fiddle

I was thinking about fiddling today. I was. We do fiddle about, do we not, with fingers, with ideas, with olding, with blockades, with the constant push against the barriers we meet on a daily basis. Should there be a question mark here? Honestly, the whole ‘how you do grammar’ thing was once my absolut. Don’t mess with me on that word. It doesn’t need an ‘e’. There are kids this day bothering about results on where the eff they place their ees, never mind their hyphens and dashes and please don’t bring up exclamation marks, which, btw, were just fine a few years ago, and which have now become a yawn. Turmoil at worst. Fiddling at best.

Let’s fiddle. Fiddling requires finger movement, dynamic finger movement, in the fingers, that is. Limited, yes, unless you have learned how to. In the mind, different. There’s a wildscape in that head which (not ‘that’,….never ‘that’.. #grammarqueen) can spiral the brightest mind. You might go low one day and all the old stuff rushes in as if a tide has suddenly turned on you. It stutters, physical momentum, there are stumbles, hesitations, pauses, a want for hiding. Other days, and for no particular reason, the fiddle mind plays a wonderfully dynamic tune, and your heart is light, your clothes feel right, your make-up worked, the path ahead clears like a walk into bright opportunities and surprising serendipities. What you expect, you will attract. I know this. It is a fact and proven. So what is the thing about days when your fingers tangle-damage your scarf, when, in irritation at said tangle-damage, you wheech off a precious gold chain, breaking it; when you forget your keys, can’t decide what to wear for an important something or someone or when your ego is way below knicker level, in fact it’s ankle deep and asleep? There’ll be days like these. Mama said.

I had one today. I know these days of old. They’re trying to be the seventh wave, and maybe they are. They do piss me off, nonetheless, because I never gave them permission to diffuse me into a spread I feel incapable of. I wanted focus, a strong light ahead, a clear path, and now you straggle me into a general illuminator. I don’t care who else can see. I just want light for myself. Ah! there it is, the conundrum. So I don’t appear to be the master of my own days. Instead there is a force I cannot see which confabulates my story, my plan, me.

When I arrived at work, I felt as if my outside, all uniformed up, didn’t belong to me. At the door, I pulled up, said some stern words to myself, got to it. But it didn’t shift. I listened to the laughter from my delicious co-workers, chatted, heard their news, cleared tables, engaged with customers, laughed with them, loved their dogs, filled water jugs, cleaned endless kitchen equipment (inventively), but I still felt I was limpish . I thought ‘tired.’ I thought ‘old.’ I watch my fingers type this out and I laugh. Tired, yes. Old yes.

Ach, wheesht! Fiddle on. Always fiddle on.

My favourite music, the fiddle. The word alone lifts my feet into dance. Fiddle, rhymes with diddle, piddle, widdle, skiddle, and I could add a few more. All of them traverse me into lift, laughter my aide de buoyant. That might be French, might not. I’m not for caring much right now about semantical language shifts, nor their accuracy. Actually, fiddling is rarely an accurate science. I know because I had stood standing (a rare thing for me) at a ceilidh, just to watch the wild crazy sawing of that bow across four strings, the bow and bend as the fiddle and the player become one with the dance. I hear more beats to the bar, more sudden shifts into minor, into major, I hear it and it wilds me too. Even if others don’t get the musical seasonal shift, I can sense their excitement as it happens. Needless to say, there is often chaos in the field, a lot of crashing into each other, laughter lifting like spice and sugar into the over-breathed air above our heads, and we forgive, as our toes sting like hell. We just dance, we just move, we just collide and apologise and move on. We have to or we might end up as part of the single track road.

Sticks. After all the winds we have buffeted against this summer season, we find sticks every which where, spun off from big limbs, like they are no longer useful. And, on the picking up of them, I get it. It’s a bit like clearing out a wardrobe (such an ancient name) and shucking away those dodgy frocks and blouses (another ancient word) for the moving along. That’s a season in a word. Move it along. It seems to me that nature is much better at this than we are, we daft humans who hang on to what was fine in the past, and is no longer. Nature just spits out. Maybe there’s a lesson there. However, and notwithstanding, (sorry, indulgence there) it is not easy, because we have this propensity to hold on to our past. I was young, looked good in this, once, thing. It wonders me, even as I know the feeling. And not just in bodily coverings, but in mindal (my word) acceptance. If we could, can, spit out the dead sticks in our lives, just like that, how might we free ourselves? From past pain, from regrets, from the feeling of pointlessness (way too many esses in that), how might we be able to enjoy the seasonal changes in our own lives? And our lives are seasonal, not as an accurate science, no way, but as a random crazy unknown thingy. Which it is.

In our turbulent times, as we try to navigate the yet unknown, who the frick are we? We have seen Sea take Land which seemed solid. We have been there when the light died and the black came in and held. We have danced with the reckless and longed to stay in that moment. We have loved, we have lost, we have done bloody well by the way. So what now? Who is caring, who is in charge, and what is it about that which tells us we need a leader anyways, beyond our own ability to flick and flex with a new dynamic dance? I say we need only ourselves, and that might need inner work, but that is where our power lies, not over anyone else, no way, no, no no, but over our own selves.

It’s a fiddlesticks sort of desert, seasons shifting like waves in a menace, sudden, unexpected, wild and infuriating, much as life is now. Meet you there.