east

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Island Blog – Nothing So Finite

The birches glow purple across the sea-loch as dawn hefts night over her shoulder and away. No, not purple, not just one colour descriptor. There is wine in there, the deepest darkest Rioja, some indigo (how come that rich word does not demand a capital letter?), amber, chestnut, a little, ebony and ivory. Not just purple, never ‘just’ anything. However, all that aside, the flow and blend of faraway birches in winter colour, arrests me. I watch them for a bite, even though they’re not going anywhere, rooted as they are to the whatever of whatever. The sky is blue-grey like our young heifers on the Tapselteerie hills, and, like them, refusing to be contained. Every time I look up, the dynamic changes. Flat and apparently peaceful, they erupt into crescendos and subside again, fooling us all. Feeding those female heifers took all my courage, the blue-greys I mean. Like rebellious teens with a strong sense of self and a kick-ass attitude to any authority, they would bound like puppies. However puppies are usually afoot whereas these wenches powered over me, canting and taunting with way too many kickerly hooves. One sent me flying once, the little madam. I got too close to her girly bits and she lashed out. I caught it on my knee and, in slow motion, flew miles, or it felt like it, before crashing to the unwelcoming ground in a most ungainly heap. Needless to say, as I slowly came back to myself, the whole playground had come for a looksee. 20 noses puffed sweet silage breath into my face and all I could see were legs, legs with hooves attached, far too many of them to make sense of the nose count. I touched one, wet and soft and like rubber. I looked into enquiring eyes. A child’s eyes.

Walking today, the wind is coldsome and from the east. It thinks me. What countries lie east of me? Ah, yes, the cold lands, the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian lands. Oh the stories I can hear as the wind brings them in. Tales of hardship and cold, of desolate winters in unbroken places that could break a person in the end. Tales of survival against odds I will never experience, the harsh honing of a human body, the dark, the endless winter dark, the pervasive cold, the snow children moaning at loose window panes, the biting teeth of a wind that will not abate until the very last minute. Of frozen lakes, no fish, of impassable tracks, no food supplies, of harpies and wood sprites and other complex variables that can, and will, derange an isolated mind, break a body, fracture a family. Of course, any environment can do that but my imagination likes to fly and the very thought of only 3 hours of light in a whole long winter shivers me. I have read the stories, the memoirs and the fiction and I can see how easy it might be to capitulate and to sink. We only have laden clouds to winter us through and very different stories to tell. Today, I might say, inside a story, I took my wellies off for 5 whole minutes, dancing in the freedom of toe escape. I scrubbed the mould off my legs and clothes and basked in the lick of flames from the fire we all fight over because A, it is pathetic due to the wet wood that would so love to dry given half a chance, and, B, there are way too many of us doing this basking thing. Plus, the smell of wet sock, unwashed feet etcetera is only for the desperate to endure. Some of us slink back to the cold. I have done this, lived this and, with hindsight, loved that I did.

The track is coppered now with beech leaves, a warm colour, a lie but I love that lie. Is it a holding on to the last warmth of summer past? Is it a transition, yes it is definitely that. Standing here, watching not the birches, purple or not purple, but the skerry, pumped like a lunatic with rising salt and spume and flying birds and danger, it thinks me. Do I like transition? Hmmmm. Nope. Who the hell does? Only those who think too much before they answer that question and I smile when I hear that think translating into Politely Positive Response. Way too much blah coming. The sky is darkening and is putting on a spectacular blue-grey show. There’s a moon landing ahead. I watched the moon this early morning. She’s a crescent just now, clouded in puffs of those lower in the ranks, those fluff balls loaded up until their bellies birth, and all over thee and me.

How extraordinary life is. How transitional. How small we are. Purple? No. Nothing so finite.

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Island Blog – Stories on a Backwind

It’s been ten days since I blogged, give or take. I blame my best friend because she and I have been here on the island together and there is much to talk about after a year apart. She hasn’t been able to leave, thank you Dudley, Eunice and Franklin, even as it irks me to buy into this nonsense naming of storms or winds. We were always quite the thing just acknowledging a new storm and for hundreds of years, as if we knew we could never tame, nor name them, so powerful and volatile were/are they. Nowadays they take on bowler hats or the memory of old grumpy great aunts who smelled of things nobody ever wanted to smell outside of a wheelie bin long uncollected.

Moving on.

The winds whip crazy this month, flipping from North to Northwest, to West and back to North. Sometimes the South pulls up her big girl knickers for a wee toot but she is up against the big winterboys so doesn’t get much of a word in. Occasionally I have met her on the Tapselteerie track, a sudden hug of warmth but she is wheeched away in seconds. I might walk backwards a step or two to see if she is still there because she was about to gift me a story, but no. She is gone. So what story did she carry on her back? I caught the first line but no more. That’s ok. She’ll be back soon enough.

However the winterboys carry stories too on their backs. If you look at where the wind is coming from and check out the country in line with the wind, you can hear the stories from Iceland where all the mythical stories began and beyond to Greenland. They know cold as ancient. And stories come from ‘ancient.’ Listen as you clothe up and bend against the hail stones. Listen to the slough-song of the wind. Let it blow through you, feel it on you skin and listen. No, not just listen, hear.

Most of the time I do this listen/hear thing and have no translation. Thing is, it doesn’t bother me at all. I am a tiddler in this walk through time, but I am here, I am a tiddler and I can engage. I might catch an image, see how it was when skinning an Elk was the biggest thing for that day. We, now, Elk free, can fight against the winterboys but we will never win. Nor will we master them with expensive outdoor kit nor giving them ridiculous taming names. The moment we can just thrill to the cold, feel the wind, walk out barefoot (just me I think) and really feel the whole craziness of winter life whilst listening to and hearing the windback stories, we are, at once, at home with the whole gamut of seasons.

Such a freedom.

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Island Blog – The Trees Speak me Friendship

Yesterday lifted into today about five hours earlier than I might have chosen. Sleeping is obviously not my strongpoint. I should know this by now, accept the truth of it but I am a natural believer in a good ending, not because the aforesaid happens to me, but that I happen to it. If my attitude is positive, my diet good, my daily walks beneath the giant trees accomplished, mindfully, then I will sleep and sometimes I do, but on those ‘do’ days I wake in astonishment and rarely expect a replay. Perhaps that’s my mistake.

I dress, pull on my attitude, go through my decisions for the day, squirt perfume, turn to the dark window and look out. I know it is fully dark here by comparison. No streetlights, no headlights, no light pollution at all. I keep looking. There is no such thing as full dark. My eyes adjust. T’is a survival thingy. I can see a bit more, a bit star, a bit moonslice tipping out from behind a cloud for a moment, just a moment. Ah, I say. I remember a time, no, times, walking home from a ceilidh in the village into the pitch black of night in all the wrong kit. I remember the first frill of fear, the fingers of it touching me, shivering me. I remember stopping still on the Tapselteerie track. A mile of this to go, more and a lot of winding and pothole avoiding. Stop. Look. Listen. The trees know where you are. Find them and listen. Alone out there and with the fear sliding off my back, I felt myself come back to me. Bringing all senses into an intelligent one, we moved forward in a new light. I could hear the wind coming from the west, or the east or the south or the north just by the lick of it against my skin and the trees bent accordingly. It thinked me, this bending with a powerful element. I chuckled as I move forward. Of course they, the trees, must learn to move with the wind changes, with whatever each one brings. Otherwise, well, think firewood. Could I, this small and only ‘I’ learn from the trees? Could I be as majestic and strong as they are in spite of wind changes?

I did and I still do. This day after the clouds dumped about 27 rivers on our heads, the sky cleared a bit and that lovely blue appeared, swirled with clouds. Actually, I can feel a bit sorry for clouds. They are at the mercy of all four winds, all four temperamental powers, shredded, clumped together, fluffed up until they get complacent and then pulled apart like rotten cotton and thrown into space. So, the blue came and I walked through the Tapselteerie woods, every single step a memory and yet each step completely new. I stop to watch the beech trees, all sung out and bare, silver trunked and light rooted. Hold tight, I say as I move beneath 100 year old limbs like gifting arms. I hear the squeak of birch branches, the tic tic of brush Hazel, the groan of the giant pines and the song of their needles. Looking up is fine but don’t step forward when you are doing the looking up thing. There are potholes and puddles and things that bring you right back down to earth just when you thought you were Alice or Dorothy.

I think of land ownership. Not that I believe in it. We are just tenants for a while and thus responsible for the land we think we own. I know now that trees care for each other, that a beech tree roots light, that pines go deep, as do oaks, but, as they do their roots find weakness in another species, say a birch or an alder and that root will lift like a strong finger until it holds the weakness, securing it to the ground. Now that is friendship.

And the trees are friends to me.