choice

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Island Blog – The Pretend and the Real

There’s a thing after a big occasion. It’s a bit of a down in the boots. The build up to something takes frickin ages, months of thought and prep and unholy panic. And, then, the day comes, as it always will, skidding in too fast, knocking those who aren’t prepared right over on their butts. We get through it, love it, hate bits of it, and then the night comes like a full stop to all that thought and prep and unholy panic. And, even though it is done for another whole year, there’s a wistfulness squirking around because for one day everyone got together, rising above the ordinary, the boredinary, the slough and chuff and scuff and dribble of the next bit, which is much longer than a bit. It’s going to work again, to school again, to facing the weather again without the lift of pretence. It’s like stepping out of fairyland and back out onto the street, wetter and colder than before.

I get it.

Oh, I know I am in Africa and Christmas was super hot and sunny, no need for a merry fire in the grate, no need for candles, which, by the way, would have melted into puddles by 8 am, but I still need to come home to the ‘street’. It wonders me, this whole shift, not just mine across timelines and a gazillion air miles, but for everyone else. Life will never stay still. Such a damn nuisance, that. But, it is how it is, and the slump after two days of festivities will affect all of us, no matter whom nor where we are. We love to celebrate, to have fun, to lift ourselves up and away from the pressures of our lives, to pretend, just for a short time. I believe this to be a strength, because I have met many, so many, who say MEH to celebratory felicitations. That saddens me. You, my friends, have lost the child in you, and that is a massive loss. We love to play, however stiff and starchy we may become, through pressures, hurts, wounds, damage and disappointments. Good news is that the child still lives in there, somewhere. And, the most playful people I have ever met, have always been the most broken.

We make resolutions. We break them. We set them too high, way above the beyond of what we can reach just now. We want to change, or we would never set these damn things, these Don’ts and Do’s that may never be us. I just decide to be more playful, to see the fun or to initiate it. To laugh more, to share smiles, to say hallo to anyone, everyone. To bring out the little girl I once was, before the pretend became a conscious decision, when it just happened because it was real.

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Island Wife – Lift and Slideways

I love the way they lift. Birds. It gasps me every time, the sudden sight of a life that can do that lift thing, all feathers and aerodynamics and who the eff cares, thing. I’m behind the wheel of my sassy mini, one, bless her, whose brake pads are skinnyrink. Not her fault, of course. It’s those tourists who have no clue about passing places, reversing, spacial awareness, nor a care in the world for the big ass drop on my side of the single track road. I digress. Back to the lift.

As I watch the Little Gull lift without any sign of a run-up, just an effortless rise from Terra Firma, I not only feel my own body lift, even from within the clutches of Matron of Seatbelts but I also sense a deep longing in me. To fly like that through a whole life, to lift from standing when something bothers or threatens, or just from boredom, must be truly wonderful. I watch the white and grey touch the sky, slide sideways, cutting a line, a definite line, then scooping up again, and around, and all of it in silence. It thinks me.

I can do that, I whisper to my home. I can live that way, just not exactly that way, being featherless and weighing a few stones more than that wee body of lift and slide. But, in my mind, my attitude, my chosen direction, I can. Yes, it is a damn pain in the arse being a thinker, I agree. These beautiful elevators, and the animals grounded, don’t think at all. They respond to instinct, our own fight or flight part of the brain. They just respond to an outside stimulus, and they are always on the alert for danger. That part must be exhausting, although, and this thinks me too, how many of us live that way, feeling so under the power of ‘someone else’ that their innate sense of independence and choice is quashed into mud? I suspect too many beautiful souls.

Every single morning, and through each day, I self-correct. The Terra Firma of my thinks, could sink me in that mud. I kid you not, and here’s another thing……those of us who really feel, Really Feel, for others, for the world, for our future, for our even now, for our self image, and that’s the biggest pull to ground, feel bloody everything, question everything, are consumed by everything. We need to remember our feathers, even if those around us just don’t get it. My advice? Don’t bother to explain. If you are a creative, recognised and acknowledged or not, know this…….you will find your place among others who recognise you, even if they never met you before. Trust in this, through all those awful lonely times, those dark places, those rejections and mockings and nightmares. I have no idea why I went there, but perhaps someone needed to hear the hope in my words.

Back to the lift and slide. In this ridonculous world of rules and behaviour parameters which seem to close in like jaws at times, there is, for the brave who just say, Enough, just once, and stick with it, a new flight. Yes, it will be tough, dangerous, all of that stuff, but who wants to live the one life under another’s control? I watched a big predator lift from the sea-loch, all 8 foot wings, big ass, confident, the queen of the sky. She rose up and up and frickin up until even a cloud gave in with a sigh and a divide, so intent was this big lady on full exposure. Then I saw the Little Gulls, wee smouts (look it up) in an immense sky, skinny wee things, intent on moving this big lady on and away. I heard them talking to each other, You go this way, You round on her, You tackle her, You deafen her with that dreadful squawk of yours, and so on. The Whitetail lifted, slid, lazy, like I’m in charge here. But the gulls, the small people, were having none of that shit. Persisting for a whole skyline, they moved her on. I’ve seen it many times, and have always wished that the ‘small people’ in business, in the world, could band together like Little Gulls, and not just in business. I think of a book I have with me always. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, by Richard Bach, a slim book with fat wisdom. One gull decides things are not right. Just one.

Please never believe the shit inside your head. It isn’t you. It’s learned lies. You, too, can fly.

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Island Blog – Reflectology

It seems to me that, once way ahead of an unpleasant thing, I can see the, heretofore unseen, benefits hidden in the turbulence, sadness and pain. At the time, in the thick of the thick of it, I am no more than a tumbleweed in a vast empty desert. All my supports have abandoned me. I am left entirely alone, and yet not alone because my thoughts, often my enemies, stick super close. Child, teenager, young wife, mother, disappointed dreamer, et la and la, all morphoses requiring me to change more often than I do my knickers. Life, anybody’s life, is like this. I sincerely doubt a single soul can say, truthfully, that everything that happened to them was just what they wanted and, better, predicted. Looking back, I can settle, somewhat, swatting away the bluebottles of Why and How, quick sharp, so they have no time to lay eggs in my brain. At this end of a long and adventurous life, I can see so much. Rejection strengthened me. Neglect taught me to love myself (eventually). Abandonment, judgement and loneliness made me resourcefulness, a respect and love of my own company. In short, I learned tactics, found tools, good tools, ones I can always rely on because I always keep them sharpened and greased. This is Reflectology.

The study of reflection is a good thing but, and there is always one of those, it is essential to remember that one life is just that. One change, one ticket to the dance, and balance is everything. To fall down and to stay down is a choice, presuming appropriate limbs are still strong. Something in me, deep, deep inside me, probably a bloody connection to my parents, will not let me stay in that down place for long. Oh, I can go there, all mawkish and brimming with self-pity, sinking into the black, the sadness, the regrets and the rage against any dimming at all, and then this Get up and Go does it’s thing anyway, patiently waiting for me to do the same. It stands there above me, all calm and cocky and that ‘we’ve been here before’ look on its face.

Go where? I whinge.

Who the frick cares, comes the reply. Just do it or that bus, see that number 38 rounding the bend, will flatten you and then what?

I’ll be flat, I say, defeated.

And useless, comes the eye-roll answer. I can’t make you, can’t lift you. You have to do that.

This has served me for decades. I could tell my grandchildren this, and they would puzzle. They expect someone else to lift them back up again, bring them back into the light, love them again, just as I did. It wonders me, the fairytales we read them, much as I love a fairytale. However, to read them ‘reality’ might just turn them into tumbleweeds on the spot. We learn slowly and by experience. We learn how strong we are only in times of war.

I fought everything and everyone as I did this tumbelweed thing. Not openly, covertly. I internalised the bad stuff. But it seems to have done me no harm, not when I reflect on the utter brilliance of my bonkers life. Yes, there were cuts and bruises, yes I felt rejected, abandoned, all of that, and very sharply, but here I am a septuagenarian, and still ready for whatever comes my way. The key, my key, is that I am thankful for all of it, even the shit times, and I honestly believe that such a choice, because that is what it is, means I can keep getting up, even if I have no idea where I’m going.

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Island Blog – Calypso or Collapso

We deal with much, these days, in real time and online The online-ness of it all. Everything was fine for a while, until suddenly we have to update, or change, when neither of those demands are fine, at all. Someone wants your mobile or home details, and there is a suddenly in there, a stop, a halt, and then endless questions, most of which ask you if you are a dunderhead, an eejit, a left behind, even if those judgements are not voiced as such.

We are in a new era. We can go with it, learn new tactics, ask family of friends to guide us, or we can concave, we can bow to what we no longer want to welcome in, and rest. And I get that. But that’s not me. I am so out there with curiosity and barricades which thought they could keep me confined. Well, arf to that.

I meet many folk my age and older, and I just love them. Such beautiful folk with stories I wonder will ever be heard beyond my ears. I love stories. The why of this plant pot, the why of the way you make coffee, the how of your choice of dress for a ceilidh, the what of all of it.

And I meet choice, all the time, on the street, in the shop, as I travel this beautiful island. I meet it, There are those collapso. Then I meet calypso. The laughing connection to the wild, to hope and to the dance, the always dance. You know who you are my friend.

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Island Blog – Still a Light

I watch the days and the nights. The sharp twist of frost overnight, the sun big as a baron in his barony, wide smiled and warm as a beacon. A light to guide. Jack Frost holds on as long as he can, but even he is no match for that burning fire star. Beaten, for a few hours, Jack slinks back to Winterland for a chilly snooze, biding his time. The switchback road is icy or it looks like it despite the gritter of last night, for it is still zero degrees. The sky is cerulean with whisper clouds, the ground flat and brown and decorated with frosted grasses. Sunlight catches the icy spider webs, diamonds in the bog willow and heather. I meet no cars at all. Ah, the perfection of island life in winter!

I am driving, not Miss Daisy, god bless her and RIP. By now she may appear recycled as a sardine tin and I sigh at the thought. So not how she would ever have seen herself. She may have had rusty underpinnings and found it a bit hard to fire into life of a chilly morning, but she was a strong spirited old girl and kept going till a very definite end. Out, as they say, like a light, which she was. It thinks me, about my own life, the light of it for me and, hopefully, for others. To remain in memories long after your drive belt, or shaft, or whatever has broken is a very uplifting thought. As we grow old, with rusty underpinnings and the struggle to fire up, we have a choice. We are sentient beings, spirited and intelligent and we can make that choice, no matter how crap we might feel, no matter our anxieties, aches, botherments and tiddleypoms. And they are, for the lucky ones, very tiddley indeed. As we readers and curiositors know very well, there is always a choice on how we present ourselves. I know of those, as you do, who have faced, are facing very dire internal horribles, whose lives are actively under threat and yet who still decide to be cheerful. I have nonesuch troubles but I like the ethic and choose it for myself. Ideally, I would like to live a good long life and to have my drive belt snap politely in a beautiful place with eagles soaring overhead and close to home, inside it, ideally. Miss Daisy almost managed the latter, but not quite. Her life ended just as we turned down the hill to home, thus allowing me the relief of knowing that we could freewheel all the way into the village. It could have happened on an upward bend, in snow, with the gritter coming at me like a huge yellow monster, but it didn’t.

This day I drive Miss Pixty, a sassy mini cooper who is a bit of a speed freak if I’m honest. I need to rein her in quite often, but she is great at turning on a sixpence, parking in tiny spaces and responding immediately to whatever I need her to respond to. She will outlive me, this teenager, and we have become fast friends. She is going for her full service, which means, I tell her, that handsome mechanics will be checking her personals. She blushes. It’s okay, I say. They are good lads and it will only take an hour or so. I meet an old friend for coffee. Neither she nor I admit to ‘old’ for we know that there are doddery old 90 year olds about, but because we have known each other for over 45 years. We laugh about getting older, learning acceptance, wisdom and humour at the various small demises we both encounter such as forgetments, bent fingers, slower walking and the strong likelihood of us walking through the town with our frocks tucked into our knickers. Together we can laugh. Alone we blush with embarrassment. We agree that connectivity at such a time is reassuring, uplifting, allowing us to feel we are not the only one going through this process none of us prepared for, one that came so quick, like a thief in the night.

I wander to various shops run by those I knew as children, not five minutes ago, those who now have teenage children of their own. It wonders me. Time, though an illusion, has such power to confuse a mind. She, Time, can scoot the years whilst also managed to dawdle an hour until I am screaming for the clock to hurry up and arrive at the end of itself. The smiles of welcome are heart warming. I wonder what they see as I fankle with the door handle, burst in, laugh at my fankle bursting thing. I surreptitiously check my frock is not tucked in anywhere and straighten, re-aligning the arrangement of island made soaps and candles and creams that almost toppled at my inburst. All well. We chat, I purchase and move on. More chat, more purchase. The island shops are wonderful, offering not Scottish Tat, thank the holy grail, but island-made, inventive and inspirational and I am proud to be an islander in a world that seems to have swapped quality for plastic.

Mis Pixty awaits me and she visibly relaxes as I say hallo and take my seat. How was it? I ask her, flicking on the engine. She growls a bit, then a sassy note comes into her voice. I know that sound. Although she has suffered various underskirt poking and proddings, she has also had her throat cleared and she is raring to go. Steady, I say, Gently, I say and then Let’s Go! And we do, driving round corners, hugging the road and meeting absolutely no-one. As we pass the graveyard, where Miss Daisy died quietly I look across at where Himself lies. The sun catches the stonewords, all of them, not just his. You all lived good lives, I say. Some hard, sometimes hard, some easy, sometimes easy. You had days of dire and days of ire and days of fire and sunlight when a child’s laughter, a moment of intimate love, a glass raised at Hogmanay lifted you above and out of yourself for just a little while. You read a book that smiled you, spent an hour in the pub with a friend chewing over old time, old memories when you were someone else, younger stronger, vibrant and fluid. Then came Time to fickle you. You didn’t invite her in, nobody ever does, but she came anyway and dulled your wits, challenged your dignity, unalughed your laugh. I hope, I continue, that you chose to present the great untruth when someone asked How Are You Today? Or, more unfortunately, and please take this one very seriously, How Are We Today? Eish, never ever ask that one. And, the great untruth is a wonderful light to give out because it lightens everyone you speak to. The bumbling, faltering slide into old age is no news to we bumblers and falterers. We know it, it wakens us in the night, it reminds us of itself all through the day but my questions are these:

How do you want to be thought of right now?

How do you want to be remembered?

What do you want to say about growing old?

This last is important. Young people say they don’t want to grow old, as did I. Now I am here. And I am still a light.

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Island Blog – Here and That is How it Is

So here is how it is. Ten days of a visiting son with his kids, this morning, gone, the air sucked out of my lungs as his car disappears around the corner. Nothing has changed. The sea-loch still rises and falls to the whimsy of a Sturgeon moon, the birds still flit and flut between feeders, the house still stands strong, broad shouldered stone, protecting me from a load of outsidery things. The shop still opens at nine, the builders head off to work chugging iron bru at 6.30, my neighbour heads off to his fishing boat for another day of net tangles and swear words. And yet everything has changed.

I meander through the morning telling myself not to focus on the gone thing. I tell myself to get busy as if all is as ordinary as it was 11 days ago but as the hours slouch by I know this gone thing will catch up with me, with the hours, with my thoughts. I feel old, stiff, annoyed with both. I never thought I would get here to this old feeling. I used to laugh at such nonsense from my ma, my scary mother in law when they looked as I might look now if I allowed anyone to see me looking thus, which I don’t. Feeling old, I told them, is one thing. A thing you cannot avoid. Presenting it is a choice. Don’t make that choice. I hear again my wise words, spoken through a young set of lips still plump, words begat by the father of ignorance. Who can know the feel of old until it arrives one morning with enough luggage-intention to stay long term? Nobody. What we do, when this guest arrives is to choose our pretence. It’s a bit like a journey on a false passport. This is me, not me, me from choice. I may not be this person but I am determined you will acknowledge this ‘me’ because if you don’t then I am grounded with the old feelings, the fear feelings, the lack of swing and chortle feelings and I refuse, point blank (whatever that means) to accept that.

I walk as I always walk, noticing the grasses husk and ochre. I touch their still yet softness as I pass. I see bracken spot and curl, the carpet of fallen leaves, already brown and crisped into tiny coracles on the track. I see hazel nuts overhead, rowan berries blood red against a blue sky, beech leaves goldening high above me. The ground is soft and mud blown, cut and spun into soup by yesterday’s sudden thunderstorm, here and then gone in a matter of one short hour but nonetheless a herald of Autumn’s closing fist. We may have more sunshine days, who knows, but the word is out among the seasons and the Your Turn thing is shifting. I pass by the shore and look down but cannot go. For ten days it was crazy down there, endless loud girls crab fishing, the growl of a quad, the squeals of delight, the absolute takeover of a small thrust of rocks, the learning, the delight, the falls, the fire lit to cook noodles or sausages, the glorious family fun of it all. I continue around the track, remembering. In my mind I see them all, bright eyed, ready for nonsense, scaring me with their bravery, no, not that. It is their confident youth. The way they skitter like lizards over all terrain, the way they sparkle at cake or chocolate or fruit pastilles. The welcome they give me. The whites of their eyes, their teeth, the shine of their wilding hair, the flash of their feet as they dash past.

They are gone and it is a heavy thing. I know, I know (please don’t fix feelings through logic) they will come again. Others will come again to inhabit this glorious place, to redefine it, to render it their own for a short time. They will sing into the clouds, the blood red sunsets, yell at the moon, cry at the falling in, laugh at the cake, fish for the abundance, argue, storm off, come back for a warming hug. I know this. But this day I feel their loss deeply. And that is how it is.

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Island Blog – Cake on a Plate, Curiosity and Choice

To choose a day, if I had to, it would be this one, simply for its beauty and surprise. It began with what looked like a full moon at 2am although I was never spot on with my absolutes, an almost circle millions of light years away being, by definition, unmeasurable through the naked eye. A little sleep later and I awaken to warmth, to clear blue skies the colour of possibility and happy sighs, little puffs of cloud as from a celestial pipe. Tranquillity after months of rain and a twisting wind unable, it seemed, to settle on a restful direction. It thinked me of bluebottles which, in my opinion, have no sense of direction at all. Too hot by coffee time to sit outside, I throw open all the doors and windows and settle to my weaving, now that I have completed my ‘journey’ wall hanging, the completion of which made me restless too. Completing a long-term project means I now have to think of the next one and that place is like a crevice between two cliffs, or two rooftops, the possible fall a fatal one. I look down it and my eyes cannot find the bottom. It is unnerving although it never used to be, not when my to-do list was the length of a roll of wallpaper at the very least, those days when I just jumped the gap, undoubtedly in pursuit of an escaping child.

However I knew it was coming, this crevice thingy. I could tell even from a distance, that a break awaited my footfall, even if I couldn’t gauge its width nor depth. But I am a moving on sort of woman and also a curious one. Nobody ever got anywhere by turning back through fear, only through a considered choice. My weaving is my first, colourful of course, and without an image in mind. It is a journey and I am at peace with that. I find my colours in voices, encounters, skies, hills, woods and shorelines. The chirrup of oystercatchers, the piping of curlews, the scurry of woodmice, the distant laughter of children, the sound of a boat heading out to see the dolphins play. And, through endeavour, I learn. I learn and I improve, I change and I adapt and all beneath the cloud scud, the cerulean canopy, the broil of Father Sun. It is enough.

To say I choose a day might sound as if it is the best of all days by comparison. As if somehow all prior days were a bit limp. But this is not what I mean. Not at all. Sunshine is a truly wonderful thing, necessary for a spirit lift. Sunshine warms the skin, sets natural hi-lights in dullen hair and tints bare skin to freckles and tan. But there are a zillion days when this is not the case, when it’s cold and darkling, wet and endless, but even that last word, the endless word sits me up straight and shoots my eyebrows into question marks. I want to shout ‘So?’ because when I awaken to one of those, it is just one. There may be more, although life is never linear, not really, even if the weather appears it so. It is all about attitude, about personal choice. Will I venture out #eveninthis or will I sit on the wrong side of a the window and allow my body to slump in defeat? Will I follow my curiosity or will I grump that Alice in Wonderland is ‘just’ a story? Just a story, as my own life is and I will not write out a boring one, one that sleeps everyone shortly after Chapter Three. No indeedy.

As this day is chosen for its given beauty and surprise, like cake on a plate, other days are no less of a gift because we never know when all days will stop. The thing I do on far-from-cake-on-a-plate days is to choose. I am a bright, intelligent and imaginative human, just like you. It is a singular choice to celebrate every single day, regardless of weather, circumstance or cake. Among those whose lives are a real and genuine struggle, I have met the widest of smiles, the warmest of welcomes, the wonder of generosity. The impact of that insight changed me forever, and deeply.

Tomorrow, whatever the weather, will be my next chosen day.

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Island Blog – Rain, Alice, Getonwithit and no Cat

This morning as I rise from my sleeping quarters at some ridiculous hour I decide that enough is enough. From the moment I stumbled into the bathroom I knew it at gut level. This day is going to be my return to Getonwithit. I know the place well, have lived for lengthy periods of time within its borders during my long life and it offers considerable sustainability and protection. Its gardens are beautiful, long expanses of emerald grass tonguing into the distance, borders fragrant and blowsy with blooms in every colour of the palette; pretty arbours and trellises of clambering beauty, falling like waterfalls to brush against my cheek as I wander through. Birds flit and flutter among the shrubs and trees, butterflies of every hue, bees and other winged buzzy things sip nectar from open-mouthed blossoms, backlit by the nurturing sun, their stripes and wing patches painting magic on the garden canvas. I can wander all morning here, sit to rest on a garden bench whilst my eyes go deeper into the foliage to see more and yet more of nature’s life. In the evening I can watch the light fade to dark, the sun dip beyond the horizon, feel gentle sleep nudge at my edges.

The trouble is that my stay is limited and never long enough. The double trouble is that I am the one who decides to leave, my edgy gypsy wandering mind becoming bored of all this wonderfulness, for no reason the rest of me can explain, and clamouring for the bark and bite of everything harsh and difficult. From simple not-thinking to complex over-thinking. I blame my parents.

So, this morning I considered a few things. Swinging from Getonwithit with all its simplicity to Questions Without Answers is a waste of my resources. The key is to think Child. I had forgotten her, the wee Alice, the one who keeps falling down habit holes, sorry, rabbit holes, and who accepts a smile without a cat as if that’s completely normal. I find her. She is sitting on the stairs, half way up, half way down and I almost ping to the bottom in a tripcartwheel. I start a bit but I am happy she hasn’t abandoned me, me with my edgy mind. How patient she is, I smile to myself and myself rolls her eyes. Children, I remind myself, get on with it. They may not like the things they are ordered to do. They may not like living along the lines of a rule book they had no say in, but in the main they find fun in their lives. That is what Getonwithit shows me when I am there and this morning I am going back. Myself eyes me, knowingly.

It rains today and blows a hooligan. Stripes of heavenly water cut my window panes into slices and the wind batters the seedlings. Petals flee, birds scoot backwards and walking folk look like kites as they pass, their waterproofs flapping out behind them like wings. Dogs drench, woodpiles sigh and soften, the sky frowns and dumps on us. I can go back to Questions with no Answers, to a droop, to gloom, to the whom I had allowed myself to become recently, or, and this is my choice, I can remember Alice and fun and Getonwithit. So I do, we all do. Me, the dog-about-to-drench, Alice, and the rain, join as one this afternoon as we walk out into the wild, lowering beneath the wet beech leaflimbs , dodging the puddles, smelling the rain, the lovely scent of newfall . And there is a smile in the branches as we wander.

No cat.

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Island Blog – Plan Be

As the doors re-open into others’ worlds, shops, cafes and space, I acknowledge a little turbulence in that moment when I get out of my car in order to move along a narrow pavement, people heavy. Okay, I am outside now, so…. mask? Not mask? Inside the shop there are thingies on the floor to keep us a metre apart but this doesn’t work in doorways nor when someone remembers they forgot something and makes a U turn between the acres of alcohol and a long colour run of biscuits and cakes. Unable to disappear, there are at best, 12 inches between the U-Turner and the long queue of masked up distanced basket carriers. Suddenly we are, momentarily, way too close for comfort. I help an old lady with her bags, taking her arm on the steps. Of course I do. It wonders me, my choice to do this when I almost felled a structure of pink wafers in my frantic reversement just a few moments ago. This is indeed a time of wonderment. It takes me back to one of those ballets I was in a hundred years ago, one of the Little Swans, I think, all tippytoes and tutu, breathless and terrified and way too close together for ballet shoe freedom of speech.

But I must not give in to fear. I refuse. Stoutly. This is at attitude I have learned and infused into my very bones. The fact that it doesn’t work for me is, largely, my failure. I hear stories of those who have moved beyond the unholy mess of fear and doubt that we currently live in, those who have ‘mastered’ their fear and done it anyway, whatever ‘it’ was. They are beautiful, confident, unreal. I buy into it, and, in doing so, I fail. Again. So how do we ordinary folk doing our best with all our current limitations, whether extraneous or intrinsic (and ps btw how do we know the difference) make sense of it all? How do we correct the imbalance between fear and doing it anyway? It seems to me the biggest map of all, the biggest gap of all, the one between us and where we want to be. It is as wide and as daunting as the Sonoran desert. I have (had) a husband who crossed that desert, that Sonoran Desert with its 1000 square miles of nothing and no-one but sand and massive heat and massive cold and a blast of sudden butterflies to clog the radiator half way across.

My thinking, my counsellor’s advice, is to take baby steps, one day at a time, all that stuff.. Even as I know it is the only way, it bugs me. I’m thinking this. I have got this far, I am 68, mother to five, grandmother to ten plus two steps and surely I have done my baby stepping? I had loads of confidence once. Where the hell is it now? But it seems we still have to work, we oldies, and maybe that’s a good thing, however much it irritates me. These days I notice a gamut of emotions swirling inside my heart bringing thoughts that are not always helpful. The loss of self confidence, the emptiness of this space I inhabit, the feeling that something huge and irreplaceable is gone for ever, all swipe me sideways at times. I walk, I read positive books, I study (deeply) the power of emotions and how to both allow and control them. At first, no, for yonks, I have bought into the theory that moving on or moving through is all about control, self control, emotional control ya-di-ya. This belief has held me up, and possibly down, for most of my life, swooping right back to childhood. Stuff happens. It hurts. Deal with yourself and come back down when you are like the rest of us, aka fitting in and not trying to break the sound barrier. I tell someone I feel sad, afraid, lacking in confidence and angry and they say nothing for a split second, but here it comes……’But look at the sunshine/Spring/flowers/view, as if any of those things have anything to do with how I feel. Such a response is counter intuitive and counter intelligent but we all make that response because we have never been taught how to allow a ‘negative’ just to be.

I walk further, forgetting to acknowledge Lady Larch, for which I will need to apologise tomorrow, not that she is crabbit about such things. She has taken a very very long time to get to her full height and knows a thing or two about distracted walkers passing beneath her graceful branches. I pick up ideas along the banks, from among the self-heal, the wood anemones, sorrel and bluebells, colourful ideas with petals that follow the sun or petals that line a stem, indigo against the bright green grasses. They tumble around in my mind. What is the key to this emotional rampage? Do I allow or do I control or do I both or do I neither? Which way is up? I know about down. Down is always right there.

Listening to a talk today on exactly this subject, I have learned something. I think I have been hoodwinked into believing in the horns of a dilemma, either this, or that, black or white, positive or negative. Our culture promotes Positive, big time. After all, the alternative is pretty unappealing. Who wants to be negative? Negative is glass half empty. Negative is dark, slow, miserable. Negative needs to look up more, look out more. Negative needs to get over herself, get out there, do something for someone else – in other words please make sure you run away from negative as far and as fast as you can. Better, deny it exists, at least in me, in my heart, in my ticketyboo life. As I write this, I chuckle. How utterly ridiculous it sounds as it reads itself back to me. But that is what I have been doing. I have made an art of not being negative, of being insistently positive, of pretending, of not truthing. I am damn good at it, excellent in fact and I am about to deconstruct my own myth, not that I can take all the credit for its pervasive presence within our culture, one that has been fed to us like mother’s milk for generations. So how exactly do I put my inner construct of beliefs back together again in a new shape? Behold all these minute complex parts spread out before me for which there are is no instruction manual? The myriad and tiny parts look up at me and titter. I am not daunted, I refuse to be. That would be me siding with you know who. After all, I have lived almost 7 decades, each one loaded with learnings, with ups and downs and with many an adventure. So, maybe I don’t need to reconstruct this structure of beliefs. Perhaps I just need to let the old lie there in pieces and to walk back out into the world open-hearted, curious and interested. If I just notice my emotions, acknowledge them, all of them, the negative and the positive, then maybe a natural construct of beliefs will form all by itself. I could watch it happen as an observer. I could be emotionally agile, ready to change, ready to adapt at a moment’s notice, ready to engage.

This morning I ‘noticed’ I felt grief, loss, sadness and fear with a sprinkling of anxiety as garnish and with a side of self-doubt. I wrote them down. There they are in a neat list on the page before me. Hallo you. I said. But what I did not say is Go Away. I did not scrunch up the paper and use it as a spill to light my pipe. I did not shut down my heart, draw the dead bolts, pull up the drawbridge, whisper insurgence in the ears of the guard dogs and then hide under the bed. I just watched the list from time to time and said Hallo you. I thought a little about each feeling, brushing over its surface with my fingers, gently. I was kind to each one of them. Yes you hurt. Yes you feel sharp and (interestingly) judgmental and that is when it came to me like a blinding flash. That is the moment I blew up the old belief structure because deciding to be positive always makes a judge of any negatives. I should not feel this way. I do feel this way. Therefore it is I who am to blame. This crime is punishable by a whole stretch of time wherein I will find a gazillion ways to tell myself that I am a waste of space, always was and that there is no earthly chance of anything good ever happening to me because I just don’t deserve it. Anyone relate?

Accepting that ‘There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ is mildly helpful but the wisdom is not explained very well. If thinking is also a crime, or poor thinking, negative thinking, then off I go again with the self-flagellation. However, if thoughts are unconscious, if such thoughts precede emotions, then they are extraneous, surely? They come at me about 60,000 times a day. My mind is never still and nor btw is yours. There is nothing we can do about this truth but what we can do is to ‘notice’ an emotion, an unconscious thought, to step back from it, to observe and acknowledge it and then make a choice, of action perhaps or maybe inaction. A decision made based on doing nothing much, just noticing, observing, watching or a considered decision that is not a dash for the safety net of positivity. Dashing into a response just gives that random emotion or unconscious thought all of the power, power over me, over you and it ultimately denies the existence of that sad, angry, fearful feeling which achieves two things. First it tells the thinker that he or she was wrong to think that way and second, it fuels up the ‘negative’ feeling for a far greater assault another day.

Bereavement brings so many thoughts and emotions. I want to wind time back and re-do or re-don’t many things. I have so many questions that will never be answered. Even when my relatively sane mind is busy on some project or even fast asleep, my unconscious is working away like a busy little bee so that my decision not to think about the somethings I regret, missed out on or wish had never happened just makes that bee very happy giving it full permission to fatten up the very things I don’t want to think about. Don’t think about an elephant. I know, you just thought about an elephant. But it isn’t just people like me with a dead husband of just a few months who are bursting with emotional chaos just now. The lockdowns, the indecision, the fear of catching the virus, all collude with inner confusion to confound so many of us. We hardly know what to think any more and it will take many of us long time to grow new confidence. And that is perfectly okay. Let us take the time. Let us let ourselves move at our own pace through whatever wilderness we wander, observing, noticing, but mostly not judging ourselves. Thoughts will come all the way up to that last breath. There is no stopping them, but, like a good sailor in a brisk breeze we can work with the thoughtweather. At times we can spill the wind, at others we can let the sails, fill fat-bellied, and just fly. At times we can moor in a peaceful cove, and at others, when the morning is fresh and the wind lively, we can weigh anchor and head far out to sea, laughing in the spray, exhilarated.

In the time between birth and death there are we. I plan to live that time as the very best me I can possibly be.

by

Island Blog – Not One Word

Although I make a considered choice to live in the present and always did, there are times when my brain and I are not working in sync. Like today. Today I feel 107 and furious at myself. I ask, Why are you feeling like this? even as I know the only way to trudge through such a day is to allow the unpleasant feelings to come to me so that we can have a wee chat. I don’t want to, nonetheless. I want to bat them away and for them to go bother someone else. But they are ours, says Myself and I roll my eyes at her. So damn wise she is and infuriatingly so, especially as I know her to be right. I whine a bit and decide to write a blog on the whole fiasco because writing is my therapy. There is nobody here with whom I can discuss this, speak out my feelings and receive reassurance. Not any more. The ordinary little conversations of old are now firmly parked in the past as I would not assault a passer by with my whines and moans. It just isn’t done, duckie, I hear my old ma say to me and I bat her away too.

My way of meditating is to walk entirely in the present moment, noticing everything and so I trudge out for a walk, noticing. I notice that the hungry deer are stripping the moss from the base of the big old trees. I notice a new primrose and the fat slug of an incoming tide as it squeezes through the narrows. I notice the sky, flat white and remember I need milk. I notice that the potholes have been filled in and that my neighbour’s attempts to keep out the rabbits is failing again. By now I am bored stiff of noticing and my brain still whirls and whorls, chuckles and gloats. Shame, it hisses, guilt and shame, regret and a refusal to accept that it is as it is and it was as it was and it will be…….Stop! I yell, and startle another walker, causing her wee dog to bark. Sorry, ignore me, I say and she smiles kindly. We wander together, my brain finally silenced with its ‘you are never enough’ nonsense, its criticisms and judgements, its false truths, the lies it tells me about me. I tell her I feel ancient as those trees today and she tells me she is going stir crazy with being stuck at home. She also finds her meditation in walks and we laugh a bit together. It helps.

I listen to an audio book for distraction, empty the bin into the wheelie, lob the wine bottles into the glass bin, the empty ones, of course. I think about supper. Good lord girl, its miles till supper! I know, I know, I snap back but this day has lasted a whole week and I am bored of Time and her achingly ponderous walk, as if she’s in trudge mode too. Next door my young neighbour is busy with planks and angle grinders. He is doing up the kitchen or the somewhere inside the house and he is positive and occupied and productive. As you were once, says Goody Two Shoes. I sigh. I remember. I also remember wishing I wasn’t any of those things but could, instead, sit for a long while watching a sunset or a bird or the grass grow. How strange is this life, so full of care etc etc. Used to be my favourite poem. Nowadays my poems of choice are on loss and loneliness, empty days and long. sleepless nights. Perhaps I need a poetry rethink.

I know that days like these come unbidden and unsought, that they blindside me and that I am always ill prepared for their assault. I know I have to get through them and that they will, like all things, pass. I imagine I am stronger, have grown in some way because of them but it sure doesn’t feel like it at the time. Acknowledging that I am only a newish widow, lonely, looking back on my life and the mistakes I now regret, is key. The judges are there and probably always will be but they will fade if invited in for that chat, or so the books tell me. I am not sure I can trust myself to be civil, however. What will they look like? My mother? My husband? That crow of a teacher who decided I was the devil in a frock? Probably all three and others too who helped me feel I was never enough. How does anyone converse with such a group without losing their cool? I don’t have an answer for that, not yet, maybe I never will. But wait……maybe I just let them in, pour them tea, sit them down and let them have their say. Once the tonguing is done, perhaps I rise with dignity, smile and show them out, saying not one word.

Yes, that’s what I will do. Let them think what they like. They think they know me but they don’t, not as I do. I check my brain. It’s asleep.