faith

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Island Blog – Brackish Waters and Swim on

In my work at the Best Cafe Ever, I am among young people, young with dreams and opinions and attitudes. They are all sure they can do it differently, as I did once, long ago. I listen to the chat about the whatevers in their lives, the doubts, self doubts mostly. I can hear the outpuff of frustration as they may or may not acknowledge expectations lowered over their heads, the fears and concerns of their parents, ages with my own children. I hear it all and smile as I shove yet another heavy load of dishes into the wishdosher. I say nothing. I am granny to them, old and brackish and I like that place. I can circle in the safety of the inlet whereas they are pushing hard into a new ocean. They are about to head out alone and somewhat scared. What will their idea of the world out there teach them, confound them, frighten them? Even the cafe owners don’t know of what’s ahead and how could they? We can have rain and a complete invasion. We can have sun and a complete invasion. We can have neither. This business is a risk and a beauty. We are here and where are you? Or, we are here and what on earth just brought so many of you in? This is how it is out there. And I remember it as I went to collect those who wanted to watch for whales. Sometimes a few keenists, sometimes an acre of humans I managed to cram into the back of the landrover, just hoping it would be ok for all of them to fit on the boat. I remember first taking my children to school, watching them go,, even tearful and turning back to business. I didn’t like it, but I did what I did.

I sense a different parentage now. Oh, I remember the dream talk when we were expecting our first. We will not be parents as ours were, not the harsh stuff, not the judgemental stuff, not the controlling expectations, none of that. And, I believe to a degree but not enough of one, that we did that. But there was a leak. Actually two. I was 29 with five kids and with a mother-in-law living down the track and she had a hold. I don’t blame her. I just remember how the father of our children gradually absorbed the old ways to a degree. We had such rebellious dreams, I thought. And yet, over time, I complied. I make no excuse. I was also of the old controls and recognised them. And yet I watched him be the father he never had, at times, but not all times.

Enough of that.

I smile a lot as I listen to the young women and I so want them to be able to absorb what they meet and yet to stand like an Amazon in the face of the old ways. I didn’t. I want them to be who I wasn’t, just to show me that it is possible to set out on an ocean,resting in brackish waters when needed and then to actually find a new shore.

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Island Blog – Swans in Dark Skies

I just couldn’t get to sleep last night. I did go to bed early, closing my curtains as others dressed up for a night out. I spoke, out loud as always, my thankyous to the beauty of the world around me, the hours of the day, the way I am still alive and well and for so much more. It can take me many minutes to complete my list. I settled with my good book and read for a couple of hours as day gave way to the dark, the precious dark, no street lights, no flashing anythings, no glow from any electronics. Just a glorious and natural dark. I realise this is rare and there’s another thankyou.

As eyelids droop and words swarm on the page, I turn off my light and courie in to my soft pillow. That’s it, I think. Morning will wake me, although even as I think this, I know it to be nonsense because I am now left alone with my thoughts, no longer inside another story but back to my own. And here, there be dragons. Over many many decades I have worked to affect this and without any success. I don’t know why. Nor does anyone else.

I bring to mind, in my wakefulness, images of all the good times, the wonderful in my life, the happy faces of my children and theirs; the moments, the adventures, the successes and the way we carved out a life in difficult circumstances, a wonderful and all inclusive life. I see faces of the students who worked with us, the randoms, the ceilidhs, the spontaneity of a Tapselteerie chaos, the way we sorted, fixed, fed, accommodated a gazillion people. I like that movie.

As the midnight hour ticked in I must have dozed off. Then I heard them. Hundreds of them and I know the call.. It took 20 minutes for them to fly by. Shouldn’t be Whooper swans, not now, I thought. They are happy in the Arctic enjoying the feeding grounds. But I am sure it was them, and their longsong, the way I could picture them in the black of night, supporting each other, encouraging each other other, shifting leadership, all that, as they cut the night in half. I heard them gone.

Then I slept.

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Island Blog – Confusoball

I flip on a light as I head for a shower. That’s a first. It’s been light for months and now light is shifting. I don’t need the light, but I choose it, I want it. As I curve, like the staircase up to the next floor I choose that warm glow. I almost heard the light, the wee thing, chuckle. I am back. Yes, I said, and paused and by the way you will be pivotal for endless months because Spring is like a teenager who never wants to get out of bed. I’m not sure she got that, but we do. We can bow down to the unknown, to fears, to olding pains or to the sense of living in a world we don’t know, nor understand. I am very aware of the bow-down capitulation. It gets me every single day, no, doesn’t get me, but it rises like a rising thing and I am very aware very aware that it is just me against it. And I am, against it.

Most people I know about live on the surface, paddling like mad, looking for shore. Think about it. How often have you actually have a real deep conversation with anyone? Quick hallos on the school run, eyes checking for how you look as ‘mum’, the quality of your clothes, boots, makeup. For men, the whole ‘right way’ to look, to impress, regardless of financial constraints. Surface paddle. I see that it is important, but it is only sustainable if a person decides to be owned.

I am with those tho swim against the current because that is where something happens. It is never about money, nor greed. It is singular. One person just swimming the other way, brave enough to risk, wild enough to break out. As long as we bow down, as long as we believe what ‘they’ say, we will be safe for a while, but not for long.

Buying, social media, all of it, can consume a soul.

It isn’t real. What is real is connecting with granny, lighting a light on the stairs, minding the chickens, covering the bee hives in a storm, sensing that storm, forming a cupola. However, I completely get that I would have wanted the best high-top sandals, the lowest cut skinny shimmy of a dress. Such a confusing time.

I’m a confusoball.

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Island Blog – Lonely and a Yellow Fallen Thing.

Jeez, every time I type a word, an intriguing word that this isn’t recognised by the world of chiitterlings, I infuriate myself. I can actually feel the twist of a wild in me, until, that is, I remind myself of the days in which we now live. The cobwebby shadowland once called Grammar has been doorshut and locked for a long time, and to be honest, I am the first to squint words into their other possible selves, to re-weave consonants and vowels, to yip and encourage adverbs and adjectives to go home and shower, pick new clothing, make new impact, so I should probably shut the eff up. The word is Nemesism. It means turning aggression and gui

I know what this is. It’s the past of my past and the past of my dead dad, the eloquent deliverer of more grammar than most people could swallow in a lifetime. Oh, but he was marvellous, the way he held a room and it seemed effortless. He brought words into the dance of his story, words nobody understood. I knew that. I watched him, and them, fixts smiles, a little tipsy, clueless. But I got those words, looked them up and when I did I just knew I could never use them, not in the bus queue for work, not in a meet of friends intent on a friday vino collapso. And right there, right in the now of that, rises the Lonely. I have known this companion for ever, for decades and he/she arrived so early. I was about to dive down to the next paragraph, to take this away from me, to write about the Lonely I see, clearly, in my grandchildren. Then I returned, because I don’t want to dilute this. There is too much dilution on the webby world of now. Everything is fine, presentable, perfect, happy and completely not the whole picture.

Reduction. Lonely is everywhere. In all, in the chitterlings, the next linear up, the awkwardlings who suddenly become committed to one home. A collision. It’s like two boats going different ways in a collision and then an okay collusion, plus diffusion ending in confusion. We change. I remember my old dead husband, my beloved, my nightmare saying, all stuck out chest and strutting, that he has not, and never will, change. This informed me. He won’t, so I need too, and I would never have known the choice in that had it not been for his resolute. And that led me into a wonderland of thinks, jinks, augers, fears, sprites, opportunities, dances, shadowlands. Quite an adventure. And not just once. No. Many times over many years because this. You can be be with someone and still be lonely. You can be in a crowd and feel lonely. You can be meeting your trusted friends in a safe place and feel lonely. You can be in a long marriage and feel lonely.

I propped up the falling yellow thing. The whip wind and the rain drag is overwhelming. It came in. I saw the puddles. Cornflowers, sunflowers, many decked, There is Lonely everywhere.

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Island Blog – A New Matrix

I’m squinting at the screen with my dodgy eye. I have two, by the way, but one is dodgy and on Monday I am offski for minor surgery. All will be well, of course it will, it always is because there is a matrix for this as there is for everything. It thinks me. Matrix, from the latin ‘Mater, meaning mother/womb with the secure landing of ‘ix’ gives me confidence. Needless to say I am not concerned on behalf of the surgeon. He, and he is a ‘he’ has trained for ever and comes highly recommended. It’s the cricks in the matrix which unnerve me, the ferry not running, or running late; the potential miss of the train to Glasgow, the stranding of me. I remember, once, that all we had to do was to check the maritime weather report to know for sure that we would make the crossing. Not now #cricks.

Perfection is a rubric, a guide, a set of rules and moves and decisions that would always result in a tidy cube. Over generations this rubric slices into lives, fed wordy, initiating acceptable behaviours, cementing vows of loyalty, stultifying relationships and informing choices and, in places of power, decisions. Such a complexity and so rigid, a scoring guide with awards proffered to those who comply. And, bizarrely, I get it, even though I have lived within a rubric matrix at times in my life and fought through the cricks to escape. We do need order because disorder is unsettling, even though the ancient greeks and well before them considered Chaos as being the most powerful auger of change. I also think they were right because only from chaos does anyone, eventually, choose a new rubric, to then form a new matrix.

Think on it. In a war zone, when bombs take your everything and the street is a heavy landing of rubble and dust, there will be a voice, a someone who rises and who gathers in the broken. In a family when disaster hits there will be one who rises, takes control. In a troubled mind, full of ferrets and snipers, a voice. These voices don’t dismiss the situation as so many humans do. There are no platitudes, no empty words, no sugar coating. They are simply there and vocal. Just saying I am here. I can keep you safe. Here’s a new matrix.

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Island Blog – Eluctation, elucidation and endings

The ending of my son’s golden retriever is a wonderful thing to follow. He sways all sassy without having a clue he’s doing this sassy thing as we walk through the vineyards over sand tracks all cobbled with stone-rush thanks to the recent heavy rains. He has four legs so his walk is more of a glide than mine as I pick my way over ostrich egg-sized stones. The sun is already fire-bright and hot at 0900 and there is red sand between my toes. My feet look like I haven’t washed in weeks which isn’t the case. As the three of us walk, there are many strides of silence peppered with sprinkles of shared ideas or information. The vines are turning gold and copper now, curving into rest, their long and important work done for another year.

We talked of how the world is now, for a bit, but didn’t stay there too long. The thing about my family is that, whatever comes (or came) our way, we always see the wotwot of it, are as aware as we can be, and then quickly find what we can control and all that we cannot. That is where we begin because we have all learned the dangers of being an ostrich. You just get run over by either the next ostrich or worse, a lorry. When there is a moving on in someone’s world or over the whole damn world, those who freeze will not survive. I know many of my ageless age who say they are glad they are old, and I have said it myself, but once I thought that through, I pulled up my head and looked around.

I cannot stop what is happening, and, by the way, nor can anyone. This is not an ending. To watch the news every day only hurts the watcher because I never do and it is all happening to me as well. My mind is clear, my limbs old, my usefulness……..? Good hesitation there. What is my usefulness? A simple question and a sort of park bench reflective moment. Elucidation, the light moment. In my community, within my family and wide circle of friends, I can bring some light. How do I do that? Oh, not with wise words, not with uplifting nonsense, not when they may well be downed as starving rivers, carving whatever path they can through red sand valleys just to get somewhere that isn’t here. Not that. So what is my call? What is my walk when false eluctation will only result in a turnaway?

To remember the magic, that’s it. There are children here still with unicorns and stars in their eyes. And not just the children. We all have a choice here. We moan and groan, grow grey and shallow, lightless and downturned, or we rise to this. We’ve done it before, after all. Perhaps we just need reminding.

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Island Blog – It’s All About The Hunny

I haven’t cried for decades, except that’s a lie. When Piglet almost got blown away in the Hundred Acre Wood, I did shed a few tears. It wonders me, as I watch everyone else leak a lot when shit hits. I sort of envy them that release. I know I am far from cold, feeling everything about everything and for everyone, but maybe I have some sort of cold in me, a woman in a life, one who wants no pity, no fixing, and one who has grown tendons and sinews like steel props. I just made that up. It’s probably ridiculous. But it does think me. Those of us who have pixillated themselves into another’s world out of choice, willingly at first and then through sheer stickability, find sinew and tendon strength. I don’t think it resolutes us, not all of us. Some grow bitter as old wine, vinegar, loose teeth and joy. Others choose the yellow brick road, the tricky walk towards a truth full of wonder and hope. Life is not a dream. Life is a dream. The Bothers, the Both-ers. We seek another and then that other just isn’t enough, nor are we for them. Two separates with too much of a gap for the mending, the amending. A sadling for sure, but a reality. We change, we learn differently, we choose what comes to us through a learning. And, we divide. And I know this, I see this, and I also see that the ‘stickability’ of the old pioneers has had its time, because in those times, nobody was their true self, not could ever, ever, admit to such. I lived there, so I know, albeit at the arse end of that limitation.

What we all long for is to be who we are, without fear, safe, recognised, welcomed. We may be years off that but I hope it is coming because for too long the world, often the religious world, has controlled and ruled through fear. The people believed and walked in blind deference, superiority and damning, like they had no independent thinking. Independent thinking got you hanged, subdued, dismissed. We don’t have that fear now and yet we still can’t be sure of who we are without labels. I am seriously hoping that for the next year, those with the courage to gently voice, with the courage to step out, to come out, to be who they really are, will find the strength to rise, to pioneer us into a truth which just might kill off the lies of centuries.

In all, in everything, in the daily grind, in the knocks and batters, in the sudden joys, the falls the resists, the hidings, the resists, the falters, there is choice. Always is, always, no matter the stricklies. New word. For me it is all yellow brick road and the hope and the courage and the determination and the honey. That choice is no nonsense. Try it.

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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 – Moody and Beautiful

I love to watch the headlights moving around the backside of the sea-loch. Where have they been and where are they going to? I love the bitey catch of coriander when I open the pack to snip it over a green salad. I love the fall of the dark, when my twinkly winkly lights show themselves, a string of golden positivity. I love the disappearance of my whole garden, the emptiness of birds at the feeders, the slink-silhouette of a cat on the track and the way it suddenly looks up at me, the movement of me, the momentary connection.

I love my shower, the way it changes me from one day and into a solace. I love to sort and prepare something interesting to eat. I love the window dark of my rooms, the blindness of looking out. I love the pop of a cork and the glass of red wine, the way my speaker bigs up my playlist. I love that I got through today, that I walked into the wild, noticed, stomped, trudged, faltered, filled in time, did some admin, all of that. I love that I assembled a tapestry frame, after many attempts, that I changed my bed, laundered bedding, cared enough to respect the linen.

I look around my warm and comfortable sitting room, see the fire licking flame, feel the pushed out warmth, hear the tunes, and it thinks me of the other side of this I love thing. It isn’t an ‘I hate’ no, because I don’t believe in black and white as parentheses. I believe there are many greys in between. So, (don’t ever begin a sentence with that word) Sorry, dad, but I am doing just that beginning…….If there is, and there is, an whole nother to an I love beginning, how does it begin?

Perhaps it is honesty and doubled; perhaps we find it hard, if not impossible, to allow the truth to spill. Because why? Judgement, tick. Failure,tick. You are young, made mistakes. You are menopausal and angry most of the time. You are a young man who was told at a vulnerable age to pull yourself together, to stop snivelling, to man-up. You are a young woman who doesn’t want to do what her parents think is ‘best’ for her. You are sure you don’t identify with the sex you were born with. You are olding and furious about the tiny and daily losses of sight, of movement, of where you put that important receipt, or of who will help you stack a ton of wood, your fingers gnarled and weakened. The Lonely in all of these can be black as an island night.

Perhaps it’s because I am old and doing this looking for receipts, or trying to work out a way to see better in winter craft work, that I can see the love in the lack. Living so long gives a person a ‘so long’ on the angst of things whilst holding tight to a tryst with life. I am still trying to rein in the Lonely, a really feisty and bloody-minded colt, all spurs and twists and moody and beautiful.

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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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