conversations

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Island Blog – Don’t Stop the Dance

So what, after death? Nobody can answer that because a whole load of shit blocks all doorways for the closest, the ones who, from now on will face down anger, regret, emptiness and a big dark. On the outside of them there’s another so what. No question there, just thinks. What we outsiders feel is the obvious, the wonderfully human impulse to make things better, which we cannot; the beautiful desire to bring something like a plant, or soup, or words which can be swords, trust me. The formers are well meant, lovely, kind and do very little because the dark is all invading. So what can we do? There are two answers to that question.

Bring light. Not the light we want to see but the light worked out through a lot of thinking. Too many times we have all given gifts that weren’t well received. The reason for that is simply because we didn’t bother to really find out what makes another tick. I’ve done it myself, we all have, until that is we decide to learn, and that learning guides only one way, in human contact, in calling, in asking, in gentle conversations over coffee. See, the problem we have, as we had pre the invasion of Covid when we were ‘forced’ into neighbourliness is that we have forgotten each other, all over again. It seems, from my friends who live in cities and environs where nobody really has a scooby doo about any of their neighbours, even when all 10 flats or more share an entrance, that nobody knows anybody. It saddens me but of course it does. Out here in the thwack of gales and skinny switchback roads, we have a strong community spirit, but don’t let that think you that it’s a breeze (scuse that) living an island life because it is tough and controlled firstly by weather and secondly by the ferry company, by product being landslides. We are volcanic and eruptible, although ages late on that one.

My point is this. Communication with others is our key to surviving. It is also our key to a happier life because no award, no amount of money, no rise over someone else, in work, in words, ever lasts beyond the initial feeling of superiority. We all still have to put out the bins, deal with bills, sort childcare, park our dreams, work hard, bring in food. All of us. However and but……each one of us have to find the fun, the dance in our lives. From the time the dance left our feet, when we got a baby, a mortgage, a demanding job, we stopped believing that we had a choice. And the years go on and when something takes over as acceptable, we let go of it, the dance. Until when? Every life is tough. But, and this is me talking about me as I face olding and don’t want it, as I have a few aches and hesitations and lacks of confidence, and as I, every day, tell myself Don’t stop the Dance, don’t, because all around you are falling into a grimace as if their legs have forgotten the steps, Don’t Give up. Someone has to keep bringing in the light and the tunes even as cancer takes hold, even as a beloved dies, even as a child is traumatised, even as those my age slip and dip into an acceptance I won’t accept.

This is my so what after death. I can’t beat it down, but I can still dance, still reach out to others, ask them about their lives, actually see them, and learn. And I can bring light, not a candle, nor an enlightened fixing, but just by sitting there, making eye contact, no mobile, no other agenda beyond that other broken human across the table talking with me.

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Island Blog – Lexicographer

We don’t ask to be born. How many times is that used as an accusation in the face of judgement? A lot, but it is true, and we didn’t, at least not necessarily into where we landed. We all want to be seen as who we are, and at every single stage of the who-we-are-ness which, I have to tell you is frickin tough for parents who are equally puzzled, and daily, at the transmogrification of what had at first, seemed like a wonderfully planned out life.

I came first, on the back of a howler. I’m sure, judging from photos in the album of me with hair tweaks and frilly frocks with matching bar shoes, all pristine and ironed to death, that I was the one, the perfect girl, top of the chart, a celebrity. That didn’t last. And why was that? Well, from what I remember, I was, well, different. I did conform, I did, and it was very wise to do so in order to avoid the slap, but what is it in a someone else, one who inhabits a ‘good girl’ even as she damn well knows she is on a slide to nowhere? I got brilliant. Please excuse the slanguage. I was best at performing, elocution (does anyone nowadays knows what that means?) English Language, Wordage, Dictionary expertise, the Study of Words, their history and their importance, once. And this was a gift? No, it was a loneliness. It felt like I was in some in-between space. I could see my ‘friends’ out there all happy with endless conversations about nails and clothes and fashions and horse riding and bejewelled parties around uplit infinity pools and I just wanted to sink into a bed of bluebells with a book and a like-minded friend. We would talk words, new ones, old ones, work out their meanings, laugh at our mistakes, be together on this lonely journey.

I knew one once. His name was Tom, and a bit older than me. We both worked at Lotus, watched the first run of the Elise around the track, which was right outside our big wide glass-filled office. He gave me lifts to and from work in his VW Beetle. It was the new age of seatbelts and we laughed a lot at working the whole thing out. We did spend time in the bluebells. We did talk words and their origins and it was a fire lit in me. I moved on, as did he. But I remember that glorious connection with words, with Lexography, with research, with the play on words, the way they change over time.

I’m glad I had that time. I can still see him in a stumble of trees, bluebells at his feet, laughing at some word I’d conjured from nowhere, the sundown at his back.

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Island Blog – Thought, Feeling, Action

This day I have spent in my bed watching an otter take on a sea-loch. I saw the briny surface break and explode as the creature chased down salmon. I saw the flash of silver as the fish leapt to escape, caught by gravity and doomed to curve back down into the ready jaws. I sipped beef tea and listened to Hilary Mantel’s book, the Mirror and the Light read by Ben Miles. It is captivating.

My reason for being so indolent is one of the aftermath. Although I know that my home telephone number has now been changed and that the police have located the abusive caller, one who, thankfully I do not know and who lives hundreds of miles away, I am left upset and sleepless. I am a child now, afraid of the dark as I remember being when my shoes were mouse sized and sensibly buckled up. I lock my doors at all times and have to check the surrounding area before going out for wood. The fire burns all day long, a friend to warm and a living light to watch. I hide from phone calls and conversations. I am momentarily caught in the gravity of the situation.

However, I am not a salmon and I no longer have an otter-like predator stalking me. I am not bound for doom and probably never was for if this perpetrator had known how old I am, I doubt he would have persisted as he did. I also know that these fears and frets will ease over time. They are all, of course, in my imagination. Where he left off, hung up having delivered his explicit threat or promise, my mind took up the line and held on to it. Even waking in the night, something I can easily do at any time, I no longer feel confident about going downstairs to make tea and to sit awhile in my cosy kitchen awaiting further sleep to soften me, to lead me back upstairs and to hold me till morning.

As I lay in my bed today, I realised how much I miss, and have always loved, the sound of someone downstairs, someone pottering about doing this or that. The sound of the kettle coming to the boil; a door opening and closing, the radio chattering quietly in the distance. Any incoming phone call or knock at the door would be answered by someone else, and I could safely lie watching otters take on a sea-loch without a care in the world. As a child I could only go to sleep if I could hear my parents beneath my floor, the television on, their muted voices. Were I to awaken into silence, the fear would grab me at my throat, refusing to let me go. I had to speak firmly to my jangled nerves, unravel them enough to walk along the darkened landing and into my parents room in search of a hug or a story.

As dusk begins to fall and the otter, sated and spent, is back in its holt, another night lies ahead of me. But I am safe. I know that now. My thoughts, bellowed into flame by my own unrealistic imaginings, will not imprison me. I have been offered only kindness and action from the police, from Victim Support, from friends and family, and I am mindful of the fact that to allow any theatre to develop inside my head, inside my body, is the short walk to madness. My old ma would immediately respond. You are already mad Duckie. And maybe she is right, but fear will take no root in me. No flag will stay in the ground for I will see it and remove it. However, for now, the aftermath will be my companion, for a while, until this thing passes as all things always do, and if I decide to watch an otter take on a sea-loch, drink beef tea and listen to Hilary Mantel then I will do just that.

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Island Blog – Up to Me

Morning has broken on this beautiful island and I am ready for the day. I write down all my sins of yesterday, something I do in order to release them. I see them fall away into the earth as neutral energy. Any actions I regret, thoughts that don’t serve me and, in particular, any poor-little-me conversations with my inner self, are all dealt with pre the boiled egg. It has become a habit. Once a habit is formed, it begins to trust in me and grows roots whilst pushing up a bit of green to catch any sunlight that might just be available in between hail showers. Life is like this, I think. I may be alone with nobody now to correct the trim of my sails with a raised eyebrow or a ‘shush’ or a ‘do you mind if I tell you something’ pre-cursor to criticism, but I am still responsible for my behaviour at all times. I yawn. It was so much easier when the judge lived with me (not that he always donned his wig and banged his gavel) to live in a well-established state of defence and defiance. Now that all of me is down to, well, all of me, I can spin a bit on my axis, if I am honest.

When everything, every moment, is my own choice, I no longer have to fight. I longed for that back when the naughty step grew flat and submissive beneath my butt. My voice does not rise in a whine and nor does my wordsmithing brain need to find big long words to justify or explain myself, as I sought to confound him with eloquence and delivery. Arguing with myself takes longer, seeing as both of us are wordsmithing away with equal power and a shared determination not to lose the battle, and it seems pointless anyway, because I know what I am going to say and what the impact of it will be and so does she. It’s like playing scrabble with myself.

Once I have written down my sins and before delivering them, mindfully, back into the earth as neutral energy, I eat the bit of paper. Biro tastes better than felt tip pen, I have discovered, even if it does turn my tongue black. The symbolism amuses me. Eat your sins, swallow, digest and let them go. Then decide not to sin again. Roger that, I say, even as I know that I must stick to my habit forming programme if I wish to avoid falling into the same sinship today. To be honest, my ‘sins’ are more like errors of judgement but I use the ‘sin’ word because it fits me like a crown, or it used to. Believing that you never quite get it right for decades makes it harder to budge such a belief, for it has big strong roots and a good ear for triggers. The cadence of a voice can flip doodle me; certain words or the catch of a sideways look; a silence; a less than welcome ‘Welcome!’ And these are fed by my incredible imagination, one that scoots me from Alice to the Wicked Witch of the West in a heartbeat. I hear what I think I want to hear even if I never want to hear it again.

What to do?, I ask myself, but she is as clueless as me and just sits there looking like a spare part, her face vacant. Well, someone needs to think this through and that’ll be me and so I write down everything from my thoughts, through to my ‘sins’, and on beyond to my goals and aspirations. Then I jot down the ‘how to’ of each and I’m already rolling my eyes at all that homework. But homework always was and is the key to change as I discovered by not doing it when at school. When Penny or Liz or Melanie charged forth in History or Maths or even Latin, with smug smiles and a pat on the head from Teacher, I was sent to the naughty step. What I didn’t seem to understand is that being a rebel is all very well providing you have a cause, and know clearly what that cause is, the how to and what and why of it. I have learned since those days that homework is essential, whatever life I choose to live, that daily practice (yawn) is the key to that door into a new place, and the only one. I honestly believed that something or someone would come to save me, make me happy and free of sins, but, of course, this is just a fairytale and never happens to nobody, including me.

So, once again, and with renewed energy, I start stepping through the morning, the hail stones, the beauty of this sea-girt land. I notice everything (excluding the un-hoovered carpet which is an exception to all rules) mindfully. I notice how I feel and what I think. I notice what tries to push me forward into action. Will it serve me, make me feel good about me, ease my troubled conscience? If t’is a no, then no it shall be, even though it is much harder to stay strong when there is only me and myself watching.

The naughty step is lonely now. I feel a bit sorry for it and sit on it now and again whilst I read from a book on self-improvement or happiness or self-control for we are long time friends. Then I look up and I smile out into the empty room, remembering that if it is to be, it is now entirely and exclusively up to me.