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Island Blog – Barefoot and So Very Connected

Shadows are longer now. They surprise me, twisting my eyes towards them, when the sun gets behind this overgrown shrub or the line of my rake, or just me. I am, it seems, the giant. I reach all the way up to the big larch on the rockface, my neck and head lost in the skinning branches. I smile at the thought. Long gone are my days of hiding in trees, of scaling the scarp of an ancient trunk, scratched, bruised and, at times wishing I hadn’t bothered to begin. But the absolute joy of hoiking my butt onto a strong limb, into the hook of a tree mother’s arm, the inevitable wobble and correction and the determination to stay exactly there, completely lost to the eyes of predators, aka, adults or, later, visitors, even my children, is like a fizz in my blood. I like the memory, hold it, recognise it, know that it, once, was mine.

Although the Siskins, Goldfinch, Swallows and House Martins are gone, Robins have returned with a different song. Their Spring ‘Come to Me’ has changed, in timbre, in melody, in regularity. Timely, I guess, but what do they sing for so beautifully? Perhaps they sing for. Autumn, on the cusp of Winter. Perhaps it’s for the superb clarity, the reviresco of light, the copper,gold,fiery sunsets, the way the basalt sharps up, glitters with rain, sparkles with sun, moon, reflecting, as we all do in the autumn of our lives, a new and unexpected brilliance.

There is sudden sun and sudden rain, sudden cold and sudden warmth. The invasion of another seasons is always a fight. Think about it. Summer (so called) has lazed about for months, taking her place, sitting fatly upon her throne, throwing us, this year, a capulet of cloud sneezing and, somehow, she managed to throw into our mix, a. big dose of winter. I suspect, she, fatly lounging upon her throne in the Out Of Work Months, mixed up a laboratory of cold spite, made it work, cackled a lot and then brought her experiment down on our heads. Summer always had a love/hate relationship with the Winter King.

I watch chimney smoke across the sea-loch, early morning, as the stars are still stars and the cold is a thrisk of caught breath. The ground is sharp and fierce to my bare feet, a thrill and a real connection with the earth. It is a mystery to me, this sense of connection. I claim no understanding, and I don’t want to, because I love a mystery. I just know that I am always, ALWAYS uncomfortable in shoes and that my feet are happy bare. I cannot walk barefoot along pitted tracks now, any more than I could heist a larch trunk, nor heft my old butt into a mother curve, but that is ok. I could once, and that is enough.

The mice are coming in. I knew they would. The nights are cold now and they are no fools. Survival is everything. I won’t say I am okay about mouse droppings inside my pots and crockery kitchen cupboards but I honestly feel this is a problem that would arrive me a derisive snort from a woman who has no kitchen left because of the bombing. I sweep them away, wash anything I cook with, hope the wee sweet furry creatures don’t eat through the lagging of my water tank in the loft, and wish them well. I suspect I am fortunate to have met animal invasion on a regular basis in my young wife-life. It helps.

Rowan berries, wild sienna, catch my eyes. One here, heavy with fruit, a wide bloom of branches, over there, one skmming for space t’ween big-ass confers, doing her best. Hazels nut up, cones catch the sunset, way up there atop an ancient fir or spruce, and brambles wink blue-black in their tangle. This is Autumn. The rut will begin soon. I will hear the roar of stags echo across the sea-loch, plaintive, threatening, both. The crisp is coming in, no matter what, and it is beautiful. It is tough. It is upskittling, confusing, sudden, It is as it is. We, who live so very close to nature, are so ready for the tapselteerie of fickle weather changes, and we will adapt, and that is our human skill, if we so choose. I think, sometimes, no, often, of those who live in cities, in controlled (so called) environments, and wonder how they are coping with the strangeness of our new seasons.

I wake in the night sometimes. If the moon is loud, or if I hear swans beeping to each other as they fly over my island home, from the freezing arctic, heading south, I wake. I know why. I cannot miss one single chapter in this extraordinary life journey, even if inconvenient. I rise from bed, fling open the curtains, see the night, see the stars, search for swans, feel connected. So very connected.

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Island Blog – A Fetouche

I’m watching the tide, Springs now, so big high, big low. Kind of reminds me of me. The tide, at this flood time, brings in the salmon and sea trout which (I’d rather write whom) just want a reasonably safe passage up to the fresh water that they seek for spawning. Interruptus lies in wait with lures and nets to catch them t’wirly. You might have to look that one up. Nonetheless, it intrigues me. The full moon, the swell and suck of it, of her, for surely, with her tempestuous nature, the sea is female? I cannot believe I wrote that, so ridonculous it reads in our, thankfully new, appreciation of how wrong we have been for a verrrrrrry long time. Eish.

Back to the tide. And to the weather, which, or is it whom, has confounded us this year, as it did last year, only in a kindlier way. I have frickin massive sunflowers, green for about 5 feet, blocking my view of any tidal flow, and yet producing no buds at all, till now, tiny nubs, and yellow as butter and I am so pleased I didn’t wheech the stalks out a while ago. There is always hope and that’s how I live and so, perhaps this seasona interrupta is teaching me, and you, how to listen and learn. I have blue things growing, pink ones too, stocky and holding to the earth, hesitational. I get that. And it wonders me.

I worked at Lunch Club today, just as a volunteer. In the village hall we lay out a welcome table, flower festive, for anyone who comes. One did. Then two, and then, as we in the kitchen decided it was a quiet day, up to 17 arrived, all smiles and ready for soup, sharing and laughter, and pudding, of course. I leaned against a kitchen unit, as my friends accommodated the rise of human tide. It told me that, even if each singular life appeared all green and no flowers, even if the tidal rise and fall of this year, this season, never lifted their spirits, that we could conjoin here, in this kitchen, we could make a stepping stone for each other into the next day. I am no fool. I know that most folk ‘pretend’ that everything is ok, that they are ‘fine’ and that they are not afraid, scared, cold, lonely.

We know the moon rise and fall here. We see it loud, every time. We are so close, we could touch it. We can walk out into the blast of Spring tides. Sometimes, I wonder how you who live in cities and out there beyond the connection we have, manage emotional flow. It is hard enough to understand out here. A fetouche, for sure.

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Island Blog – And it Did

When time stops for someone else, it also stops for me. If I don’t know them well, it stops for a little while, a gasp of shock, the ensuing ripples and thoughts and rememberings of the time we shared, upsetting my natural flow, and I understand and accept it. However, if it is someone much closer to home, this time-stopping thing courses like a virus through my mind and body. It’s as if my days are uppity wee shites, refusing to walk the way we have always heretofore companionably walked, through an ordinary routine, however dull, acceptable and, above all, recognised and known. I can wake without the day, out of kilter somehow, but not in a somehow I can re-jig nor whack into submission. It’s a stumbling, and it disorientates me enough to rise a roar in my mouth.

Because why? Hmmm, perhaps because all my thoughts seem to collude with the ‘stopping’, a timeline snipped like a ribbon, that fragile, when you think of it, the Big Scissors and the delicate ribbon. My thoughts, like all honest folk will admit to, are for myself. In the gone of someone, my own Gone thwacks me in the face. I can feel boundaried when I didn’t before. Of course, it isn’t about me, and why do I say that, because the me in this situation is definitely loud as a claxen? When any sadness comes, I battle with the elements therein. The reason, the why, the what, the what if, the how, the where. I am a strongly emotional woman. I am unable, nor do I want to be ‘able’ to take any loss as a ‘whatever’. I know those who can, and I find it odd, weird at times, that anyone can just shrug off anything that happens to someone else, to the over there of their lives, and just move on, light-foot, confident. Confident in what, I often wonder. In the immediate truth that nothing such as this will ever come their way? Or is it that their inner wiring is right and mine is faulty? Looking at that sentence, I know it’s not true. There is no Right. There is no Wrong. There is just a different wiring. It isn’t perspective, because I know about perspective. I lived with a long-term husband who never saw anything as I did, beyond the obvious mathematics of lambing, or the positioning of the massive Christmas tree. It was in the area of emotive intelligence that we found ourselves on different continents. I don’t say he didn’t feel emotional, because he did, but all that ‘mess’ was kept firmly under wraps and almost never turned into words of communication, whereas I could bleed noisily and copiously over the death of a lamb, a cat, a dog, a friend, even a notreallyfriend.

It wasn’t that I was a damn fool about death. Everything has a timeline, everyone dies, I knew and know that, and it doesn’t enfrighten me. I just might not be ready for that delicate ribbon to be cut, is all, because it comes on an ordinary Tuesday morning with the day mapped out and things ready and the linchpin working just grand on all four wheels of my wagon. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there’s a cut, a stop, a finite, and my hold on the hours ahead falters, hours and hours escaping my fingers like a jail breakout, and I am left here on my sturdy wagon, fingers splayed, mind blown, alone and thrown, suddenly pointless. Shopping for groceries, visiting friends, laughing gaily, all of those a stop, as if the curtain just came down, which it did.

And it did.

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Island Blog – Like Wild Birds

This is how I see it. Tidelines create as I watch, an incoming huge force meeting resistance, another super force. Sailors call it wind over tide, which sounds like a tablecloth lifting teacups, a shatter of inconvenience and mess in a street cafe, like an ‘oops’. The incoming Atlantic is striped as a deckchair, the recalcitrant wind fighting a pointless battle. The tide will in. But the wind is no less of a player. And she is no fool. Any voice against a mighty force can make a difference. She may concede defeat, for now, but she will blow on.

In my ordinary life, I did a lot of blowing against an interminable tide. Life was as it was, and my timeline was my timeline. Many will know this for themselves. I gave my all, as so many did, and still do. And I regret not one minute, well, maybe a few. As those I knew and loved die, it thinks me, and remembers me, of the times I knew they were riding right with me as a wind over tide, and the laughs we had, the way we turned back into our lives, the way we just damn well got on with it. Of the way that connection kept us all going on, no matter what, and with joy and laughter and mistakes and a fierce attitude.

Like wild birds.

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Island Blog – Equinoctial

When you find yourself, suddenly, as an author, as if you’ve suddenly elevated to some level above everyone else, with the looking down puff up that comes with so called fame, albeit momentary, it is not what you originally thought it might be. Told, as I was, that I need to blog to engage with Facebook, to put myself out there, no matter how much I might hate being the focus, how much I still hate my body, how little confidence I have when everyone is looking at me and waiting for something. For what? Oh I got that bit. People, my people, my could be friends are looking up at me and I don’t like it. I was down there with you, but yesterday, playing on the streets, hooling the hoop, laughing in the lunch queue, swapping stories of how frickin awful the weather was on wash day, and how much we hate Mondays. I remember, deciding, I had to move back home. Now, let me be clear. I did not, and never will, elevate myself because of what I have achieved. What I have achieved, what any other person has achieved, tells me absolutely nothing about who they are, who I am. Are we good to our partner, kids, family? Are we kind, always, understanding, always? Are we able to forget self in moments of stricture and irritation. Are we? That is how we are, in truth.

I felt the cold today, the nudge of Autumn. I have a few jerseys (jumpers in American) and I required a more substantial one today. And that, jumper, jersey thing brings me to a point. As I write, a blog, or read other stories, or listen to them, I hear a word I thought I knew well being ‘wrongly’ presented. I check it out. The Brits have one way of spelling this word and omg the Americans have moved a whole consonant. My musical mind, the heretofore understood mathematics of language rising up in me like Mozart in a mood, fights this. It was spelled this way, for ever! But not now. Now we flex, those of us who will. We become equinoctial even when being that close to any change is, at best, a right pain in the mental arse, at worst, a tsunami.

I felt the chill today. Actually, that is pants. I felt it a wee while ago, but did the whole pretend thing, and amn’t I great at that! It isn’t that I don’t want the equinoctial change, I love it, but there is a difference when we get older. I think of all those who are terrified of the long winter months without support, without food. I have never been there, but I see it and, as I write from a place of stone-build, a fire burning and food in my fridge, choices even, my humble stumbles. If writing could change anything, I would write it. Even as I say that, I know that brave journalists, brave writers have done exactly that. I bow to them.

We allow ourselves to become so caught up in our own stuff. I do it myself. But, but, and but again, when I notice I am all caught up in the sludge of ME, and it sickens me enough to march up the stairs, to dress myself, to pull on my boots and to step out even though that judge inside my head is urging Rest, Don’t Bother, Stay Home, Do Nothing, I push through and it is a push. Once outside the door, I breathe in the cold, hear the Robin, see the rain, feel it, watch the bowing of roses in the wind. I get in my car and I go. I’m not sure where, but the where of where I was is not the where I want. I want to embrace a change, not as a watcher, but as an integral part. I want to be equinoctial.

I have no idea how to do this, have no plans, but I reckon, am sure, that there are gazillions of people who will be right there, clueless, like me, wanting change, scared stiff, stuck, fed up, lonely.

Hallo You.

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Island Blog – Accidie and Work it Out

Well, I’m having none of that. Mental Sloth? No, no, not me. Or so I say. But the truth is, we all know it from time to time, that stimied stultifying collops, sorry, collapse into the I’m not going anywhere, even though I should, ought, should, ought, to. And, even if we do have to go to that Anywhere, we fight it every step of the way. And then comes a morning when we feel like Peter Pan, or I do, and nothing, not nothing will stop me flying out there. The trudge sludge days are the way life is. I do wonder what it is in that clear and researched knowledge that makes us think we are wrong to feel that way, when everyone does, over and over. What I have learned is to unjudge myself, and to celebrate the days of crash/ lift and shift. However, I do know that accidie may well be lurking. I don’t look for it, she, him, but they just might be awaiting the chance to pounce and for no reason at all. I dig down for the roots of accidie and I find them, tendrils that go back, if my fingers can trace them, to childhood, through teenage, through marriage, through motherhood. It seems to me we love/hate guilt.

Today, this morning, I awoke to sunshine, or the beginnings of it. I smelled it coming through my wide open window and we met in togetherness, once I had worked out my eyeballs and a dissociation from a completely bonkers dream. We humans take a while to get there. I heard a robin sing out like Pavarotti, as they do this time of year. No other bird sings and that makes sense. They no longer seek a mate. So what on earth the robin is doing, making dawn melody is both a wonderfulness and a wonderment. So not a chooser of accidie.

I drove to the harbour town, swinging around the bends, the single track gloriously free of tourists, not that I mind tourists, we need them, but their driving skills are so insouciant and it minds me of something. Lack of research. We have tippy roads, cows everywhere, sheep, deer. We have ridonculous corners, big drops, loads of reversing opportunities and more, locals in a hurry, going to sort something and needing to get there, doctors, vets, and more. I’ve been here 46 years and I am still hoping for a touristic change!

Home and a walk into the wild, hearing a young man sorting a fallen beech, talking to him about regeneration, about the danger to touristy kids on fallen limbs, because he knows about woodland, and also about the complete cluelessness of visitors who, it seems to me, expect fallen trees in a wild woodland to be health and safety safe. I am glad that my kids lived in a time when we said, Work it out, Keep vigilant, Check where you are, and then, Go for it.

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Island Blog – See You There

We do what we do, what we can. We step out there every single day, sometimes with the underworld sludging our forward movement, all those doubts and obsolete plans and the damn chatter monkeys that always fill the spaces. But we keep going and that is a very big thing. Being human, we have a strong hold on the life force, even when we might consider letting go. Finding a reason to be cheerful can be a daily frantic search through the dusty dark corners of our capacious minds, but we keep looking anyway, because the alternative is a steady sink into a pit with no footholds, and in the middle of the biggest of Nowheres. Even those around who make out they never feel low, sad, unhappy, depressed, disconnected, doubting, hopeless or desperate, do, believe me. They, perhaps, just see any such admission as a sign of weakness, and, perhaps again, they have managed to build multiple layerings of protection atop any rise of darkness, until even they believe it doesn’t exist.

Although it is over four years since Himself took off to join his mummy and the angels, I have never really mourned for him, at least not in any messy breakdown sort of way, nor into uncontrollable tears that might have rendered my nose blocked, my head pounding and my face a strew map of a continent randomly divided. I don’t want him back, not as he became, anyway. If I miss him, I miss the way he could lift my spirits, comfort, encourage and support; the way, I think, that he showed his love, not being a romancer at heart; the impulsive Shall we go out tonight invitations. Walking just now in the sunshine (how wonderful to even write that word!) I feel a powerful rise of emotion, the roaring in my ears which once would have heralded tears, tears I haven’t been able to shed for many decades. As I bring his face onto centre stage, he is young again and grinning wide, his eyes bright. Do I miss you? I ask him, knowing that I don’t. What I miss is Love, pure and simple and yet not simple at all. I can feel love all around me, from my kids, my sibs, my friends, my fellow islanders, but that love is not the same as one between two people for whom the other is the only other; the only one you don’t mind being stuck with in any situation, like a tailback, a broken down lift, outside a ‘sorry, no tickets left’ venue, anywhere, everywhere. There is always another option because the most important element in any situation is being with that other person, not the stuff around it. What a rare and beautiful thing, and one I realised, saw super clear just now, on a walk I didn’t complete.

So, I am open and honest about feeling deeply sad for myself, for my loneliness, full of self-doubts and confusion in my go-for-it navigation of a world I never wanted to inhabit. As I bounce out there like Tigger every single damn day, grinning, thankful, uplifting others, making friends, cracking jokes, it is my truth because this attitude is a daily choice, not a lucky-for-her gift from birth. Most days, really most of them, I believe in this attitude, and then comes a day when I want to cry me an ocean, never mind a river; when I just want to hide away, to not be seen by anyone, to disappear completely. I know, for sure, that everyone has such days, but that is not my point. To be honest about it, particularly to oneself, is to fully embrace the holistic human state instead of pretending everything is tickety boo all of the time. We all are the drivers in our own lives, and nobody wants to slop around in a cloak of gloom and misery, but it is exhausting to stiff-upper-lip (whatever that means) all of the time. And, it isn’t reality, and I honestly believe that good people who are doing their very best to live life to the full might stop judging themselves so harshly. Accepting down days, admitting loneliness, self-doubt and so on, isn’t comfortable, but it is real and honest and normal and understandable.

Social media is uplifting twaddle a lot of the time, although I have uplifting quotes stuck to the walls of my kitchen, and they do help. The hourly news are about as ghastly as can be. Some days feel just as ghastly. Our culture is all based on couples. Two steaks, two tickets, two, two, two. One to hold the front end, the other, the back; one to check this, the other to check that; one to joke, the other to laugh; come for supper invitations are usually for two, adventures are shared and somehow a tad pointless alone. Going out is always uncomfortable at first as an unwilling single. Do I look ok, is this the right wine, should I mention this, how can we (we) avoid that, or him or her? Somewhere in between, we live on my lonely friends, doing our best, falling, rising, laughing, crying and then doing it all again, over and over again until the wind changes and our candle gutters to the wick, once and for all.

See you there. It’s guaranteed I’ll make you laugh.

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Island Blog – Wording

Words are my thing. I am no worder, powerful within the pages of research books, no academic Brilliantine. But words are my thing. They fly about my head like birds, assault me, trip me up, wake me in the night, confound me in the day when I’m scrubbing the loo. I am a word vessel. So, when words bugger off, their absence is like I’m naked, which I am so not. I can walk deep into my Mother Nature, feeling my way, searching in the brush, the fallen, the ancient, the rising, and find no words at all beyond Wow, or Thankyou, or Shit I just soaked my Boots. Not enough, not good at all. And, yet, resting in the ‘how it is right now’, I consider. Perhaps i need a rest. Perhaps the wordness of words need one too. Everyone is always actively searching for a word, the right word, as if words tumble away into the vast void of everything lost, for now. Right words must be exhausted.

In my younger days, I freaked out if I couldn’t find a word, when, inside my head I had this clear and beautifully perfect one somewhere just behind the bins, behind the confusion and questioning of my life, one which refused to grace my lips. I would leave an encounter, furious at my lack. It thinks me, with a wonder. Maybe it was not for me at that moment, infuriating as that felt at the time. We humans seem to think we are in the upper echelons of pretty much everything, thus, in control. Maybe words don’t want to be controlled. I certainly don’t want to be, so, maybe I get it. Perhaps I am being taught a life lesson, because this is not the first time, and I will be wise to notice.

So, I can flounder, for now, abject myself to a considerably higher power, and wait for the words to fly back in, as the Redwings will soon, the Mistle Thrush, the Autumn visitors. There is no loss, as long as I don’t buy into loss. I know who I am, and there is no weakness in bowing down, in letting go of ego. In fact, I believe it is a strength.

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Island Blog – A Third Chance

Been absent from my desk a while. I chuckle at that, remembering my young days when that absent thing would have heralded a whole bucketload of shit, when the Rulers ruled and the whole western world was caught up in a Hyancinth Bucket capitulation to Appearances. Omg I am so damn thankful for the leaving of this, even if it just a beginning. The more young folk rebel, the happier I am. So many of the rules are ridiculous, as so many others are wonderful. It seems to me that Someone decided to take ‘ruling’ a stick or two beyond acceptable, and we cowed. Not now. Not now. Or so I hope.

However, this not now thing can bring in an overload of rejection. It has always been that way, over manifold times, when the initial reject becomes a loudy and damaging rebellion. I see it happen, and know, having lived this long, that, hopefully, the damage to those who don’t need it, don’t want it, flowers into a new and peaceful growth. I’m no fool. Just aware of this troubled world, the changes within her protective shell, and hopeful, always that.

I didn’t want to write all that, not at my outfirst. I. wanted to write about the week. past, the funeral of a young woman, too young. It thinks me, has thought me for a few days. It is said, and often, through the young pert lips of my young friends, and laughingly, that they never want to grow old. I suspect this young dead woman might have liked the idea, her daughter, ditto. But I get it. I said the same, and often, as I watched my oldings go through all the tests and shit that seems to come with olding. They, my folks, accepted, fought, smiled and left the planet, and it is sort of ok when the person you see heading off has no teeth and forgets to wash for days. But, but and but, before any of that stilling whacks the bejabers out of what everyone thought was ok, let me tell you a thing or two, now that I am in the Oldie Zone. Listen up.

I will dance you off the floor. I know I had cancer and might again. I know that every single day i have to crank myself upright (laughingly), that I can find friends to laugh with, that I adore tunes, and have a great playlist, that I so so want young folk to see that being ‘old’ is not what it once was, or sometimes is. Being old is a third chance at dance. Some never get there. Lucky me.

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Island Blog – Dammit, Sea Dog

It has been four years to the day since he died, right here in his home. I don’t remember feeling like this last year, but this year I do. So, what is the this I am feeling? Perhaps it is loneliness, yes, for sure; perhaps regret at all the things we didn’t talk through, yes, that too. As I talk with my kids, his kids, on the subject of parenthood, a difficult role for everyone, no matter the books you read, I realise how little guidance any of us are given. Nowadays, thankfully, the culture has changed for the better. Access to supportive help from enlightened writers and therapists is widely available. Conversations never countenanced when we were young parents are spoken openly and accepted. Parents admit to learning instead of holding fast to what doesn’t work, never did and never will, afraid to lose control of a situation. In my own experience when I visit as Granny, I can see how communication has a flow to it, between a troubled child and a learning parent, and it smiles me. I do remember reading once, when I knew I had been responsible for completely messing up an already volatile situation, that to. say Sorry, Please Forgive Me, without any reference to how the child might have been equally to ‘blame’, and being astonished. Had either of my parents ever said sorry to me, or taken responsibility for their obvious blunder in that volatile situation? Definitely not. In fact, that is quite possibly whyI beat myself up so wonderfully, even now.

Once I had absorbed the fabulous power of saying Sorry, Please Forgive Me to a small person, somewhere down there below me, I had to find the courage to risk rejection. Ah! Now we have it. The biggest fear of all, capped only by finding myself alone in the dusk of an African bush as Hyenas head out on the hunt. I don’t remember if it worked or when, but I never forgot the lesson. Being humble is not for the faint-hearted, to be sure.

Back to this day. He died, and left us. We’ve done ok, most of us. But when the Big Friken Man goes, julst like that, it a definite off pissing. Oh, we knew he was going but that is so not the point. When the gone does it’s gone thing, everyone is stalled. And, even after four years, that influence is a halt in a day, in the day when he took one breath and that was that. A body stilled forever is a something to sit beside, and I am glad I did, although ‘glad’ is not how I felt, nor do even now. What a ridiculous word. Just saying.

I think of him a lot today, the way he made things happen, sudden parties (many), whale encounters, way out there when no other boat had seen anything much, the way he drove me mad over many years, the way he loved our children, awkward and unsure about communicating the deep love he felt. The way he bought me flowers, the way he suddenly looked my way, and I knew I was safe. The bastard in him, the lover, protector, the influence, the everything in my life, dammit.

dammit, Seadog. I am a little drunk.