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Island Blog – Intelligent Adaptation

I walk this day around the shore of the sea-loch as the tide ebbs and fast as if there’s a great ocean sucker fish drinking deep. I watch the water startled, yanked backwards by some fierce mother as it is whipped back through the narrows, rock-squashed into a skinny rip tide. It thinks me of my grand girls when Mother decides on plaits and will not allow any escape from said plaiting.

I chat with the trees, the track, the sunlight and even the damn flies having been away for a marvellous four days during which I boarded a ferry, drove over 200 miles and spent 3 nights with my daughter and her family for the first time in too many years; when I left my island home alone, knowing she was empty of life until I returned (first time); when I found my inner brave and launched out into open ocean, as me, as one, as singular, as a widow, as me. Although I knew that it would be more than ok, that I would encounter only k9ndness, the thought of going any further than island rocks scared me. But and but again, no buts, no butts. On the ferry, good lord the slowest and smallest Calmac ferry ever, I sat with poppy dog on my lap and longed to turn back home. Called back to my little Pixty car waiting for me in the bowels of the boat I am safe again. I drive out through the open metal maw and my journey begins. I know it well but haven’t driven it long longtime. My fears? traffic. people. that’s all. (all lower case).

The stay was wonderful. I remembered easily the activity in this home, the go here now, the go there now, thing. We did it all. We checked horses in fields, walked dogs, skirted rivers, watched butterflies, played word games, cooked food, laughed, engaged in private moments, slept and went again. When I left I reflected on it all, the whole colour wheel in captured glances at how it was, that singular catch, the legacy of it. I drove back at my own speed. I am not slow but I’m not fast neither, or is it either? And this this thinks me into intelligent adaptation. Maybe a big jump but stay with me. I have 3 hours for thinks.

In my sudden (for death is always sudden, no matter how expected) widowhood, I find an identity. Initially I was a puddle. For a long time. Now, not. I want to be known as me, unpuddled and rising into a lift of wild water, connectable with the rain that falls from the great Up There. I never knew me. I never was me. I was daughter and then wife. ‘Me’ was for decades irrelevant and unremarkable, as if she didn’t deserve noticing much beyond her physical presence. And, although I have made many adaptations over time I didn’t really know my way through it and, to be honest, I am glad I didn’t. It would have caused fire without available extinguishers. Instead I just kept moving on, learning, adapting and repeat. But now, now that when I go away I come back to just-the-way-I-left-it; when I can go out without saying anything at all; when I can plan new encounters, new commitments, new anything, I feel a quandary of contradictions. I know the old way but that way is dead now whereas I live on inside this loneliness, this freedom, this nothing, this everything, this, this, this.

How to work with the hoo-ha of such contradictions? Intelligent Adaptation. That’s how. Oh, I sound so smart but I am not smart at all, not on this lonely road, not on any road. But I have learned that it is eminently possible to move on from circumstances and situations only if a human wants to. In my journey, particularly through the older years, I find myself the moving on person. It saddens me because I know that there are wonderful people stuck inside the dead past, unable, unwilling to accept the new. Not me. Don’t let it be you. Isn’t this intelligent adaptation? What I went through is peanuts to many. I don’t need to say anything because, and this matters, I found someone professional to talk things out. Private. Secure. My regrets, my pain, my fear, all of it conversationed in the right place; thus I can walk towards the village, watching eagles fly pre buying broccoli et la la, tossing my Hallo into the day, knowing that my very private angst is in safe hands.

I called my bank today. I was welcomed with Hallo Mrs Fairbairns. It jarred me. I am not Mrs anymore and never will be. Many thinks around that one. I think about intelligent adaptation and I know that I can adapt and then rise into the me of me. However, the online thing requires a title. Mrs, Miss, Ms. No. Captain, Brigadier, Princess…… No. Each one of those titles sound like ownership. I was Mrs. I am no longer. Titles bother me, labels confound. It’s probably my issue but I doubt this affects only me. Being boxed, labelled, leaves many of us on lonely streets, wandering, wondering who we are now and where we might choose to belong or to whom. And the wandering is of import because it is not possible to adapt to a whole new life in the wake of the old and familiar one. I might feel lost at times, probably will, over and over, but I am finding my way. My Way. I won’t inwardly growl at being labelled as Mrs because I know the title to be one of respect. I also know that our language is archaic in such an area as this. I want my first name and then my second. But, wait. My second name is now my married name, which is not my name but a gift from the rule book of Traditional Marriagitis. So I continue wandering, the conundrums flitting about me like swallows. Whether or not a definite answer comes, it doesn’t really matter because I am building the new me from the inside out, using intelligent adaptation as my thought and reasoning process.

If all this sounds confusing, it is. Even to me.

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Island Blog – Some Days and a Dragon

Some days lift without me doing a thing about said lift-ness. Rising with the early light, everything flows in perfect synergy with everything else and there is no chaos within or without. My body feels lithe and supple, the music, Satie’s Gymnopedies, swims through the dawn, my home and me. Birds flit between the feeders, goldfinch, siskin, blackbird, sparrow, woodpecker, dunnock, chaffinch. No neighbourly cat yet to explode them into the sky, no sparrowhawk to bring them down, just soft reverence to Life herself. I dress, make coffee and wonder how everyone else feels about this morning. Across the sea-loch, mist ghosts the hills below what might just be a blue sky. I haven’t seen one of those for weeks and it’s a welcome sight, one not to be taken for granted as we don’t get ‘spells’ of weather on this island. One day may be all we can ask for, one day of dry, a gift and not one to be ignored but instead to be celebrated actively, mindfully, each minute thoroughly lived because tomorrow, that day that never comes, may well open grey and wet, the sky closed once again.

During these widow days I have known many mornings, many hours of self-doubt and fear, of loneliness and sometimes, despair. Although I know that I must, absolutely must, animate my inner poltroon, start believing and continue to believe that I am more than able to live not only a solo life but one which can still really live even with a missing part. It will always be thus because 50 years of marriage is a very big chunk of any life and to be left behind inside that life now empty of all that was familiar is discombobulating at best. It is almost 2 years now, no, more, because dementia eats a person up little by little and ten years of watching that monster nibble away changed us both. But still, the familiar remained. I knew him and he knew me and no matter the ancient battles fought, neither of us ever won. Now I am just me and sometimes I feel very small indeed. I can spend all night awake freaking out about absolutely nothing real, such as what I will do when my oil tank leaks gallons of oil into the garden, or a huge pine crashes through my roof opening me to the sky in the midst of a hooligan gale when it’s snowing and my neighbours are away in Tenerife? Now, however, a bit further along the road un-travelled I find myself wandering through interspace, a sort of misty corridor of in-between. I am moving, learning how to create a new familiar. Ignoring the clamjamfrie of panics, I sit with myself and we chat. What can you do within this situation, she asks. I close my eyes and let said situation settle into some sort of shape. Nothing about the being alone thing, I begin. She nods. Nothing about the gale. Ah, but I can ask a tree man to check the pines and I can call the oil tank man to check that. Good, she says. Get on with it.

There is nobody in this world, no matter how rich, how well-organised, how balanced who can avoid the big things. Things like gales, oil leaks, death. Nobody. So that means that all of us can learn new ways, a new familiar, but only having gone through the dark times, the rain days, the storms both inside and out. Courage in the face of ‘disaster’ has legs, a brain, strength and power. Fears flit like birds all the time but I can explode them into the sky if I think ‘cat.’ Imagining disaster is normal but not liveable with for long. This state demands action, not helpless panic. To ask, What can I do about any of this? is the question, followed by action and fuelled with courage, even if it feels as though courage seems to have gone off to India to find itself. The human spirit is unbreakable unless that human turns his or her face to the wall and I am not doing that, no matter what.

I was reading about Koi the other day, those beautiful Japanese fish (originally from China) we might see in lakes and ponds far far away from this place. Koi represent courage, the overcoming of difficulties, challenges, big horrible threatening life-changing things. It is said that Koi can swim upstream against any current. It can fight its way to the top of a waterfall and when it arrives at the top, will transform into a powerful dragon, not a destructive one but one re-shaped by all that life has thrown at it, all that it has learned on its journey. I like the idea of that. The thought lifts me, encourages me to face my challenges, make friends with my loneliness, and more, to keep on keeping on whilst engaging completely with it all, even the fearty times. I might become that dragon one day. What larks, Pip!

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Island Blog – Diversifly

Moving on from the Accept and Adapt thingy, I have thought many thinks about how I might diversify. As I very gradually learn to accept and to adapt to this new loneliness, my search for how to make something of this apparent nothing has led me to a new light. Instead of dreading another long evening alone I whittled the stick of it down to a fine point. As late afternoon draws near, as I watch other people slow into a time shared, heading back to wherever together, exchanging laughter and conversation, I come back to where I sit here watching them. Although I still yearn for what was and will never be again, my inner imp sniggers at me, taps at my brain, asks me (with rolling eyes) when I plan to get off my ass and take some action. My start point may appear to be so not what I want, it is, nonetheless, my start point. I must diversify, I must find a something to replace a someone, something that absorbs me and that moves the minutes along in a happy and engaging way. By this time I am too tired to read, not very interested in television and my eyes are done with sewing. So what to do? I ask my inner imp. What do you love to do? I answer her. Cooking, I said, but…….

But nothing, she snorts. I wish I could snort as she does but I am unpractised and she has turned snorting into an art form. My resistance stands firm. There is no point cooking, I whine. Cooking for one small eater is hardly worth the bother. Pshaw!! she says as I knew she would. If, she continues, you want to diversify and you love cooking then what is there to lose by trying it out, at this very time? It will take your eyes off imagining that the whole world is happy and content with their own lives and curve you gently back into your own. Your investment in your own life can only bring you joy, even if you cannot see that yet, and it will tell you that you is important. Okay, I say. Maybe. I go to my fridge at the lonely time and turn back to her. There’s nothing much in here I say. Oh, fiddlesticks! She is right behind me. I see mushrooms, an ancient lime, natural yoghurt, that jar of capers, an onion and two old apples that look like they were born in 2020. Bring them into hope. Invent. Think. Diversify.

I soften the onion in olive oil, add the mushrooms, chopped apples and seasoning and let the lot simmer. I am absorbed, thinking outside my box, engaged. I add veg stock and a few capers, the juice of the lime and turn down the heat. People still wander by, wave, move on into their shared evening but I don’t feel sad. I am completely involved with what to do next with this flavoursome concoction. Serve with rice, reduce the liquid, add a tin of butter beans, what? Once the ingredients are softened, I decide. Soup it will be. The flavours float through the house, the punch of mushrooms eased and tweaked by the tang of lime, the snatch of capers, blending in a way that surprises me. My olfactory senses are dancing, alert, lifted. Once combined, I blend the mix, add seasoning and stir in two tablespoons of natural yoghurt. It smells heavenly. Once slightly cooled I taste. It is divine and who would have thought it? Later, once cool, I taste again. The lime and apple have challenged the mushrooms and facilitated a conversation. I hear it, smell it and taste the unity. This is as delicious cold as it is hot. I am overly chuffed enough to make a decision. Cooking will be my activity when this lonely time barrels in. It doesn’t matter that there is only me to taste whatever I prepare. I can deliver to neighbours, I can share and I will. This is not important but I is and I will build me a new way. I check recipes for inspirational combinations but I know I won’t follow them word by word. I am too flighty for such. I am more ‘bird by bird’, cooking spontaneously, using ingredients that challenge each other, not for domination but for conversation.

And so I am learning to diversify. No, more. Diversifly.

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Island Blog – Accept, Adapt and Diversify

We have rain enough to share, sans personal loss, with about 4 countries. It is as it is. Elsewhere, one country away, there has been drought, is drought. Crops are gasping with thirst, falling over, crunchy underfoot. Gardens are demanding twice daily water and it is still not enough to save the seedlings. Out here in the boil and flip of a wind blown Atlantic Ocean, our gardens are drowning. It feels a bit off balance to me. After all, t’is but a 4 hr drive to the drought, or the beginnings of it but weather is weather and there is much to understand; mountains for a start, those high froth-clouded peaks that pierce the sky and, as far as I can see, make their own deal with Weather. Then there are the huge and thoughtless clearings of woodland, of forest, of hedges and natural stands of natural trees. We have invited in what we never realised would come. Now we do.

So we have change. Seasons are all unsure about their clothing and I know that feeling. I still do. Up here it is a jumper and sock morning, fire lit and then, around mid afternoon I am so boiling hot I could personally conflagrate. I haven’t seen one walker go by, and I see many as I live at the beginning of a most beautiful (and wind-battered) walk in the wild, without full waterproofs and for months, bar a few days of warm sunshine, that shine, that delictor, imposter, fooler of people. I don’t blame the sun, don’t blame anyone or anything. It is change. That’s it. Many will discuss and refute and discuss again the damage of clearing natural forestation, the poisons tossed carelessly up into the ozone layer but honestly there is is no point in any of it because it is as it is. And, the reason I rest there is an important one. If we stand on that baseline, a question is begging to be answered.

What are we going to do about it, about the ‘it is as it is’ thingy? I believe we need to accept, then adapt and then diversify. I like that word, diversify. I have met farmers who, in the shocking loss of their livestock after swine fever, foot and mouth, drought or relentless rain at harvest time choose to diversify. These farmers converted barns into cafes or wedding venues and more. I have met the same with restaurant owners when their clientele changed because the demographic altered. People with thinking heads accept and adapt, look forward, don’t hide in whines and moans but take a brave step to move on and into the new even if that new is a blind to them at first. The humanic desire to live lively is strong in all of us, if we just take time to have a chat with ourselves.

The rain up here is threatening livestock and outdoor businesses. It is dampening the spirits of visitors, halting walks and flipping baby birds which struggle to remain bone-straight on the fence. This is a bizarre summer for sure and we who are not homeless, who watch the bizarre through windows and from behind strong walls, are indeed the lucky ones. And I accept even as I do not choose the battering wind as it strips the roses, beats the seedlings into pulp, drowns the garden. Then, Adapt. Now that might take a think or two. Sometimes I go out into the blast and the torrent without plastic coating and barefoot. I stand back-faced to the wind and the swordic pelts of heavenly water, the knives sharp against my absorbent frocks and I wait to hear the story. The sky is angry. I hear that. I come in soaked but connected and this helps me not, necessarily to understand but to accept. And adapting is easier with understanding. Now, Diversify. Well I am so not going to buy more plastic in order to remain dry. No. Instead I am going to watch the sky, to remember what Himself taught me about weather, how his sea knowledge leaked into me over the decades, so that I can step out into the wild and the new and the change and let go of how it ‘should’ be, how it ‘was’ in June. It isn’t now. And, I am learning to love rain. Accept. Adapt.

The Diversify bit might take a while to click in.

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Island Blog – On Golden

This day it is warmer, even warm. I awaken into the morning, light already, the wind light and the sky bright. No flat grey this morning and no cold wind and I am thankful. It has felt for a while now that this island stuck out into the great Atlantic has been the fulcrum for conflict, as if Summer and what we expect clashes with Autumn and what we don’t expect, and in June. Even the sea is a restless woman, plucking at her coverlets when opposing currents and wind patterns argue loudly with the tide cycles. Tide over wind, wind over tide, it’s exhausting and I am mighty glad not to be out there on a boat.

Today would have been our 50th wedding anniversary. I am not at all sentimental but I cannot say I haven’t given it a thought. Quite the opposite. In fact, I choose to think and a lot as I look back down the years of anniversaries and of 365 days in between each of them. So many and over such a long time, a time of growing children, of laughing and crying, of loving and hating, of warm easy peace and big storms, of wind over tide and tide over wind and repeat. Not many marriages make such an arrival into the harbour but we would have done, had he lived. In a traditional type marriage there is, or was, a lot of old fashioned claptrap, a lot of He is the Man of the House and She is the Little Woman who cooks and cleans and I can tell you I yelled and rebelled a great deal, but somehow we stayed where we were and where we were was together. This sunshine day I remember him as he was way back when romance was still alive and the pressures of adjusting to change flicked the feet out from under us. I sometimes wonder, now that I have time to engage with the wondering thingy, why it was so hard for him as an older man to accept change between us. I remember him questioning once, Why on earth would I want to do that? when I suggested that we both might consider this change. After all, wasn’t I fleet of foot and fancy free until my first son was born? I knew I had changed, of course I had. However this man who could accept all the vagaries of a capricious ocean found it very hard to accept any such in me, even as I knew I was 90% ocean.

But here I am alone now and remembering. I remember the times he surprised me with dinner plans, with roses and thoughtfulness. Romance was never dead in him. He just found me impossible and I know I was. The last anniversary card he gave me on this day in 2020, the year he died, he wrote in a very wobbly scribble ‘You know I have always loved you.’ I recall a mental snort, one I am not proud of, one I didn’t show. Instead I bent to kiss him on his withered cheek and smiled. We did ok, I said.

Happy Golden my husband.

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Island Blog – A Gentle Circle

When I write I feel better than I did with all those words and feelings and observations twinging about in my head. They circle like planets, a circumcircle within triangular sharps. As I move to sit here at my desk and lift my fingers to the qwerty keyboard, I sense freedom. From here I can fly my words , no, not fly, because flying is random and words must needs sentence up, find rhythm and then there’s grammar and punctuation and la la tiddly pom, all sharping their own sense of self, of importance, of an importance to the whole and quite right too. The one who drives the forward beast, horse, bus, train, plane is no good on his or her team. Every other who takes a part takes a vital part. I mean, just imagine the world without full stops or question marks or spellcheck? Well, I can, actually. Many and I mean ‘many’ letters (did I sound old fashioned there?) or emails astonish me with their obviously random dance into the world of grammar, spelling, sentence building, the verb in the right place, ditto the noun. For me this is basic material but, and but again, I am one who believes that language moves on and changes and so should we, even as I squeak at grammar ghastlies. But I am not a grammarphobe. Jeez no. Life needs to move on and btw She is not moving on without me.

No matter the day or the previous night. No matter the weather or the to-do list, or lack of one, I find joy in so many things. No, not things, although the things are things. Like the rose bush outside my window. I watch it. I see the blooms bud, open and fall in just 3 or 4 days. Something I could miss if I wasn’t watching. I go out barefoot (it is essential to feel the wet grass under my feet) and smell the fragrance. I know is isn’t perfect for these sentient plants, they know the climate is changing and that they need to burgeon quickquick before another and unseasonal gale wheechs their beauty into nevernever. I walk and see 3 bullfinch, such a gasp of beauty, lift from the undergrowth, chirping danger and warning to their one chick. They are teaching it to fly. I knew it. I hear gulls in a frenzy and know I will find a big bird somewhere out there, a sea-eagle, a buzzard, maybe a kite. The dingdong goes on until they wild into the sky, the big bird and the hecklers, white white against a grey skyfold. And then I write. Not about the missing, about the emptiness or the triangular sharps, for within is a gentle circle.

Like grammar. I must move on.

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Island Blog – Candy Floss Tastes like Clouds.

It seems like yesterday I foraged for wild garlic in the Fairy Woods. Now I couldn’t get there if I tried, not with the bracken man high and laden with ticks. But I did go before the bracken woke up and the woodland floor was a carpet of gentle white flowers and strong green leaves. Now, the big jar of pesto in my fridge is almost empty for another year. It thinks me of how quickly Time and her inhabitants pass. When children grow they do so whilst, it seems to me, we are not watching. From a little girl or boy to a strapping, strongly independent individual in moments. The catch of their sweet and awkward 5 year old selves to this girl who decides what she wears of a Tuesday school morning and it is SO NOT THAT! From the boy who played with toy boats in a puddle to a the lad who can ride his bike no-hands and way too fast. Gone times. But I saw them, I watched them, I noticed and there’s the key, right there in my hand, and yours. Those of us who remember no television, no social media, no media in fact, no streaming, no downloading and a finger dial telephone knew of a different world, a very different time. We can smile at our memories, laugh at the puzzlement on the faces of our grandchildren or we can hanker for the old. Don’t do that. It’s boring.

Today, on Father’s Day I celebrate my sons and my son-in-law. There is no big daddy here now and even though such a day meant little to Himself and for many years, I remember. I remember him at Tapselteerie, strong and with no thought of any sort of demise and I smile at my rememberings. I was there, oh lucky me, I was there. I saw. Adventures, meltdowns, angst and hilarity, all of it and more. What a privilege to be able to remember and to have been there because I know our shared life was way more bonkers than many others. We were wild, spontaneous and sometimes reckless but we really really lived. I don’t ever remember feeling bored. There just wasn’t time.

This afternoon I walked my grandgirls and the Poppy dog down to the shore in a rare burst of warm sunshine. We skipped in and out of the water, played word games, watched duck fly in, a heron land, oystercatchers twirtle overhead, a sea-eagle surf the sky. Conversation can fly too and I sat on a rock listening to the sisterly interaction. I began. I go to the shop and in my basket I put……..Oh, I know this game, they cried. Good I said. Play. Ok, I’m first! No, I’m first. No, you’re always first. What is so important about being first, I said from my rock seat, genuinely interested because I get it but never questioned it till now. They both rolled their eyes, unified once more. Gaga! they said. First is best. Ok……well I will go third. Why? they asked, mystified. Well, because that way I can hear all your mistakes and learn. Long pause. You go first Gaga. Ha! So I put sausages in my basket and the next one put in a Rainbow Dragon with a Big Heart. The Redhead’s turn. She went through the list and added Candy Floss. Of course, says Big Sister, you always choose candy floss or other boring things! Quick as a flash the Redhead is back. Candy Floss, she announces importantly is not boring. Besides, it tastes like clouds.

And that was that.

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Island Blog – Captured in Words

Today I awoke to a gale, a Sou’Westerly blast and birthing rain. Good Morning, chirruped I, wheeching back the blackout curtains to see goldfinch flying backwards and the mouths of my wheelies opening and closing in excitement. Here we are again. We did this, I said to my first frock as I pulled it over my head. It’s climate change. My frock said nothing as it fell in silent acquiescence over my body. Once dressed I downed the stairs and made for the coffee pot, noticing the time. 04.30. Great! Another long day just bursting with opportunities to notice and to learn something I didn’t know yesterday. The wind ruffed up the rain-stabbed water on an incoming tide making the fretful waves popple irritably. I didn’t share the mood. I don’t get irritable, not any more because there is too much to wonder at, to watch in peaceful silence and too many opportunities to learn something new.

I work through Book 2, drafted some months back and in serious need of distance (from me) and revision (by me) throughout the morning, discarding much and slashing my red pen across swathes of utterly indulgent nonsense. I was too close to it. My agent was right. Later, after reading for an hour and listening to a podcast on grieving, I decide to wander. Wander! I admonish myself as I note my fast pace, feet going like the clappers as if Himself was still back home and without a grasp on the concept of time. For him, 45 minutes, the length of my walk, was more like 3 hours and counting. I slow my pace, watch the thrust of my right foot, then my left, noticing everything as I go. The bark of an Alder. Must pull some off to make a yellow dye, I say out loud, very probably startling said Alder. I swear she pulled her tummy in, holding tight. I laugh and she softens. Just a little bit, I soothe, and not all the way around, I promise. Sunlight dapples the track into negative space. I stop to admire the ever shifting mosaic for the wind, now westerly warm and more like a caress, still lifts the leaf-heavy limbs of beech, oak, alder, birch, hazel, chestnut and the conifers I cannot name, although I know a pine. Everyone knows a pine.

A snapshot of the now calmer sea-loch shows me sparkles as if the sun is melting golden drops. Dandelions answer with butter yellow, speedwell with indigo, oxeye daisies with snow, stems swaying as if in time to the music, all faces turned sunwards. Turning down to the shore, a path I haven’t walked since my baby sister was here with her husband some weeks ago, I gasp at a crowd of foxgloves. They stand as tall as me and in that disco pink Himself loved best. Bumble bees fly in and out of the bells sounding like tiny dirigibles but without the threat. I stand awhile and tell them all how beautiful they are, out here where only a few will ever see them. We don’t mind that, they say. We like our isolation and besides, the bumbles will always find us and that’s what matters. Out on the shore the wind whips at me, warm and westerly and full of stories. I smell seaweed and salt, stories and history. Men rowed out from here once to fish for their families when to catch fish was to stay alive, at least for one more long winter. Seaweed in rainbow colours cover the rocks, the 200 million year old rocks that line the shore, the seaweed lifted and abandoned by the recent full moon tides. Rust, lime green, yellow ochre, kettle black, it looks like art to me. It is also draped over the old Alpha Beta pier, now just a skeleton made beautiful with mermaid hair and shells, random, natural, passing. Soon it will dry and break up and be gone. Such is the life death cycle.

Wandering (yes I am still mindfully wandering) back home, I see a broken egg shell and stop to study the crushed coloration. It’s a big egg so not a blackbird, robin or thrush but it is blue, striated grey, silver, rose gold. A heron’s egg, it must be. I lift my eyes to where the herons nest, just over there among the bow-backed hazels that flank the shoreline, frontliners, protectors of the woods and they can take it, have done for centuries. How sad, I whisper. This little one didn’t make it to life. I pass the pigless pen, move through the gate and step onto the home path. So much I learned today but what did I learn? Ah, I know. I learned that disco pink foxgloves grow at the shore for the first year since the bracken was cleared. I learned that they can stay dormant in the earth for 50 years just waiting for sunlight. Such confident patience. And see how they they gasped me and changed my whole day and poignantly because in a few days me and Himself would have been married for 50 years. When I drive the switchback I look down on his gravestone. Golden script. Sun-melt, captured in words.

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Island Blog – Innovator Generation

For all that we might berate the ways in which our lives are susceptible, nay wide open to corruptive influences, we should also notice and admire the benefits of that wide openness for it teaches us. Everything teaches us, both the perceived good and the perceived bad if we acknowledge that nothing is as it seems viewed from our own limitations of fear. Yes, there is ‘bad’ out there but there is far more good. This visibility also allows us to see further, look deeper and accept our small place in a very big world. We might be tempted to hide from being so seen and I am not saying this is wrong, not at all if it is mindfully considered, but if it comes from a place of fear, we are forgetting to love, to love the way our young are finding their stumbling way along paths we have never walked, at least not as young innovators. We might remember that we were just that once, recalling the tuts and the warnings of our own elders and so-called betters whilst dancing off into what, hippiehood? reckless decisions? risk taking? And more, and more.

This day at midday on Radio Four, You and Yours, my son Ruari is being interviewed. From oil broker to One year No Beer entrepreneur, founding a business to encourage and support anyone wanting to cut down or quit alcohol, risking everything, he and his wife are finally finding recognition and I am so very proud of their passion and their determination. It has been a rocky road, and still is, the one they have chosen. Losing the income they enjoyed, moving home more than once, building on through Covid when the consumption of alcohol elevated considerably according to stats, when nobody wanted to think beyond just coping with the restrictions, the fears, the tension, they persisted, changed shape, adapted, kept going. I have followed every step and I feel nothing but admiration. To stand for something you really believe in and then to walk away from comfort and predictability in order to lead from the front takes a great deal of courage and then to keep walking out front as followers fall away presents a test many would fail. This isn’t working. Where is everyone? But they didn’t give up. They kept walking and now their followers number thousands and worldwide. Wild tundra is being tamed, not from the desire to control, to develop for personal gain but from a passion for people, a belief in the individual’s ability to rise from circumstances as a powerful game changer.

I wax lyrical on this in order to show the good side of wide openness. Without social media, without vulnerability, this entrepreneur would have struggled to gain such recognition. In my days of no television, bad radio reception, no Facebook, instagram and other animals, how could it rise in the way it has? It would have taken decades had it been limited to the paths well travelled. Yes there is risk out there as I know all too well, but without risk and the opportunities that come with it, it is impossible to discover the extent to which we can adapt whilst still moving forward. Fear is a killer as we know. Instead of retreating behind our protective walls, saying nonsense things like “It was better in our day,’ we might take a moment to seek the good in this generational change. And, when we do this seeking thingy we will amaze ourselves. I write a list at times when I am confounded and afraid of wide openness and as I note a negative, I consider the positive aspect of that perceived negative. It laughs me because one comes almost immediately. I decide I have a choice about how I see what I see. It takes brainwork, yes. It can feel almost impossible at times but I am determined to employ my innate intelligence, to thwack the sleepy dwarf into a tall and wide open woman, to stretch those mental limbs, to flex, to look around at the very big world, one I am more than happy to be a tiny part of.

Good or bad? Retreat or walk forward in vulnerability? Learn or refuse to listen? The choice is yours.

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Island Blog – Scatterfry and Meaning

I collected my scatterfry of grand girls from school this morning. Early, although unannounced, I was welcomed, as I always am. I remember so well the possibly fraught minutes through waking a reluctant sleeper, encouraging pyjamas off, breakfast proffered, rejected, recreated, rejected again, the whole flipping tiredness of motherhood. I remember it well and am glad it is no longer my role. This child needs to eat before school. Am I failing? Did I get him or her wrong? No, no no, my wonderful young mothers and no again. This is motherhood. Welcome.

Then I went back to my life. An hour long call with my counsellor, strong, challenging, compassionate and funny. He is a strength for me and weekly and lucky me. However, he didn’t just appear like a white knight, no. I seem to be No-ing a lot here. Hmmm, moving on. We spoke of many things, not cabbages nor kings but of the questions we ask ourselves, the doubts we do or do not challenge, the foundering on rocks and the maybes and the what ifs and the option to lift above all of our circumstances as a sentient and choisic being. We choose who we are in any set of circumstances. I have always believed this, not always managed to show it out, not having the confidence to find the words to deliver my belief into those circumstances. I did cower, I did hide, I did, I did.

Back to the scatterfry. I collected them from end school, arriving a bit early thus giving me the chance to chat to the young mums and dads on collection-duty. We spoke of many things, of foraging, of ferry halts, of weather and of school brilliance, which is a very big thing for us. The Primary School here is second to none and even none can leave the room. It is a magnificent school and no mistake.

As we left, the scatterfry and me this morning when all our hats were askew and our breakfast half eaten something big erupted. Let me explain. I was to take them to school to help mum. No issue there. However, in the porch, whilst pulling on trainers and backpacks, something feral wilded. Who is to sit in the front of Gaga’s car? Eish, you might think, who cares? But the care manifested in tears and more. The young girl just knew, just KNEW that her older sister had been in the front the last time. She melted on the steps. She was sure, she was certain. I waited by the car with the older one, already in the front seat, however, her face in that front seat was downcast, sad, somehow. I asked her, what are you thinking? She said, I don’t mind being in the back seat Gaga. Ok I said, good for you (thinking compassion learned at such a young age). She quietly back-seated herself. The wee one got in. We moved to school and I said I would collect them. Your big sister in the front next time. She agreed. We came to me, ate crackers and watched Sponge Bob. Well I didn’t. Then they went the scatterfry and the silence of their Go, thinked me.

The ‘wee one’ remembers everything, is a sponge for learning, forgets nothing and remembers everything, more than anyone else. And I wondered. Was she right about who sat in the front of my car last time? Was she? Well, maybe she was. There is the likes of me who really doesn’t care. And then there are those to whom such information matters a lot.