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Island Blog – Middlemoon Smile and a Skinny Life

I love the middlemoon, the calm of waters and the gentling of skies, the chiaroscuro, the huge pines on the shore standing tall and unskittered. Birds can fly wing forward, scooping the air into helpful bundles of energy instead of backflipping onto bird feeders, thus sending them way beyond pendulum security. In short there’s a lot of wheeching going on when the full and new moon takes control. Life is just like this, I tell Jock the Blackbird as he flips and holds onto the seed tray, skidding somewhat and sending a shower of seed into the ether. There’ll be a few unsterilised seeds. grabbing the chance to root and grow and I’ll not be knowing what the hec this green thing is, come late Spring, and I will suddenly know and smile at this tiny opportunist. Again, this is life. The storms come, the dark holds like being inside a dustbin bag but someone, one someone is patient. A random thing happens, a blackbird skid, something, and that someone grabs at skinny life, no promise of success nor growth. So what is that energy, coming from nowhere, from somewhere?

My belief is that it isn’t planned. There is an extraordinary strength in all living things, not just fight or flight, and not calculated as some do, watching the stock market, pursuing business ideas, believing that to be financially wealthy will bring comfort and security. Live long enough and know that there is neither in the accumulation of money. It helps, yes, but never will it fill the human void. The random catch of opportunity, being open and aware and ready for the upset of moons will always bring growth, the ask to be spontaneous, to listen to hunches and random thoughts, to not explain them away,but to just go and to risk the wrong direction and then to try another one. Laughter and fun, work and focus, family and friends, food and sharing, listening and hearing, supporting and making hard choices. These are life skills and sustainable. I say ‘skills’ because they need honing and they need a ‘becoming’. They make us feel whole and a part of somethings and someones.

The birds fed in calm today, no skidding. There was rain, of course, but the land was at ease, the trees unskittled. There is no visible moon so the cloudal shift is light-blown and soft as wool, grey and light grey and white and off white and barely moving. That’s a rare for them. I can hear them snoring. This middling is short term. It won’t last and nor it should because that is life. If it was always easy on us we would never appreciate anything. We need the beginnings, middles and ends in order to grow into ourselves. It isn’t always pleasant but when I remember the rocks and the climbs and the falls and the fails and the sharps and the joys and the sunlight and the soft and the way I learned to grab opportunity, I smile.

I unloaded and stacked a ton of firewood today, aware as I always am of fumbly fingers, the way I can no longer grab as I once did and accepting, once I get through the fury of such a decline. After all, I want to do this for myself, not giving in to the dark thoughts. I listen to an uplifting audio story. as I climb onto the window seat to re-hang a heavy curtain. I check something on my car computer which tells me my engine is in trouble and here I meet a temptation. I could ignore it but I won’t ignore it because my wonderful Pixty Forkov is my freedom, my independence. Still, for seconds, the ‘Oh Whatever’ in me is loud in my ears because the complications of life are more tiring now. But NO, NO, I will not listen. I contact the garage and I get this response. ‘Hi Judy, we can fit you in on Wednesday next (tricky as I have commitments, but wait…) and someone can pick up your car early, delivering it back in the late afternoon. That ok? Hell Yes. My life is not skinny, even if I am. My life is my community, support, friendship and warmth.

I had my beginning, or so I thought but these beginnings keep beginning. I am not sequestered, not excluded, not abandoned, not that I ever really thought I was, but so many do. Thing is to keep moving on, or keep buggering on, in love and giving and being seen and dressing up and showing up and arriving alltimes in fun and playfulness. Maybe that;s how the moon feels at times.

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Island Blog – Light in the Dark

I love the dark, the way my eyes adjust, the way I can see something of the way ahead. I love the way it prevents forward motion through the fear of it, and the way I can feel that fear whilst the my of self says, stop, stand still, look and see, and I do. I suddenly do. A terrain of black grows light just because I bring the light. Fear still lurks like a smirk but I can allow its companionship. It’s just a kiddle, a scurry, a nobody much. I can step out into the island dark, unpolluted, only stars doing their twinkly winkly thing, no threat, and pull out annuals which have, heretofore, hidden wee tulip hopefuls, their green thrust a whoop in my discoveration. Hallo you, beautiful you, wonderful powerful you, so strong, so bloody determined. You inspire me.

In my life there have been one or two whose recognition of who I am brought light to my eyes, my heart, lifting my step, giving me self-belief. I was walking in the dark, so much dark, the unfriendly kind, and then someone came, someone said something, didn’t judge, correct, didn’t try to fit me into a shape I could never fill, but oh my I was trying so hard to do that. It was like being a size 16 and being in a fitting room with a 12, longing for it to fit. But this person, this person saw me. She saw me. She didn’t do the parent thing. I wasn’t a number of many. I wasn’t an outsider. I wasn’t too loud, a showoff, an embarrassment, a girl to be kept away from gatherings of others in order to avoid the upskittle of bone china coffee cups with her quick wit and the flicksnap of her dance shoes. Nothing predictable about her, about me. Eye roll.

I think this has learned me that darkness is actually see-through. Even at an early age, there is cognition, even if the early-ager doesn’t know how to work the whole thing out. I remember well the moment when a woman, my mother’s age, said to me, stopped me with her hand on mine and looked me full bore, her eyes stars. ”You need to be who you are. I curled away, all broken and lost and 16. You are talented, beautiful, gifted, even. Take that. Own it.” I didn’t know her. I don’t remember her name, but she shifted some blockage in me and for the first time I found the light in my dark.

Right now, and for my own reasons, I want to raise a glass, a light, a life-changing Thank you to all of those who notice, care, speak out and recognise all of we who feel they are worth notalot unless they fit the shape required. You have given us the courage to step out, step up, move forward, and to pass it forward to the next darkling we find.

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Island Blog – All About Light and Laughter

There’s a thing about the old year heading into our past, what with Christmas excess and access just a week or so away. It dillies us. Many are considering big things, big changes, altered thinking, all of those tiddleypoms. I don’t mean to minimise the intent behind them, not at all, but it does wonder me because in my long experience of a gazillion changes in a long marriage, long life and an absolute whammy of inventive children, nothing big happens overnight. Not sustainably so. It thinks me. Do we imagine we can transform as happens in lovely but completely unbelievable films? I think we might. Because we have this deep longing to be who we aren’t, with all our mistakes, even as we may happily allow them in others, proffering encouragement and even support to bring them up and out of those clutching chains. So what holds us in brackets, a definite halt in a sentence, one which might have developed on and on with the odd comma? It wonders me, even though I flipping know every graphic on this hoodlum nonsense. It’s not grammar that holds us in chains, but people, awkward relations, expectations, fixations, and not one of those bring light, nor laughter.

I stood on heights today, affixing twinkly winkly lights as the afternoon took hold of a bright morning and brought in a shroud of cloud, a darkling rain. I growled. I did. It’s as if the old year hasn’t peed for months. I look up as I go fo fill my bird feeders, the goldfinches, blackbirds, dunnocks, sparrow, tits all cheeping and swinging like gymnasts on wires and through skinny branches, and I say, quite loudly, Well Damn You! There is, as you might imagine, no immediate response. The birds still fly, even as the wind buffets them awkward. It lights me and I laugh. I know that they can live without getting their knickers in a knot, because they work with what meets them each morning. I want to live that way. I do live that way. I didn’t always, not with all the youngstress of kids and work and business and what-the-hell- is-happening thing.

But what I did know was that I was always going to be about light and laughter. It was a choice. I had seen too many others go into the dark. I knew about the dark, of course I did but when I met it or it met me, I pulled back eventually, recoiled. You are not for me. You have no power over me. My favourite people? Those who have found the light, through endless searches, looking for help, guiding lights, those who were broken and who decided to rebuild from, sometimes, nothing. I look at them and it definitely thinks me because I have everything, I have enough, I have it all, and there’s a new year coming after the gorgeous Christmas hooha, a new chance to be who I am with light and laughter, for anyone to be who they are with confidence and the right to write their own name across 2026 with a big fucking pen.

With light and laughter, of course.

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Island Blog. – That’s my guess

There’s a time and it comes as the night pushes down the day and takes over. Before, when they argue with each other, the clouds tangle and squish, bumping against each other like school kids in a lunch queue. Inevitably the dark wins. How could it not, pushing down like that, an easy pressure, whereas, just saying, the light has far harder work? Dawn has to push up, after all. I think of Dawn with strong shoulders, her determination strong. She’s been doing this for millennia. Let’s hope she doesn’t get tired of the whole pushing night away thing.

Once night has squashed all of the light, I move me towards music and candles. It isn’t a stoop of my shoulders, more an invite to a new dance. The fire is fiery, licky flames thankful for the island timber, those old trees felled, usually by some storm with a dinky name. Eish the nonsense in that! A storm is a storm is all. I will never understand why there are pet names for such as storms, those massive and upwrenching take-out blasts of gargantuan force. We are, in my opinion, both foolish and blind to the truth of what is true. Nature will always win. We are almost irrelevant in that truth, but not quite, not those of us who learn, who are as prepared as anyone can be. It’s those who pretend it isn’t happening who concern me.

I went off on one there. I am not a worrier, not a fearty. I turn on the tunes, light the candles, begin to write. In this simple island life where roads may be passable in icy conditions, when a ferry may run, where rain falls a lot, when there are parking spaces in the harbour town, when everyone sees everyone else as an islander even if most of us are blow-ins, white settlers, whatever, even as we did choose to actually live here, to work here, to join the community and there is a strength in that. I think on that, as tunes play through my speaker, as my twinkly winkly lights twinkle and winkle. So simple. Enough, yes, enough. I walked today, twice, once with. a friend who laughed me a lot. We met muddy dogs, squelched through mud and the sharp stones of puddle refills. We talked of life and hope and christmas trees and future plans as we listened to the plop of raindrops on rhodie leaves, or from the ridonculous highs of Cyprus, Caledonian Pines, the Oldies in this place. The music of it, the beat, the laughter it brings, the musicality of Nature. Who hears it anymore with headphones on?

Community life is simple, bloody hard, difficult, awkward, challenging, slow moving, and wonderful. What else is real life but this? A confusion, an out of self. That’s my guess.

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Island Blog – Left of Right in the Dance

There’s a silence at this time of day, when the sun has set behind the hills and the dark, greedy and heavy is bloody determined to win the game. I think about that game. It’s gone on for a gazillion years and yet these two keep on keeping on. We adapt. However, I notice that at certain times of the year those two fighting for space, early themselves. On a cloud-sworn cover up day, the dark finds an invenue and grabs it full force so that, say from about 2/3pm it is effectively dark. The school run is all headlights and avoiding those horrid blue-lit-light cars which confuse and diffuse clarity of vision. Or, they do for me. I’m pulling over thinking Ambulance.

This morning I knew I was going to collect my beloved mini who has been in the operating theatre for almost a week. I was up twirly, Dark still holding like a control freak but obligingly (or maybe because Moon is stronger than Dark), hoisting a crescent moon into its sky, and that light showed me big frost. Oh shoot. I de-pyjamad myself after a couple of strong coffees, black. I did falter. The sun will be low, the courtesy car frozen up, the switchback road possibly an icescape. Then I calmed, ate something and set off. I got as far as my neighbour (8 yards) and could see nothing but black, even with switch-eye shades, the visor down, nothing, no road, no concept of a landscape I have known and trusted for decades. It was gone. I did falter. I could go back home, explain, they’ll understand, I’m old and a fearty. I could. But I didn’t. I stopped, parked, thought ‘what is the left of right, and what is right? It jinked my thinks. I love movement, the physical, the mental, the way we can shift in a dance.

And I remember the dance, the way I went to the left of right with a partner who was making a collision mess of such a simple swing, couldn’t count, legs flying, hands barely gripping. My feet knew better than I ever did, and I saw what might happen if I didn’t guide this galoot back into formation. It’s the same inside my own mind, the crazy galoot, the dark and the light and the whats are there for me to hold onto when the dark oppresses, the light is quiet and hesitant and the galoot is a wild tom on the hunt?

In the silence, now that this island comes bome to itself, there are bare roads, plenty parking, no holidayers, some of whom expect more than they might if they just got the whole island thing, the way we have to go left of right, a lot. I’ve met plenty who’ve come here, and they love it. I do, I confess, have a squidge of an issue with the expectations, as if here is the same as the ‘there’ they have come from, with everything perfect. Island life is far from that. Instead we learn to go to the left of right a whole lot. Here it is all about acceptance, understanding, a gentle acceptance of the way that every single one of us do our best. And, all of us can keep up in the dance.

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Island Blog – There’s Something About…..

Having no idea who reads my blogs, nor who benefits. Never knowing what each new day will bring, a serendipity or a catastrophe, a gain or a loss, a fall or that moment when I will stand tall as a warrior. It’s as if life lives me, and, in a strange way, I like that, most of the time. I like danger, living on the edge, always ready to do my very best at outwitting. I am naturally spontaneous, a state which can, and often has, found me in a dodgy situation, mudswamp rising up my legs, the dark completing me, eradication. Until, that is, my eyes adjusted. They did, and they do, and once the ‘ayes’ have it, the house is quietened, and then comes sensibility. Love that word. ‘The quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences; sensitivity.’

There I am, was, appreciating and responding to my highest level, and although this life is bloody exhausting most of the time, what with all this learning even when I left school decades ago, I still love life, the way it lives me, the way I live it. Well, not so much the latter to be honest, because I can still flounder in mudswamp and the dark. However the importance of the important is simple. It’s poopy in the mud. I can do dark but not for long. I love light, am light, bring light. And there’s something in that, the need and the strength to defy. Any something is an enough something because we know the opposite of that.

I have no idea where my children are. I have no idea what will become of me, ditto when the next gale will smash down most of our island trees, nor whom will fall sick, nor when this baby will be born, nor when I will see this person rising from the sadness with a smile on her face. I know not whether this shrub or that will survive the winter, nor when I might hear the Arctic swans softly talking from across the sea-loch. I don’t know when a still day with all its quiet glory will come, not after a torrential rainday, the sea all a-popple with white smoke and sprachle. I never know and there’s something about that.

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Island Blog – Quick Light, Quick Dark

When I write a blog about stuff and things and thoughts and whatevers, I am cautious. Oh, yes, I do boundary swipe, shift wordings, alter the cations of things, I am guilty of all of those so called crimes. However, as the languages around us change, challenge, and then become a part of of what we say out there on the street, in the grocery shop, between ourselves, I adapt. Sentences morph into new creatures, verbs become nouns, adverbs and adjectives (still well over employed) sprite their unspelling into sentences, or comments. T’is the way of now, and we had better get the hang of the new hang, or we just might end up without a single visitor. Just saying.

That aforeness is nothing to do with my theme. However, it might be. This is about a friend. My age, my friend from the age of 7 or thereabouts. Reluctant boots tapping up the metal steps and onto the school bus together, pulling back as the driver moved off too quick, steadying, moving to the back, or near as dammit, every single day. Fixing school packs, settling into gammy seats, talking, looking out, facing the day ahead, and then the coming home. We all had trouble in our hearts. She was a good student. I wasn’t. But we still stuck together. I met disapproval everywhere. She never did, but I knew and still know that she was as wild as I, but could control her wild, her language, her longing for freedom. I never asked her about that. We grew apart, over choices, over timelines, over hundreds of miles, but the connection doesn’t bother with any of that shit.

And now she has gone dark. I’m watching her. You went into the quick dark my darling. There is quick light awaiting you. If that is your choice.

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Island Blog – A Spangled Lacuna

In every life a little rain must fall. The trouble is that we, as negatively wired humans, tend to collect up all those rain days until the sunny ones get tired of shining, and all but disappear. Folk around us can say ‘Look on the bright side’ until our ears deafen, but it makes little difference. They can also suggest that we focus on the positives, but blind inside our fog or darkness, we just cannot find them. Am I a ‘glass half full’ person, ‘glass half empty’ or ‘no glass at all’ person? Oh please…….too much platitudinosity! In truth, we are all three of those, at times, all of us, even the ones who exhaust us with bounce, their faces always lifted, the lie a cloud in their eyes. None of us are Either, nor Or, Black nor White, for we are both at times. A million colours and a million greys at others. And to feel disallowed when wallowing in black is to feel corrected, fixed and re-routed which does little, if anything at all, to help. We long to be heard, listened to, accepted, befriended, our injuries noticed and respected, and only then can we decide to lift our heads from the ground. It is not easy to find such support outside of a counsellor’s cocoon, because, bizarrely, we all feel the need to elevate a ‘fallen’ one, seeing it as encouragement and inspiration when, in truth, it only serves to highlight the state they are currently in, stuck in mud, pale and lost, beaten down by life.

When I, rarely, flip through social media, I notice there are a gazillion ways to lift my spirits, wisely worded, some ancient, some contemporary, and they all make perfect sense. To my mind, that is. But this is for others, surely, not for me down here in the oubliette. I can see the daylight, yes, long for it to surround me as it seems to surround everyone else in this whole coloured-up world, but I cannot reach it. I am unworthy of this light, obviously. The platitudes and uplifting phrases are as irritating as bluebottles around my head, buzzing out my failure to keep above ground. Until, that is, my eyes adjust to the dark, until I can smell my own decay. I might look back on my life already lived and recall a flash of rainbow, a shift of perspective, and remind myself that I played a leading part, and I played it to the very best of my ability. It was I who made that choice, that decision, took that first step, activated a change. Nobody else did. It was all mine, and still is. Yes, I made mistakes, some ghastly, but I made something happen from nothing. My head lifts as the sun glides overhead and I feel the warmth brush my face. My shoulders soften, my mind gentles, the tanglewire now compromised. Yes, I have been weakened by this decline, but I am stronger too, because I am done with this darkness, and it is I who found my way here, and I who will raise myself up again, with new thoughts, a new energy, singular and vital.

It is precisely because I have become lost in this lacuna, that I have learned just how strong I am, how resilient, how much I want this one life to be all it can be. Others’ lives impact on my own, of course they do, and some have taken all I can possibly give, too much in fact, I gave too much. What was it that led me to give myself away, to believe that, in doing so, I could ‘fix’ all their manifold human problems? We are taught to give, are we not, that to be ‘selfish’ is to be a ‘bad’ person? We are also taught that everything healthy grows from self-love, without which we cannot effectively and wisely love others exactly as they are. If, however, we build ourselves from the amount of love we are given, and that is often lacking, we tell ourselves we don’t deserve it, anyway. We are easily hurt, put down, can feel judged and misunderstood, awkward, unseen, unimportant, invisible. Just as in the oubliette.

I see a rope, one I hadn’t noticed heretofore. The spangle-light dances off rocks, footholds. I rise and stretch my limbs, turn my face to the sky, and begin to climb.

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Island Blog – The Sad

Today I wake with Sad. I do sometimes. It just happens. Sad comes in like a burglar, and nobody really wants such a bedmate, nor a daymate. Sad doesn’t take up half, or more, of the bed, nor does it bring me tea, plump my pillows, sit to tell me what fun we will have today. It is a mournful beast, so big that it fills the room, clouds me around and is unshakeable off. I can shower, whistle a merry tuneless tune, turn up the volume on Radio 2, light a candle, because. it waaaaay before dawn, all those things. But Sad stays true, true as an old friend, one I have totally gone off, and some time ago; one that takes no hint, obeys no command, one that can, if I am not very vigilant with my thinks, subsume me for the long hours of a whole day. I can swear at it, threaten appalling punishments, sing LA LA LA very loudly, but it won’t go and I know it, and there is only one way to bear its presence, and that is to turn, smile, and welcome it in. Okay, you are here again, bringing me bearings, not of gold, frankincense and myrrh (well, maybe myrrh) but of husband gone, children gone, Poppy gone, breast like a war zone.  You want me to wallow, I know your tactics. You want me to search about for a reason, the reason you are here and to dive into the muddy cold depths of that pain. It could be my parenting failures = millions; could be my bad choices=billions; might be poor decisions, awful choices, myriad regrets, endless falls from Grace, whoever she is, the snooty madam. 

But I won’t go there, so if that is the conversation you plan, then try another tactic, because I will not go there. My lips, thin now, old, a skinny bow below my nose, will not allow any responses to escape. They are sealed. 

Sad is silent now, so I continue. 

I don’t need to define nor explain you, not any more. You’ve been around for most of my life and I engaged with you at my peril, because you took me down down down into complete darkness with no proffered candle, no guiding light, and you won’t take me there again, I promise you that. My mistake, I continue, as Sad is just sitting there saying nothing, was first, to banish you, I get that. You will visit so many people, so many homes, and banishment means nothing to you. You just dissipate and reappear again and again. Do you have a To-Do calendar, names written down, days to visit? Do you discover times of loss and grief and leap into action? I suspect you do, but I am moving on now, not up, but on. I know I cannot prevent you in my morning, the way you stay all day long, and I will be polite but I will not allow the seep of you to infiltrate my new self, my lonely self, the self who, despite the cold of sadness and loss and grief, is bloody determined to smile, to give out, to laugh and to dance.

And btw, you won’t be here tomorrow when I wake. I just know it.

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Island Blog – Upright

Although I am loving these crisp cold days, the starry starry nights and that skinny moon, I find myself seeking for light, almost starved of it, and when there are many darkling weeks yet to come. I feast on the tiny upshoots of snowdrops, daffodils and tulips, down on my hunkers and peering like a mole. This morning I was almost upturned as I cautiously moved like a russian dancer, keeping my body solidly above my feets in the sure knowledge that, at my age and alone, I could crash to my arse and not be noticed for days.  I thinked about that. Tomorrow morning I would be softly iced, like a carrot cake, sparkles on my eyelashes and lips, my fingers gnarled white and probably sticking out rudely, knowing me. By the next day, there would be crows, oh that’s it, they’d find me then, but let’s not go there. This is not the right direction. I fed the birds, from my really upright position, schmoozing them so that the daft Jackbird hopped and peeped at me from afar, and his potential missus, brazen and capered with white (an anomaly) shouted at him and came close. She’s no fool that one, and if I can possible save her from Madam Sparrowhawk, I will, although my pounce has never been that accurate, that fast. A robin dunts and dips almost in touching distance, but I make no eye contact, just keep my voice low and musical, soft as a doughnut and as jammy, because I love this engagement of a slippery morning. 

Birds fed and feeding, I watch them twist and spin, the lift and dance of them all entrancing me, so fragile and light. I remember feeling this for myself, sans flight, obviously, feeling as if I could flip any flop and jump any boundary. Perhaps this is how it is when oldness takes over, but I never saw it coming, not ever. And, now, it is here, the wobble and ungait of gait, an unsureness of the space t’ween earth and heaven, and then how to fill it with my spirit as my body becomes my prison. What? No! Bollix to that load of shite, no, no way. What drivel, shrivel, bevel up you old twit and point these thoughts to the recycling bin which, to our villageing delight has finally been collected after weeks of yet another lorry breakdown.

Today I confess I was victim (loathe that word, will NOT be one) to vapid thinks. I resurrected myself, threw up a prayer or two and made ready for the wotwot that comes after I have dripped myself into a cone of tumbeltwist, someone, me, who absolutely WILL spiral out from less than queenly thinks and up, up, up, into the stratosphere, the thinkosphere, the absolute, the wild, the impossible. I’m ready, boots on, earth beneath their tread. Upright.