight and sparkle like jewels.

On the line, the breeze pulls and pushes at the washing, slowly, at first and faster as the water moisture lifts back into the sky, whence it came, via the tank in the loft, of course.

I have flown as high as the geese and then higher,

burst like a seed through the hymen of space

I have watched a star explode into millions

new lights for the darkness, in patterns of lace

But wherever I go, that’s where I’ll find me

there’s no running away

for I always need to come home again

even though voices may beg me to stay.

lucky that.

July 9, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 76 – Webcage

This morning, early, I took my camera outside to capture what looked like froth covering everything. Trees, long grass, bushes and the fence. Closer up I recognized the froth.

Spider webs.

They got me thinking.

Yesterday, in the hot bright sunshine, I saw not one of them. They were all invisible until this morning’s heavy dew painted them clearly for my eyes to see. And that is the whole plan. If I was a fly, this could be dead dodgy. I could ping into one of those sticky tendrils and be lunch in seconds. If I was a wasp or one of our honey bees, I might be dinner instead, for no spider will attack things with stings immediately, for very obvious reasons. And they always know, the spiders. I have watched, many times, a stinging thing fly into a web and become part of it whilst the spider dashes out, stops dead and dashes back again to wait. Things with stings have more time for an escape plan.

In life, we all know the feeling of being caught in a web. The ‘spider’ in charge may be bigger and more powerful than us, or half our size, but this fact matters not one jot in the end. Once we are trapped, and held fast by the web, we can either struggle ourselves into an even tighter fix, or we can work ourselves free.

It might be our job or aspects of it that spins an invisible web to catch us. It might be a relationship, or aspects of it. It might be habits, contacts, colleagues or our own mistaken need to repeat old patterns. Whatever is holding us, weakening us so that we ever so gradually dull our own wits and lose purchase on our freedom, we have to recognize it, and therein lies the rub, for we will blame anything and anyone as our wings grow weak and our fears take control.

As a result of becoming trapped in a webcage, I might take on and develop bad habits. I will probably grow fat or I will grow thin. I will become a bit manic (if it is possible to become a ‘bit’ manic) about a fitness routine, or my own private space or the way I like things done until I can no longer see anyone but myself in relation to the rest of humankind. What I will not see is that, if I just rest a little, I can probably work out an escape, because resting means dilemma to me. I cannot stop moving, because if I stop moving, I will have to think and the inside of my unhappy head is the last place I want to spend any time at all.

But this is exactly what I need to do.

Someone, possibly more than one someone, once said that in order to find a way out of the pain, we have to stay inside it, engage with it, to accept it, and to move on beyond it. It sounds ghastly at best, but from experience I know it to be true. The alternative is a lifetime of running, and not from one bad situation to another, although that is exactly what it will be, but from our own self.

What we all need to do to free our wings is to stop and say…….ok, Pain, talk to me.

If our job/partner/lifestyle is slowly killing us, we must find the courage to acknowledge it and take action. Yes, it is scary, but I have done it and felt terrified in a strange land, one I now know well with views and spaces and light and fun; not one of which I saw before I acknowledged the dark pain and fear, reminded myself that I have wings and a sting,and rose myself up and away into a new sky, trailing a strand of web.

July 8, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 75 – The Show goes on

When we are little we are all taught good manners, how to be polite, how to be giving, although no-one can teach us how to want to be polite or giving. This doesn’t seem to bother our elders and betters whose main aim is to make us look like we are genuine in our giving, so they won’t appear lax in parenting skills in front of the family or, worse, Uncle and Aunt Grumfuttock, who live next door and who claimed visiting rights the day they elevated themselves from plain old Mr and Mrs.

There can be a chasmic gap between giving and wanting to give; from saying sorry when it wasn’t your foot that got in the way of Aunt Grumfuttock’s stick but the other way round, thus making it NOT your fault that she now flounders at carpet level like a fat walrus on the rocks, to offering very small crustless sandwiches around at tea time to women with orange faces and big bottoms and answering inane questions about what you want to be when you grow up – something you no longer plan to do – not if it involves any more of this giving, which looks more like giving in.

What to do with this gap? I told my kids it was absolutely fine to think one thing and say another, after all, they didn’t feel in the least bit sorry and nor did I think they should, although I went through the ghastly mother-motions of enforced sorryings, in order to keep some equilibrium. What I wanted to do was bop the Smug Adult myself, but that would have caused no end of on-going problems, especially if the SA was a teacher or policeman or relation which was usually the case. I had turned the process into a fine art myself, long ago losing the initial false guilt that the world so happily heaps on our shoulders. What you do is this……..imagine a different ending for the old so-and-so who won’t back off till that Sorry word falls out of your mouth They could explode, for instance, or fall into the sewage works, or be filled with helium and float all the way to Australia. They might take the biggest cake, the one you filled with laxative, or disappear down a rabbit hole and come face to face with the Red Queen. You could make a mouse run up a trouser leg or, better, a sheep tick. Let your imagination run free.

Another gap is between helping and interfering.

I practice the same mental acrobatics when someone tries to be helpful and is quite the opposite. I tell myself that they have never really landed inside their own lives which is why they invest great effort in fixing mine. Initially I admit, I feel a prickle of sweat on the back of my neck and the need to rise up and defend my choice of action, one I mistakenly shared with them. I should know by now that to keep quiet about what I plan to do is the only way to avoid unhelpful opinions, but I am consistently foolish, sharing my ideas with one who just can’t help but leap in to fix me.

Picturing funny endings frees me from growing a mental garden of resentment, anger, bitterness, hate. If I can picture Aunt Grumfuttock filling with helium and floating high over the rooftops at the same time as she is glowering at me through her mean little eyes with her pudgy paw held out for her stick and her apology, I can say whatever she wants to hear and turn away with a wonderful picture in my mind and a big smile on my face. If a person steps over the boundary of helpfulness (because I asked for it) given freely, and without obligation, or so I thought, and becomes overly ‘helpful’ (when I didn’t ask for it) given at a price, I can still be gracious-ish whilst thinking what I like.

We all face people every day who ‘make’ us feel we need to protect ourselves. Instead of taking it seriously, taking it on, I say take it off and make it fun. There is so much ‘wonderful’ in our lives to focus on. When someone grows tiresome we may need to find a way to point out our boundaries, but, in the meantime, the picture of Aunt Grumfuttock, floating like a UFO among the stars with a sheep tick inside her bloomers, will do.

July 5, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 74 – Spontaneous Adventures

I rarely plan adventures. They just happen to me, swooping round corners and whopping me in the eyeballs.

Here I am ! Look at me!

And there it is, the adventure, full frontal and blocking my path.

I could, of course I could, step around it. I could cite a whole gamut of plausible and dull reasons why I can’t take this adventure by the hand and let it lead me astray; like it’s nearly lunchtime for instance, or I must catch this ‘dry’ for a load of wet sheets, or it’s only Wednesday and nobody adventures on a Wednesday.

But, I say, and but again, the best times I have had in my bonkers life have been spontaneous adventures, when logic is wheeched over the fence leaving ample room for imagination and emotion to fill the inner void. Then, and only then, does the adrenaline fizz like bubbles in my veins and my head feel light as goose down. I never get that fizz hanging out the sheets.

Yesterday we were planning to turn left. The day had arrived in its customary shapeless grey but as we walked the little girls through the woods that climbed into the sky, we noticed a patch or two of blue. Avoiding as best we could, the manic desire to search for more, we found a bridge with fast-running peaty mountain water and looked down to play Pooh Sticks. We went under the bridge and sloshed over the slippy rocks, and climbed up the banks till our knees were brown as caramel and we were dizzy with giggles. When we looked up again the day had shucked off the shapeless grey and the sky smiled blue and gold and warm.

So, instead of turning left for home, a sensible lunch preparation and an even more sensible change of trews and wellies, wet on the inside, (overly enthusiastic Pooh Stickery), we turned right and headed up and over the hill on the skinny track that first laid itself down, hundreds of years ago, beneath the feet of animals. We turned up the tunes and sang our way up and down again, stopping only to remove a jumper or to admire the view or to encourage a mother and lamb to step onto the verge. We passed by the little school shed with its beach hut stripes (The Square Rainbow) and turned down the track to where the little ferry would take us over to lunch. We pulled back the slide to reveal the red square, and the little boat cast off it’s moorings and began to move towards us.

Lunch, as I have said before, is a really delicious experience at the Boat House. The welcome is warm and gentle, the food superbly prepared and presented. We sat outside, watching the seabirds, and eating fresh prawns and I don’t mean those piddling shrimps most people understand to be prawns. I mean island prawns, big and meaty and you only need four to be quite filled up. The bread was straight from the baking oven with a lovely crust, the salad crisp and fresh and the dressing delicious. But, it is not just the food that makes this place, run by Becky and Emma, so very good. It’s the light in their eyes, the passion and enthusiasm for their business, their island welcome, their no-fuss-about-anything attitude. They think outside the box. They don’t say NO. In fact, there is not a single NO visible on the island – such a joy to see in a world where NO is the most overly used word in all public places.

On the way home over the hill, past the Square Rainbow, we stopped to buy fresh strawberries from a roadside stall with an honesty box. It was the last bag and as we put our money in the little till, and I saw the amount of cash already there, I thought…. how wonderful it is to adventure, to take risks, whether it be leaving an honesty box by the roadside, or opening a restaurant on a tiny little island or simply by turning right instead of left.

July 4, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 73 – To Give or not to Give

I learned recently of a man who gave his wife a lovely piece of jewellery.

And then left her.

She kept it for some years, eventually making the decision to sell it.

Of course, any beauty it ever had was lost way back when it no longer spoke of love and giving, but more, perhaps of duty and guilt.

It made me think of what really is beautiful to our eyes, and not for a moment, but for always, and the answer is that it has little to do with eyes and everything to do with heart.

Gifts are often given to alleviate guilt, to fill in that huge empty void, so often an unwelcome part of a relationship, the place where communication forgot to settle and make into a home.

I don’t know how to love you the way you want, so I will buy you this, once I’ve checked the price tag and been suitably impressed. I won’t even be sure you will like the gift, but you won’t be able to show anything other than delight, once you realise how much it cost me. After that, I can go back to not communicating with you for another year.

Phew!

Lovely gifts are always free. We never remember the gifts that were bought and paid for, unless they directly reflect the level of communicated love we receive from the giver. If this giver always criticises and grumbles at us, then suddenly presents us with a pretty gift they just know we will love to wear, but have never worn before, what on earth do we believe of them?

Confused, no dot or com.

So each time I put it on it feels awkward for it is not something I ever wear nor ever have worn so why…….

Aha! I get it. This is what you would like me to like, so that you can like me better, because, then, I’ll be more like you, not me!

No longer confused, although I do wonder if I’m really here at all.

The giving of gifts is a free offering, without expectation of anything. Not even a thank you letter.

Otherwise, it is just control. Of course, I am excited to give whatever it is I am giving you. It could be my time, my smile, my kind words, my whole life, but I must remind myself that, unless I give these and many more similar gifts, freely, I am not giving at all, but taking.

So what do I do when my giving is not received as such? When it is, at best, unnoticed, at worst, rejected? Do I keep giving, fighting back the hurt and resentment that curdles my belly, or do I stop altogether and be true to myself?

Many have pondered this one but only a handful ever managed to get it right. I don’t mean a handful this year or even this century, but ever in the whole history of time. A handful.

For those who seek this blissful state of giving without expectation, there is a huge and lucrative business out there just waiting to welcome us in. There are ‘Find Yourself’ workshops, group therapy sessions, counsellors and psychiatrists all trained and qualified in this method and that method and many, including myself, have benefited from their wisdom and guidance. But there is no quick fix answer that works across the board.

I think it is a daily journey, as long as we are seeking a better way to love. And never giving up.

June 25, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 71 – Letting Go

Yesterday I took some washing up to the line like a good island wife, in a stout breeze.

That is not an article of island clothing, by the way, but, instead, a good wind for drying things.

As I climbed up the little mosaic-ed garden steps, a bush erupted beside me. I knew from the sound effects that this was a Blackbird Hoo-ha, at which Blackbirds are pretty good. They can make one out of nothing with their alarm calls, causing an island wife to drop her laundry basket, tipping her husband’s undergarments into a flowerbed and requiring her to wash them all over again.

I stood still, my back against the wall, my husband’s undergarments safely within the confines of the basket, and waited for the drama to unfold. For a few seconds, I and the blackbird family listened for each other, neither of us daring to make a sound. I knew they would give in first, through their natural curiosity and also because time is of the essence for them. Not so for me. I could linger here all morning without a shred of embarrassment or guilt, but, then, I don’t have to learn to fly in order to keep a hold of my life.

Or do I?

Anyway, the male jumped out of the bush first, which is quite proper for a Father Protector, and he locked eyeballs with me and said something rather sharp and double syllabled. I looked away, knowing that this removed me as a confrontational threat, and waited some more. He chirruped at the bush and out bounced three youngsters – all bigger than their dad, followed by a rather ruffled mother

After a few aviation tips, he told them to get on with it, and led the way, landing on the apex of the roof. Eventually they followed, but not without giving dad a whole load of lip about this flying thing and his overly high expectations of them.

This morning I noticed them all around the compost bin, which has overflowed with an excitement of worms, thus providing the family with three good meals a day plus healthy snacks. How wonderful it is, I thought to myself, that this adult pair are likely to have pitched their nest around this very spot precisely because of the overflowing compost bin and the excitement of worms. I wonder if we are clever with our own nest pitching – considering what is best for the family, and, then, moving if we find a danger too close at hand. I doubt it somehow, not with all that mortgage angst and debts and work commitments, although none of that makes it right to be living in the wrong place.

At my little grand-daughter’s naming ceremony, the words for her, in poetry, promises and songs, offered gifts and wisdom and freedom. She must learn from her parents, her guides and then be free to take that learning and shape it her own way. We all want this and yet few of us get it or give it, not really. Through our own fear, we try to keep hold, of our children, our friends. How many of us ever listen to someone, anyone, announce their new plan, a completely bonkers and impossible one, in our opinion and make no comment whatsoever? No word of caution, no opinion, saying something like this:-

Wow! That sounds incredible? How will you achieve that do you think?

And then listen and learn and encourage and only ever give opinion if asked.

Bet you can’t do it. We are all jailors of someone in order to feel free.

June 24, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 70 – Life is a simple thing

fig: http://favim.com

It’s all about breathing in and out for decades, something that happens to us quite naturally. We can take no credit for this and it’s not complicated, until it stops, of course, or struggles to continue. All we have to do, as out heart beats and our lungs fill and empty a thousand times a day, is to get on with living.

Ah, you might say. That’s the rub. My life is so much harder than just breathing in and out and getting on with things. My circumstances, you see…..well, life is not simple at all.

Yes, I say, it is. It may not be easy, but it is simple, and then I draw back in case I get swiped, because why?

Because people love to complicate things, all things and especially their own things.

I know people who have come through cancer and people who have not come through. I am not one of them. Therefore my life is a breeze.

I know people who have lost a child. I have not. Therefore my life is a breeze.

I know someone disabled, paralised, in prison,bereaved,destitute and hungry.

I am none of them. Therefore….etc

At Jenny’s funeral yesterday, I listened to the tributes. I counted 250 at least in the church. I caught the sparkle of a woman who refused to moan, although, believe me, she had plenty of reason to. In fact, she had absolutely no time at all for moaners.

On the way to the church, down winding country lanes, I saw a land rover parked in a driveway. Across the top of the windscreen the words in bold black said this:-

ONE LIFE. LIVE IT.

Jenny did.

Short or long it is the same for us all, as far as we know, although one friend whose family are fisherfolk, plans to return as a crack shot seagull.

Whatever our piddling ailments, our list of miniature disasters, we were born with laughter in our hearts and we all know it.

We might consider laughing more and particularly at ourselves.

June 21, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 69 – Aground

There’s a ship in our harbour aground on the rocks, a big and very stuck ship. It was on its way from Belfast to Sweden with a load of timber. I don’t know what will happen to it, or the timber, or the waters in the harbour, but I do know that it matters to me when anything bad happens at sea, because the next part usually involves one of my men.

In the early days of living on the island there was no lifeboat, and the local seamen became auxiliary coastguards. I remember not infrequent calls, especially during the summer months when every loon with a dream of the wild ocean waves, took to the sea without a clue of tidal rips, wind direction or the rise and fall of the tides. Add to all that ‘complicata’, those dodgy times when the wind argues with the direction of the tide, creating a real stooshie, when your little craft, so safe, (you thought) begins to screw tail in the boiling soup and runs the very real risk of tipping right over if one big wave comes at you sideways on. Then there are those razor sharp rocks just below the surface. You can’t afford to marvel at the wonderful views anywhere near land, because land is not where you think it is. Land goes on into the sea and says nothing much. It just blows a few bubbles that can look dead cute if you don’t check your chart.

I’m not saying the skipper of this massive hulk didn’t check his or her charts. With a ship that big, stopping at all must be planned a mile away, and turning round quickly at the last minute when bubbles reveal their teeth is quite out of the question.

Anyway, back to what I was saying about my men. The old sea dog had to turn around quick sharp often after a tourist trip to the islands, or out to watch for whales, if a call came through on the radio. Out he would go, spotlight on the waves, if it was a darkling time of day, to search for a dingy, or worse, a person in the black soup. It is hard enough to find a huge whale in the sea, never mind a little person with only a head showing. He has towed sailing boats off beaches and rocks and stayed to reassure folk who had to wait for the lifeboat to arrive from the mainland. He has helped people be airlifted out, and seen many back into safety. Now we do have a lifeboat on the island, one with big twin engines, and our son is deputy cox and sometimes the whole cox. When a storm rises like a bully and when the wind roars and the night is black as a witch, I wonder what he might be called out to do. There have been some really tough times, but the team is tight and experienced and they know the rocks like teeth just under the surface of the sea, of old. But still, we women and our imaginations can take the facts and spin our spin and hardly sleep a wink for the pictures in our fluffy little heads.

The sea is a wild thing- unpredictable and demanding respect. Nobody can be her master and nor they ever will be.

June 19, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 68 – Songs for the Girls

fig via: futureengagedeliver.com

I wrote a song for Jenny and one day I will sing it out, perhaps after the funeral. And then I wrote another for my little grand-daughter, the youngest thus far whose naming ceremony is being celebrated the weekend after.

How life organises these things I cannot say, but she always does and it makes a sort of sense. It’s not about one life replacing another, but more that the sharp-edged void created in a heart, when someone dies can be softened by a new life. These two girls will never know each other; will never come together except in my heart, and that is something rather wonderful and quite uniquely precious.

When I write my songs, or create my paintings, or lampshades or cushions or whatever, I work for one person. I think of who they are and what colours they wear and what stories lie in their eyes, and I work to honour and recognise them all. This is why I won’t create a production line, nor paint the same, but in blue, to match the furnishings. Every single piece of work is a one-off.

Much like a life.

The song for Jenny celebrates her as a woman of the sea, of the world and now, of the beyond, wherever that is. The words are taken from a well-known poem and personalised, and I don’t suppose anyone will mind, because they will hear what they want to hear and think what they want to think about Jenny as they take it all in. The music will lift them and pull on their heart strings and someone may well recognise parts of other melodies and other phrasing from a different song for there is nothing new under the sun.

And yet, everything is always new when someone catches a thing and forges it again in the fires of their heart.

The song for my granddaughter is different in that the words are all mine, and the melody pinched from a couple of other musicians who won’t know and wouldn’t mind anyway. We are not talking chart topper here. The words had to be bespoke, just for her, and with respect paid to her mum and her dad and the fabulous crazy wild people they are, and all those attributes now handed on to one little girl. It’s light-hearted and fun and will bring smiles to all the faces watching me stand and deliver.

We are all unique, but it is a rare bird that can fly alone into a busy sky, with its own song to sing, certain that just by singing it, everything is new.