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Island Blog – Feelings Left Behind

We can lose years of feelings, yet remember moments burgeoning with them. When someone died, or was born, we know the date, but have quite forgot the feelings around that event. We get a glimpse of joy, of sorrow, of relief, of anger, of being there, as a person, remembering, perhaps, what we wore and who was there. Feelings flitter away. The sense of presence, of engagement, of inclusion, seem, to me, to float into the already past of such events. It thinks me.

How many of us can accurately come up with a date, when asked, one which includes lockdowns? Not me for sure. I start off answering a question, one that requires a datal fix, and I founder. It was four years. No, that cannot be. ok, 6 years. No again. And. I trawl, literally trawl as through a whole expanse of ocean, sky, time. I can feel my arms reaching back, lifting as I try to gather in an answer, wanting so much to gain a hold on ‘that time’, but I cannot. Then, when some semblance of datal knowledge (did I just invent a word there) arrives between you and me, I find myself alien to the facts, because I cannot find the feelings. This happened. I know it did. You just told me it did. But i am not there without feelings, so, basically, I am not there at all, although I was. I did get a glimpse (stupid word btw) of a sudden rush of something, but it was gone in a second, and I couldn’t hold it back.

There are so many memories I want to haul in like a fisherman, to pull ( with my own strength) into the boat I am now captain of, and to spend time bobbing in the salt, the wind, the sun, the storm, picking through those times, feeling them in my fingers, remembering them as I was then, as everyone was then. A memory bank, like other ocean banks where living is visceral and immediate, and time is but an illusion.

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Island Blog – A Capacious Confusion

There’s loads of room in there. In fact, acres, hectares, whole countries. When I find myself tumbled into such a state, unexpectedly and completely unprepared, my thinks go viral. Something, or someone, I knew as in a confirmed state, the shape of it, or them, suddenly shifts like a new weather, from sun to cloud, from known to strange, from confidence to pull back and run and I do tumble. I have been good at such tumbles over the years, although I am no acrobat. But, I can resume a stand-up and pretty quick. Things change, things break, people change, people break. It wonders me, it does, because it seems to me that, in this culture, in the the now of now, change brings in a desire to destruct, and I don’t mean, necessarily, to take apart and reassemble, not if the break is a person, a living, breathing strong, and wonderful person who is, let’s be honest, in the evening of their life, and for whom a switch has been switched. They gave no permission for such. It isn’t as if their battery ran out. It is just one of the many things unexplained which took a foothold. just when they were about. to make some great adventure. What I mean is a a desire to control.

My issue is with the response to such a dynamic shift. Because it comes a-sudden, just when, ach, please, no, ‘I don’t need this thing’ blasts in on a new wind, not one anyone had heretofore noticed, and which now is very and loudly here creating confusion, at first. That’s shock, and I get it. But for those who can think beyond their own convenience, and for those who can swipe away any talk of confinement or control, there will be renewed freedom for the changed one, and for everyone else. Someone else doesn’t know best. The person who has experienced all of it is suddenly falling into the mercy of others, having never been at the mercy of anyone, and for decades. It saddens me. There are so many rooms in this situation, acres hectares, whole countries.

Why would a person who has lived over 7 decades want confinement, control? Would you? Oh, I know we might need help with bigger letters on our phone, with a stick, with kindly neighbour watch, with lifts to a doctor’s appointment, to a farmers market, even to check we didn’t have make-up in the wrong place. This is life, and this is the autumn of a long one. Not many of us get here.

I get that a change is Confusion. Think Capacious. there are so many rooms, acres, hectares, a whole country, for the intuitively wise thinkers. Even in your busy young lives. You’ll be here one day.

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Island Blog – Consequences

We say things, we look this way, away from this way, away from that, towards both. We just do it, not much thinking, nothing conscious. We have, or may have, little idea of the result we just cemented in time. I so would like for children to be taught this, about body language, about what is never communicated via vocal chords. However, that is another thing. Let us elevate from the depths of wisdom, for now.

Saying something, doing something, any something has consequences. I remember learning that word, behind a scratched-on desk in the afternoon of a very long room, and being determined to know it for ever, even if I had yet to grasp the meaning of it. It was a big long word to me which meant nothing, but, I knew it, had a forward grasp.

We learn as we fumble our way through life, letting dreams what slip through our fingers, fighting for space, unsure, and, if we are open to our own possible failings, we can rise again, recognising our wrong choices, whether intentioned or just the result of carelessness, lack of research, or thought, and we can still clean up and take control of the next step.

There is never an end. There’s just a stop which leads to a new and informed, humbled,open beginning, thinking this. Whatever I do, or say, or act upon, all of that brings consequences. All of it.

Have I thought about that?

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Island Blog – A Royal Visit and Perspective

I went into the harbour town on Monday, relieved, I was, not to be travelling the switchback road today, Tuesday. I knew that Prince William and Princess Kate planned a walkabout, and I just knew. No parking, Chaos, Road Closures. Angst and Grumps. A lot of capitals there. However, my beloved son called me to say his big fancy yacht was coming in to harbour on the Visit Day. Oh…….

It wasn’t really a conversation with myself, not when one of my darlings are nearby. I would drive anywhere on any switchback to find and hug said beloved. As I spun along the almost empty switchback, up hills, around endless corners and hardly meeting a single visitor, whom, we joke here, has no idea how to reverse, and on a single track road, I hoped and prayed for a parking space. My mini is tiny, easy to park, I could perch anywhere. I turned down into the town, saw the camera crews, the newspaper journalists, the big mikes with those fluffy tops, the tourists all regailed in summer sparkle. The sun did shine, the air warm. I arrived to witness a serious and furious altercation on a parking space, and thought, no, this isn’t for me. I spoke to my lovely friends in the Harbour Garage and asked if they could advise me. They did, and I applied my mini, sort of, around a couple of vehicles with serious issues, neither of which were going anywhere this day. Then I walked, no, I danced through the thronging crowd, as if I was somebody, down the Private Pontoon, to this classy ship,and there he was, chatting to the lifeboat crew. A cup of tea, no, two, and a good catchup with a man who was my middle child, still is, but who is now a husband and father of five and just marvellous. I heard it today from the guests aboard. I’ve heard it hundreds of time before. He is calm, he is intuitively connected with the vagaries of this Atlantic/Island conflict, and is decisive and respectful. That’s him.

Anyway…..I managed to escape the harbour town before the roads were closed. I am thankful. Not just because I escaped, but more. How on earth do these young royals cope with no freedom, endless security restrictions, no chance to say Hey, let’s go for a picnic, let’s walk down the street, let’s do any damn thing spontaneous? I heard murmurs about the Royal Family as I fannied about with parking, as I walked down the pontoon to the superyacht. It thinked me. It is easy, no, possible, to be so unvisioned in a life as to make opinions and judgements based on fluff, no experience, no research. Not sure that’s an opinion, nor the basis for an intelligent judgement at all.

Later, I see how my islander friends greeted the young couple, the smiles, the touches, the obvious conversations. And I am glad. They came to our island for peace and I hope they found it. They did their visit thing, they were gracious and approachable. They didn’t choose to be born, but they have grabbed it with both hands. I cannot imagine how tough that is. I used to be furious when the father of my endless children wasn’t home by six.

Perspective.

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Island Blog – The In-Between of It All

We learn how to live our lives, following, whether we want it or not, the echoes of what we learned in our childhoods. Hoods. Like coverings which deny our looking out. This is normal. However, as we age in wisdom and, hopefully, with a measure or a deal of independent thought, we might lift those hoods and slip into an (heretofore unknown) crevice, an in-between. It’s a weird thing, that slip, that fall, and it can happen anywhere and at anytime, particularly when we think we know who the heck we are. Especially then. It’s as if my clothes don’t fit. As if the chair upon which my butt is perched is, all of a sudden, the wrong shape. As if I suddenly want to run from this place and into the new understanding of me, but don’t, because I am half way through a starter and the running might make me look weird and deranged. After all, only I know what just happened, how what someone said connected with me like a dart to my heart, literally. All this occurs in complete silence, even though an entire planetary explosion has just shot me from whom I thought I was, right out into space without oxygen, no space suit, no map.

In such an in-between, I am inadequately dressed. My shoes are not for climbing out of this deep and rocky divide in the land I thought I knew so well. It’s cold and I have no answers. But, but, I can still see the sky. I can still hear the swash-slap of ocean whack against the rocks I do know. And I know that this sudden realisation is going to be my pal on the road. I just know it. Oh, I could, and many would, flap the whole thing away and find a way back to what……reality tv, the projectile misery of the daily news, the poison and the lies of social media; a comfortable landing; what happened was just a thing; a No Thing; the thing that clicked with me there, really halted me in the everything of my life, meant nothing, it’s nothing, I’m fine.

Thankfully, I am not one to not notice such a spontaneous and unexplainable crevice fall. In fact, I invite and welcome one, because life is not a straight line, nor is it a following of old echoes, of parental control, of school experience, of hurts and damage and disappointments. Life is lived from Day One no matter what age nor stage. I ask myself this. Who do I want to be? What do I want to achieve? When will I finally like myself? Why not now?

The in-betweens will come. They always do. I’ll leave that with you.

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Island Blog – The Elbows of the New Moon

Back from work, I’m watching the tide ruffle, lift, push against the rocks, elbows out. There’s a moon in this, somewhere, I know it, and there is. A new one, yet another, and isn’t that a wonderful thing? I mean, well, the moon catapults many of us who recognise her influence, sending us into haphazardness – and many more who justify their bad temper and bizarre choices to something else, like work, or her, or him, or school, or envy, a hightened sense of failure, or of a choice made in faith, hope and love, as being a grave mistake. Hmmmm.

Because of the discomfort, a big tide brings in, it reminds me. Living all those years on Tapselteerie, we would, or I would, walk my way to a ‘spending beach.’ Such a beach, almost a wee cove, a cup of catch, like a hand grab at whatever might come in, a something of value which might be held and captured. Then, it would be plastic, the weariness of toil and spoils, ropes and hopes thrown overboard, en route to somewhere after fishing, playing, not-caring about the ocean and those within her depths, who, btw, don’t want any of that sh*t. It hasn’t changed, but worsened. We gathered, cleared, unleashed, yes we did, seal pups from rope strangulation, setting them back to the ocean, scarred, disorientated, already time-separated from their parent, their safety. However, the beauty of a tidal flow is like a photo to anyone who has no idea of what really goes on. I won’t lecture. But, having seen what we are stupidly doing, does, I confess, alter me. Plastic blows and goes up with any passing wind.

Back to the new moon. She’ll have some ridonculous name, for sure, as if she could be tamed like a terrier. I see what she can do, the lift and luff of her influence over a tidal flow, big, lush, swelling, feisty, sexual. Her voice quiet. And yet she moves, grows, with no care for a sheep stuck on a rock, no care for uninformed canoeists who set off in all the gear but without respect for her. She is wild as the wind, stronger, more powerful. In fact, I think she controls the wind, brings it on, shuts it the eff up when required.

For now, in this balmy soft, sunshine evening, on this beautiful, grumpy, shifty, awkwardly weather controlled outscape, this most westerly point, this wild and wonderful place where folk gather to celebrate anything and everything, I am just going to sit quiet and watch the elbows of the new moon widen and spread.

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Island Blog – Happy to Wash Up

Work today was wonderful. I spent many hours washing up, and I loved it. This task, the behemoth of cups and plates and tea infusers and cutlery and so much more, was my empire. It was my bag, to a large degree. I chose this task. I am, after all, the granny in the mix. Here, behind the dishwasher racks, the queen in charge of two deep sinks, the one in control of the water mix, I am calm as Yoda. When asked to step out of that safety, I felt a frisson of fear. It isn’t that I have a single problem about stepping out. You can put me behind a microphone, on stage, and before hundreds, and I will talk, sing, engage, easy. But this is different. It thinks me.

This bag is not mine. The young couple who have begun their own beginning in this beach cafe are my leaders. Perhaps there’s a thing in that. Years ago I ran a hotel, many guests, many dinners, many dishes, much baking, but I am not that woman now. That was another time, and that time has taken from me a load of skills and even more confidence. I am happy washing up. And that thinks me too. No, two and a half, if not three.

I remember, and clearly, the moment I decided to risk myself out there again. It was helped through observations of others at my time of life who appeared to accept their end game. I want to shout and yell and dance in the face of that. A wee walk a day. A visit now and then with a friend. A load of hours wishing the (very busy) kids will call, the grandchildren too; the hardly knowing who anyone looks like – it’s been, what months, since…….

I think the fight for the me in me is vital. I know it, hence my search for work, for c……connectivity, competence, confidence, connection, there’ll be others. I know that to collapse into the olding is an inevitable slide. I may be sliding, but, if I am, it will not never be because I let my old wrinkly self become my focus. Oh, no. My focus is out there, where life lives on and, btw, everyone needs a granny and someone who is more than happy to wash up.

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Island Blog – Winding my Way up

Happy Easter to you all. A new beginning, the chance to change direction, to question old thinks, spouted from mouths a generation or two old, and definitely dead because times change, and situations alter facts and circumstances. Thing is to notice all this, and to adapt as best we can, no, better. Let’s be honest here. Nobody has an easy stroll through life, even if we imagine there are those who do. They don’t. It just looks like it.

It isn’t easy to make a change, not one that appears huge and as far away as another planet. However, it is possible to stop, notice, think, assess and then initiate a first brave step. I don’t like this place, person, dynamic, circumstance, let’s say. I can already hear the fall down all those steps of expectation. Clunk, ouch, clunk, big ouch, and so on. Ok, there might be a clunk or two, or three, maybe four, but if we refuse to accept whatever control is controlling, we will find strength. I promise that. It hurts for a while, but once the light comes in, it really comes in.

In the wild, nature has a dynamic shift and shrift. I see it every day I walk in the woods, along the basalt and granite coastline, I see the way those who have landed in a place which no longer suits them change things. Wild flowers that lined the track, which, in the interests of wide-vehicled vehicles, were dug out and discarded, now appear further back on the bank, or, even between the stones of a drystone wall. I actually laugh out loud on seeing them, my smile wide as a banana, and I crouch down to welcome them, their tenacity, their sneaky over-winter move beneath the cold ground. They refuse to be less than they were, than they are. You will not take us out, they say. It thinks me, a lot, as I walk on.

This afternoon after a lovely uplifting church service with people and singing and words, I decide to chop some wood. It isn’t all that dry, to be honest, and needs chopping into notquitesplinters. I’m game. I check the stack, notice the twists, the tricky bits, the very wet collars around the fallen trees, because these measured logs formed big trees once, hosting bird nests, sheltering humans in rainfall, protecting mosses and wildflowers from sunburn. Respect. I select a log, fix it on my block, so old, so scarred, such a friend. Anyway, moving on. I position, raise my axe, whack it down. Ah, I know that sound. This is not going anywhere, but my whack, even now, is dynamic, ferocious, driven, and, unfortunately stuck. My efforts to separate axe from wood is a right battle. I had to employ a metal wedge and a mell.

This is not the point, although I did free all of us from this tricksy mix. What I noticed after was the twist and lean, the reach and the change of direction in this tree. You had no light. You noticed that. You decided to change direction. You wound your way up, so slow, so long waiting, so hopeful for change, so trusting in it.

You marvel me.

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Island Blog – A New Beginning

I started work today, at a new venture, or an establised venture, now in new hands, which means it’s new. btw. Moving into a new place, even if the venue, the stones and location are the same as they ever were, a newness is created. There are new ideas, changes, alterations, a personal stamp stamped. I always love new beginnings, have no problem with change, mostly speaking. We greeted, checked out the lay of the land, heard the ideas, decided to be dynamic. Let us go, I thought, as we did just that. I knew it before, the way it works, the flow and rhythm of what had been the been for yonks, shifting its gaze into a new sky. This, I said to myself, is a be. Not a been…… and I am in.

We worked, and hard, and busy, fixing, trixing, laughing, sharing, sticking, unsticking, wiping, washing, tide-fighting, tide-aligning, talking, finding out about each other, watching, checking. We are creating a new dynamic. There are wonderings, doubts, fickle-twiddles, stopstarts, upskittles, solutions flying in like birds through newly sequined window panes. Tables – juxtaposition, chairs too, wall hangings yet to be wall-hanged, or not, lights to be twisted this way, that, this something to be considered, this something else to be moved, or removed, all a considering, for now. It’s like a birthing, and I am at the business end. I have no idea what I am doing, beyond the obvious, the cleaning prep work and the beyond of the dance of mischief I will always bring to anything. However, there is no fun, nor mischief (interesting word if you. break it down……mis…..chief…….just saying) if there are no-ones to work with, to laugh with, through tricky stuff, when this isn’t working well and that isn’t working either.

We had fun today. My first day. I loved it. I’m as tired as the others, but so excited to be a part of this new beginning.

I thought I was all out of those, to be honest!

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Island Blog – A Fascination of Friendship

It grows, doesn’t it, a friendship. First, it is just a click, mutual, a connection, when it isn’t even looked for, a surprise, on a street, in a doorway, at an event, on a station platform, on a country walk. I’ve heard of liftetime stories which began thus. It smiles me, and I know it happens, such a friendship, as it has happened to me. Love at first sight is real, or so I am told, and I want to believe it – across a crowded room, etcetera. I have’t experienced that, but I do know the ‘click’, the sudden connection and the unwillingness to move on, to move away. I want to stay, to talk, to ask questions, to hear his or her story. Occasionally that has been possible, but mostly not, even as that face, that person may intrigue me, remain in my thoughtful wonderings for weeks, months, even years. I wonder what happened to her, to him, to them, and all of that creates a fiddlehead in my own mind, a swirl of unanswered questions with a backdrop of warmth and smiles. Is the power of these encounters, I wonder, because so many people don’t smile, don’t catch another’s eye, don’t dare to stop, let alone talk awhile, and when just one does, the whole world stops spinning for the split of a second, a moment, leaving their colour, voice, story, hover above us, leave us longing for the share? Perhaps.

I can connect anywhere. I am the smiler, the eyes searching for other’s eyes. I am she. It isn’t that I am needy, no flipping way (I really run from ‘needy’ unless I sense authenticity in that need), but, instead, because I sincerely believe that we are fast losing the strength in humanunity, on the street, in a bus shelter, on a platform, in a doorway. Actually, that’s not the whole truth. I am just friendly. I love to connect with anyone, and anywhere. However, and I have learned this, that, even when a friendship grows, something can change. I’ve thought about that, a lot, as I knit a blanket for a new island baby, or wander among sandpipers, oystercatchers, primroses, violets and wood anemone, the latter bursting out from drystone walls, grassy banks, even slap in the middle of the earthen track, which twiddles its way up and into the Fairy Woods. I have thought, a lot.

What changes is not cataclysmic. It is, more, a tiny shift, like, as I imagine it, a movement of plates deep down, miles down, beneath an ocean surface. Cataclysmic at source, but resulting in a tiny crack nearer the surface, a lift of tidal flow, an argument of salt water, a pause in cloud talk. It is, or will be eventually, all encompassing, a big gasp, but it doesn’t begin that way. It begins with a turn of the head, a question rising straight, then curling into a fiddlehead, enscrolling text or score as yet unknown, unread, as if all the usual has run clean away. Confusion.

I understand this now. I remember changing when my first son burst into life. I remember how I no longer held his father first in my love-list. I remember the tectonic shift, deep in the depths of our marriage, the tiny crack, the lift of tidal flow, the argument of salt water, the pause in cloud talk. I don’t think I am alone in this change. I also recall times when I put my children first, lead the team, watched ‘beforefriends’ melt into the shadows. I know I stood for a principle and found yet another ‘friend’ slip away. I don’t miss any of them, even if it hurt, the rejection, at the time. I think, only slightly, of those whose power and greed have bought them ‘friends’, and I know that world, I spent time in it as a teen. How lonely they must, eventually be.

To move on in life, to stick to the moving on thing, which, btw, can feel so dam tough at times, and, I know that, to do this moving on thing takes guts. I salute you all, if you find yourself hesitating and doubting, because it is so much ‘short-term’ easier to be whom others want you to be, and just for their own sense of peace, it is not you.

It is not you.

I can sit back now, in the late sunshine, with a view to captivate (I will never say the other thing), with a glass of good red and remember my difficult choices, the times I rose like Boudicca, and the times I drowned like Ophelia, and the in-between Cowed Woman who did nothing at all, but just hid in the shadowdark. We are all many people inside just one person. We change, shift, lift, fall, cry, hide, rise, pretend, come clean, like oceans, like clouds. I don’t know if we ‘find ourselves’ eventually, but I can say that having the guts to search for self, and the finding of friends on the way, is, well, fascinating.