Family

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Island Blog – Someone, a Smile, Enough

On the spur of the moment, and it felt like it, I made a dash across the water two days ago. Otherwise I would have been stuck, or something like stuck. Instead of being able to celebrate Christmas with a branch of the family tree, and his wife and family, I might have been home alone, and without Kevin to entertain me. I did prepare for the big-ass winds and the faulty ferry situation, I did. I bought a whisky/marmalade cold smoked salmon steak from Tobermory Fish, some wee potatoes from heaven knows where and a pack of frozen peas. I would have made it fun, with or without Kevin, I know I would.

But, thanks to Someone, in this case my sea captain son who knows all about winds and faulty ferries, I dashed early. My ticket, also faulty and dated for Christmas Eve, was accepted and I ran down the ramp in the rain and wind blast and prayed for arrival. I have, in the past felt this, only to have a heart sink as the ferry turned back because landing was not possible. I can remember other ghastlies in my life and that is right up there.

I’m here, warm and welcomed and surrounded with very small someones, each one full of their own angsts, needs, troubles and dreams. It reminds me, although I find myself a tad distant nowadays, not really understanding the language, the lifestyle. I am a granny now, older, but still a Someone. We have walked into the blast, through puddles and a bit of rain but not much, woolie bonnets on, boots afoot, conversation and song flying up into the sky. Mince pies, nourishing soup, a visit to the food shop, encounters in doorways, smiles and felicitations exchanged, trolleys bumped, the indie dash down the aisles for chocolates, treats, more bacon. So many Someones on the way, to bump against, smile at and notice, Every single one of these Someones are Someone. I never forget that. All those we might not notice, those who serve us day in, day out and over years. Do we even ask their names? They are all Someone.

I have learned, over longtime, to separate the Someones from the fog of controlled humanity. I lived through many culture changes, many wars, many geographical border swings and roundabouts. A swirl, a confoundment and not just for me, me, over here in the West with no apparent threat. I think of the Someones caught up in it all, lost, wondering and wandering and I just hope that Someone will see them as Someone. 

All it takes is a smile, eye contact, a tiny hesitation and a hand held out.  So much of enough.

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Island Blog – Tidal Curve

Such days of glorious Autumn, dry, sunny, coloured up like blood, gold, emeralds and fox. Folk wander, stop to watch a silken swirl of thrushes, Mistle, Song and Fieldfares, all dinging about the blue in search of berries. They can strip a tree in 20 minutes, working as a team, even though they don’t gather like this at any other time of the year. There appears no discord, no fighting, no chest bumping, just a ribbony swirl like the wash of a boat, lifting over treetops, diving into branches, all a-twitter. I walk out into this, into the fairy woods, under a shelter of trees hundreds of years old. What stories they could tell me, if only I spoke ‘tree’. The sealoch is speckled with diamonds, stealers of sunlight, reflectors, the surface broken by the rise of an otter, busy with the salmon run and mighty with cubs to feed and protect. Herons bicker and shriek, divers fly in silent until they settle on the surface and call out in ‘loon’, their velvet voices schmoozing the air, and me.

I watch Arctic Swans, various of them, push past the wind and into the lee of the loch, where the tidal flow comes smack bang up against a right bloody push of rainwater. The flood against the tide. I go out to watch the meeting. It’s like a Scot meeting an Englishman. The rise of wild bubbles tells me much. There is no way out of this. I know it, as do they. I watch them curve away from each other but there is no escape, not with those damn hills and rocks and wotwot hemming them in. They have to bond. It thinks me.

Not of cabbages and kings, nor of how to service a chainsaw, nor, even, whether or not I ought to deal with the extraordinary wonderfulness of spider spin that fills most of my corners. In this sunlight, they look like hope, connection, determination and strength. I watch them rainbow, lift and move with any breeze, almost breathing. In my before cancer life, around this time of year, I would be flapping a cloth or cobweb thingy through these webs and strings and connections, always very cautious not to hurt the spider. Sometimes, if I reckoned the spider to be a very tiny one, or couldn’t see it with the naked eye, I would employ binoculars. No. I am not anal. This is when they’re ‘in’, and they are my friends. Now that I know my cancer is, colloquially, known as The Spider, for it does not pronounce itself in a lump, more a spread, I feel a kind of safety, as if all those gazillions of spiders I have saved and relocated and freed, have returned to me. This reads bonkers, is bonkers, but allow me please, for it helps me to find the positive in all this interminable waiting, in the sleepless weeks, the slash of early waking fears, the exhaustion of keeping myself upright, fed, excercised and washed. That’s on the bright side. On the other side, I feel scared and lost and exhausted. I might tell you this and I bet, I absolutely bet, that you, like so many others, will respond with a ‘but’ and place a lovely new Patch on the coverlet of my life, a glorious one with no fraying and with colours that will last for ever and ever, Amen. Don’t do this. Not to anyone. If I could, personally, remove the word ‘But’ from the dictionary, trust me, I would. It is a fixer, like the freshwater is to the tidal flow and yet, which is the wild one, at the beck and call of the moon and the four winds, the storms, the violence of volcanic eruption, the dying of an iceberg the size of Brazil?

Feelings come unbidden, unasked for, unsought. They just come, like a tidal flow. We attempt, because, (if we don’t we are counted weird, odd, unmanageable (?) and ‘difficult’), to process our feelings into a palatable presentation, delivered over the phone, on the street, at work, in a relationship, among family members. I have not learned, yet, to butt against the ‘buts’, and, maybe like the tidal flow, a pisces me, I can just curve. Maybe bending to the butt of the world is exactly the way to continue a flow. That thinks me too. And, to be honest, I am weary of being a standup in my life. Perhaps this cancer is proffering me a curve, the layback into the care of others, short term, and, perhaps, there is a sweetness therein, like the ribbony flow of the thrush family, who only conjoin at a time when the collective brings power and success. I can go with that.

My baby boy, well over 6 feet of him, is flying over from SA to bring me home. Number OneSon will drive us to a ferry which may, or may not, run for a load of reasons, not many of which make sense. We will home ourselves, and we will celebrate when we do. It is always a birdlift of relief when we do, when I do, when anyone does, cross the water, and land. At times, oftentimes, we have to curve, are stuck in the wrong place, no toothbrush, no jamas. This is when we might(y) take on the curve, if we decide to.

I am one, no matter the buts. I am afraid, moving into a space on which I have spare intel. It feels as if I am shoved into a time I do not recognise. I will, after.

Here comes the curve.

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Island Blog – Cancer and Wotwot

Well, well, and what a time of it! I am having my time of it, whilst many others are doing the whole time of it having thing in their own homes, around, hopefully, their own people. My people left this morning (just the one son, so, okay, person) who brought me home from pavements and noise and a couple of hospital appointments in his Lotus, a classic, very small, like a dot on any highway, but fast and safe. Apparently. I was lying down, as, to my alarm, was he. Mostly I watched sky because conversation was tricky. There was a deal of shout and many ‘whats?’ But he got me home. The peace that came as we coasted into the ferry queue was almost an embarrassment.

So, home again to the wee dog, beautifully cared for, and indulged and played with and walked and wotwot by my lovely friend, and the joy rises like a warm fire on a winter’s night. The smile of it takes me upstairs to, finally, unpack my few bits of frock and underpinnings, to a shower, to the familiar. The sounds of gulls heckling a sea-eagle, the cornflowers rising like hope outside the window, the grass green and ebullient; the view across the sea-loch. Warmth beneath my feet, food in the fridge, clean sheets, a new beginning, for me. For my son too, I guess. For all my children too. Cancer is a cut in a life, a shock with ripples, like an ice cream, or a cocktail, and it is both, or can be.

Since I heard I had cancer, I have heard many stories. It seems to me that nobody talks about it in the street. It wonders me. Is illness, such as this, embarrassing, or shameful? Or, is it that we, (god bless the british) never want to inconvenience anyone, say anything that might make them feel awkward on a Monday pavement outside of Aldi? I completely get that some people don’t want anyone to know because they want to work it themselves and just telling anyone means they are obliged to keep the information coming. I respect that. But, and but again, I feel a challenge coming at me. Not to those aforesaid. No. But to those who want to say how they feel about losing a part of them they depended on for years, and, more, that part that didn’t necessarily give the heads up on ‘Something Wrong Here’. Such a shock. And that shock has outwaves, biwaves, tsunamiwaves. These can shock on for days, months, years. And the Cancer One knows this. No matter how she or he tidies it all away, how serious the (lost the word) thing is, it is an impact, infecto of dreams, a stealer of thoughts, sleep, decisions, movement through any day.

I await the results of my MRI scan, but spoke with my surgeon yesterday. He says, it looks good, just a lumpectomy. A few more checks, an ultrasound, then it is done.

I’ll go with that.

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Island Blog – An Overwhelm in Perspective

When an overwhelm crashes in like a tsunami, I notice a shutdown in me. I didn’t expect it, to be honest. I believed I would ride the wave of it with my upbeat and positive attitude to life in general, but I had not considered that a threat to my own little life would feel so, well, overwhelming. The walls closed in, that’s what happened, gradually, once the reality of a cancer threat grew horns and fangs and claws. I still thought I was stronger than any monster, but that is not the truth. I battle with thoughts I don’t want to develop. I win, minute by minute, and it is exhausting. Knocked down, get up again, knock down again, get up. I need all my compromised reserves of energy to simply answer questions or to decide on the simplest of choices. This doesn’t feel like me at all, but I am not me, not the me I was just weeks ago. Did I fall off a cliff, or into a new world full of aliens and dangers unknown? Too quick, too quick for me to gather up my sense of humour, my ability to find my way out of any maze, my self belief, confidence, identity. They look down on me, or over at me, across the divide of space, of water, of air. I call to them, but they are also afraid, unsure of our connection. I am still me, I whisper, but their heads shake, No, you are not. We don’t recognise you down there, over there, a tapselteerie of bones and muddled thoughts.

In and among my children, my family, I feel strangely disconnected. I feel watched. Of course I am watched. I would be watching any one of them in my position. What to say, how to encourage, how to keep momentum going, how to bring forth distractions, how to kill time in the Wait Zone. It is tough for them, too. Am I hungry? I don’t know. Do you fancy going sailing, out for coffee, into the woods for a walk, or, perhaps to a game of Ludo? I don’t know. Is it Monday, Tuesday, Ash Wednesday or Christmas Eve? I don’t know. All I know is that I have to keep my phone charged, on LOUD, and with me at all times in case of a call from the consultant or the breast cancer nurse. I fight, really fight, against the constant rise of disaster thoughts, day by day, hour by hour. I write something down, then score it out. Foolish thoughts, pointless thoughts. What do you see in your future? someone asks me. I almost hoot with laughter, or I would if I could locate my funny bone. I don’t know. Imagine! they urge, meaning well. I poke about in what I know to be a very vivid imagination. It’s hiding, hibernating, on hold, something like that. The effort involved in such a thought process is way too much. I just want to float.

On a cloud. I dreamed, not so long ago, that I was walking in a wilderness, through unknown territory. I often find myself there in dreams. Tumbleweeds tumble by me, dust and sand fly around my ears and face, rocks thrust up wherever I look, but I am not afraid. Somehow I know I must keep walking, keep aware, not for dangers but for opportunities. I walk and walk until, ahead of me, I notice an area of smokey white fluff on the ground. Nearer I come, and nearer, until I recognise a landed cloud. Bizarre, yes, but not in this land. I walk around it, touch its chill, my fingers floating right through until they disappear completely. Barefoot (always) I nudge it with my toes. It lifts ever so slightly at the edge. More solid than my fingers think. Gingerly, I step onto it, moving into the middle. It holds me, easily. Then, a few moments later, and once we have got to accept each other, the cloud begins to lift. Slowly, gently, steadily, no rocking nor threat to unbalance me. Higher and higher we float, until the tumbleweeds look like dust balls, the rocks like pin pricks in a wide open desert. There is no sand in my face, no land to trip me up, no big rocks to halt my traverse. In short, there is a new perspective.

Then I awaken and think. There is what I can see. There is much more I cannot see. And then, there is that place in between where I get to choose how I see what I see, and what I see are my self belief, my confidence and my identity on that cliff edge, right in my flight path. It is easy to grab them as we float by, and I do. Then we all go down to breakfast.

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Island Blog – Through the Pond Weed

I am gradually growing used to city life, even as I absolutely do not wish to live in one. So many people, cars, bikes, streets, houses and windows. So much white noise, black noise too, sudden sounds of too many folk living cheek by jowl. A car bump, horns, ambulance alarms, a shouted caution or rebuke. Even the darkness falls with a clunk, although mornings slip quietly through curtains and under doors. I love mornings and today I took off for a walk around Blackford Pond, feeling the harsh resistance of pavements give way to a softer track, muddy around the stones. Benches flank the curve of the pond where I see ducks, moorhens and a family of swans with four healthy looking goslings, velvet grey, necks long, heads proud as they move with grace through the pond weed. Plaques name those long gone, etched in brass. ‘In memory of Jim and Mary, Robert and Matilda, who loved this place’. I remember this pond years ago, the banks less densely covered with spindly trees and ebullient water weeds, the body of water more visible. I exchange Good Mornings with dog walkers and joggers as we pass. each other by. The sky is white with sprachles of grey but no blue. Gulls cut through the white, a single hawk, pigeons. I miss abundant wildlife and must keep my eyes up to see any at all.

I am playing the waiting game, but it doesn’t feel like a game. Some day soon I will receive a letter with a date on it for an MRI scan and the process will nudge forward a few steps. For now, all I can do is to build strength, rest, play and keep my imagination under firm control. If I was at home doing this waiting thing, just me with my thoughts, I doubt I would manage such control. It is good to be here, with family distractions and in a completely different environment, despite the lack of wildlife, of space, and this constant movement of mass humanity. In quiet moments I watch people walk by under the window. Mothers or fathers with wee ones, old grannies, like me, with shopping bags, stout footwear and ice white hair. What is going on in your lives, I wonder, you tiny old woman, you, jogger with a dog, you young families with laughter or angst on your unlined faces? Are you well, happy, frustrated, sad, disappointed or thankful to be upright, well fed, free to walk, supported and loved? I wish you some of your dreams, because nobody gets to live all of them. Life has her own plans, after all. And it isn’t what happens to any of us that matters, but how we deal with it. Thus we make a deal. We say, okay, I didn’t want this, ask for this, even imagine this would happen to me, but it did anyway. How will I accept, with the spirit of fight, whilst concomitantly showing to myself and to the world, that I am bigger than my circumstances, way way bigger?

In my attitude of gratitude, that’s how, my acknowledgement of all that I have, all that love and support and friendship. Priceless gifts and completely free. I hold them close and, in doing so, the waiting loses density and gravitas and I am light as the swans on the surface, effortlessly moving with grace through the pond weed.

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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.