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Island Blog – A Wonderful Thing

I’ve decided. I may have breast cancer and wotwot, but the knowledge has kicked my wobbly butt. I used to think that bereavement and loneliness was a fricking big deal not so long ago. Then I was Nearly Dead for a couple of weeks and now cancer is my new companion, offering a new perspective. It thinks me. How Life twist and tapselteeries us, what a tumbler, a flipdoodle, and once a simple human using a minute percentage of her huge brain has come to some sort of agreement with all this twisting, tumbling, flipdoodling thingy, there remains a think or two. So much of it all is way beyond my control, but there are snippets of life or self, over which I have complete control. So that is the country in which I have landed. It is new territory, for sure. I have sat on said wobbly butt for almost 3 years now and you can tell. I refuse to run anywhere for fear of setting off a landslide. Looking out at Life through windows is no way to live, even if the looker cannot see any side of Life to which he or she belongs any more. Once, she was this busy, rushing, active, caring woman and now, well now, she is a blob, a pointless one. It isn’t that she misses the man to whom she was married, because she doesn’t. He was wonderful and infuriating. He was everything to her and he drove her to distraction. He reached his Sell By date most timely. She was done with caring for him. And yet, and yet, his presence was something she thought she could live without and with ease and, in that, she was delusional. His company, his very self had merged with her own, dammit. She knows that now. It took that horsefly bite, that collapse into Nearly Deadness and the subsequent cancer Hallo, to sharpen her wits, to tell her that she is now her own purpose and that knowledge requires action.

So, I call the local swimming pool. Local! ha! It is 23 winding miles away, a real shlep and I do not like swimming pools, no thank you. However, my wobbly butt tells me it needs attention and not the unwanted sort. I, through 3 years of sitting on it, writing, sewing, hiding, reading, are done. I had to go for a chest Xray this morning and that takes me very close, dangerously so, to the damn swimming pool. So, I clear my throat and call. I speak to Nadia, delightful, and she tells me there are no lessons on a Friday. I explain, overly so, that I must build up muscle tone having lost it all somewhere, although I couldn’t tell her where. X ray complete, no metal, no, hold this, rest your chin, done, thanks Helen. The sun is warm, ditto the wind. Glorious. Well no excuse now. Damnit again. I arrive, book in, swim, hating the first two lengths and then, and then, I get into my stride. Instead of jerking and splashing and hating it, I begin to flow. Well, sort of. After I spend a while chatting with the girls at reception and we laugh and connect and now I have to go again next week because I said I would.

I swing my sassy mini out of the car park and drive home. My energy level is up. It hasn’t been anywhere near the Up thing for 3 years. I grab a mushroom omelet for lunch and decide to take the barky terrier (bored) to Calgary beach, ignoring the usual flaps about No Parking Spaces, or Meeting The Bus on That Tiny Road (especially on corners) and we are off! I feel wild again, my favourite feeling. No jumper required. Only a poo bag and a my phone for photos. The sky is as blue as my hair, the tide way out (Blue Moon) and it is lunchtime so the sands are almost empty. The bay is huge and we walk it, in and out of the warm saltwater. Geese fly overhead and I almost fall over watching them. Life. Life. Life abounds, and in me too.

Home again but still fizzing with NRG, I decide to wander to the shore to gather sloes for gin, even as I have no gin, yet. I balance cautiously, on the rickety rocks of the shore, and gather the beautiful blue berries. I hear seabirds, the rush of a changing tide, the laughter of children somewhere across the sealoch. I wander home as leaves fall around me. The faithful old trees are heading for a long sleep, and Autumn is in full and fine fettle holding up blue skies and clouds, stars, Lady Moon and Father Sun. The circle of Life circles on, as I move gently through memories and hurts and joys and promises of more to come. I don’t know what, of course, but just the knowing is a wonderful thing.

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Island Blog – The River and the Flow

It’s all about rivers here, these African days of heavy rain, unheard of they say, even those who have lived here since childhood. Times are a-changing and that’s for sure. I wonder how the river life is coping with this abundance. Crocs will have more room in which to pretend they are rocks with eyes and the hippos, well, they can go anywhere, land or water and I’m sure they do. The mudslide turns a river bank into a skitter and many a zebra, impala, bushbuck, eland, nyala, to name but a few of the deers, giraffe, wildebeest, buffalo, warthog, person is at more risk than usual, when the bank stopped at the edge of the river and the river stopped at the edge of the bank. Roads have been washed clean away, gardens too and yet the ebullience of flora and fauna, the sudden rainbow blooms along the way sing a glorious song, thanks to this rain. The birds above the floods are spectacular. Even the dull looking ones back home are flamboyantly coloured up like disco lights in the tree canopy. Waterholes are full to bursting. I have only ever seen them dry, staring red-eyed at the sky, offering no relief to those thirsty wild ones who may have walked miles for succour and hydration. In my minds eye, I watch elephants flumping in the swollen pools, squirting each other, the little ones scooting along the bank trumpeting, or, rather, tooting, for they have to learn the trumpeting technique as they grow, much as we humans do when learning to play an instrument. I, we, haven’t been able to get to the camp, the one beside the river, the one around which all of the big five and more wander without reservation just whenever they fancy, because all the tracks have become, let’s say, rearranged over the past week. Ridgebacked and sluiced by deep rivulets, vast quantities of red sand washed down or pushed to one side, the track becomes trackless and most certainly does not allow traverse for a vehicle. So, the water controls the land, it seems and that makes sense to me. We can build all we like, the best house, the best road, fixing our human flags into a tract of land we call our own, and then the sky opens her maw and vomits for days, for nights until she is quite emptied out. Another week, they say. But, in between the thunderstorms and the deluge of rain, the sun is afire. Sitting in the sun lasts about 4 minutes, for the burn is ferocious. You don’t sunbathe in Africa unless you want to turn into brindle at best, biltong at worst, which I do not. I wander about in the garden doing this and almost can’t bear to stay for ‘that’, so hot is it out there.

Back to the river I have yet to see for real. Water is my element be it a river, the sea, ponds, lakes, tarns and puddles. I am drawn to them all in fascination, feeling the pull, loving the connection as if they are my birth mother. In the turbulence of my adolescence, wherein I felt like a zebra surrounded by lions, I imagined a river and saw it clearly in my imagination, watched all those fish going with the flow without independent thought and I could feel the disappointment. Why are you all following each other? Don’t you know we are all as unique as snowflakes or the stripes on a zebra’s back? It’s hard going against the flow, they burbled, and we feel better going with it. Pshaw! I snorted. Not me. Each time I was upbraided I was going against the flow. At times it was dreadful and I longed to be like Penny and Marion and all those other fish I met inside a school uniform or in the work place or later as a mother and wife. I even changed my writing to look like Penny’s and Marion’s, following them, following the flow. Yes, it did make life peaceful but the schisms in my mind, my heart, my soul had voices loud and demanding. In fact they were disappointed in me and that is the very worst thing, to be the disappointee. Certain I was born into the wrong family, a stork off course thing, I couldn’t not swim against the flow, not all of the time for real but all of the time inside my vulnerable heart. Instinctual behaviour was not encouraged and that’s the only way I could be. That way, they said, may lead to madness, at worst, a reform home at least. Well, I managed to dodge both thus far but it thinks me a lot when I consider this fitting in thing as if it is an essential requirement for life.

The ones I relate to now in my older life are always the ones with a twinkle in their eyes. Oh, Hallo You! You have run amok at least once in your life and you enjoyed it, didn’t you? Yes you aged and yes you learned how to balance the imbalance in your heart, your soul, your mind in order to fit in, I get that. Otherwise you would be either mad or in a reform home or worse, but tell me about those times. How did you get there at all when so many, constrained and for-your-own-good fettered folk just give up on their inner voice, their intuition. and have to spend a fortune and a zillion hours in later life re-learning that which came naturally at birth? I see the others, the conformers, in the river, conforming, going with the flow, going nowhere at all and it is all I can do not to scoop some of them up for a time of Q and A because they have not challenged what appears inevitable. So many, stuck in silent desperation, going to work and back again and loathing it, wondering Is This IT? Well, yes it is if you keep on keeping on with the same old routine. So turn around. Try it. It is definitely tougher but there are only a few of us and there’s so much light, so much to feed on, so many empty coorie-holes to safety in, and such a thrilling rush as the river pushes by and my goodness you’ll grow so strong.

I recommend at least a try. I also know and can see how incredibly hard it is to call a stop. There are others to consider, they depend on me, this is the shape we discussed and agreed upon and what would I do instead? An understandable dilemma but with one life, isn’t it worth deep consideration, a turn around in the river just to see things differently?

The river flows in one direction, always moving towards the ocean, always claiming land back along the way. Underground, overground the river flows. Think of the river as life. And then decide whether or not you want to remain with the flow.

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Island Blog – Ebb and Flow, Days of Minutes

This life without himself can feel like a loss even thought he was (often) a pain in the ass. As, I imagine, was I. The days are minutes to be filled, and I am advised thus:- to write my list of things I want to do in this new life when nobody ever asked that question in the old one. Not never. It begs the question. What do I want? Well, I don’t know. Can someone tell me please because I know that place, a place of ‘no I don’t agree’, of ‘seriously….what?’ of ‘okay then, if I have to.’ This is my comfort zone which btw has abandoned me. The peripheries of my world are blown like a bubble burst and the world beyond is one scary zero. I turn back. I oftentimes (love that word) do. But what I turn back to is a day of minutes and there are many, oh so very many. So, I don’t like this minute thing. I don’t like this nothing, nowhere, nobody thing. So what? Hmmmmm. So what.

I was once alone, for about five minutes having been expelled from school(s) and college and my first job. Sacked. I was, so they told me, a muttering disturbance, a rebel in the corridors of whispers. Had I been not me, I probably might have led a revolution but I was never that courageous and I laud the ones who did, who will do in times to come. I was taught to be a lady. Not to upheaval, not to upset, but nobody taught me the wisdom of being such a creature. It isn’t about being a doormat. No. Being one of those lady women is to be wise living with attitude. within structures, confines and male domination without aggression, without fight, without loss of self, but clever enough to get what this lady wants. I wish I had learned it from my mother’s milk but she had not the skills to help me there. I am learning them now.

So, I walk, run, dance, play within the minutes of days. No, it is more than that. I am loving the journey. Yes there are times I wring my ankle on memories, on moments, but I am still a dancer. I watch my bone-awkward fingers as I work my keyboard. I say, hallo, swollen joints, well done you. Just see what you have done, achieved over the minutes of days in your life. My toes, bent and bony, my body skinny and scarred. Hallo you all. Well flipping done.

And then, suddenly, as though my thinking has been heard and taken to heart, in comes the painter to redecorate the upstairs rooms, ridding them of short term history, the falls, the clutches at cupboard doors pre a fall, the rust, the grease smears, the smoke of an old pipe. All opened up in brilliant white, fresh, the promise of a new future, a new strength of days. Then comes the gardener, to cut my grass. I kept my grass long, my dandelions fierce for the bees and butterflies till now and he gets that. Now the bees and the butterflies are sucking from the bluebells so it doesn’t feel so bad to cut the heads off my favourite butter yellow sun-followers.

This is the flow. People come in. Someone leaves the table. Nobody else can take that seat, but the loving hands that reach out can somehow help the day of minutes into something else, something that has new life, that can move on into more days, more minutes and can, with their investment, change everything.

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Island Blog – Poppies, Tides and Hugs

There is something deep about a hug. Like an ocean flowing over, through and around you. It won’t drown you because you can breathe underwater. Enveloped inside big strong arms, feeling the pressure of warm fingers, the familiar smell of home. I am home. You are here. You and I are, for the length of this hug, as one body. My love flows to you as your love flows to me, right down to my very core, fizzing along my capillaries and through my muscles and over my skin like the first sip of champagne. When we part, the tide has turned. From slack water to ebb or flow. Birds lift in anticipation, fish swirl in the depths, sensing a change; seaweed flutters in confusion. Which way now?

After months of slack water, these son-hugs turned the tide. Tall, strapping men, fit and healthy, warm and soft, gifting love and support, hugging. They have to bend down a bit for a hug with me and even further down to hug their wheel-chariot dad, but they can flex and stretch, rise up again effortlessly, as once we did. Buried in their chests I breathe them in, remembering. Not so long ago they dandled on my knee, fed from me, squealed their delight, screamed their anger and now look at them, fathers themselves with knees for dandling their own little ones. How fast life travels, how fragile it is and yet how strong. How long is a life? There is no answer to that. What matters, it seems to me, is what we learn during that life through observation, sail correction, through the anger and the joy, the near drowning.

Moving through a morning of poppies, I feel the inner shift. Tomorrow, if the wind rises, these crimson wide-open petals may be ripped and stripped. I saw them as buds at 6 am. By 7.30 they showed me a cadmium red mandala. By 8 they were face-up to the sky, black mouthed, anticipating insects, their petals combing the breeze like silk. To seize the day, the moment of lift, as they do, teaches me. To show me life is beautiful, fragile as poppy petals, strong as sons, and, most of all, to be truly lived, no matter how long or short. No matter at all.

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Island Blog – Waiting, Silence and Engagement

This day I walk into absolute silence. Nothing moves, not a whisper, not a leaf, not a nothing. Under the tree canopy, beech, birch, sycamore, hip-hop, ash and alder, all branches, all leaves are completely still. T’is a rarity on this wind blown island and one to be noticed; one to become engaged in, to stand still beneath the huge silence and to become a part of it.

It is tempting to march on, my thoughts pushing at me like a man might ‘encourage’ me to get a move on. The Hurry Up of life is a part of our being. In order to get this done, I must move quickquick because the next thing is out there tapping its fingers on the table and rolling its eyes, impatiently. Do I always need to buy into this? Well, no, I don’t. Not now, anyway.

Standing under this still canopy, I reflect on those days, when the list was so tightly packed as to be almost impossible to achieve. Is there time between the napkin ironing and the school run, the first school run, for me to walk? Maybe, but only if you go like a dingbat, whatever that is, and avoid any such nonsense as looking out, up or around; no following a woodpecker’s looping flight, no sniffing of a wild rose in the cupped hand of that wee burn because that might take a few minutes being as you will have to lift your skirts, flip a fence and clamber.

These slow days, these days of so-called retirement, lend me time. Time that begs a payback and that payback is engagement. So, I engage. I turn to watch the sea-loch. It is flat as a mirror, burst open only by an otter, hunting. The waters close over almost immediately, as the air does once I push through it, ready, cleansed, new, for the next thing that might interrupt the still. The track is empty, as it mostly is. The stones lay flat or sometimes upskittled by a passing estate vehicle. I notice change. A branch fallen, a new growth spurt on a blackthorn, a higher rise of glorious grasses, a touch of sunlight illuminating a dead branch on an ancient tree.

In these extraordinary times, there is stillness. In fact, there is complete stopness. Where there was a flow of communication, a moving towards each other, we now step back. This day, as giving people delivered food, fish, vegetables and mail to our lockdowndoor they all pulled back as I came forward to receive. That space in between us has become, could become a long term space of fear. It must not be allowed to do that. In many ways it is so simple to go with the rules right now, but when they are lifted, will we lift, also? It thinks me, a lot. Living with Captain Vulnerable, I have many thinks about it, to be honest, and find it quite hard to see my feet on any of the future ground.

No matter. I will wait, as I did beneath the still trees, until something new illuminates my thinking. After all, I have lived through many battles, climbed many mountains, felt the fear and still marched on. And, in the meantime, I will celebrate the care and the giving and the inventiveness of those who have made these extraordinary times their chance to engage in ways they might never have known, had life stayed ordinary.

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Island Blog – Composing History

This morning, around 4 am, the chaos awakened me. I cannot call it a dawn chorus because, by definition, a chorus is a group of musicalities singing, or playing the same melody with sensitively selected harmonies plus the odd discord for salt. This gradually escalating cacophony smacks more of jazz, country, classical and pop all playing at the same time and yet, bizarrely, it is far from discordant. It flows in a glory of counterbalance through the open window telling me the day is rising and so should I because light is my thing and this music is the most uplifting I could ever wish for. Wherever we live, birdsong is a daily gift, whether it be given to us on the island, in a flat in Glasgow, on the coast of Spain or in Crinkly Bottom, Englandshire. And it is free, no need to download an app nor pay a monthly sub. We cannot see the music, but we can see the musicians, if we let our eyes roam the landscape. They are free, wild, not in lockdown, not separated from loved ones, and they can do so much to uplift a flagging spirit.

I come downstairs, make tea and go check on the moon. I know she is there, could almost hear her and most definitely saw her light seeping through a crack in the curtains. She is gibbous, pregnant with a burgeoning rounded bump, about to give birth to fulness. The tide is waiting, I see her, sitting there, flat and rising as the undertow pushes more sea beneath her bulk, swelling her until she will reach her full height on May 7th. Gulls shriek above her, their sharp eyes following the fish just below the seafoam, occasionally to dive, with no grace whatsoever, thus erupting the surface into splash and bother. Greenfinches bounce along my fence, Goldfinches flit like butterflies across the field and a lone heron, yelling abuse as always, flaps over the narrows heading for the sea.

All of this looking and seeing thinks me. Of us, of all of us, all people, all colours, shapes and sizes. We are a chorus of humanoids, no matter what melody we choose, and in singing together we have the same power to uplift a flagging spirit. I know that in this crazy-bonkers time we cannot meet each other to compare notes, and all of us are changing, will be forever changed by this. There is a new score being crafted, new melodies unfolding, twisted and turned by capricious tides, pushed along by a strong undertow, powerful as the pull of the moon. 2020 will never forget what happened, what is still happening. And, there will be stories, millions of stories, myriad hearts speaking out, singing out and the chorus of these songs and stories will be remembered and resurrected long after we go back to dust. How remarkable to be living in this time! This period in history will be taught and learned in schools for generations to come. And we were there, we are there, we are here, living it, seeing it. This is our time. May we take it all in, really look and really see everything, employing all our senses in order to round the story gibbous, pregnant, like the moon, ready to give birth to a brand new world.

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Island Blog – Connectivity

As my departure day moves inexorably closer, I think on the ties that bind. Some I can see, like a rope fence or the woollen threads in my jumper, but many I can not. The familial ties of parent and child, husband and wife, friend connecting friend, distance between places, people and things, all quite invisible, but strongly there, nonetheless. Both ties need careful and attentive attention, all ties do. There are threads connecting us to our past, some of which need the snip, some need untangling from the falsitude of memory and some just need untangling for a more intelligently wholesome second look.

On the ground I have complete control over my ties that bind. I can choose the flavour of my message, text, tweet or letter as I can choose my response to those sent to me. There is an awesome and awful power right there in my hands. I can create and I can destroy just by letting my fingertips dance. They say the tongue is the most dangerous part of a human body. What you say can kill or it can cure. But it isn’t just the tongue. The way I think is the true beginning of everything, for if I think all people are intrinsically good, then this thought automatically controls my tongue. It also opens my heart to acceptance, compassion and humility so that my tongue has no desire, nor motivation, to wag unless, that is, it wants to support another’s dignity, in which case, wag on tongue, wag on.

Connectivity requires intelligent attention in all things, from rope fences to woollen jumpers, from familial ties to a worldwide spread of proffered threads. I have often been astonished, when someone I barely know wanders into my head and then astonished again a short while later to receive a message from them or a phone call. At times when I have met a friend or child or family member in my mind, I discover that on the very day I thought of them, they were going through something tough. However, I don’t believe I ‘thought’ of them through my own undeniable genius as a medium. I don’t believe I thought of them at all. In fact I know, without doubt, that it was absolutely nothing to do with me. Some higher source connected us because that is what higher sources do – they see the whole, the eagle eye view, only they fly even higher and can see a whole lot more. This connection opportunity is just that, and it has a name. Love. My task, down here on the ground is simply to let go of my need to control and to open my mind and my heart.

Doing this brings rewards. Not things, not status, not an ego polish but instead that elevating sense of being connected to everyone else. Deep inside we are all damaged to varying degrees and we all need each other to heal. Think of that smile that some stranger sent your way the day you were late and flustered and cut them off at the roundabout. They could have sworn but they didn’t, they smiled and in that short moment everything changed inside. Think of that WhatsApp message that came through on a rainy morning as you battled with your year end accounts, saying “just thinking of you my old friend” and adding a heart. If we pay attention to these times, we open our hearts and minds for more. We are also inspired to give back in the same way. But paying attention is a decision. it doesn’t just ‘come’. We must invite it in and walk with it wherever it may lead. We don’t need to study. We just need to take the time to notice everyone. There is no feasible excuse for not paying attention. ‘I’m too busy’ doesn’t cut it because we are all too busy if we decide to be. Busy is not productive. Productive is productive and Busy is just making noise and loneliness. Busy cuts us off from others and it is Others we need, not Busy. When people ask me if I am busy I say an emphatic NO, because that screen between me and everyone else has done me no service at all in my life beyond cutting me off from my healing source of light.

Keeping connected to family and friends is comparatively easy, although even then we can erect that Busy screen. But the real and proven way we can heal ourselves and the sadness, loneliness and war right across our beautiful world is to pay attention to connectivity; to let those threads flow out from us.

Every moment, busy or not.

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Island Blog 156 Another Way Back Home

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I realised, whilst getting myself lost in the streets of Barcelona, that although most of us have two eyes, two ears, one nose and one mouth, no two of us look exactly the same.  Similar, yes, almost identical in twins, but never exactly the same.  Even the identical twins I know, numbering one brace of birds, are not exactly the same; eyes slightly further apart on one, mouth a bit wider on the other, one quiet and pensive, the other gregarious and full of chat.

People throng through these streets.  I stop in a patch of sunshine as they flow by me.  They seem to know where they’re going, these hundreds of different faces, just in this one square with 10 narrow cobbled streets running out from it like sunbeams in a child’s painting. Not only am I seeing different nationalities and colours, but within those very numbers there are more differences, and more.  Perhaps, I wonder to myself, as I puff for the enth time back into Government Square, they are all thinking it’s Groundhog Day and I am the one keeping it going, popping into view again and again as if I can’t get enough of Government HQ. Although they are a moving mass of human souls, I’m sure I recognise a few of them and they do stare a bit as I grow more and more de-hydrated and anxious.  How on earth I manage to keep returning to the same flipping square, when I choose a new street every time is a marvel, even to me, although in my defence, I would like to point out that every single one of them is lined with the same shops.  One Desigual, one Barcelona Football Shop, one Flower Shop and one Pharmacy.  I might be needing that one if I don’t find my way out of the maze.  I also have no money, no idea of the address I’m staying at, nor do I have my mobile phone.

I bet not another soul in this flipping Government Square (oh here it is again!) is as vulnerable on this deceptively calm sunny afternoon.  I decide to stop panicking and lean against a wall looking as nonchalant as I can manage. Even though my mouth is dry as sandpaper and my heart about to take off,  I manage to calm my breathing, refusing to pay attention to any thoughts of being lost in Spain for months and dying of thirst.   Nobody knows where I am, other than somewhere in Barcelona and, as it took us 30 minutes to reach the outskirts yesterday in a speedy motor, it’s a pretty big city.  It’s beautiful too, and filled with stunning architecture, churches with bells that toll every quarter and on the hour, quirky alleyways (!), window boxes ablaze with colour, bustling cafes and wine bars.  Gaudi is everywhere, or his influence is.  The Gran Familia is spectacular from the outside with swoops and swirls of stonework, angels and trumpets, holy words and what looked liked bowls of fruit at the very top.  The queue was long and it was raining that day so we didn’t go inside but sat, instead under a cafe umbrella drinking strong black coffee and sharing our opinions on the charge of 25 euros per person to walk through a sacred space, squashed, as you would be, in a seethe of people, and unable to see very much at all.

We are not only different on the outside, but on the inside too.  It’s a strange part of our DNA, this difference thingy, because, to be honest, if a little more consideration had gone into our wiring, we might all be great pals, and life would be a doddle.  And dreadfully dull, or so I imagine.  If we knew just what to do next around each other, we wouldn’t have to ask, research, enquire.  We wouldn’t have to dig deep inside ourselves for those folk we find ‘difficult’.  We would never need to change. It sounds like Pleasantville to me.

However there are times when I get thoroughly fed up with all this inner changing.  It’s all very well writing, and reading, books on the subject of inner betterment, but putting any of it into practice is hard work.  Sometimes minute by minute hard work and for years and years.  What I have learned is that, if I want to succeed in life I must put everyone else first.  I must be compassionate even when I feel like murder – especially then – and I must learn not to talk about myself as often as possible.

I could fold my mental arms and stay exactly as I am, but the damnable thing is that if I put into practice all of the above, learn to breathe more slowly and to count to ten instead of ripping someone’s head off, it is I who feel better about me!   I have achieved something, because I have overcome myself. I have found a new way. I don’t welcome change, not in the areas I don’t feel need it, but it is needed for there to be any peace. Biting my tongue is painful, but so much better in the long run.  Those unspoken words can leave my mouth in one slow outbreath.  Simples.

I was certain I was right in my choice of direction out of the square and yet I was insistently walking the same way over and over, hoping for a different outcome.  Once I stopped marching forth with all the conviction of a zealot, my mind set in concrete, and I slowed down, breathed away the panic and allowed in, if not welcomed, the possibility that I might be wrong in my choice of direction, I noticed a wooden walkway between two buildings that had been there all along.  It was the one I had walked beneath and admired some hours before. This was my way back home.

I can do the same around a routine, or the way I like something done.  It can be a no-big-deal sort of thing and yet it escalates into exactly that when I hold on too tight. After all, I’ve done it this way for years.  Why should I change it?

But….  if I let go,(just saying it lowers my shoulders and unclaws my fingers) I allow in the possibility that there might be another way.

Another way back home.

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Island Blog 44 – To Live Again

Island Blog 44

Sometimes, in ordinary conversation, a friend might ask me if, given a choice, I would live my life over again.

I think back across the millions of miles of it, the lush richness, the deserts, the rainbows of success and the stumble-grounds; the learning and the laughter, the birthing and the dying, the joy,grief and inner growth.  Particularly the inner growth.

It is not a logical question, or answerable using logic, so you can guess that there are no men present, although maybe that’s just the men I know who, bless them, would say it can’t be true unless it’s been proven.  I know what ‘proven’ means to me.  It’s that point in the process of bread making, when the dough has risen as high as it can without pushing open the skylight.  The point when it requires further bashing and twisting and pummelling into shape before being popped into an extremely hot oven for a permanent shape-arrestment and a nice brown crust.

Anyway, answer the question you daft island wife….

Well would I? Live it all again?

My first feeling is one of huge tiredness.  It is not easy to imagine, let alone believe in, the energy required, not just to go through it all again, but to know what I’m going through as I go through it and worse, to know what comes next!

My head is reeling at the very thought.  So, park it for now.

My next thought/feeling/response is that, had I not been gifted the life I lived, there would  be no story, dynamic and whacky enough to have led me to write it down;  to have been guided to an experienced agent and through her, to have found a well established ‘we-don’t-take-on-books-unless-they-are-top-quality’ publisher.  And if there had been no madcap story, just a regular law-abiding disaster-free life, kept under militant control, I probably couldn’t imagine wanting to go through it all again.  The very idea would just have made me wriggle my ageing butt deeper into the sofa cushions and pull out my knitting, thankful that all those requirements to jump about and be adaptable are just blurred memories.

Instead , look at me learning to Tweet and Blog and answer messages on Facebook (for goodness sake) and feeling rather like I hoped I might feel, but didn’t, at the age of 17.

Is this, I ask myself, because you are being stretched when others are shrinking?  Or is it just that I am still living this life, instead of peering back across it all from the soft plumpy feathers of my wide-mouthed armchair?

So ask me now.  Would I live my young life over again?

Absolutely N.O.T.

But….. I wouldn’t change one bit of it, except, perhaps, that one time I drove right over a roundabout near Greenock because I didn’t know it was there.  Men were digging up the road and the leading lights had failed.  It was a splendid performance and I came to rest in a field with my headlights illuminating the bottom of a large white bull.

You can’t park here!  Said the roadman after chapping on my window.  Yellow rain streamed down his face and a furious gale played skittles with the traffic cones.

No mention of the roundabout.