ghost

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Island Blog – A Softening, Perhaps

On the track, the snow is dibbled, pecked and scribbled. Footprints slideside with others, creating giant boots, the skitter of bird, claw of dog, a circle and a stop. The pines, spruce, fir and thuja overhang the track, endless fingers luffing in a breeze that whispers thaw, falling drips to pepper the snow, and deeply. I see that other walkers have, mostly, kept to the midships of this snowfull track, each side flattened by big ass tyres, pressed into a slipslide. 

When a thaw is coming, it makes noise. My neighbours will notice that noise, as snow slides and crumps to the ground, but I won’t because I have no insulation in my loft. Their roof holds the snow. Mine shucks it off. It laughs me, when I’m not worrying about it. As I walk, I can hear the trees register a change, a lift from the stasis of snowfreeze. They creak and groan like old men lifting from a chair (or being told to do the washing up) and I stop to listen and to lift. You old buggers have been standing here since 1840. You have seen so much, heard so much, learned so much, withstood so much. I know you can keep on keeping on. I imagine an eye roll at my retreating back.

Turning into the Fairy Woods, where the beeches ghost, I notice where the thaw is slow.  Needle spread underfoot, no birds, no song beyond the scrawing screech of a jay, the ground is still hard, still snow covered. It wonders me. Does the earth feel the warmth of snow cover, as would a polar explorer, Inuit, Bear? Perhaps it is kind of cosy below that duvet of ice crystals, soft and almost motherly. Usually we have slice-rain, sleet and unkind slapdunk. Perhaps you like this new thing? I ask and something rustles.

Rounding, I tramp the track homeward, keeping to the midship. Younger trees stand here, scalped and ghosted but just resting, really. They will return in Spring. On this track, the thaw is more obvious, not on the track itself, but beside it. The dance of endless birds leave their prints, the pock mark of thaw-drips pepper the besides. Everything was covered yesterday, covert, hiding truths. Today, a softening. An opening, perhaps.

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Island Blog – Nature and Form

I felt overwhelmed yesterday. Stuff came in, calls and wotwot, like a collision. I am not good at that, this, it. I confound at dawn, no, earlier, because the beloved old frickin dog wakes me at o400 when I am finally asleep, btw. She means no ill. I know this, deal with the rag of this, and she still rises me with a smile as she squeaks and dances around my sleeping form.

Form. We all love this. It has a geometric shape, can solve an equation, can create a whole frickin building. I love form too. But today had no form, nothing form about it. My overwhelm took over. it was a spread across a peat bog. All those acres of apparent nothing. Generally speaking, I love the nothing, the gasp of cold air, walking out there into the sparkle of ice.

It thinks me. I take me and the dancing squeaker out for a walk, feel the cold hit my face like an energising gift, stopped to hear the thrust of an incoming tide and looked up at the skinny branches cutting the sky. I watched my little dog bounce through the ice-crisped leaves, saw he pick up a stick, long as a fence post and a definite threat to my legs when she scoots into the lead. I chuckled and felt the expulsion of air blast out all the overwhelm. Among the beauty of nature, things simplify. Fallen bracken stalks create a twinkling mound beside the track, all covered in ice and flashing in the sunlight as I move onwards. Ghost trees stand like sentries either side of me, and through the evergreen pines, the sky is a cerulean blue. Tiny clouds, miles above me, look like they’re painted on with a wide and wet brush. Ahead, snow clouds puff up behind the hills, a sort of ariel bonfire, ice white, sun-tipped. Will it snow, I wonder?

I meet nobody at all. Cutting through the woods, I look to the beyond. It seems to go on forever, and however hard I stare at it, this beyond, I will never get to the end of it. I realise that I have been staring at the ground too much, scurrying like a frightened mouse through my small concerns, and allowing them to create my state of mind. I watch a sea eagle slide through the sky, wings wide, slow and easy, and decide I need to get myself up there, to let my small concerns remain on a page or in. my diary, small they are, very small, and I am at liberty to alter or change any or all of them. I am unsure driving in icy conditions so, once I am home again and have rebooted the fire, I call to organise new appointments for a hair cut, an MOT, a shingles jag appointment. I settle to some sewing, eat lunch, switch off the phone and go upstairs for an hour to rest. Perhaps I will sleep a little. The walk into the wilds has given me form perspective, as it always does. Always.

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Island Blog – I and the Ghost

There is one in my system. A ghost. I know it is there, can feel it, smell it. Sometimes it is a catch of earthen mulch, autumny, wet and visual, sharp with the glint of long buried crystals, and stories. Other times it is lavender or lemon pressed close to my nose and causing me to pull back from the attack to my senses. It is never rose or bergamot or patchouli. Never. Visual. yes. But fleeting, so fleeting. I wonder if I am now too slow to turn my head, that, if I were still a young woman, I might turn faster and snap! Catch it. I wonder, too, if I my snap-catch might arrest it, for it and I seem to be strangely connected by an invisible line. It might pause for no reason other than this. But I cannot and it does not. It slips like mist through me, serving only to stop me for a second and to fill me with a sense of discomfort and perplexity.

I am curious. I am intrigued. Who or what is this ghost? Then I wonder more. Does this ghost have purpose? Does this ghost know who it is, if, indeed, it is a ‘who’ at all and not merely a what without purpose or function, identification or mission like a sudden rabbit bursting into my space as I wander along a track in the wild lands? What if it has blundered into me, by mistake and is now trapped somehow?

All these questions beseech answers I cannot give, but here is something I do believe. As a human, being the top predator, the top of the pecking order etcetera etcetera, and thus, that all things weird happen to me, this may not necessarily be the truth. Now this is, at first, confounding, ungrounding. It baffles me and I must explain it, for if I cannot then I am all at sea, so to speak. But what if it is just where I need to be? At sea, I mean. I have sailed enough dodgy oceans in ever dodgier seas to know that, at such times, when the balance of power shifts to an unfathomably powerful force, I find my place. I find my lack. I find my feet, my hands and my brain.

And here I am with the ghost, at a worldly human level, limited by what I was taught, what I learned, whom I trusted and who let me down; on my sibling dynamic, my understanding of how it should be and of how it should not; through religious curfews and constraints, through expectations and demands; through loss, anger and frustration. But the ghost will not explain itself, nor do I have the snap-catch to arrest it long enough for such a demand. I am the ‘I’ of the beholder and much good it does me. ‘I’ stands taller than a lower case ghost and yet has no supremacy over it. This fleeting misty invader holds it all with its ability to arrest and confound, to take a free flow morning into chaos, albeit momentarily, for the human ‘I’ will immediately rise into armour plating with his, or her, lance at the ready. But we are fools. The ghost can move through walls, through empires and lives and through history without a second thought or any thought at all.

So what is it? I decide to acknowledge what I already know and so what I say is this. The ghost that apprehends my normality (whatever that is) and challenges it, is a friend and, like a friend, it challenges me. Like a friend it leans in closer than anyone else. It is easy in my company. I need no armour plating. It tells me there is something as yet undone, unfinished, even unexplored and it will not leave, this laughing wraith, until I have addressed the issue. I might ask, what issue? But it will just laugh and wisp away, only to come again and again and again, because it knows that ‘I’ know exactly what needs to be addressed. My weak humanity is avoiding it and we both know it.

I am glad of the ghost in my system. It is my helpmeet at every turn, even if there is a great longing in me for no more turns. It stops me folding in, giving up, turning weak and feeble. It makes me strong and fiery, all punch and growl, all fight and roar. It also makes me impish and jocus, wild and circus with belief. It friends me in ways I would not, could not fathom; would never ever have invited in. Am I privileged in this ghost invasion? I doubt it.

I think we all know this ghost.