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Island Blog – A Sylvan Lift

Woods. I recommend them. Among trees, my daily ‘among’ thing feeds my soul, lifts my feet, my heart. When I walked, careless and young, my hand inside my dad’s big warm palm, there were trees but I had no idea of their sentience. I knew they kept me from rain beneath their wide leafy branches. I knew they shaded me from the intense sun-punch. I knew I could climb through their limbs. I knew they lined our suburban street. Beyond that? Clueless.

Oh my, how I have learned over time, so much, so very much. Even the street trees, those ones pushing through the confines of concrete paving slabs in shopping centres, even they have a voice and a story and more, something wonderful and something healing to share. However, my daily walk is into wild woods, no people, only the trees, the deer tracks, the otter spraint, the lift of a a snipe, although I only heard a flutter from the bracken as I walked and the flash of a lifting bird.

I turn to where the track lifts kindly gentle past horse chestnuts and up to the beeches. I say hallo my friends, as I always do. They are quiet for now as a big hooha of a hail storm has passed on through and the sky ahead is promisingly blue-ish with only a few flattened clouds, stunned I decide from the slam of sudden hail arriving on the back of a cold wind. I may just make the whole walk before the next one arrives, which it always does. On I go past the politely fallen pine, 20 paces long I count. One big limb hangs over the road just high enough above it not to poke me in the eye, fingers canting down all bare and dead. Witches fingers. I call a greeting to Finneas and Magnus the only huge pines in the fairy woods who have given me their names. I round the corner and into the straight. This part of the sylvan scape is flanked solid with hazels and birches, the chorus line. Hallo ladies, I smile at them, feeling the usual urge to burst into song, and stop to study another fallen giant, this time a beech and this one still living despite the man-high curve of yanked out roots. Its fall is held in the arms of what looks like an Eucalyptus judging by its bark. The beech fell, arms wide and this beautiful saviour caught it slap bang in the belly. Although the beech, a huge one, did make contact with the ground, the saviour may well have kept it breathing still. Eventually, I am guessing, this holding up thing will exhaust the saviour and I suppose even saviours have a life span.

Where the track curves back on itself there is another beech of whom I am particularly fond, the one who grew straight out from a rock face, turned straight for the light and who now is almost taller than the others that surround it. Brave woman, I say, as I always do. You think me of me, of many women, of all the courage and sheer determination that ensures life goes on, no matter the difficulties. As I head back for home I greet Lord and Lady Larch, Archie Larch and his girlfriend the Alder. She’s shy I think as she is always quiet when I go by. Their limbs are so intertwined that I find it hard to work out who owns which. But, no matter. They are happy together and that’s all that counts. I see the lichen, green, white, orange, the different mosses on the drystone walls, the fallen wood and in the stands of rainwater. So much colour and life.

A warbler warbles at me as I come down the last stretch. I stop to find it, but I never do. Tits chatter in the sycamores, skittering like children when school is out. One flies overhead and there is a little something in its beak, something like a feather. Nesting has begun already. As I open my door and feel the rush of inside warmth, I am smiling, refreshed, rejuvenated and ready for a cup of tea. As I sip it and reflect, I can sense a change in me, a calming peace, a sylvan lift.

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Island Blog – Conundrums and Palindromes

An intriguing subject and today I realised something whilst pondering the grammar I so oft forget even as I knew it like I knew my own self a hundred years ago, could navigate its complexities and dark alleyways, its sharp and tantalising edginess, its opportunities for a witchy twist. I still feel that but now I need to let a ferret loose in my thick small print Oxford dictionary, even if it needs a serious upgrade. With all the new language, the new ways of saying the same thing the Greeks said but with different spelling, I can see that my dictionary is a very old man, dusty smelling and wonky chops at his edges, bless his old falling apart interior.

However, it thinks me about life, the subject of conundrums and palindromes. So many many times a conundrum taunts us, challenges us, confines us. Then, if we pause ad reflect we see the palindrome, that what challenges us spells the same way forwards or backwards, telling us that there is a see-saw in the problem. From one end it is all about win or lose but once we see the whole see-saw, we can understand the whole thing. Just a see-saw. Just an up and down and another and another.

I remember see-saws with my kids and my grandkids, the same bump on the same ground as I downed heavier than them but cautioning my downing. and then my uplift. Life, I thought, and learning.

If we can understand that when life slants us off kilter with a conundrum and then in kindliness offers a see-saw palindrome, thus gifting us the chance to monitor our bump down and our uplift, then we can deal with whatever comes our way. There will be endless number of weights that confound and upset us; yes. And here we are on the see-saw. On the other end there may be impossible weights and hitting us at times we don’t expect and feel we are not ready for, but we can hold tight to our end of that board and can learn to work with balance. Whatever comes, comes. Who we are and what we decide to do about who we are in the circumstances will decide not who or what wins, but so much more.

We will understand that we spell the same, forwards or backwards.

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Island Blog – Call on Pooh

Although I always awaken with Tigger bouncing in my head, even that striped loon can change shape as the morning unfolds. I never know how it will be until it decides for itself. It isn’t to do with what I do nor what I don’t. It isn’t about the weather, the season or my best laid plans. I can continue to bounce until even I get tired of the bounce thing, all the way up to evening, or I can feel myself turning grey. On the outside of me, I laugh at this. It’s the same for everyone else isn’t it you daft old eejit? Your grey slump is not new, nor is it original enough to warrant a voice. No, it is just a grey slump. Get on with it. You could, if you subscribed to self-pity, find a load of reasons to explain this. Or you can try to outrun it by attaching yourself to Blue (the marvellous hoover) or a bucket and mop or the iron or a pen. Third option. You could just stop running, stop searching for the reasons for grey, and let go. It is allowed.

I paragraphically distance myself from this conversation, as you can see. I have never been good at allowing myself such an indulgence, as I see it. Oh, I am really good at this allowing thingy with everyone else. It thinks me. Am I perfectionist? Well, maybe, because my standards for myself are as high as the sky and equally unreachable. I look up. Everything up there is doing what it does, naturally and adaptively. Clouds move because the wind moves them. Sun rises and falls, ditto the moon, all naturally. Down here it’s not so easy to adaptively flow. Our wonderful brains make mince of us if we are not in charge of them. We are also impatient and expectant and judgemental, often and mostly of our own selves. I find it reassuring to know that the grey hits each one of us, not that I wish it on a single living soul.

Today began with Tigger and became Eeyore by 0800. He’s a sad old sausage, tail gone plus other losses. Imagined? Possibly. Then I considered the stories lived out in the 100 acre wood. That is quite a wood by the way, and an opportunity to be lost for days. Moving on. Each of the friends find each other, seek each other out so that no distress remains thus for long. They are a team.

I believe that the writer fashioned each creature on the moods of a human. Winnie the Pooh, happy with everything in life, every opportunity a gift; Piglet, scared and lacking in confidence; Eeyore believing that life itself worked against him; Rabbit, tense, anxious and fearful; Kanga the mother, the carer, the soother of troubles; Roo, well, Roo is just Roo; Old Brown trying so hard to control whatever comes his way and failing and Tigger the jester. We all know all of them. We experience them all. What might trouble us, and troubles me is that I want to be always Tigger or Pooh but I cannot control that (Old Brown). Life has a life of its own and all we can do is to be okay about cloud thinking in the face of whatever wind decides to luff into power. Yes we must plan, yes we must take action, yes and yes. But when Tigger turns into Eeyore before the school run, then we might consider leaning into the grey, which, by the way, takes forever to create on the palette, more than 7 colours and in such cautious amounts that it is very easy to turn it into slump mud if distracted.

So when Tigger becomes Eeyore, call on Pooh. Always works for me.

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Island Blog – Finding me on Sundays

I’m not sure I like Sundays. I notice more things I don’t want to notice, such as nobody here and nothing on the cards and the wrinkles on my fingers and those bone-age knuckles that would need no ‘duster’ to take out a big man, had they the strength. Saturday, now, passes like a slip of a thing when Saturdays were always more of a yahoo. I don’t think that helps.

Sundays in my young past were a hair wash/get ready for school panic; or a back to work dread. Saturdays were always better. No preparation angst rising like indigestion. It was just a yahoo with crazy plans and sauncy clothing and opportunities, even as a daughter/married woman/wife, when me and him would often suddenly book a dinner table somewhere, just because it was Saturday and Sunday gave enough room for the aftermath. Now Sundays offer the same but without the Saturday fun. Doesn’t really work for me. Funny that I am still stuck in that life calendar.

This is my 3rd winter without him. Although I am, mostly, okay about ‘tempus fugit’, it feels like I am fumbling about, my fingers combing through the times, the timeline, and bringing up nothing more than seaweed or old hair as from a drain. Even as I grow into someone I never knew, nor recognise, I have this pull back to the past. Let me go there, let me have what I had; that sort of nonsense thinking. But, nonsense or not, it is how it is. This bereavement/grieving thing has no shape, no tidelines, no dateline. It is the weirdest of all times of my life as it is for anyone else who knows what the heck I am talking about. There is an identity loss, that identity having been set in place decades ago, refined, pruned, nurtured and encouraged to bloom. It will never be easy to ignore that, nor to walk away. New identity? What on earth does that mean? But, we find it, I am sure, because so many have.

And I am ready to love Sundays, to learn and to find a new me, no matter how hard the work.

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Island Blog – She’s so right.

This day we got soaked, twice. That’s probably a fun thing in the eyes of someone without shelter, warmth or security. I write ‘We’ and it stranges me. I haven’t said or written we for 18 months, nor ‘our’. Our garden. We do it this way. Our home. We like this or don’t like that. That separation is a tear. A tare. A pervasive weed in the cornfield. I remember them way back in Norfolk days and the faffdiddle pain in the backside thingy about us having to walk into the crop in order to remove the invaders. For acres and acres and all the way up to the horizon. T’was the only way.

Inside the rain, there are choices. I, no, we, but not the old we, were soaked in seconds and twice, as the heavenly rain canted sideways and upwards and fickledraft and slanty-sneaky in the short minutes from car to home or t’other. I had to change twice. But I could. I have options. I can warm. I can find safety. I have a change of underpinnings and overpinnings. Just saying.

The day, a day no doubt exhausted with all the rains of our island life in these times, slips into nightfall. It’s dark now. I close the curtains and whisper a thank you to the day, one I shared, one I felt alive in, got soaked in, laughed with others in. All of that.

I know that life lives on and it does, I see it, get soaked in it. But I also remember the we of me and I smile, I cry, I value what I had. Different now, ally mango but I like different.

A quote from an author I so admire. Sally Magnusson, from her moving book The Sealwoman’s Gift.

‘grief is not a rough stone the tides will polish in time but a storm that may abate but always returns, fiercer and angrier for the lull.’

And, she’s so right.

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Island Blog – I am alive

And so it rains again, sideways and spiralling like wet smoke. I watch islanders walk by attached to damp dogs, legs all a-skitter. The humans are water clad, their faces shining rosy, their laughter lifting into the sky as they share a chuckle, again, about the rain, again. Visitors drive by, droop-faced, vision misted, windscreen wipers tick-tocking to keep the skinny road clear ahead. Where will they go today to see notverymuch I wonder? Inside the heating warms me, the fire curling amber red flames around the dry wood that spits and crackles; timpani. This is the island, the one that tongues far out west, dividing the Atlantic with its basalt and granite determination. I am content.

Walking out to feed the jittery birds sinks my feet into the sodden grass but no weather stops the need to feed their hunger. They scoop and swoop in, wary of the neighbour’s cats, of the sparrow hawk dive. I watch them cluster around the swinging feeders and am thankful that my meals are easier to access and without danger. I hear the drip drip of a ceiling leak, the plink of the drops as they land in an enamel jug. I used to need buckets, four of them, but not now, not since the ingress was located and bunged shut. And so I am thankful for that. Soon the day will kick off, unfold, pull me here and follow me there. I have music, words, timpani, birds, windows and rain. I am alive.

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Island Blog – Really

This morning I walked beneath the Still. The Still is a strange creature up here, on an island where winds reckon they can leap into any old mood, and without warning and without informing the helpful/not helpful weather apps on my phone, neither of which agree with each other. Much like the winds. Hallo, my friends, I say to the trees. Well done, you are still standing. They say nothing, holding in stasis. But they, unlike I and my schoolboy weather apps, just know more wind is coming.

I meet said wind this afternoon on another walk. Oh, Hallo my friends, you are dancing to the new beat, the beat of this wind, this not-yesterday wind, nor to the beat of a gale…….Oh shutup about that gale, they wheeshed at me and, ps, there is no beat to a gale, only rant and shout and punch and all of it beat-less, rhythm-less. I chuckle and bow to their deeper knowledge, and then I ask them, do you know when a gale is coming, a storm? The trees roll their eyes at me. Duh!

I walk on looking up to where the bony branches move and dance and sway and bend to a force they know of old even if I never quite know; one which has pounded skies and islands, seas and trees for centuries. Honestly folks, it is never going to change. The elements are four things we can contain, shut out, hide from, even deny, but never control. Not never (love a double negative) but only prepare for as best we can. Back in the days when humans just knew, feeling the change in smell, in the sky, in the behaviour of animals, who still work with the elements, we would plan our days so differently. We would be in tune with the forces that, even inside a city, could be our guides, our helpers and our warnings. Like the trees.

Did you know that trees will send more strength to their roots when they know a gale is coming? Did you know that they will also enhance the root support already in place for a weaker tree so that it might survive the gale? Check out The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. It will astonish you. This is why I talk to the trees. There is the overstory, that’s me in my boots and then, oh then, there is the understory which is astonishing.

Anyway. I stop to hear their song in the afternoon, watch the knuckle bare winter branches comb the wind. I hear their song, one for beeches, a different one for silver birches, another for hazels. I call them (the hazels) the chorus, and they have pulled me up on that. I explain that being one of a chorus is an individual role. Each one of you is important. Without you, or you, there would be no choir. They settle at that. I move on to the pine tops, singing away, slicing the grey sky with needle fingers and with their stop point half way to Mars (swaggering actually) but I get it. If I was 100 feet up there, I just might feel pretty good about myself. I watch tits dart from pine to pine, from fir to fir and it thinks me. This whole woodland knows itself. It knows what it needs and how to get it and it has held that knowing for centuries. We think we know how to live together.

Really?

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Island Blog – The After of Now

I suspect that sounds a bit weird, but I do love to play with concepts and absolutes and, if I am honest, I feel a girlish thrill as I envision the face of my Eng Lit teacher. If you actually think about it, there is Now and then there is After. There is also Before. Before the Now, which is in my case, now After, there was a Before. I am now stopping the capitals.

The anticipation of my singer songwriter friends coming to stay lasted a few days. The beds ready and ironed, the wood ordered, ditto wine, the house cleaned, although not by me #veryblest, and endless lifts of doubt. Will they feel comfortable? How will it work? Do I have the right food? Bla, bla,bla. Offs, I know these people as longtime friends! What is all this faff? Good question. T’is normal, I have heard and even more so since Covid swiped our freedom to move, to share, to connect.

They swing in a few days ago with smiles and hugs and a ton of music making instrumental kit. I am already buzzing, remembering the days when arriving musicians, including them and often them, was an everyday experience. I just know we are going to gel even though I couldn’t find any good harmonies for the songs they sent me. I thought, at first, that I had lost it. (No comments please at this point) But it took just an hour or two of settling in and catching up for me to feel the electricity between us. It was the same as we put together my music CD. Most songs were written in under an hour and adorned with a musical skeleton an hour after that. The rest was building, swapping ideas, changing this, developing that. It was the same here, in the now. We worked for four days on two lovely songs holding a poignant storyline captured in musical collaboration. Dynamic is too small a word for what happened during those days.

Now it is after. We have recorded, laughed, racked up the fire, sung before breakfast and they have gone. But not really, because the before of now is a functional surface thing and the now of now a whole multi-depth experience, as tangled and as complex as a lift from the before with all its house cleaning nonsense into a surprising and sudden connection with the whole universe, with the rain, the gales, the stars, the tides and a surprise of gulls making ribbons against a wide grey sky.

And the after of now will live for a very long time.

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Island Blog – Let Go and Welcome

After a few days of wondering who the hellikins I am and what to do next and then the next next, I awaken with eyes rolling. I have done this often in my long life, this eye rolling thingy. It’s as if I run, run, run for days in my own strength until that strength runs out, as it always does. Reaching that place, be it a crossroads, a wall or a chasm, something wiser than me yet in me stops my feets. And there is a relief in that, an eye rolling, a letting go. If I pull back from that image, I might see failure, but I am learned enough not to do that because I know that the moment of lift comes straight after it. Every time. After each letting go, new paths appear. I cannot explain it nor do I attempt to. I just know the pattern.

I think we imagine we can decide something and then everything will fall into place. When it doesn’t work that way, we take it personally. We think we, or others, or things, or the weather or the neighbourhood we live in or our job at work etc are to blame. No matter our age, circumstance, knowledge of loss or the place we currently inhabit, we believe it. And it is IT. So we make new decisions based on that, on IT.

But what if we thought beyond that IT? No, not thought, because anything ‘beyond’ is obviously beyond our thinking. What if we just trusted that the world is a wonderful place, that those angry people we might meet in shopping queues are just like us only hurting, that there is hope for the millions starving, lost, abused, silenced, living in dreadful poverty? How might we consider ourselves in such encounters?

I walked today and met Finneas. I have seen him a zillion times before but today, in this wind, in this soft face rain, he called to me. A fine pine, a tall one, right up to the clouds, no branches, just his pine dreadlocks meeting the sky. I watched him sway, from his roots to his dreadlocks. Miles of trunk just moved gently with the wind. He stands in a beech wood. He will be kind to them. Beech mothers are feisty. An oak would not survive here but the mothers accept pines, maybe because the pines are grandfathers to them and they, like goodly women, are happy to cohabit. (slight joke). I say “met Finneas’ because he has never told me his name until today. I felt emotion, tears at the beauty of such long term survival, the bending, the allowance of beech mothers, the way the wood works together and for so very long, longer than any of us will ever live.

In the woods of our lives, we might fight for space, enough room to understand our place and to speak it out. Or, we might let go and welcome.

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Island Blog – Call them by their Names

This island night, I hear of another name, suddenly moved into the past. Just like that. She was a woman I met now and again, and one I always saw as strong. Strong, hmm, means something else up here in island life. It means tough against pretty much everything. Atlantic slice winds, sudden have-tos in the middle of something else, like baking or feeding a babe or just sweeping the floor. As woman here you need toes on your toes, ready at any moment for the ice swipe of out there to save a cow from the bog in mid February when the hail is ready to take you out, when you can barely stand on a rock face that doesn’t give a monkey’s about whether you succeed or fail, but you are always ready. She was.

She was, and is, Jeannie. Others who I remember this night also need naming. So, here I go. Jessie, her twin sister, Donnie her husband and Angus her son; Kirsty, Katy, Helen, Kathy, Amy, Willie, John, Mouse, Jonnie, Belle, Blind Katy, David, Hughie, Eck, Katy, Bert, Chrissie, Sonny,and so many more; folk I met when I moved here as a complete idiot and who became my kindly guides. As an incomer, back then, a welcome was not expected. I get it, now. However, island west coast folk have big old hearts and I met those hearts. They may have laughed at us but they didn’t block us out.

Hey Jeannie. I am so glad I met you. I saw, in you and Jessie, strong women with attitude. From my protected life, women like you stood out, literally. Tall and booted up, in the ring, in the field, in among the shit of stock farming in sometimes cruel conditions. You showed me that being woman is not a thing to be taken lightly, nor restricted to domestic duties. I smile as a I write this, because without knowing you changed me, you did. Thank you.