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Island Blog – Endless Positives

I have a think. In this culture of everything positive and uplifting (good so far) after Covid lockdown delivering awkward separation and restrictions we left way back in the when-when of school, familial confines, fears around ‘others’ who didn’t behave like Us, I think we might be losing the self of us. It is almost as if we shouldn’t feel sad, angry, lost, confused and unsure about what to wear, how to move in a sudden meet. It is as if we have become strangers, when, yes, we used to move past and beyond each other without even clocking a face. Now, there’s a thing.

I know I live in the back of beyond (all welcome by the way), with a view of a tidal loch, nothing much shouting but gulls on the hunt as the Atlantic slews in, but I still notice and note the change in media stuff. So many positive uplifts, and it wonders me. Who is left behind in this? I remember being so low I seriously believed pills and me gone was a good thing. Now, I recognise that woman, and love her and wish I could have been there for her. I just hope she sees me now, and I believe she does.

Nonetheless, I do find this, almost denial, awkward. How do we, who don’t want to fit beneath a label, find a voice? Yes, I fell, yes I fell, yes I fell, but somehow, and with strong and loving help, rose from my lost self, and found just one step, and then another, into a better life.

Perhaps the endless positive is a good thing. I still think there are loads of heads in sand out there.

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Island Blog – To Risk

This distraction thing…….well, this one is a wonderful one. No, I’m not telling, nor spelling it out, but it is far beyond cancer or insect bites, has nothing to do with hospitals nor scary journeys with too many questions in my mind, too many fears. This one is magical and hopeful and exciting and I feel wilder, free-er and it just looks as if the being of 71 is suddenly not the slow slide into an ending. Of course, there will always be that ending wotwot, we can’t avoid that, but if it’s possible to shout Wahooo on that slide, I am in. I didn’t think it was mine, however, just a short 3 weeks ago. No. I sat with coffee and my spectacular view and the birds dafting away around the feeders, watching other people living out their lives in a snapshot as they careened by (young) or wandered (older) and I reconciled, reluctantly to what seemed inevitable. In my experience, from what I can remember of those long ago days when my reddish chestnut hair was long enough to sit on and my body obeyed me and my eyes were light bright, twinkly and challenging, the next generation up seemed ancient. Perms and blue rinses (good god) and with shoes matching handbags, and the men, jowly and rotund, not that there is anything wrong with any of that, but I confess to thinking, oh very dear. Please not me. I said (I did) please take me around 60 when I still have control of my bladder and my footsteps. Obviously that fell on deaf ears! And now I am where I am, and, by the way, I still challenge anyone to stay longer than me on the dance floor, with breaks now and then, of course.

Do you remember a time when something, or someone happened, and that connection, so random, so unexpected, made a deep shift in everything, when thoughts, confused by this happenstance, swirled like a whole frickin twister as it just ran right through you? Sensibilities are unsensibled in a moment, and it takes some time to settle the unsettlers. But it seems to be a good thing, after decades of self-protection, fuelled by fear and doubt. We immediately doubt and question, after a lifetime of caution and routines that uphold, define and confine, until this normal is normal, even if we don’t like it one bit. We accept and perform as we are expected to, and, to a degree, that’s a good thing, until the roots go miles down like blades, cutting through the fragile connections to self.

And then something or someone walks into my vision, yours too. How wonderful is that! Even if it is just a snapshot, it came to me, came to you, a shift in a personal tectonic plate, the underground split into a new geology. That’s something, for sure. It proffers a chance, a wild step into the unknown. If we are to live with joy, fun, light and energy, it is up to each one of us to risk.

My favourite word.

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Island Blog – Bubbles and a Rare Bird

Sorry, been a bit distracted these past few days, and, to be honest, I never imagine anyone wondering if this frickin eejit has finally sqwarked her last, fallen off her perch, not to be discovered for days, and then feel an element of concern. I always thought that everyone is absorbed in their own lives. My blogs, and me, might be a pleasant diversion, when bored on the bus or in a tea break. I kid you not. So, when I get a nudge or two, it bubbles me. I suddenly feel seen, important, that sort of thing. And that feeling is affirming, because who feels seen, let alone heard? Not many, I think. Until we are, seen, noticed, and heard, really seen, noticed and heard, we think it only happens in stories. T’is

A rare bird.

I have a strong woman friend, and she, recently, has chosen a new path in her life, in order to be in the right place for the right people, even as it cut her heart. She has had many cuts prior to this one, and they have healed, or she has determinedly healed them. She doesn’t look broken at all, tall, beautiful, standing fast, and yet she has to adapt, once again, to new surroundings, new challenges, a. new location. I watched her leave the familiar, her eyes brimming rainbows in the capture of sudden sunlight, her focus forward to the what the hec now. She’s

A rare bird.

As for me this past week, I found bubbles everywhere, rainbow globes, in conversation, in the clouds, in the sudden and random. And I am lifted, changed, energised and a bit wild (surely not me…!) by these bubbles. I’m going to buy a bottle from the local shop tomorrow, let them fly free, watch them catch the sky, float cloudward and then disappear like rare birds, gone for ever.

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Island Blog -Jabbly Crossing and that Flower

A boat cruise, picture it if you can. It was sudden, as in I hadn’t forward planned it weeks, months before, so I had needs to adjust my seating and the hold on my phone when that offer landed in my ear (the good one). I alerted, as you might imagine, suddenly on the spot. Decision. Choice. Adventure. Oh, I get that one, the last. I love adventure, but I have found, in recent years, that my woohoo is somewhat deflated like an balloon at my feet, and requiring CPR or a foot pump at the very least. And yet, and this yet thing still can firework me, I found a sparkle, a dynamic in my heart that is still pumping. Go for it. And so, I said yes.

And then panicked, thought the whole thing down, told myself I couldn’t, whilst the ‘could’ in me swanked about like a town crier telling everyone I was off on a mini cruise, spontaneous and wotwot and let’s just go. Everyone being just me, of course.

So I went, I arrived and there I was on a mini cruise and immediately engaging with the other guests who had come from everywhere else and were just as bug eyed as was I, and then we boarded and the welcome was warm and wonderful and on we went in this warm and wonderful state over jabbly seas to the calm of the Cairns of Coll, scrunched our bare feet over shell sand and bird flight and not a human for bloody miles and the sky wide and inviting. And the time we had together, the strangers and I, we met, just a bump, but a meet nonetheless, and, because we have all experienced the wild , the truly wild, the uninhabited wild, we met there and we know it, and there is a beautiful flower we all saw, just then, just for a moment, out there.

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Island Blog – We Can Too

There’s another hoolie blowing here, strafing the daffodils, splitting the petals into suncolours on a lewid grass. It isn’t really lewid, the grass, I just found the word and it would out. The grass is, in fact, growing strong and upwards, but only the latter bit when the hoodie pauses for breath. I swear we are all bent over these past months, the taller ones, like Jim and Archie are almost paperclipped. We work with the gales, that’s what we say, as we cheerfully take fifteen minutes to unfold from the driver seat and take another ten to straighten, pre entering the local shop. This bit is very important, because the paperclipped could well be in danger of leaving with all the wrong products, thus being unable to stick to their diet plan. A terrifying thought.

It thinks me, this wind, Kathleen or Jinx or Indigo or whatever is the sequential naming nonsense applied to ‘just another bloody gale’, which is what we called the whole damn lot of them when I was younger and when we believed in a world that talked straight, unencumbered by the ridonculous need to put everything into prettily labelled boxes. I sincerely believe we understood wildness, back then. I digress. My thinks, spiralling away from the whole gale-ness of things, make me consider disruption. As, indeed, a gale disrupts. But when something disrupts us, as humans, we respond in so many different ways. Some hide away, some rise in latent anger, some observe and consider, some run for higher ground. I’ve done them all. Trouble dropped into a community, a family, a couple, a crowd, dissents, if that’s a verb. It is now. If we can allow any respondents to respond in their own way, without judgement or, (or is it nor, Dad?) and we are not saints, not at all, but simple humans, then we have cracked it. I don’t say it is easy when challenges to said trouble comes thwack attack and feels personal. It hurts, until, if we have engaged in a lot of personal (and personally uncomfortable) inner work, such that teaches us about empathy and acceptance and humility, we just let go and listen. No, not just that, we actually hear, and grow.

Gales flail daffodils, tulips, anemones and narcissi. And, next Spring, they rise again. We can too.

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Island Blog – Survive, Flourish and Life

I watch a robin cling to a fat feeder, wings dinging. It can last just long enough to get a mouthful, pinging back onto the fence and looking around as if to say ‘ so?’ I smile. I think it smiles back as its wee black eye clocks me doing this watching thing, but I’m unsure about the ability of a beak to smile. I see sparrows do the same, their feet adapting to feeders, their learning pivotal to survival. And, it thinks me. We do it too, we humans, adapt when survival seems beyond our understanding. We become inventive. And, thus, we survive and flourish. At first, the robin floundered and wobbled and fluttered as if gravity had won, but not now. Now it holds, steadies, self-corrects and stays, as I said, long enough for a mouthful. I think of my own life and all the adapting I have undergone, and it makes a perfect sense, for I have encountered many, many of those who, or is it whom, I just knew were not going to make it. And that saddened me and still does.

From a young age, well, about 20 years old/young, I knew I wanted to be a survivor, more, a flourisher. I had no substance to support my knowing, no experiential wisdom, but I just knew. That, may I say, is a tough thing to hold inside, because everyone wants facts around any such pronouncement. I did not pronounce. I had no facts to support my ‘theory’. It just grew like a newing and a knowing in me until I found someone who, older than I by a decade, had tried out a few of his theories and was equipped with some gravitas. T’is a shame, in my opinion, that we don’t listen to the young and their beliefs, and still now we don’t, because our culture decides them into schools and subjects and noise and ‘success’, confizing a sunburst into a tiny, and ‘acceptable’ light. Just saying.

I walked today beneath gale-strafed bows, the trees quiet but I know what’s going on inside their heads. Kathleen will return tomorrow, the gale thus named, resurrecting the waves, upsetting the fisherman, turmoiling the ocean into lifts and spits and deeps and discordance and none of us need it, not even the great Atlantic. I notice nubs of new growth littering the track, and it used to bother me. I thought, Oh No, the new growth is gone! Not so. The trees know what goes on here. The first fruits of growth push out anyway, the birds, hungry, long winter (and still not gone) pick off the growth to find the juicy life beneath. Their long hunger is lifted and I can hear them sing from those branches, inviting in a mate, life all over again.

And that is what I knew, without a damn clue, way back when I was 20, that life does that over again thing. We get through shit. We keep going. New life is beckoning. Trauma, bereavement, enforced change, even a move into a world we have never encountered. We can adapt. We can. And, we can not only survive but flourish, because we are strong and intelligent and an important part in what happens next.

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Island Blog – Paucity, Abundance, the Tallyman

It has now been just over four weeks since radiotherapy. Feels like four months, at times, so damn tired am I, and being tired is one hell of a pain in the aspidistra. If, when, I allow myself to indulge in self pity I wander into a day of paucity thinking. Not my thing at all. I don’t do paucity nor any other city, for that matter. I am an abundance thinker, dance being right up there for me. I have danced through apocalyptical landscapes over the years, moving purposefully along and crunching paucity underfoot, en route to heaven knew where, anywhere but there. I believed, and still believe, that moving onwards takes me to the beyond of, not only my skinny et collapso thinking, but also of the barren scape within which I appeared to be currently stuck. This tactic has worked well and still does. But the biggest bore seems to have roosted in my eaves. Tiredness, all day, and not just that neither, or is it either(?) for feeling consistently weary is not cheery, and although I have been told, oftentimes, to be patient, I am an impatient by nature.

Rising from another patchy night, I wheech myself out of bed, physically able still, and I command paucity to get-to-hec as I gather my abundance into a warm dressing gown as I descend the stairs for coffee and, hopefully, dawn. I know that dawn, bless her, will always come, eventually. As I sip the hot strong brew, black, no sugar, I call in the tallyman. Take a seat, I say, let’s count blessings, which we do, as I write them all down. I had breast cancer, which was discovered quite by chance; I had excellent surgery to remove the blight; I have been fully supported by the NHS, family, friends and others who know what cancer feels like, the shock of it, the concerns around it and the recovery therefrom; I live in the most beautiful place, on an island, alone and independent; I am loved by many; I can write, used to sing, can dance (a bit) and have full use of all my important extras; I have life, love life, live life. Now I need more coffee.

By the time dawn has risen with the birds and their glorious singing, my mind is full of abundance, the whining of paucity barely audible. Yes I am tired, yes I am impatient, yes I have lost a considerable portion of self-confidence, yes I am lonely at times, and scared of life, but who isn’t once over the cusp of 70? In other words, let these words float out into the big wide sky, to dissipate like steam. I say that out loud. Then I hear the door open and turn around. The tallyman winks at me as we both watch abundance holding it open for paucity to slink through. The door closes quietly and we all watch the slinker trudge down to the shore, and then disappear.

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Island Blog – A Let Go

There’s been a whole lot of that Let Go thingy lately, well, for a while, to be honest. I used to could (thanks Vicky) do so many things that fight against me now. I could do anything yesterday in my thinking. I could lift heavy potato sacks, furniture, road blocks. But, and this is in the forgetment of aging, I can’t now, and that bothers me because it seems to come as a new thing, every time. I don’t want to give in, give up or is it give over? No matter, a struggle so it is, and that fight for who I was rises like a crazy old loon every time I meet such a finite. Is it finite? Probably, but I don’t like it one bit. Anything that concludes itself makes me fire up in challenge. However, this one might win and I do not go down easy. It thinks me.

My thoughts are not so easy to collate. I might forget what I said just then and say it again, maybe a few times until I notice the eyeroll from my beloveds, patient though they are. Nights collude with the thought chaos, old memories tangled and switched into confused sentences, not as I remembered, my perceived rememberings. I know what I know, but that knowing shifts and the whole dynamic of life is not one I can understand. I can get bits of it, but as I don’t live comfortably in the wholeness of what this generation has learned from pre-school, I can only watch from the sidelines, and cheer.

Many young families have moved to the island. T’is a wonderful thing. Children filling schools for a start, new lives growing in this completely safe place with the chance to experience all the wilding of an extraordinary island, but more than that, much more. The parents of these little ones have found work here, good work, and what I notice and love is that the mothers of these children have too. Actually, that sentence pisses me off big time, as if being a mother isn’t work. Jeez.

I met and have met before, outside my gate with the huge sky loud and my sunroom taking it all in, the sunrise, the sundown, the in-between, young women with children and a smile connects us. She looks up, me in my big goldfish bowl, and I lift and step out, barefoot, to connect. She has moved here, a choice, she has children, she has connect, she is a professional. And, talking to her about sunshine, about hope, about this and that, it hits me, the letting go thing.

To be honest, it is a punch, but I knew it, knew it and for ages. Although I have let go so many times before, all those times that my children left, when I still was ‘it’, when they chose partners, when I was not ‘it’, when my husband began to leave, when , when, when, but this one this realisation has brought me home to letting go. There are young families here, striving as we did once, to raise a life, a family, to make it beautiful and warm and friendly and safe.

I let go happily. It isn’t my time. It’s theirs.

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Island Blog – Nicky and her Sass

The past few days have been all about memories. I have them, yes, but, in my current melancholy state, as I impatiently await my levitation from radiotherapy tiredness, I don’t allow myself to indulge. It’s not just the tiredness, but the aloneness, and the the Lonely. When someone gets to the beyond of 70, that someone can be forgiven for believing they are now elderly. I am not elderly. It’s quite a word, now that I look at it in print, like a kind of dismissal, or the onset of such. I hear writers name my age thus, in the kindest of ways, my grandad, my granny, the old girl next door, but for the one inside the body and mind of such labelling, it sits not easy. So what to do? I don’t know because I never, ever, thought I would get here and the here of this here seems to have blasted in very recently with handcuffs, a takeover. Perhaps this last few months of……I won’t say illness because I have never fet ill, so let’s call it astonishment. There I was, quite joco, getting on with living alone and learning with faltering steps to realise that I am my purpose now, when that feels like a whole load of shite because my purpose was, and for decades, all about others, and then came this tiredness. I am bored with hearing from others that they are tired. I am bored with myself hearing me even thinking it. Why is that? Well, I know that consistent tiredness is an ask for change. Obviously I don’t include those recovering from surgery or illness, but I meet so many who are just, well, tired of their lives. Too many, and I don’t fix, I am gentle, but my hands are itching to guide them out of their familiar, which is consistently depleting their beautiful energy. I digress.

A young friend came to stay. I haven’t seen her, as she was to us, for well over 30 years. She has grown her own family since then, been through her own troubles. She, like me, has sunk and risen and flown and sunk and risen again, and retained herself, her energy louding my little home into light and fire. She led the marine students in that faraway time of innovative benign research on marine life among the Western Isles. She was dynamic and determined, focussed and bonkers. She still is, and that is what rocked me, me, the elderly, the not needed-anymore. And, yet, I was there with her, once, inside the memories.

She loved being here. Out there, walking the old walks, covering remembered ground, at one with the weather, sun for ten, hailstorm, rain, sun again #normal, and she didn’t rest for a minute, hungry for the memories that I try to avoid. It thinks me. We did good here, me and himself. We launched many such hungry girls, and lads, and we shifted the shift in their lives. We did that. Himself with his utter and complete commitment to being at sea for as long as possible, and me with my gift of cooking barrel loads of nutrition at times when those I have spoken to, other elderlies, would have gone to bed with a not me, help yourself, thing. I never did that, not once, no matter the exhaustion. And, I am proud of that.

She is gone now and. her going has left me drained of breath. She is so vital, and that thinks me too. She sees me as, not granny, but as someone I cannot get a hold of. To her 20, I was at least 40. She calls me inspiration, naughty, out of ordinary, and more. A changer. I am working on believing that. And, these memories that haunt, the ridiculous wishing to walk back into those wild, exhausting, purposeful times, and to not be ‘elderly’ and alone, and not to cower down and hide and resist and all that bollix has led me to get forward (not back) into my frocks and bare legs, no matter the toothy north wind, and then to purchase turquoise button ankle boots.

Maybe the energy this trixy minx left here just found her sass.

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Island Blog – Trailblazing

Anything that risks showing up whilst other things hold back for more clement weather have my deepest respect. They are showing courage and bravery, risk takers, future makers, trailblazers. ‘Anyone’ who does the same thinks me samely. I thrill to witness the braves. At times, I may have been such a brave, perhaps. As I ‘ink’ my thoughts, I long to cut the ribbon of correctness, and I do, but with caution, because the world is a heavy old judge and everyone listens to him, or her, or so it seems/seemed. I think of song lyrics, of poets, of writers who, in their time, were dismissed and banished, and, yet now we elevate them into an almost saintly status. What they took was a risk. What they said confronted the acceptable, particularly in the UK where class division appeared solid and impermeable and for generations over generations. I smile when I hear the echo of my past generation, sniggering at people from America, as it was called in my day, a country which had no class system and thought it laughable. Actually, most of us here did too, but we never had the brave to challenge the nonsense of it, and, perhaps, for it’s time, it had a place.

Today I met three bumble bees, always the first, these glorious and singular bumblers. They dip into the early blooms, thrumming with hopeful nectar, longing for pollination, and they will get it from these trailblazers. Barrel-bodied, humming like a C-130 Hercules, without a belly full of bombs, they swing crazy , bumping into me, into the window, but when they land on a primrose, a perfect gentle landing. I marvel.

I consider bumbling. With focus, without focus? It thinks me. The bees know nothing but focus. They rise from a dawn of frost and minus, and the minute Father Sun lifts his lazy butt out of bed, they fly. I think about focus. I am bumbling these after radiotherapy days, and may well do so for some weeks, but do I have focus? It’s an ugly word in my personal opinion, for such an important thing, and that thinks me more, because it seems that the speak of a word and the look of a word often don’t match at all.

I am bumbling. The radiotherapy is tireding and the zap map area, stings. I know that this will pass. I do what I need to do, want to do in the light of this new thing in my life. I rest, a lot. Sometimes i am in and out of bed for bits and pieces of the day so much that the concept of a day makes little sense, if any at all. I hoover, a bit, sort things, a bit, clean things, a bit and there’s another thing……what does ‘a bit’ tell me? Much.

It tells me that a bit is often more than enough. That rising through the frost of something is more than enough. That being one of those herculean bumble bees is exactly what I am. I buzz at that.