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Island Blog – Heroes Awake

Accordion to Radio Two, all of us who bother to wake up at all, are superheroes. Anyone who bakes chocolate cookies before 6 am, someone who runs 10k as Father Sun lifts into his sky or a woman who makes her own muesli, automatically grow wings to lift above the rest of us who achieved none of these. Even the morning greeting is directed to superheroes leaving me to feel somewhat wingless, and this feeling causes me thought.

In my memory, superheroes, or even just heroes, were those who achieved something remarkable such as leaping off a rocky bank and into a swirling river to save a life, or the old woman who took in homeless kids and asked for no benefits. People, in other words, who did what they did just because it was the right thing to do, expecting no publicity or recognition at all. Although I understand the need for a leader-ship to find a way to uplift us during the lockdowns with all their sadness, loneliness and fear, I do confess to hoping that we might now shift into a more realistic perspective on heroes. I think of the children. Is she a hero or a superhero just because she dressed herself this morning? Is he a superhero because he brought mum a cup of tea? Well, possibly yes if these achievements are long overdue, but only within the family. If children really believe it is that easy to superhero-up, then how on earth are they going to cope with the Big Bad World? Life is a truly wondrous gift but it is no easy one, not for anybody. I would like to see more intelligent teaching for our children, lessons on kindness and compassion, relationships, heart/mind balance and connectivity. Teaching them to notice, honour and develop their own skills and gifts instead of pitching them against each other. Showing them that each one of them is important and no less nor more important than her or him. This hero thing causes a non-hero to feel less than, every time, and that is a crushing feeling.

Perhaps my way of teaching all these things to my own children is not how it is out there in the BBW. Maybe it is just fine to hero yourself by totting up the number of likes you get on Facebook. More than her, less than him. I can’t see a happy outcome, can you? Nonetheless I know that the way I feel has no influence on the BBW, but it can perhaps have some among my own little grandchildren and maybe that is the best I can proffer from my not hero place. Life is tough enough without it being presented at a very early age to be a competition and then fed and nourished by social media, radio stations, online games and t.v. In my opinion.

I believe that our times of lockdown and isolation has given us the chance to rejig our thinking on life and if we are wise and visionary, thinking of our little ones who will face a very different world as they grow into adults, we will sew new seeds right now. We might find a voice instead of accepting what is powerfully offered by those wielding that power. Quietly, gently, we might think independently about our own life values. Banging on about how much better it was, apparently, in the olden days, helps nobody. Action is the key. I know that each of us is just one person and the powerful ones are, well, powerful, but we can do something within our own space and life to grow awareness, suggest a new way to see an old thing. We can support and encourage and this will make a difference however much we may doubt it. We can stop shrugging our shoulders and sighing resignedly.

My belief is that everything is just as it should be, but that doesn’t mean we can sit back when something troubles us. When that happens there is a call to action. What action? you might ask. All I say to that is ask yourself that question and wait for the answer. Once a heart is open, there is an invitation sent out and answer will always come. Covid has been a wake-up call. Are you awake?

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Island Blog – November days, Petals and Butterfly wings

Today, November paid a visit, bringing with her a socking great gale and heavy rain. As I forget, mostly, the name of the month we currently inhabit, the last 3 being much the same as the one before, I did wonder, for just a moment, if everyone else knows it’s November and here I stand bare-legged in my cotton frocks feeling puzzled. No, no, don’t be a twit. You know it’s not November. But what month is it? The calendar on the wall will ground me. It’s still May, our island month of steady sunshine, warm nights, petals remaining affixed to their parent stems. Well, inside it is, but out there where maple leaves are scooting into the sky and birds are being blown off fence posts, I feel justified in my ditherment. The sweet pea seedlings I lovingly sank into the goodly ground just yesterday afternoon, the sun burning my neck, the ticks crawling towards me like I was a surprise picnic, must be very upset. I watch the seedlings flee this way and that, their roots holding, just. I had put off releasing them into the elements for way too long, thinking cheeky frost, and was understandably seduced by a few days of soft sunshine and calm. Actually it is not just the sweet peas who feel cheated. I’m feeling it too.

It has blasted on the whole day and is still blasting. This gale is enough to send boats a-scatter, lift waves into grabbing hands, turn underpinnings, left on a line in the sunshine cocoon of yesterday, into cotton-mix butterflies to land who knows where. Nobody will ever admit to owning them anyway, not once they’ve made public the size and width of the owners bottom. You could hardly Facebook’ Has anyone received delivery of a pair of baggy greys that once were white about ten years ago, or a bra with reinforced cups for the sag factor? No, indeed. I should have gone to M&S a while back.

This crazy November mayday has something to teach me. I look out through the rain-bashed windows and whisper to my newly planted seedlings, as I did to my children, so long ago, You can survive this. You can grow, you can fly and precisely because of this November gale in the May of your life. Many won’t, but you will. You might flip backwards off a fence post you thought gave you a solid base (could be a friend, a work colleague, a boss, even a route home) but you have wings. The thing about that blackbird I saw who spread his wings at just the wrong gust and who flipped like a tiddlywink into the fist of the wind, is that he knew he could fly out of it, find the temperate safety of low-below and who could gather his feathers again. We can all do that. We just need to remember we have wings too, not visible, but there anyway. The drudge listening of the factual news is all about how we will ‘cope’ after this lockdown time is done. I shake my head at all of it. Cope? Are we victims of this time? I say No. I say we are marvellous and colourful inventive humans who will find wings we never knew we had on our backs. I say we may be scared, because ‘out there’ now is not the ‘out there’ we hitched our wagons to and that is fine. It’s ok. We are so ‘flipping’ resourceful, it is almost embarrassing.

Let us consider this. In the swatch of material, that little square we cannot escape for now, the flow of colour can make new swirls; the limitations of the square will never confine us. We will out. We always did.

And we always will.

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Island Blog 132

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We never talk about shrimps up here.  In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that word used anywhere in Scotland.  Up here, across the tempestuous border, we talk about prawns, and they are quite believably so.  Shrimps I remember from Norfolk days, and you needed 3000 of the little so-and-so’s for all of seven sandwiches.  I have been served up a plate of ‘prawns’ before now, and knew fine I was being ripped off, but not up here.  Folk can’t believe their good fortune when they order a prawn dish, savouring the fat pink bodies, dense and firm and tasting of a fresh wild ocean.

In Tapselteerie days, I would drive over the hill to meet the fisherboats coming in, bartering with the raw and ruddy-faced hard-working ‘boys’ for an overflowing crate of still-twitching jewels, the huge aga pans left to bring themselves to boiling point as I travelled.  The eyes of the guests grew wide with amazement as I laid down plates of them, pan fried with garlic and fresh herbs.  Then I would make bisque from the shells.  Nowadays, you can’t buy them on the quay, as I did, because they all go for export.  But there are a few choice restaurants who either make sure they have their own creel boat, or have found a way to do as I did, and connect with the fishermen. Some of these ‘boys’ are still fishing, some have stepped back to let their sons carry on the good work.  After all, shrimp or prawn, lobster, oyster or mussels are always a different experience when they are fresh and still full of personality.

Much like us.

So why am I talking about shrimps and prawns and the like?  It isn’t to lead on to the obvious Bigger is Better thing.  What I am talking about is choice and quality, yes, but more about paying attention to the strings that bind us.  Driving over the hill to find fresh shellfish meant I had to know and befriend the fisherman.  If he thought I was a stuck up little madam, he would have said nothing was available and I wouldn’t have blamed him for that.  I know that the lonely process of buying goods, any goods, via the interweb is easier, cheaper often, but it involves no human contact, or very little.  In fact, we seem to enjoy  as much ‘very little contact’ as possible these days, and, yet, it is only through a bonding process that anything in life really works.  Oh, I am not saying we don’t need, use and value the internet, but out of balance we can find ourselves clumsy and careless at times when we are with another person.  Out of practice.

When I go shopping for clothes (I hate shopping for clothes and am the very first to look online), I will avoid with great energy, huge shopping malls, caves of blue lighting, plastic walls and no air, or none already breathed in and out again.  Instead, I will choose the little shop with a ‘ping’ as I open the door and a welcome smile on the face of the assistant.  I don’t want ‘NEXT!’ yelled at me.  I have a name, and it isn’t that.  Although I absolutely do not like a pushy sales person, I do like the question ‘Can I help you with anything?’ and then, when I say I just want to browse, to be left to do just that.  If I buy something, I want her, or him behind the pretty counter, to be interested in me and my choice, as I will be in them.  I want to walk out feeling very chuffed with myself and with my purchase, and, more, the pleasant memory of our human encounter.

If I sound stuffy, I don’t mean to.  I blog, I Facebook, I text and tweet, but it isn’t all I do.

Recently I came to realise that my work is lonely work.  Writing, painting, loving my little home and being in and around it, walking with Poppy in the fairy woods, none of these get me in front of people. This is my choice.  I am, at heart, solitary and I need that space around me to feel creative and healthy, but, out of balance, I get fearful in crowds and resist meeting friends.  The good news is, that this is instantly fixable, once recognised.  Driving through Glen Coe, beneath the craggy snow-covered tops of the Three Sisters, I pulled over to call Lisa, my publisher.  We talked of mice and men, cabbages and kings, and, as I turned back onto the road, I felt a lift.  It wasn’t the content of our conversation that did that, but her voice in my ear, connecting me once again to the outside world and, in doing so, raising my confidence in me, making me feel important and interesting and changing my whole outlook so that I was, once more, fresh and full of personality.