Adventure

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Island Blog – What is real

The sgurr of Canna rises in rockjag, granite layered with larval basalt and dressed partly in a lush green. The late and welcome sunshine lifts it into a story, People have lived here for thousands of years, working with what they had. They climbed these cliffs, fed their sheep, their cattle, themselves. They had boats or didn’t but either way the only connection to ‘civilised’ life was over the water, the oftentimes complicata of tidal conflict, of adverse weather. They didn’t run out of milk because someone had a milk cow. They made butter, cheese, curds and more. They didn’t run out of green because they collected ‘green’ and made something healthy. They kept pigs, those who could afford one, and sheep and they shared. They had wool for carding and spinning, clearing off the lanolin in stored barrels of urine, and then washing the fleeces in fresh spring water from rushing burns, drying them on hillsides. They had clothes. All around them moved healthy air, sea blown, pure, unpolluted. Even today, this day, in times of human foolery and folly, this place breathes clean and clear. The island has a strong community ethic. We can feel it. Unlike so many ‘civilised’ places, with instant everything and an uber a quick call away, this place, like so many Hebridean islands has so much more to offer.

I watch those who live an island life with interest. Although I do live on one such island and have done for over 4 decades, these remote places, inhabitants from a mere 40 to perhaps 400, I notice things. No woman is bothered with her eyebrows, the shape of her nose, nor what she ought to be wearing. When life is paired down to what is actually important, such fricking nonsense is just fricking nonsense. It teaches me. Although the ‘patriarchal’ control is supposedly diminishing, it seems to me that women still uphold it, maintain it.

Where life is truly lived, engaged with fully and is tough, challenging and deeply fulfilling, may well lie well outside and beyond ‘civilised’ lies. I watch the sun light up a curve of cove on Rum, its tail fire dancing over the stacs of Canna and then gone in a cloudsnap. I see salt peppering the windows of the boat as we swing and sway at anchor in this bay. I feel stories, ancient stories flow in and out of me, words in gaelic, auld scots, and understand not one word even as I understand it all.

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Island Blog – Wild and Herself

I sit on the aft deck listening to the snap of the ensign in a corrugated wind. Today we engaged with the Atlantic close up, feeling every wave, the lift and push, cross tides beneath and around us as we rounded the lighthouse at Ardnamurchan, always an adventure and a half. Then on to the Isle of Muck, the seas sideways and upside down and very teenage. It wasn’t rough. I know rough. I know massive waves breaking over the bow and this wasn’t like that but I have sea legs and my old legs remembered themselves even though it is years since I bowed through anything remotely rough. Other guests do not have my experience and I noticed how they quietened and hunkered as I rolled with each twist and screwball feeling immense thrill and excitement. I remember this. This is my whole life with seafarers.

We moored and walked for a couple of hours over many stories and a million years, through wildflowers and wild birds and the few people who inhabit this remote island. Then back to the boat for another dance with the Atlantic roil until finally the best of skippers brings us safely into our resting place below Rum for the night. What has uplifted me today is the way I feel. I was so very tired when I boarded. And yet today, the first day, I feel alive and wild again, feral and free and so happy. Is this my happy place? Not just the island magic I already know so well, the wide and truthful sky, the endless weather changes, the wildlife and the island people but the direct contact with the ocean. I thought I was afraid of rough, any rough. I remember saying I would not go on a boat again unless the sea was dead flat, dead, flat, humourless, a whisper of herself, submissive, polite, like so many women I know, as I was once. Today she showed me wild, almost in a tantrum, her truth and I felt as one with her.

I am always learning.

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Island Blog – Transition, the Familiar to Adventure

Moving from one state to another, one location to another, equals transition. Prior to one usually feels me anxious as if I have stepped off a familiar path and into the scrub. I need my navigational skills, skills I always doubt I have. Do I have the right boots? Are my eyes sure of sight, of their looking power, their clarity? Is my case too heavy or too light? Do I pack a sandwich? Stupid nonsense like that, and then some. I have always wanted to be the sort of feral woman who just gets up and goes, who doesn’t care about the right boots nor the damn sandwich and who is so childlike as to simply adventure on, scrub or rocks or cliff edge or bog notwithstanding. I never was, and yet, and yet, since I turned 70 a while ago, I am learning. This in evidence as I unpack my lightweight suitcase on board the Lucy Mary. I have four pairs of knickers for 6 days. Never was good at arithmetic. Actually I had packed 5, (still a lack, I agree) but one pair fell apart on removal. I sit on the bunk in my cabin and look at them, see quite clearly that they must be a decade old. Oh dear. The other guests look so well assembled although I confess I have no clue as to their knicker situation. My clothes, the few I had brought with me, are a touch threadbare, my usual island kit, but it’s as if I am seeing them for the first time in stark realistic reality. I also forgot mascara, essential for the other end of me. All this thinks me.

When I meet with strangers I couldn’t give a monkeys as to their outward appearance. I notice it, of course I do, the well-heeled, the tatty bedraggled, the somewhere in between, but how someone presents rarely has much truth in itself. It doesn’t tell me who you are, what you are really like, your innermost innerment. Thus, I tell myself firmly, it doesn’t matter what I look like either, and I gently slide myself into another transition, one that leads me back to myself, the real inner me, the truth of me, open, vulnerable and ready for adventure. Over the next few days I will learn from the other guests. In this sea-blown cloudscape, among these ancient rocks and twists of history, we will join in a mutual interest, risking ourselves enough to open up in ways we never do when walking through the familiar.

Right now we are heading into a mildly lumpy sea and I am thus in danger of missing my keyboard one letter at a time, so I will stop now and lift myself into the adventure.

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Island Blog – All the Way to Whales

I know that I am still a rebel. Against what? Good question. The thing is that ‘most of us grow out of it’, supposedly and politely and concomitantly and absolutely fitting in to lives so very far from our dreams. So reads the manuscript. I am at the steam spout end of my kettle life and with not one regret. I know that without the grounding, or sea-going strength of the man who saved me, I would have gone to some dive somewhere and died of over-ness. I would. I know it. He, the older-than-me, wild, foolish, closed up man, held me. He did and for decades, through the utter chaos of children, the strife of in-laws, well, just one, actually, through the fears and the choices we made, the walking out of that crazy. The first whale watching business in the UK, benign research, the first. I bought in, was right there, in the rain, boots on, helping the first intrepids aboard, handing over sumptuous packed lunches, thermoses, just knowing they would be coughing their way through engine fumes all the way to whales and that I would be there at the end to collect them, dry them off, feed them scones and jam and tea and, more, to laugh with them about the bounce and tricuncular shitski of the Atlantic, god bless her, around rocks and other irritations.

I think I found an outlet for my red, rebel. To be honest, I think rebel is born, within a child. I have one or two of my own supporting that. Thing is, what do you do with this red thing for yourself, when you just know life isn’t as it might be, when confines and controls and mysogyny and religion divides and sadly conquers. How can you see this at 7 years old without the language to process, let alone explain? My theory is this. Many of us are here in this uncomfortable playground. Many pull away, home to the familiar, the compromise and live with it for decades, never mind minutes and nights. I am a pull away, although some might say I compromised, settled, and to a degree, they are right, although I twist at their conclusion. I loved full time, moved into wife. I loved that. Things shifted, changed, the moment a child was born. I changed. I grew fierce, defensive, powerful. That modem operandi never changed with four more birthings. I never loved as I loved them, never. Maybe that was a troubling thing.

See that red rebel? She is wild and bothers not about doorways nor invitations, nor stupid rules, nor old past judgements. Atlantic thinking. I remember on a warm evening, way back, after feeding three courses to 16 guests, seeing them right, warm fire, help to bed. Alone in the corridor of clearing up, ironing the tomorrows, letting out the collies, watching the big kitchen sink to rest as I wouldn’t. I remember the wild excitement of seeing whales out there, the out there which billowed into the farmhouse kitchen, way beyond food time, but I will always provide food. I saw them, briefly, the whale-watching ones, saw their smiles, the twinkle in catched eyes, the long hold goodbye. I smiled at the rebel connection. There are many of us in the wings.

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Island Blog – Betty’s Bay and Baboon Balls

We walked this morning through the fynbos and down the wide open beach. There is something so recognisable about the Atlantic Ocean, something to do with my history and the breakers high and white with spindrift. The smell of salt and seaweed floats around and through us as we walk over a spread of bleached pebbles and shells that sparkle like jewels. In the shallows, vast tracts of floating kelp sway and lift as sunlight catches each rise, turning the mass into moulten gold. The fynbos is almost done with flowering now, as Autumn moves closer, but still some tiny flowers spread their petals wide, purple, scarlet, butter yellow, blue and spindrift white. We follow tiny sand-ways, curving this way and that, narrow and respectful, for this expanse of life is both protected and essential for all of us, breathing with us, and, unlike us, lifting goodness into the air.

Behind the house, huge mountains climb into the sky. This is where the baboons live, whole troupes of them. It is completely possible to live alongside such animals providing you don’t go out leaving a window open. Nobody does it twice, for they will wreck a house in search of something to eat. We talk of those who would like them eradicated, those who own a schmancy elevated beach front house but visit twice a month. Those who live here have learned baboon lessons and would never leave a window open when going out. There is, in short, a mutual acceptance between the species which, in my opinion, is most gracious of the baboons, because this land was exclusively theirs once. We are the invaders who dug up the precious fynbos and closed the land shut with concrete driveways and big fat holiday homes, with high fences and entitlement, fast roads and supermarkets.

Back home for coffee on the stoep, a huge male baboon leapt easily onto the roof. We quickly moved the dogs indoors and closed the door. He swivelled around to eye us. We eyed him back. Perched on a roof strut, he yawned wide and scratched his balls as if in comment. Then, with a leap, he was gone, back into the fynbos.

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Island Blog – The Little Ones

They’re here. They’re always here if we just care to notice. Right now it’s loud fun little ones in the pool after a very hot day. In fact, we barely went out there except to move between buildings, or from house door to car and, in that instance, landing on a seat fit to burn our whateverness. But it isn’t humid, not wetsweat, not fly food, just caught in the tumble of a fire wind. And so we worked indoors, loving the coolth of aircon on the rocks. We shared ideas, played with words, made new ones, honed and distilled until the flow became a whole 8 bar phrase. So musical.

As we walked early morning, the dog and we, through the winelands, flanking rivers and spectacular flowers and conifers, baboons skittled and flew from one side of the red dust track to the other. We heard the squeals and chuckles of their young somewhere down there in the river. The play smiled us as we moved on. To be honest, I would rather not meet a baboon but, as I never have, it might be a good thing for my inner scardey cat. I did notice that we slowed once we saw adults above us on the track, the young below, when my African son called in his retriever and slowed his pace, always watchful, always aware. To get between parents and young, even among cows on a windspite cloud-collapsing west coast island is dangerous. I have learned here that the protection of Little Ones is top of the agenda and no human should walk on, unaware.

Tiny flowers lift their heads to the sun, basking in its warmth. The colours are rainbow and mixed on an over-excited artist’s palette. Primaries, sedge mixes, ice on green, the tang of lemon on blue, an aubergine slice on scarlet, black full stops circling the stamens, louding them, an invitation, a landing pad. Grasses spindle and wave in the rising heat, dry, sharp, peppered with tiny beads of life, Sprangletop. I bend to watch them, my sandalled feet dust red, sunk in sand, warm. I think of friends dressed in endless layers, bodies white-faced, amidships starved of light. Scotland is cold now, rained off and not just Scotland. The dark and the rain can diminish. It is hard to remember the little ones, the Ones that lift and shift the gloom, like tinkerbells. It is so easy to swipe, so easy to deny, to decide that this little one is a nothing much. A big mistake. If we notice, welcome and celebrate each ‘little one’ then, t’is only then that we actually engage with the life we lead, and often for the very first time.

The pool is empty now. Wet little ones scoot behind my chair as if they are sure they will never trip up. Bare bodies, wild energy, wary and confident in equal measure, following the light.

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Island Blog – A Curve of Change and Beacons

I’m watching my tulips, a huge vase of them, a gift from a friend, curve into fingers of fire. Others might have thrown them out days ago but I like to notice change and its effects, so they remain, still wild with colour, but obviously existing in the end days. Do they still have a voice, something to say? I think so. In the sky the clouds move fast like a conjoining of grey-haired line dancers full of gin. Today, yet another big gale was all about push, like a bully, without care for the lids of my wheelies, the cancellation of all ferries, of no mail, no deliveries, the village shop scanty on all the expected usuals. The rain pelted and I didn’t walk. I watched, from the goldfish bowl of my very obvious conservatory, those who did. I could hear them crackling by, all waterproofed, all with dogs. There’s a kind of ‘have to’ about dogs no matter the weather. Although I have always refused any noisy clothing, just fine about getting soaked, I regret not getting out there. It was cold, the wind full of teeth and menace. However, I know that, had I got out there, smelled the wild, soaked myself, been buffeted beneath very compromised trees, watched the uplift of wind over tide, the upsurge of startled water, I would have engaged with the change. It thinks me.

In less than a week, I will be in South Africa. Am I anxious about the journey, the airport overwhelm, the weather, the ferry situation? Hell Yes. But my thoughts on these are just thoughts, my feelings understandable and still just feelings. It is how I deal with my fear of change, over most of which I have no control at all, which will matter. Matter…….sounds like someone who makes mats, as a Hatter makes hats. Sorry, wordal irrelevance. In any life there is always a surprising element of control, not over anyone else, nor over everything, but over self, over me, oh definitely yes. My response to fear, to a scary change, will shift the whole dynamic. Not like a bullying wind but more as a gentle turnaway. The anxiety comes in. I gently whisper, and I do, and out loud, I See You, but You are not Helpful to me. Please Go. And then I find a Thank you, for something, anything and the list builds itself.

Everything passes, the good and the scary, the gales and the calms, the good days and the not so good, the seasons, the daily round and its upsets, the friendships, the losses, the changes. Like the line dancing clouds, it all moves on, has done for millennia. We just need to accept and to dance on, in the rain, through the shite, bright as beacons, because we all are. Beacons.

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Island Blog – Actually Tuesday

In deference to the olding of me, I get the flapdoodle assailment. I suspect it was always here but when I was dealing with immediate disasters, such as fire in the hold or a child dangling from a rope that fell three floors and yelling Mum in a screech beyond the beyond of sludgy sleep, his slippage a definite concern, my inner Dante could barely whisper. Ditto when there was disaster at lambing, or the horse was sinking in a freezing bog, or a guest was stuck in the bath in a locked bathroom requiring a deal of laddering and a lot of looking away. Nowadays with all of that a chuckle in my mind, when most survived, I have the silence of olding and widowing. I love a lot of it. It even funnies me at times, usually when someone I am talking to bursts into giggles. Life is ridiculous after all. No matter how we plan, how prudish, how strait-laced, how desperately we hang onto rules and restrictions for ourselves, our children, our husband, wife, partner, there comes a time when Life flips us like pankcakes without a safe landing. It always has and it always will. As we hold too tight, there is always slippage. The key is to teach that to our children, even as nobody does, holding on to the right of the times, the limitations, the fences and boundaries. I hope we learn one day. I really do. By the way the dangling son landed safe, the wee shite, after a deal of leaning over bannisters, proffering smoothing okays, being there to catch him.

Talking to my children, adults now, they tell me thank you for the crazy life, the wildness of it, the way they learned to accept life/death/life at an early age; the way you did this mum, sorted that, the way dad made us safe. We never doubted that. Pretty good, eh? I have all of this and so very much more, the convoluted vortex of it, not pulling us all down, but containing us in a swirling collective. The olding years show just me centre stage, and I have to confess, despite my siblings sniggering at my ballet moves, I feel proud. I make mistakes. Today, for example, I got all ready to go to the Library Coffee meet. It’s Tuesday here half way along the sea-loch, but not there in the village hall, I discovered. It’s Monday there, the hall’s wooden mouth clamped shut. I laughed at myself and drove home. I walked up into the woods just to say hallo and tripped over a willow root, apologised and rose again. I lit the woodburner and went to close the doors, the door closing handle breaking right off. I walked into the beyond of marvellous at 3 and met the hind and her calf, about 5 feet away from me. She looked up. Hallo Lady, I said, gentle and low. She looked a minute more, then ducked right back down to graze.

The clouds are umber grey just now, a bit shouty, pushing at each other’s backs, against a dying blue. Their tips are burnt umber, gold, rose madder, the hills below a silhouette. The day is leaving. I’m hoping tomorrow is actually Tuesday.

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Island Blog – A Speluncar Paradox

Blimey it’s hot. Even the stoics are wilting, including me, although I rarely confess to any such thing. And that thinks me, a lot. What is this inborn choice/need to always present upbeat no matter what the what or the whom? I spent this non work day with my thinks. We played think tennis together, the ball whacking over the net and back again. We both did a load of sweaty running about. The ball, the answer, said damn all, and no surprise there. Had I been that ball, that question, in this heat and being arse-whipped again and again, never mind the bouncing thing, I would probably have remained silent. Did we come to a conclusion? Well, no, although the match may have brought in a synergy because what I (we) realised is that I choose to be upbeat and also that I need my cave. There’s another also. I do not need to explain nor justify either, particularly the cave bit. I am human, chancing into weak, rising into brilliance. No, not weak. Bin that. If I always bring in the light, my choice, my need if you like, and my pleasure, then this cave choice is my safe hideout. Equally vital.

So, when I mourn for the lost children, for the wars which devastate ordinary lives, when corruption in high places decide the way the streets will or won’t move safely, when social media desecrates young trusting children, when lies are told in high places and those of us is ‘low’ places hear of them too late; when huge companies hide their truths, when weapons trade across oceans, hidden and politically permitted, when news comes too late, when everyone knows what’s coming, but if the sun shines and there’s a barbecue, a dance, a chance, a band playing, then everything’s ok. Isn’t it?

I am ready for my cave, my paradox, because tomorrow I will leap into the light I bring and spread it blooming everywhere.

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Island Blog – Even When

There are times, I confess, when I am not proud of people. We islanders know it’s coming, the influx of visitors, and that those folk who arrive bringing all their issues with them do not represent the whole of island-hopping mankind, but the few can spoil it for the many. Since expected accommodation standards have elevated to 5 star, no matter what cottage nor house a visitor might pay for, at equally elevated prices, the reality of skinny single track roads, the paucity of supermarkets. the angst that arrives within each big-ass four-wheel drive, complete with bike racks, canoes atop, arrives too. I meet you on my drive to the harbour town, through the glen, through any glen, peppered with cattle and calves, with sheep and lambs, with cyclists, and I do shake my head. I’m thankful for Radio Two to calm me with tunes as you, the few, continue until we are both stuck in a hard place. No, not a hard place, a skinny, blobby, fall-off-the-edge,soggy place when your wide passing place is just a wee scoot behind that big black ass of yours. Oh, but you can’t reverse. I forgot. Let me shimmy and jimmy my way around two corners and let me wave with a smile. But do you return the wave?

We work here. We also need you, to fluff up our economy, to buy our builders, plumbers, sparkies, cleaners, servers, cafe and restaurant owners, hoteliers, guest houses, yes, we need you. Our winters are way longer than yours. When you are back in the hopeful warmth of your earning and your sweetly safe home, in a city, all without friendship and community, after you have complained of one dirty pot in the house you enjoyed big time for a week and left in a 6 hour mess, after you demanded space and questioned a slightly dodgy entrance, a slight wobble in a decking, spare a thought for the work we put in to make sure that you have a wonderful holiday next time winter goes. Because we do care, we absolutely do. We just ask respect for that about which you have no clue. We will always do our best. even when you are careless.