Family

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Island Blog – Hallo and Thank you

Today I woke too early, my head full of monsters. Will I have major or minor surgery? Will I be strong enough to deal with it all? What will be the treatment after? Will I forget my headphones? (locate my headphones), or miss the ferry because the milk lorry has capsized in the Glen? Will I arrive, as I did for the Nearly Dead hospital visit, with one nightie, no cardy and no tweezers? Tweezers? Seriously? Will my little beloved dog fall ill when I’m away, and how long will I be away? Will the chimney sweep come, will the garden go to riot because I’m not watching it? Okay, you get the monsters. They all say YES, to all of the above, of course they do, the negative bastards.

Right, you lot, I said, startling the small dog into barks and a leap from her bed. Right! No, Wrong! You is NOT getting me in a right fankle at 04.30 whilst still inside my nightie (take 3, maybe four, do I have four?) and with my eyes barely focussed, you is not. We all rose from the tangle of duvet and I did try to leave them upstairs but they had a different plan. We watched the early birds, the light spreading over the sea-loch, over my garden, over the land, like a new story. Heretofore, this has given me a new vision, a new day, a new dawn, but this morning, no. The damn monsters of fear and anxiety, of a still resident exhaustion in my battle to be undead, kept up their clatter-chatter. It is a longtime since I had to fight them in this way. I tell myself, it is okay to feel these feelings, but it isn’t okay at all because they give me indigestion and backache and a squiffy head and no inner peace. I tell myself that anyone else would feel this way, but that doesn’t help either.

Do I not appreciate the support and love from my family, friends and blog readers? Yes, I do very much. So, why isn’t that enough? It thinks me, a lot and those thinks lead me to the (possible) conclusion that, no matter how many are around us, surround us, we ultimately sail alone. We need to manage our own craft across all sorts of dodgy oceans. In the knowing of that, I managed the hours of today, just. I rested a lot, read a whole book, walked into Tapselteerie and met not one soul, something that would normally delight me, but not today. Today I wished for an encounter, just a wee hallo and a passing chat. I went to the shop for a few bits now that my ‘recovery’ and ‘preparation’ demands a whole load of dark green vegetables, pulses, seeds and probiotics. I didn’t even know what that meant before now. I just cooked and ate.

I have decided that this living alone thing is not much fun, not when you want a Resident Familiar to proffer balance in the face of inner monsters. That smile, that joke, that ‘come on, let’s go out for coffee’, or to the beach, or something. Although my Resident Familiar left the relationship a long time ago when dementia arrived to take up residence, he was still here, a sometimes warm, living Familiar. I don’t want him back, but that is not the point. When a girl is swept off her feet at just 18 when she still has no idea about life beyond the parental home, she can be forgiven for feeling somewhat lost after 50 bonkers years of marriage to a dominant male and on the adventure of a lifetime. Being alone means I have to instigate everything and others, who have a Resident Familiar, are, well, busy until next Tuesday. I get that. I was always busy till next Tuesday, and for decades. But, on the other side of that, being alone is marvellous, so freeing, so uplifting, so damn new. How bizarre.

I am not moaning. Tomorrow will come and will proffer a new set of ideas, new feelings. Today is just today. So why do I write a blog? Should I not, instead, keep all of this to myself so as to spare whoever reads these words? Possibly, but I have been a polite girl/woman for a very long time and right now I feel raw and bloody and honest and congruent. I don’t want phone chats, don’t want visitors, don’t want anything at all, in truth, other than for these feelings to melt away. I am effortlessly positive as a rule because that is how I see this gift of a life. Perhaps, then, I am simply in a place I do not recognise, one that upskittles me, tries to trip me right over. Yes, that’s it. I don’t know this terrain and it is hostile. Simples. And it really helps to write and to post. Really, it does. In writing out my feelings about whatever is going on, and to send it into the ether, whatever that is, my spirits lift into a reassurance, that no face to face contact can give me. I think of you all, in Canada, In the States, in Englandshire, in Scotland, on islands across the world, and I reach out, saying, through my own stories, Hallo and Thank you for being there, for clicking on the ‘follow’ link to my blog, for reading my words. I also imagine your lives, tough at times, maybe many many times, easy here and there, the infuriations, the lifts, the shocks, the abundance and the lack. The bones of a life, the flesh and the guts of an ordinary/extraordinary time on this goodly earth. Life, I love you. I truly do.

See? I feel better now, just writing this. Hallo you all. And Thankyou.

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Island Blog – Thanks to a Horsefly

I’m here, back home and in the wealth of warmth. Well, warm, eventually, as the mornings can be sharp and bitey, requiring jumpers and leg coverings and a very good attitude to the shivers that challenge a mug of hot coffee. The afternoons sprawl wealthy on the bed of confidence, no leg coverings required, in fact, bring on the fans please. T’is weird and the way it is. By noon, I am overly clad and fighting my morning garb for the sudden, and somewhat desperate freedom from all that morning hoo-ha, which I abandon on the stairs. Jumper, leg cladding, even wrist warmers for the day is in pieces up here. Where once, we knew how the day would be, might be, the wise cautionaries telling us to keep our semets (vests with buttons and much restriction) on for months to come, now there is disarray and not only in the vest, leg cladding, jumper department. Weather steers moods. Cold rain, warm rain, just rain. Promise of sun, hope of sun, arrival of sun. It all guides us from pissed off to delighted, from a confirmed ‘there’s no hope’ to the one who is alert and watching the cloud shift, is accepting climate change, is actually the one in the game. And the game is more than weather. The game is one we play together and alone. Many of us have been assaulted by massive loss, like a sudden death. I almost cannot follow that sentence. It is too catastrophic. Too alone.

I find this next bit quite hard to say, as if I feel that what is going on with me palls by comparison to the catastrophic and sudden loss, one I have been close to this last week, and a timeline I can never be a part of, beyond the paltry can give.

But I am saying it. My time in hospital, whilst I fought to be not dead, has thrown up something important. With Cellulitis, there is a lot of swelling and one lymph gland remaind high despite the massive doses of antibiotics that saved my life, and after which, my consultant, Isobel, God bless her, sent me for a mammogram and biopsy and ultra sound. She was right. I have breast cancer, an unusual one, called Invasive Lobular Cancer. She, the cancer, is quiet, not necessarily presenting in lumps, although they did, eventually find one, the half size of a frozen pea. She appears in the right breast for the first time, as I have had at least five no problem lumps in the left.

What I feel is scared, unsure, and thankful for a horsefly bite. Beyond all those intitial feelings I am unsure about being in the garden. Thankyou friend Winnie for guiding me to big ass protection. Thank you to my ex breast cancer sisters who guide me to probiotics and dark green veg. I will leave island in a week for consultation and biopsy and mammogram and MRI and a whole load of questions and decisions. I don’t know whether it will be a lumpectomy or a complete wheech off of breasts. But what I do know is the strength of my family, my siblings.

I am suddenly cautious coming downstairs, cautious about walking out without a kick ass protection slathered over me. I am aware of my age, and that seemed to come overnight. Slower to move, all of that shit. But, for now I am watching eider duck on the sealoch, divers, geese, and the sun is creating diamonds on the salty surface.

And I am eternally grateful to a horsefly.

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Island Blog – This Day

People talk about, sing about, These Days, Those Days, and as I listen, I hear anew. These and Those indicate a collective, a while of days. But it isn’t the truth, not around Days. It can be, around children, or mountains but not around days. Days are themselves and particularly in troubled times, when they behave like picks in the road we knew as level, aggressing the flat ground, upsetting the flow of progress. They pucker up, cause us to founder and flounder, to twist off piste. Well Dammit. Damn those days.

I am learning to laugh at a lot of things these days. No, this day. No promises for tomorrow. I meet those puckers, and not because I have done anything different on this Tuesday, that Thursday, no, not at all. It is all the same now here in this alone state. I might have written ‘widowhood’ there, but I won’t and because there are many states of aloneness. Some chosen, some welcomed, most accepted and accommodated, albeit unwillingly. We need each other but the each and other of whoever we know or encounter can send us running for the dunes. It is confusing.

So, for this day (no tomorrow promises) I rise thankful and smiling. I walk, cook, listen to music, create some sewing nonsense, talk to family, laugh, visit a local library and connect with friends. As I sit now as the rain comes in (a given up here) I won’t say, These Days any more. Because I know, as I never did when I said those words without thinking, that there are not These Days. There is only This Day.

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Island Blog – If you Choose, then Dig.

Today the hooligan is blindways with a sideway slant of rain and wind. It’s from the South West which makes it okay enough, in that it won’t cut the legs off me when I walk out, nor skin the lips off my mouth, nor turn my eyeballs to ice. It’s irritating nonetheless. I slew right into the punch of it and hear the skitter upset of sparrows inside the rhododendron infiltratus, their safe house. There are many of them in there, all a-chatter, all talking at once. It wonders me that anything finds resolution in the sparrow world. There seems to be no leader, calling order, order, order. I move on watching puddles ripple as the wind skids across their surface, the sink holes, those birthed from the recent frosts, deep as ditches overnight. Cautious you drivers, gaw canny over this track. In my boots I have time and unfrozen eyeballs enough to avoid a sink, even though I do look, I do peer down, wondering if the old track I used to know way back is fighting its way back up to reveal itself, to have a voice in this cover-everything-over world.

The tram wires shimmy and shake overhead. A blackbird lands and I watch the way he, for it is an he, works his body into balance, his tail canting, a rudder in the wild of this wind. The rain, I watch it across the sea-loch as it rages right, right out to the west yearning, as water always will, to rejoin Mother Sea. I will be blown easy on the first leg of my walk and the return will be a fight. I align my frocks accordingly. I have no fear of rough weather, and great respect. Out here on the almost most westerly place before a collision with the US, I know what I am dealing with and it delights me. I can hear the stories, but not the words. I can feel the feelings of those who lived and knew this place even as I have no idea at all. My childhood, safe and not here at all, did not give me the roots I now know belong here, on the islands. It was as it was and it was a wonderful grounding, for a while, but the wild in me is home here in these capricious winds, even with climate change because it really isn’t so very different from how it always was. It was no big deal to walk down to a ceilidh and arrive soaked to the skin; no big deal to be marooned on the wrong side of the water when a gale arose like a nightmare from nowhere. We learned to adapt and I, as a Blow-In, or White Settler or whatever label was pulled forward at the time, found my home. I know, now, through research that my maternal forebears were island fold, sea-going folk, west coast folk and it thrills me for I am home. I am home.

Many of us wonder, if we do wonder, why it is we feel out of kilter, un-heard and lost. It might take a lifetime to find roots but if I was to suggest anything, I would say Go Seek. Roots run deep and deep can mean nobody digs. So, if you choose, then Dig.

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Island Blog – We are an I

The dusk falls like a cloak, rumpled, full of holes, quick if you turn away, look back and gasp. It is down now, this cloak, this wizard velvet, mouse-lit velvet rumple, allowing starlights to arrest my thinking, stop me, turn me as they poke through, thrust their death light into my looking. The sun, fighting still against his slip from stage right, thrusts a backlight so that those way-over-there trees, skeletal now and with limbs reach-stretched for maximum effect, stand silhouette against the indigo of a winter sky. I watch and watch as the new moon fingernails across the almost darkness, stars brighten and faraway, and this night, if I go out barefoot and goonied, I will see lace patterns in the wild space above me, above you too, although yous with streetlamps will miss a lot. I remember missing a lot whilst living in Glasgow and it was there I knew how the song came to be, Blackbird Singing in the dead of Night, because we had one of those, right outside our flat, singing and singing and exhausting himself and I felt a big shame for the wild ones who knew something once, for sure, and then became confounded by a change that might take generations to become okay with a species.

Transition is a fine thing for us, even when it sticks spikes into an ass every time you sit down in a place that used to offer ‘sit-down’ as a thing expected, normal and oftentimes visited. From one state to another. That’s how it defines itself. From cocoon to butterfly, from larva to god-knows-what that will eat your cucumbers and primulas and wonder you why you ever bothered planting the damn things. But who has a map for the bridges? The ones, like me, like you, we and many ‘I’s who must and will exist between loss and friendship, between existential pain and the light of new hope, between the doubt and fear of young age and a possible future, and the old agers who would love a rainbow beyond bent fingers, weakened wrists, and faulty legs. Both transition generations seeing what? A bridge?

There is no answer to that question and there may never be. So, we find our own answers, fumbling, faltering, seeking, searching and, in all my reading, my miles and miles of reading, our generational congregation is no different now. Centuries of searching for the absolute brings no reprieve from the ongoing thingy of human-ness. We can watch the sky and think our thinks. We can submit to sulks and huffs and the refusal to communicate within a relationship at home. We can reject or connect with ‘difficult’ children. We can walk the dog or let it die of the lack. We can dress in jewels despite the rain. We can lift old mothers-in-law into an evening of smiles, ask them of their memories, lift them back home into the empty bed of their lonely lives or we can hold to the fact that we don’t like her, nor ourself in her presence. We can enjoy a puddle with little children or claim tiredness and the need to be home to watch Countdown. We can decide to live out our whatever life, no matter what the inside demon tells us. We did not fail. We lived our best. Yes, we failed, made mistakes, have regrets, let no-one hide from that big truth. However, we can tell ourselves, even if nobody will ever tell us, that we did what we deemed right for the family, we were/are a character created, a personality shaped and formed, wonky and faltering. Or we can hide away from a anything honest and watch some celebrity nonsense on TV.

But we are an I.

We are.

An

I

And with an I lies all the power.

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Island Blog – Flying Flagrant

What a weekend! All the family together minus the old sea-dog, for some years. Five children, their partners and 12 grandchildren. And me. And the sunshine. I watched the little ones fly flagrant onto and off paddle boards, across rocks, up hillsides, all legs and squeals and motion. Come on! they cried and Hurry UP! Their young parents fed them, dried them off, eased hurts, settled them for bed. It was a squash but the best sort of squash. And there were huddles, of little leggy ones with enough secrets going on as to become suddenly silent when an adult appeared unexpectedly. Huddles too for the parents all finding out about the real deals in each other’s lives after all this time of not having much of a clue beyond the usual upbeat I’m fine and All is well sort of phone tennis.

I noticed many things to think me. How children fly free and how beautiful it is to watch; how my own children as parents have settled into their legs, their more cautious step. Not one of them flew flagrant over rocks although had a precious child fallen, they would have moved like otters over those same rocks. Instead they watched, as I did with all the flagrant flying lost to me. But here’s a thought. I did it once, in the right time for doing it. I had that. I did that. And, in my mind, I still do.

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Island Blog – Tigger

The trouble with me, or one of the many troubles with me, is my Tigger bounce in the early mornings. It’s ridikkerluss. I must have driven my children mad with all that early bouncing, especially on school days. Waking in this ‘darking’ at 3.30, wide awake, excited about nothing and everything, I have to get out of bed. Thank you bed, I say with a reassuring pat, as it’s a bit startled. Most people, I add, would just turn over but I never believed in turning over anything with the exception of new leaves, naturally. I would be marvellous on early shifts in, say, a hospital. I would burst into the ward, my smile leading the way. Good morning! I would sing, as I reinflate the flagging night watch, flip on the kettle, brew coffee and head off to cheer the post and pre-ops, soothe the sad and weary, have a blether with the janitor and make him laugh but not too loudly, naturally.

By 6 I have cleaned the cobwebs and wiped the walls that have been hidden behind the Family Furniture for decades. The walls look startled too, suddenly aware of their nakedness. The cobwebs are all fluff and dark materials; very dodgy, but easily removed with my eco cleaning spray and a determined scrubber hand. Before I wipe them away for ever, I watch the way the webs float and lift as I pass, like wisps of smoke. I check for lodgers, but they have already scuttled off into a safe corner, probably temporarily blinded. I can see where the painter didn’t paint, couldn’t reach behind the Family Furniture. I pause to wonder who will buy these big pieces, who will thrill at the very sight of them, a must-have for the perfect place inside their home. I wish them and the furniture many blessings and a very happy life together. And, good luck polishing those brass knobs. I am done with brass knob polishing for ever. I have also moved furniture, stacked books and it’s not 7 yet.

I blame my mother. She was just the same. I remember us going to visit when the kids were young. I was up early, but himself, who could sleep all night and longer, remained in bed. Mum wasn’t having any of that nonsense and she wheeched off the duvet revealing his naked splendour and tickled his toes whilst singing something nobody recognised. He never got over it, not for years and years. Ah, well, I told him. You are not alone in this. Most people never get over my mother. So thanks Mum for the Tigger in me, the mischief, the fun and the way you were the most impossible woman who ever lived and probably always will be.

Unless I take over that role, of course.

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Island Blog – Self Assemble and Family Furniture

I’m here listening to Cat Stevens and buying a self-assemble white bookcase. The Cat Stevens bit just means his song happens to be on right now from a list of my top played tunes in 2021. Apparently. The self assemble thingy does bother me somewhat, me being a woman who never has the right specs on to read instructions, and even if she did she probably wouldn’t. No matter, I can fret about that when the flat pack arrives. And, why is it arriving at all? Ah, good question.

Today, after decades of longing to be rid of ‘Family Furniture Angst’ my antiques whiz came to the island. He has been before, many times, with his fabulous sidekick, straight from the Barras in Glasgow, a man I miss for all his stories, his deals in wild island. places where the pickings were always good. Sadly, that wheeler dealer is dead now and very probably confusing God with his eagle eye and his sharp wit. RIP Peter. Anyway, back to this day. Well I was all of a confucious. I could not settle from 5 am onforth. I had to find all the things this trusted valuer would want to see, the bits, the endless religious bits and the bobs that have travelled through the generations of my husband’s family since Queen Victoria reigned in her starchy widow weeds. And, the big ass mahogany trip ups, such as an escritoire (?) and a something else wood replica Queen Anne dresser which took my antiques whizz and the welcoming help of my neighbour to harrumph down the winding stairs, avoiding the fixation of a chairlift, one, it seems, I am obliged to retain for 7 years after the death of the dead one.

He arrived in the onset of rain, which, just to say, is most of the time. You have to love West Island life or you drown, and if you do, chances are you will wash up in the outer isles somewhere Middlemarch and in February when no-one’s looking so don’t bother. Way too wet and cold. I remember him, the way he dresses, the flamboyance, no matter the rain. His smile went right through me. What on the earthly earth was I fretting about? Not him, no. It was, it was, my need to be perfect, not to hold anyone up, not to be lacking. Good lord! Hallo Me. Moving on, he came, his eye sharp and seeing. He has many many years around antiques, or anything of value. As I showed him the Family Antique Angst pieces, he nodded. I know them, he said, and, of course, he did but I was not able to move them on until the man was dead.

It felt like a betrayal, over a poached egg breakfast, in the dark, waiting for the light, looking for it. It’s late again. Light is always late in the winter. As the morning rolled out like a geriatric snail, I went from room to room, touching, moving, packing, lifting, learning my limitations and ps btw I am so not into them. I used to be jaunty on stairs, even with fifteen children hanging on to me. I was all deer legs and gymnast. Something changed and that something, if I ever find it, might just regret messing with me. Moving on. My neighbour, strong young man, helped with the big stuff and we did the rest. I see the cobwebs, decades old, hovering like stories all told out. I see the space created. Space. I always longed for it but the Family Antiques Angst is like a corralling of generations, or it was., blocking out space, confining it, darkening it. I know that he who is dead had no information at all about these big dark crow threatening pieces. So why are we keeping them? He shrugged but held firm. Hence my breakfast sense of betrayal. I honour it, that feeling. It is respect for the the respect of he who is dead.

But now, I am working beyond cobwebs, through space and into a white self assemble bookcase. God help me.

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Island Blog – Two Ways of Looking

I have weird taste in breakfasts. Where most good folk are chomping on muesli, yoghurt and fruit, I hanker for poached egg over warmed avocado and chopped banana with lemon juice, salt, pepper and herbs. Sometimes I tuck into last night’s leftovers. I don’t have a sweet tooth, in fact teeth play a lead part in my breakfast choice because it takes me a whole lot of work, and time, to sort them out after muesli. I also eat very early, long before the sun is up so that lunch is often required around 11 am. Living alone, this is not a problem at all. Who cares when I eat? Who will notice? Only me and that’s just fine.

There are times, I confess, when I think enviously of those who sleep for 7 wonderful hours and who, on waking, can sip tea or coffee, read in bed, pondering the day from the warm snuggle of a duvet for another hour or so. These people sleep, I understand that, whereas I can manage a few short hours at best, waking into darkness and with no desire to remain in bed for another second. I am way too excited about the day ahead, too curious to see what awaits me downstairs. Did I wash the supper dishes? Did I buy something online, something I absolutely do not need at all? As I rise, I laugh at myself, at those questions. Washing dishes after each meal was a big issue when I cooked meals for large numbers of hungry people, most of whom were in my own family, but not now. One plate, one pan, one knife, one fork. I can barely see them on the draining board. Back in the years of manifold dishes there would have been a crockery crash had I not washed up after every meal. But it does think me because I know how easy it is to not bother as a live-alone person ages. There is nobody here to judge my standards after all. Ah, no, that’s not true because there is me and I am the strictest judge of self. My standards are always in need of improvement, and I have vowed as I watched other live-alones get sloppy that I would never allow that in myself. So, the dishes are washed, the floors swept, the bathroom clean, the rugs bashed to death and if the dog starts to smell, she is dunked in a bucket and scrubbed to a shine.

In short, it is exhausting being me. I often wish I could lower some of my standards, not one of which I expect to see in another living soul. Quite the opposite. Was I reared to be so damn critical of myself, allowing no laxity? Very probably. But surely at my age I could be less driven? It seems that I am fated to run all the way up to the end. I can’t even sit still for long, the dance in me is too dancey. I am curious about what might be around the next corner and I just have to find out, even if it is only another corner, which it often is. This doesn’t slow me down at all and when I think of this condition, this endless curiosity, I can see it two ways. Fidget, restless, too imaginative, hyperactive, or really alive, curious, interested, imaginative, mischievous, fun, inspiring.

I pick the latter.

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Island Blog – Dark Woods and Renaissance

Through life and laughter, love and longing, light and loss and lift I become myself.

Who said that? I did.

Many poets and thinking writers have writ of the dark woods, the dark night of the soul, the longing for meaning, the whole point of this life and I am one. I am not afraid, as the world is, of what the world calls the dark side. We all have one, we all know it is there with us even as we run from it. I don’t run. Unless the twin is recognised and acknowledged, the unit will never be complete, never whole and never at peace. Life and death are such twins, one we love and celebrate and repeat stupid platitudes about, the other is whispered and avoided at all cost. I notice it when a blog I write is not about the ice cream and candy side of our human condition. Less comments come through. Nobody wants to think about the pain they all carry, we all carry but cannot quite explain. We wish it away, cover it with sprinkles or ignore it hoping it will give up trying to get our attention. But, like a toddler on a mission, it will never do that. Turn around. Look at it. Say hallo, I see you, shall we talk awhile? It is a rare human who has that level of courage and vulnerability and yet it is the only way to fill the big black hole inside, the one we hope will accept the material wealth we throw at it – the millions of hours we take away from our families in order to climb the social or corporate ladder, in the foolish hope that this will be enough. It isn’t, wasn’t and never will be.

In my life now there is only me here to fill the hours. This means I can read and study, ponder and reflect without interruption. I have never known such a state, interruptions having been the norm for 68 years. I have even been that interruption myself, on occasions. These long stretches of time afford me space and peace within which to pursue whatever I fancy. I can follow the flight of a bumble bee, a dragonfly, a thought. I can read for hours until my bum is numb. I can wear my frocks back to front, inside out, eat banana with marmite on muesli, sing loudly in Portuguese and dance Tango with a chair. I know that the older we get the thinkier we become. It is as if we finally begin to understand the Elusive Puzzle – what the hell am I here for? Yes we work, bring up kids, do our best, learn how not to overcook sprouts and other important things, but even with a socking great list of lifely achievements, that list never really satisfies, never brings the aha we seek.

I spend a great deal of time saying thank you. For pretty much everything, the bad and the good. Why, you ask, are you thankful for the bad? Because the bad, so named, is actually of immense value. It is the shadow side, the dark side of the whole, of life in all her beautiful and mysterious self. To be thankful for all that happens, all that has already happened, warts, whips and wastes is to begin to understand the point of being alive, of being here right now wherever you are. Precious human, pointfull life-liver, valued, important, needed. Every single one of us. The mistake we all make in this life, and I include myself, is that we focus on what we get, or got, wrong. It feels like an impossible flight to make, the one that shows us all we do and have done right, those times we laughed with friends, with family, shared their joys and pain, engaged in a way that held us fully present within the moment. There will be zillions of those times in every single life. Why do we remember the times we ‘failed’? I have no answer but I do know enough now to consciously shift my thought plates into a new dynamic, one that affords my feet purchase on level ground and from where I can still be of good use to others, even at my age. If I am always slipping down my own slippery slope, thinking only of my faults, falls and failings, I am of little use to my own self, never mind that of others. Yet, in our culture of running away from our own darkness in the mistaken belief that we could ever outrun such a sentient presence, we simply exhaust ourselves, and then we slip once more down our own slippery slope.

We all know and remember how quick our primary caregivers were to judge us. To varying degrees, in surprising amounts, we all know. This decides our adult thinking unless we choose to build ourselves anew, once we fly the nest. It is not simples, not at all. It takes a ‘traveller’s’ mindset. We read that anything is possible if we just believe. believe in what? Yes, we can believe in what someone else achieves but in our own self? No, that is never going to happen. As I said before, it takes the willingness to be vulnerable and to find a strong source of courage, in spite of seeing nothing ahead but the dark woods.

A while back, I was asked a question. What would you be right now, if you could choose your life? No thinking, just a first response, thus not based on your own limited mental DNA, your own experience thus far. I didn’t think. A Tracker, I said. Good lord, where in the heck did that come from? Me, a tracker? I am scared of everything. I would be a terrible tracker, snivelling on the peripheries and wishing I was home by the fire with a cup of rosy. When we are put on the spot like that, no over-thinking-just-respond, we speak our own truth. Having come from a town, known pavements better than I knew any field of wildflowers or expanse of tundra, or wilderness, forget wilderness, this tracker thing is nonsense. I have been watching too many Pixar movies. But, hold. Wait. Why not? I see everything when I walk. I know every track, even the slide of a snake across my path. I see the flattened grass beside a kill and know it is otter or mink. I see spoor and know the night animal who passed this way, and when. I know. I know. I am a tracker. Then I remember how I am curious about how this person got here, how their eyes tell me more than their mouths will ever do. I see what others miss. I am a tracker. And my brain knows this.

Our lives are so much richer and deeper than we realise as we bound away from the shadow self. We are more than we think, more than the tight pants the world has told us are the best fit. The most joyful people I have ever met have done something outrageously courageous at the wrong time in their lives, according to the world. They said a big NO to corporate misery and went across oceans to work with dolphins. They said a big NO to a broken relationship and moved into the dark woods, though the long labour of renaissance and into a new light. They moved from city to wilderness, to a shack without power or running water and opened an orphanage for street kids. Their eyes tell me everything. They found their ‘tracker’ and it is good. Courage. Vulnerability. Are you who you really want to be? If so, I am happy for you. If not, check out the dark woods. the thing about darkness is that, pretty soon, our eyes adapt and the way reveals itself.