confinement

So what is freedom? A massive question and with a gazillion answers, for sure. For some it means a facilitated or courageous move away from confinement. For others it might mean, well, pretty much the same thing. I get that it isn’t always possible. I also get that it is possible, but would take huge courage and a faith that, eventually, a life would improve. It has to. Confinement is always wrong. Always. However, a person may have been complicit in the confining thing and that bit is often the one reason to stay. I agreed to this. I let this happen. I am to blame. We are such suckers for personal blame, as if it was born with us like a tricky twin.

Here’s a thing, one which might sound bajonkers. Not only might we be the one confined, physically or mentally, but we are also the pefficor, the more senior ‘officer’ in the ranks, of which we are but one. This nonsense is crazy but it is real. Inside our minds there are the critical voices, or just one, from our past, our childhood, and there is the pefficor, quite a gentle name for such an ungentle, who didn’t see us, not really, hear us, not at all, ask about us, our feelings, our life, well, maybe once or maybe twice. We can’t understand the power of that voice, nor why it keeps triggering us into a big response in the life we now live. I know what is missing. A good self-esteem, a strong sense of self within any dynamic, any workspace, any group of friends/ strangers.

The next bit is always inner work. In this world, so lost in the machinations of gain and power, even though all of us seek simple, gentle, loving, kind, we keep listening to the pefficor in our heads. Life is all about success. No, it isn’t. Life is all about listening, learning, uplifting, observing, slowing, watching, accepting. Striving for money is a death wish. We know this. We’ve seen so very many fall into that black, snake-infested pit. The wrong goal.

Whom do we admire? And I omit with a big omit anyone in fame because that place just doesn’t exist beyond a cloudal fluff. However, with many teens in my grandlings, I can see the power of the pefficor in their lives, the subsuming of self into the morass. I can see how tough parenting is nowadays and I am glad my kids, now parents, had the freedom of the wild.

I have no idea why all this came to me as I sat down to write, but it did. All any of us ever want is the freedom to live, to love, to move, to lift, to change, to settle, to choose, to speak, to listen, to be heard. Not a lot to ask.

Outland, Outsea, this unpredictable giant of salt water, gluttoning on random rivers, streams and a million other acolyte trickles of water, bursting from deep, deep within the belly of earth, all desperate to conjoin with the Outsea, the glorious escape from endless confinement. They cannot resist the ancient call, no matter how Man levels and compromises, poisons and redirects them for new housing, for a wrong forestation. No matter the poles thrust deep, no matter the planting of invasive species just because nobody educated us in time. These bodies of water will find a way, however patient they might need to be.

I watch it all through a reach of glass. Gannets slipside a wind I cannot feel, sitting here behind a double shot cappuccino with chocolate sprinkles. I cannot sense the slant and shift as they rise and float so close to an unforgiving granite cliff. Below I notice seaweed flopped over the stony rocktops like mermaid hair. When the tide rolls back in a great big yawn, the patient weed will lift again and float away, always on the move, a survivor in a deeply awkward life. And then cometh another storm, or the oceanic and angry response to the way we humans are making life very difficult for the flow of water, and that weed will look like a victim as it is blattered onto rocks by the fist of gravity and into new places. But don’t be deceived.

Ice white spume froths around the rocks, falling away, back into the green. Under-sea blow sends shadow pulses then takes them away. Catspaws echo each puff of wind, a feisty wind, footsteps. Gulls crowd on a spit of rock, a jagged tooth. They look like jewels from here. A shag stands sentinel right on the end, sea-facing, wings out like a black angel. None of these know I am here, high up on the cliff. watching the wind taunt the water willow, the scraggy grasses, watching the long reach of every wave push across the sand; watching each one retreat, return, repeat. Across the poppling water, the Outlands are clear, striations on their rocky faces. I can count them and see a peppering of cottages, a mast or two, a ship hugging the far shore. The gulls weave a sky web, the gannets dive, the shag stands dark sentry, and up here, behind the double shot cappuccino and that reach of glass, I can hear nothing. Susurration. perhaps.