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Island Blog -Dishwasher and Changial

As I load the wee feisty dishwasher for the nth time today, it thinks me. For a few days, this wee and faithful soul has made herself a feature, not because she performed to standard and without complaint, but the reverse. Coffee cups came out still coffee-ed, cutlery not up to scratch. She is saying something. We listened, we scoured and scrubbed, took her vital innards apart, and I felt we stood her tall then. She is diminuitive by the way, down there, a wee fat square of genius with a big mouth. Our care and concern (I watched us doing this caring and concerned thing, talking, suggesting, idea-ing) guided us and we came to ‘fro’, as one of my forbears said, although I forget whom. I think he meant a. together thing, an agreement, a forward action put in place. Anyways up, she, the moothie darling, now washes everything into spectacular. We laugh about this and it thinks me, a lot.

Around humans who are a gazillion nautical miles more away from machine-land, we may presume too much, as we did with the dishwasher, that the way it was, they were, last week, last sometime, still stands. It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I have heard too many say things like ‘I thought she was fine, he loved his work, they enjoyed their evening class in Belligerent Living Tactics, had fun with Granny, were really committed to classical piano lessons, wanted to stay living with me, and so on’. Unless we check our collective self, almost daily but without intent, agenda and without too many questions, just observing, we can still presume too much. After all, we want the status quo. T’is comfortable, an easy grab each morning as we dash, all dyspepsia and inner angst, into our own selfworld, and, if we are honest, that is our world, no matter how much we try to persuade ourselves and others that our thoughts are always on them, him, her, they, I, me, and more.

My thinks are thus, or this if you prefer. Thus is a tad ‘older generation’, even as I believe thus means more than this. It has depth and mystery to it. Just saying. In any situation, what is anyone looking for? That’s a bit broad, I give you that, but let us settle on the dishwasher for now. We need her, big time, we need her, the moothie one. We discuss, disemminate. The doors open in 20. We do what we do, and as we do, we share, we laugh, we idea, we watch, we are curious, we observe, we learn and the end game is a caring synergy. Synergy equals mutual growth.

Amongst humans it’s not so different and it is so very different, of course it is. As we come together on an ordinary morning, it isn’t necessarily one for one of us. The mood shifts, the dynamic changes, the unpredicted has joined us. We might need to support. We might not want to. We might find our flow from here to there compromised because of a perceived threat, we might stand back and snort at this whole circus, thus refusing to learn, to change, to alter within a changial. My word. However, I believe we have presumed too much and for too long. I do raise a glass to the very few institutions which actively embrace the irrefutable change in our societies, but their action implementation is too behind the behind of it and that shuckles my head and my heart. We heard the siren song decades ago. Just saying.

I might end there.

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Island Blog – Faith

I wake into a ‘meh’. Most unlike me, but I can feel it trail my feet, sludge my steps, halt me in my walk to the bathroom. Actually, no, stop, it bothered my sleep too, waking me with anxious nonsense. Anxiety is always nonsense, I know this, because the images are those of fear, of what hasn’t, and probably will never, happen. I do remember, inside one of those nonsense moments, actively rising in the very dark, and walking around my bed like some circling eejit in the hope that I would lose the damn thing. I didn’t. These things are sticky. I also remember lying there, staring up at nothing, seeing nothing and wondering why it isn’t possible to take off a head, mine, lay it on a chair, preferably in another room and behind closed doors, maybe even locked, and then sleep headless, just body resting without the interminable nonsense of a rollocking mind. I don’t know about you, nor your mind, but mine is a terrorist, or can be, a rebel with no specific cause, a vandal, a schemer, a troublemaker. I do not recall requesting this as a child. Is it a punishment? And yet, the other side of this grubby coin is a brilliant thinker and I am she. It seems, she sighs inwardly, that the light requires a similar dosage of darkness.

And so, and so, I am living still as one who must (never should, never ought) work with the palaver of my mind because this damn thing is of use to me in a million ways. I can write. I can speak. I can influence. I can encourage, facilitate, lead. I am fearless on behalf of others. I can stop to sit on pavements without embarrassment, to talk with someone else held in that place. I do not bother about comments, will not judge, will sing in a toy shop if a song comes to mind, even dance with an ambulance driver out for a smoke when someone begins a fiddle tune. My mind is my friend, and my not friend. I remember ‘not friends’, at school, at work (although I only lasted a few weeks in that job) and I took myself off. I did. But when my ‘not friend’ is my own mind, without heading (sorry) into the impossible, I am stuck with her.

We moved through the day, me distracting with music, an audio book, a load of looking out, even more ‘noticing’ until we were all exhausted with the whole thing, me, my mind, my body. There are three of us in this thing. We shopped, snoozed ready for the four day work shift ahead, listened to a story, moved a few cobwebs aside, cautiously, checking for the mama house spiders (I won’t hurt) and felt alternately shit and okay. But I think my bonus ball is that I have faith. That tomorrow will show me a difference, that my eejit mind is exhausted and will shut the eff up tonight, that the roses still bloom, that day will dawn, that the sun will rise and dip, that my children will continue to fly.

T’is more than many can say.

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Island Blog – The Dance in the Delight

So much to say, so many observations and thinks. Let us begin with the bump on my pointy finger. It isn’t painful, just there and it and I I do need the odd conversation. It’s possibly an olding thing. Anyways, this bump. I filed it down to a nothing much. Then I went to my laptop to sign in with finger recognition and was refused. I’ve been refused for days until the bump came back.

It thinks me.

Today at the Best Beach Cafe Ever, it was fun, as always, the bosses so flipping great with customers, an immediate welcome, even when we are 10 orders behind them, the chat dynamic and chuckly. Did I just make that word up…? We do all the dietary requirements here with spectacular cakes, quiches, scones and more. I love the twist and the dance of this cafe. I don’t think I have met it before. There is never a ‘No’ but instead a suggestion for a something else. I honestly think anyone who comes here feels immediately welcome, as if we were just waiting for them.

They come, the cyclists, the couples, the young families with wee ones, the folks with dogs, with troubles, with the exceedingly important need to escape to the glorious wild of this island. I met two really fun couples today. Now, here, I am clumsy with myself because I don’t know (old) the naming, labelling of pretty much anything nor anyone, nor do I care. Both couples were married men. I don’t give a bejabers about labels. I just loved interacting with them, their dog, their story. All beautiful people. We laughed in the sunshine. I watched their faces, saw their connection with each other, the familiar, and that is a beautiful thing. It lasts me.

I brought strawberries home, for ‘jammin’. My lovely bosses, who know about weighing and stuff, asked me to weigh (and stuff). I did, I did try, but got lost at 2934 kilograms. Not sure what that all means. The jam will be good, I know that. I have cooked for 40 years without weighing a damn thing. However I was nonsense at costing anything and there’s a story there. This new leadership is young and building and right on the whole lot of it all. I admire that.

It was a day of sunshine and random requests……americano, short with oat milk on the side, triple espresso, with mascarpone and lemon topped carrot cake; salted hot chocolate with a pecan brownie, a slice of lemon polenta, oh, and a fruit scone, warmed, yes, with jam and butter. An herbal tea, yes in a pot, is there lemon, can I have two plates, two forks to share that gorgeous coffee cake?

Yes, every time.

I love working with such authentic people. There’s definitely a dance in such a delight. And, a going on with what is there, just right there, without any botherment.

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Island Blog – You Young Things

Jeez, it took me a while to find any grace today, as I battled with all the shenanigans of re-pointing the walls of a longtime blog, as if, all of a sudden, the mortar upon which I had depended and for many years, had suddenly mortified, which it hadn’t, of course. This is all about money even if it is proffered on my doorstep like a bouquet of fragrant flowers held by a business owner with cash problems. Hey and ho. Anyways up, what my blog site doesn’t know, and probably doesn’t care, is that I have to dash from this room to that for a signal should, (and there’s always a ‘should’) I require an MSM something that used to just be a text message, the about-to-die blue rectangle app, and one I can only receive if I stand on the stool next to where the sun sets, and for flipping ages, by which time my timing is cut and I must needs go again and again. I did the again and again thing, trying, all the time to cut the thrust of my sabre, to control my spit, to mind my teeth, to monitor my swearing. I pretty much failed. However, I do this calm yourself through doorways thing. It works a treat for me, but it does require an open mind, one which doesn’t want to get lost in the rant. I like that word. There’s a place and a space for it. I like a rant. I like punching the air, shouting at my very understanding geraniums, and there’s a laugh in the process because someone always walks by, and then the laugh becomes a tippsicato, lifting into the sky, the perfect dissolution.

In the faff and the loss of my identity, my blog site downed like a rabbit beneath a buzzard. It felt like that. My world, I know. The running between rooms, the wanting to shout about mobile reception on an island, or on an island in a storm, or on an island when said island has turned hunch against the onslaught of trixology, internet control and more, had me quite tapselteerie. I know, I flipping know, that this is how it is, and there is much good in the how it is thing. But, I write this with relief in my fingers because I am reconnected with my blog when I wasn’t for about 20 texts and a huge amount of room changing, I and my fellow confusciousees, do have a bit of a battle on our hands. I am one of the blessed. I have children who are right beside me. I know this isn’t a given. And, I am so thankful. Even so, I am still alone in the living-in-the-no-reception-place. I am alone in the confusion with the new world, the quick-sharp sorting of everything, including other worlds, restaurant bookings in another country, the immediacy of everything.

I remember having to wait, and wait, and wait, for everything, for anything, and for weeks.

You young things might ask some questions about that, about how it was, once. If you don’t, you will never know how much and how far your granny or grandpa have come, what they did, where they began, how damn hard it was.

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Island Blog – Not Just a Woman

I never can find the source of my newly thinks, they just come. Chances are someone says something that stops me in my tracks, or I notice something, a chance glimpse of an encounter without words but with smoke rising above the both of them. Could be the times that tourists haven’t acknowledged that I have snaked my way back in a very competent reverse around at least four corners whilst they, in a big four wheel drive thing as big as a starship, sit and look at me, and, then, when the driver, the man, stares straight ahead as he zooms past and never thanks nor smiles, I. know that’s when the think rose in me. I know you, I thought. I never want you again in my life, not that I did, not in my marriage, but all around us lived out these men and, it seems, still they do and in freedom.

I am not just a woman. I am more than an excellent cook, a skill I honed and refined over years, not just because I wanted to please, because I did, but more, because, when I gave up my dreams, being the centre of the need, the giver and lover, the supplier of nourishment, the one to bring smiles and full bellies and gentle sleep, my skills meant everything.

As children grew, as a community dynamic shifts, I got it. I moved with the viable, with the awkward, the times when my man hid away. I got my role. Never signed up for it, had no clue, but there I was, all young body, long hair, still with a dream whispy in my head. It dies. No, it doesn’t. I still have it, still believe in my dream.

A man. My choice. However, and in my experience, there were only about 3 who ever asked me, and listened, about what I wanted in life. I told them. I am a fiery, terrified, strong, weak, beautiful, ugly, competent, useless, woman. I am not my body, and I am my body. I am gentle and very strong. I am wild, spontaneous, awkward, bloody-minded, but not fixed in any of those. I am rainbow coloured and I am soft shell beach colours. I am the storm, the sunrise, the set, the pull of a tide, the stop of boats, the lift of cloud, the sunshift, the turning of the world. I am the moon as she wakes, loud in a starry sky, pulsing power. I am unsleep, I am warm cuddles, I am immediate, I am distant.

I am not just a woman.

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Island Blog – A Peppering of Sleep

There’s a spicy dance in that, in a peppering, and the dance is my decision. When others hit the pillow and soon are lifted into the warm embrace of many hours of forgetfulness and refreshment, I soldier on. Well, I am no soldier, btw, but there are times I can imagine myself one, although, and this must be said, I would have baulked at the confinement of that ridonculous uniform with its guttural limitations and the inability to bend at the knee and the fact that nobody ever imagined a real soldier would need to move light-quick. Which they do.

Anyway, I am in a nightdress, a long tee-shirt to be precise, and why am I spilling this irrelevance?

I go to bed at an early hour, one I remember, way back, as a Let’s Go Out time. Not now. I have my herbal tea, my book. I close the curtains on the summerlight, apologising and thanking. So far so good. I read awhile, feel my eyelids and concentration shutting down, and courrie in to the feather down warmth, the comfort of a solo bed, the space, the peace, the quiet. An hour or two later I burst up, wide awake, completely ready for a new day. I kid you not. I am raring to go. I listen to the love-call of a Tawny Owl (actually, it’s deafening, but delightful). Mother moon has thankfully chilled her pants now and is a wee Fadie in the star-crisp sky, clouds banished, or just tired of clouding for a while. No human sounds. No outlights beyond those daft mason jars full of solar beads outside my own door. You might think the world has gone out, but no. Geese mumble and croon to each other, to the gathering of vulnerable chicks, who, had they been mine own chicks, would have required a load of gathering and a ‘Muchlouder’ than any mumble or croon. Oystercatchers, always freaking out about something, trillett and dive about around the rocks. I catch them in the moonlight. A plane flows overhead, a dart, heading north. I make another herbal tea. I watch and I see.

Sleep is important, yes. But, and but, there are those of us who don’t sleep to order, and never did. There is a fear mongering around lack of sleep, a feeding of nonsense from the ‘higher-ups’ who might tell us we must have 8 hours sleep. In the times I have known and learned about, the people who determined to make a good life, may have done so with little sleep but with a brilliant attitude. I can dance, no matter, I can laugh, no matter, work, no matter, rise and rise, no matter. My heroes. There are too many lovely folk caught up in tired, in lack of sleep, and I was there, a lot, and for years, until I got sick of myself and the whining. I realised I was looking at the lack of things, of me, of life. Well, that’s only going one way! I asked, instead, What Can I Do?

No matter the tired. What can I do for someone else this new morning?

Ok, morning is a stretch. I’ll ask again once you light-lift my looking, when the owls, geese and oystercatchers shut their wheesht, giving way to a blackbird, a thrush, the dive-dart of a woodpecker, the flutter of siskins and goldfinch. A new beginning. Another one. Lucky, lucky me.

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Island Blog – To Pace Myself

Not writing a blog feels like not breathing right. I’m all staccato and pixillation. It’s been busy – I’ve been busy with work, people, emotive tiddlypoms, opportunistic dynamics and sunshine. I complain about none of those but they do demand a new attention, one to which I had, heretofore, not thought about at all. Truth is, I forgot that I am now over the 70 hurdle and that does make an infuriating difference. I don’t ‘look’ my age, or so I am told, and when I see others bent over big midriffs, stick in both hands and with a list of ailments so long that, were I to ask about them, Wednesday would turn into Thursday.

It doesn’t seem to matter how actively I make my brain work, with scrabble, wordle, writing, reading, good conversations on interesting subjects, nor how much I walk, row, bend, strengthen core muscles, a body will demise. It’s a right p in the a, and no mistake, but that’s how it is. Three days work in a busy cafe takes me four days to recover from, even though I love it. The whole getting old thing, in my opinion, is of faulty design. Surely the whole person should age concommitantly, brain and body agreeing on a strategy and just getting the hec on with it. But, no. There are those whose body continues about a million miles beyond their brain, and vice versa. Who ever thought that was a fun idea?

So I doze a lot, catching snatch-sleeps randomly, but not on work days, obviously. I tell myself this is newish, that I will get used to it, and I hope I will because I don’t remember a time when I had this much fun. Buzzing as a team member, laughing, serving, joking, teasing, washing up, chatting, moving, helping……all so uplifting. I have more energy than ever raised within the past 4/5 years. I laugh more, and easily. I see the fun in pretty much everything. I matter. I am seen, valued, important, and what I think is this……..

There should be a shop (do I have to write ‘store’?) for oldies who find a new purpose and who are on the hunt for a new body, one that isn’t carrying all the sharps and damages of decades. I could flip through the items for sale, check out the general strength, the state of internal organs, the power in the arms, hands and fingers, the vertebrae, the hips, knees and more, the versatility of well-toned muscles and the ability to bend from a strong core. A bit like buying a wedding dress, but more long lasting. I would keep my face, heart, mind and beliefs, however, because it was all of those attributes that got me this far in my crazy bonkers life and I love my life.

Perhaps I need to learn to pace myself, whatever the hell that means.

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Island Blog – Feelings Left Behind

We can lose years of feelings, yet remember moments burgeoning with them. When someone died, or was born, we know the date, but have quite forgot the feelings around that event. We get a glimpse of joy, of sorrow, of relief, of anger, of being there, as a person, remembering, perhaps, what we wore and who was there. Feelings flitter away. The sense of presence, of engagement, of inclusion, seem, to me, to float into the already past of such events. It thinks me.

How many of us can accurately come up with a date, when asked, one which includes lockdowns? Not me for sure. I start off answering a question, one that requires a datal fix, and I founder. It was four years. No, that cannot be. ok, 6 years. No again. And. I trawl, literally trawl as through a whole expanse of ocean, sky, time. I can feel my arms reaching back, lifting as I try to gather in an answer, wanting so much to gain a hold on ‘that time’, but I cannot. Then, when some semblance of datal knowledge (did I just invent a word there) arrives between you and me, I find myself alien to the facts, because I cannot find the feelings. This happened. I know it did. You just told me it did. But i am not there without feelings, so, basically, I am not there at all, although I was. I did get a glimpse (stupid word btw) of a sudden rush of something, but it was gone in a second, and I couldn’t hold it back.

There are so many memories I want to haul in like a fisherman, to pull ( with my own strength) into the boat I am now captain of, and to spend time bobbing in the salt, the wind, the sun, the storm, picking through those times, feeling them in my fingers, remembering them as I was then, as everyone was then. A memory bank, like other ocean banks where living is visceral and immediate, and time is but an illusion.

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Island Blog – The In-Between of It All

We learn how to live our lives, following, whether we want it or not, the echoes of what we learned in our childhoods. Hoods. Like coverings which deny our looking out. This is normal. However, as we age in wisdom and, hopefully, with a measure or a deal of independent thought, we might lift those hoods and slip into an (heretofore unknown) crevice, an in-between. It’s a weird thing, that slip, that fall, and it can happen anywhere and at anytime, particularly when we think we know who the heck we are. Especially then. It’s as if my clothes don’t fit. As if the chair upon which my butt is perched is, all of a sudden, the wrong shape. As if I suddenly want to run from this place and into the new understanding of me, but don’t, because I am half way through a starter and the running might make me look weird and deranged. After all, only I know what just happened, how what someone said connected with me like a dart to my heart, literally. All this occurs in complete silence, even though an entire planetary explosion has just shot me from whom I thought I was, right out into space without oxygen, no space suit, no map.

In such an in-between, I am inadequately dressed. My shoes are not for climbing out of this deep and rocky divide in the land I thought I knew so well. It’s cold and I have no answers. But, but, I can still see the sky. I can still hear the swash-slap of ocean whack against the rocks I do know. And I know that this sudden realisation is going to be my pal on the road. I just know it. Oh, I could, and many would, flap the whole thing away and find a way back to what……reality tv, the projectile misery of the daily news, the poison and the lies of social media; a comfortable landing; what happened was just a thing; a No Thing; the thing that clicked with me there, really halted me in the everything of my life, meant nothing, it’s nothing, I’m fine.

Thankfully, I am not one to not notice such a spontaneous and unexplainable crevice fall. In fact, I invite and welcome one, because life is not a straight line, nor is it a following of old echoes, of parental control, of school experience, of hurts and damage and disappointments. Life is lived from Day One no matter what age nor stage. I ask myself this. Who do I want to be? What do I want to achieve? When will I finally like myself? Why not now?

The in-betweens will come. They always do. I’ll leave that with you.

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Island Blog – A New Beginning

I started work today, at a new venture, or an establised venture, now in new hands, which means it’s new. btw. Moving into a new place, even if the venue, the stones and location are the same as they ever were, a newness is created. There are new ideas, changes, alterations, a personal stamp stamped. I always love new beginnings, have no problem with change, mostly speaking. We greeted, checked out the lay of the land, heard the ideas, decided to be dynamic. Let us go, I thought, as we did just that. I knew it before, the way it works, the flow and rhythm of what had been the been for yonks, shifting its gaze into a new sky. This, I said to myself, is a be. Not a been…… and I am in.

We worked, and hard, and busy, fixing, trixing, laughing, sharing, sticking, unsticking, wiping, washing, tide-fighting, tide-aligning, talking, finding out about each other, watching, checking. We are creating a new dynamic. There are wonderings, doubts, fickle-twiddles, stopstarts, upskittles, solutions flying in like birds through newly sequined window panes. Tables – juxtaposition, chairs too, wall hangings yet to be wall-hanged, or not, lights to be twisted this way, that, this something to be considered, this something else to be moved, or removed, all a considering, for now. It’s like a birthing, and I am at the business end. I have no idea what I am doing, beyond the obvious, the cleaning prep work and the beyond of the dance of mischief I will always bring to anything. However, there is no fun, nor mischief (interesting word if you. break it down……mis…..chief…….just saying) if there are no-ones to work with, to laugh with, through tricky stuff, when this isn’t working well and that isn’t working either.

We had fun today. My first day. I loved it. I’m as tired as the others, but so excited to be a part of this new beginning.

I thought I was all out of those, to be honest!