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Island Blog – A Fallow Dear

All creatives have times when they just cannot be arsed to create. These times are extremely uncomfortable to say the least, or I find it so. All those words, in my case, or all those lonely tubes of paint and mediums, brushes upright and dry as my father’s wit, or that piece of craft work, so compelling, so exciting and for so long, now barely touched or looked at. It is as if something inside has died, and sometimes, that is exactly what has occurred. Something has, indeed, died, or someone, and that someone took all the colours and the buzz with them when they did. It could be bad news, or a health scare or even the builders in making noise and causing a long disruption and a load of mess. It could also be nothing much more than boredom, the realisation that life has turned grey and heavy and dull, and the result will be a new birthing, I know this, new ideas, new hope, new horizons.

I know, of course, that everything changes, this too shall pass, and all other platitudinal infuriations, but that doesn’t help in the discomfort of apathy and disconnection and sludge. Even a body feels too big for its boots, heavy and ungainly, and a mind slows to snail pace. It can be a dangerous time of self-examination, of criticism, doubts and other unhelpful bollix, but even striving to not-think requires just too much effort. Just rest, they say, take time out, be kind to yourself. My eyes roll. I don’t want to do any of those things. I want to wake exuberant and planning mischief, longing to set-to with whatever project I was working merrily on, not a few weeks ago. However, having gone through this fallow slump a gazillion times before in my long life, I know it will, eventually, pass. I also know that, although my conscious mind is cold porridge, my unconscious mind is still ticking away, garnering ideas, planning a resurgence, focussed and functional. I am just tired is all, bored is all, fed up and fed down. This period of drag has a purpose and, oh yes, I will understand just what that purpose is once the lights come on again, when all will be illuminated, revealed and understood. Or so I tell myself.

So what to do in the meantime, whilst I wait, miserably, to relocate my natural energy? In order to rest I need to feel good about myself, this self who is currently a pain in the backside. I wash the bathroom floor. Oh well done, what an achievement, not. I make soup that tastes like pond sludge, wash some clothes, even hand wash a jersey for goodness sake. Is there no end to my resilience and fortitude and determination? What a star I am! But, in fallow times, I don’t actually feel those words, no matter how much I speak them out, hear them spoken by another, and if I don’t ‘feel’ them they mean nothing. I am still failing. It thinks me.

We all have fallow times, all of us and it is important to recognise, acknowledge and allow such times, because to enter the swamp of inner judgement is always destructive. Besides, those judgements roll off the tongues of past critics, often from childhood or early youth. I can hear them now. J has too vivid an imagination, is moody, unpredictable, irresponsible, wears too much eye-liner, is a terrible show-off and so on. Although these judgements don’t affect me now, the negative theme stands strong, its accusing forefinger wagging right under my nose. If you hadn’t done that, or chosen this, or gone there, or allowed that to happen, you wouldn’t feel like this. It is your punishment for past sins, in fact not so very far in the past. I silence those voices as soon as they speak. They are not helpful. This is just a fallow time is all, not a punishment, not forever, not here to bring me down and keep me there. In fact, it is a dear thing, a helpmeet, because my body and mind are both damn tired and bored and fed up and grey. Next time, when I feel it coming, this shutdown beyond my control, I will take a long holiday in the sunshine.

Africa sounds like a plan.

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Island Blog – Draggle Days, Twist Ice, Real Life

Ah Winter! Although we know he will come, we turn away at his approach, our longing eyes t’wards Spring as if this season means only draggle days and we try to imagine ourselves out of ourwinterselves, into frocks and shorts and easy light. But Winter is here, these ice twisted streets, the wind like a bully with too many teeth, powerful, pushing us down, slapping our faces with a cruel hand, all but just Winter. We can cow down, submit, falter and become less powerful. We all do this at times, in the dark, in the longing for Spring. Just heading for work is a fight and a soak or a slip. It can make us crabby, shift our saliva into spit, our feet into loud pounding away. Winter can feel like Culloden to me, the oppressor being Winter himself which, if I think about it, is ridiculous. Winter is winter and I am a piddling mortal. So what to do about the darkling ice twist draggle day thinking?

Well, music for me and inside work and more. I get out there with a challenge. I am me Big Winter, and you have no idea how good I am at being me. I pick my sky and I know I am lucky to see the whole of it from my island home, and then I just go, quick, fast, right now because I can see the grey cloudskid laden with hail and more about 20 minutes off. I walk the track, looking up and out at the bone trees the cold stones, the brilliant moss, impervious it seems to any winter bite. I watch a bird flight, hear the geese honk about, catch the flash of low sunlight through a spider web ‘cross dead grasses, see the sky in puddles, crunch last ice and smile at the amoebic snow melts aside the track. All is passing. All always will. Winter included.

I would, in my younger days, begin a Winter Love thingy. I would encourage poetry, song and music, twist ice walks and evenings beside an ebony fire, a gasp of talent only visible in the clarity of winter. Northern lights are wild and not just behind my home but in every one of us. We just got lost in cities and wages and other stuff that has nothing to do with real life.

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Island Blog – Nothing So Finite

The birches glow purple across the sea-loch as dawn hefts night over her shoulder and away. No, not purple, not just one colour descriptor. There is wine in there, the deepest darkest Rioja, some indigo (how come that rich word does not demand a capital letter?), amber, chestnut, a little, ebony and ivory. Not just purple, never ‘just’ anything. However, all that aside, the flow and blend of faraway birches in winter colour, arrests me. I watch them for a bite, even though they’re not going anywhere, rooted as they are to the whatever of whatever. The sky is blue-grey like our young heifers on the Tapselteerie hills, and, like them, refusing to be contained. Every time I look up, the dynamic changes. Flat and apparently peaceful, they erupt into crescendos and subside again, fooling us all. Feeding those female heifers took all my courage, the blue-greys I mean. Like rebellious teens with a strong sense of self and a kick-ass attitude to any authority, they would bound like puppies. However puppies are usually afoot whereas these wenches powered over me, canting and taunting with way too many kickerly hooves. One sent me flying once, the little madam. I got too close to her girly bits and she lashed out. I caught it on my knee and, in slow motion, flew miles, or it felt like it, before crashing to the unwelcoming ground in a most ungainly heap. Needless to say, as I slowly came back to myself, the whole playground had come for a looksee. 20 noses puffed sweet silage breath into my face and all I could see were legs, legs with hooves attached, far too many of them to make sense of the nose count. I touched one, wet and soft and like rubber. I looked into enquiring eyes. A child’s eyes.

Walking today, the wind is coldsome and from the east. It thinks me. What countries lie east of me? Ah, yes, the cold lands, the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian lands. Oh the stories I can hear as the wind brings them in. Tales of hardship and cold, of desolate winters in unbroken places that could break a person in the end. Tales of survival against odds I will never experience, the harsh honing of a human body, the dark, the endless winter dark, the pervasive cold, the snow children moaning at loose window panes, the biting teeth of a wind that will not abate until the very last minute. Of frozen lakes, no fish, of impassable tracks, no food supplies, of harpies and wood sprites and other complex variables that can, and will, derange an isolated mind, break a body, fracture a family. Of course, any environment can do that but my imagination likes to fly and the very thought of only 3 hours of light in a whole long winter shivers me. I have read the stories, the memoirs and the fiction and I can see how easy it might be to capitulate and to sink. We only have laden clouds to winter us through and very different stories to tell. Today, I might say, inside a story, I took my wellies off for 5 whole minutes, dancing in the freedom of toe escape. I scrubbed the mould off my legs and clothes and basked in the lick of flames from the fire we all fight over because A, it is pathetic due to the wet wood that would so love to dry given half a chance, and, B, there are way too many of us doing this basking thing. Plus, the smell of wet sock, unwashed feet etcetera is only for the desperate to endure. Some of us slink back to the cold. I have done this, lived this and, with hindsight, loved that I did.

The track is coppered now with beech leaves, a warm colour, a lie but I love that lie. Is it a holding on to the last warmth of summer past? Is it a transition, yes it is definitely that. Standing here, watching not the birches, purple or not purple, but the skerry, pumped like a lunatic with rising salt and spume and flying birds and danger, it thinks me. Do I like transition? Hmmmm. Nope. Who the hell does? Only those who think too much before they answer that question and I smile when I hear that think translating into Politely Positive Response. Way too much blah coming. The sky is darkening and is putting on a spectacular blue-grey show. There’s a moon landing ahead. I watched the moon this early morning. She’s a crescent just now, clouded in puffs of those lower in the ranks, those fluff balls loaded up until their bellies birth, and all over thee and me.

How extraordinary life is. How transitional. How small we are. Purple? No. Nothing so finite.

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Island Blog – Call on Pooh

Although I always awaken with Tigger bouncing in my head, even that striped loon can change shape as the morning unfolds. I never know how it will be until it decides for itself. It isn’t to do with what I do nor what I don’t. It isn’t about the weather, the season or my best laid plans. I can continue to bounce until even I get tired of the bounce thing, all the way up to evening, or I can feel myself turning grey. On the outside of me, I laugh at this. It’s the same for everyone else isn’t it you daft old eejit? Your grey slump is not new, nor is it original enough to warrant a voice. No, it is just a grey slump. Get on with it. You could, if you subscribed to self-pity, find a load of reasons to explain this. Or you can try to outrun it by attaching yourself to Blue (the marvellous hoover) or a bucket and mop or the iron or a pen. Third option. You could just stop running, stop searching for the reasons for grey, and let go. It is allowed.

I paragraphically distance myself from this conversation, as you can see. I have never been good at allowing myself such an indulgence, as I see it. Oh, I am really good at this allowing thingy with everyone else. It thinks me. Am I perfectionist? Well, maybe, because my standards for myself are as high as the sky and equally unreachable. I look up. Everything up there is doing what it does, naturally and adaptively. Clouds move because the wind moves them. Sun rises and falls, ditto the moon, all naturally. Down here it’s not so easy to adaptively flow. Our wonderful brains make mince of us if we are not in charge of them. We are also impatient and expectant and judgemental, often and mostly of our own selves. I find it reassuring to know that the grey hits each one of us, not that I wish it on a single living soul.

Today began with Tigger and became Eeyore by 0800. He’s a sad old sausage, tail gone plus other losses. Imagined? Possibly. Then I considered the stories lived out in the 100 acre wood. That is quite a wood by the way, and an opportunity to be lost for days. Moving on. Each of the friends find each other, seek each other out so that no distress remains thus for long. They are a team.

I believe that the writer fashioned each creature on the moods of a human. Winnie the Pooh, happy with everything in life, every opportunity a gift; Piglet, scared and lacking in confidence; Eeyore believing that life itself worked against him; Rabbit, tense, anxious and fearful; Kanga the mother, the carer, the soother of troubles; Roo, well, Roo is just Roo; Old Brown trying so hard to control whatever comes his way and failing and Tigger the jester. We all know all of them. We experience them all. What might trouble us, and troubles me is that I want to be always Tigger or Pooh but I cannot control that (Old Brown). Life has a life of its own and all we can do is to be okay about cloud thinking in the face of whatever wind decides to luff into power. Yes we must plan, yes we must take action, yes and yes. But when Tigger turns into Eeyore before the school run, then we might consider leaning into the grey, which, by the way, takes forever to create on the palette, more than 7 colours and in such cautious amounts that it is very easy to turn it into slump mud if distracted.

So when Tigger becomes Eeyore, call on Pooh. Always works for me.

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Island Blog – Darkling grey, Gulls, Chips and Walking together

Rain soft morning, grey enough for the gulls to look like white-light dancers as they cut the sky, wheel, cant, tip and slide, effortless flight like they belong which of course they do. I watch with yearning. They make flight look so easy and their beauty erases the memory of fearsome beaks and stolen chips. I once sat on the harbour wall with chips and within seconds was every gull’s friend. They are massive close up and not very white and sky cutting once their big yellow webbed feet slink closer with a look of black intent in their currant eyes. A sideways step becomes a menace when flanked as I then was and I confess I did elevate my butt, moving it and the rest of me back into the safety of a tourism crowd.

However from my big picture window I can dream. I can watch the spike flight, the lift and luff of not-white currant-eyed, yellow footed gulls become snowy dancers against the grey rain sky and smile. We are miles apart after all and there’s this big picture window keeping me safe from beaks and chip snatchers. I watched the grey and the soft rain all morning, the way it slides my window into smoke, the garden bird colours losing their integrity, becoming a brush stroke flow and return as they flit from feeder to feeder. I sewed a bit, noticing the pinks of this baby girl playmat dulling somewhat. Oh, I thought. These pinks were brighter yesterday. And then I remembered art school. Everything affects everything. On dull grey days in Falkirk (plenty of those) even the primary colours were confounded. We can’t work with this, they said and refused to flow freely from their tubes. The grey weather (is it yellow grey or blue grey?) is sending you, art student, into a dithery looking thing. Concepts, precepts, upsets and greyness are colluding to confine you. It is the real artist who can rise from this, who can utilise whatever is on offer this grey day. I am thankful for those grey Falkirk days. Others might, and did, shake their heads and head for the pub on such grey days. But I wanted to learn, not just how to work with grey days but more, how to walk beside the grey, to have that conversation, and not to turn away. To engage with the grey and to find the colours within, the ask of colour, the beg for it, to take flight.

Life. Yes? It thinks me. Whilst walking beneath the grey soft rain, which I love because rain enhances colour in everything. An upside down electric blue beetle , a feather caught in branches, leaves, speedwell blue, buttery cups, the honey back of a bumble bee, the float and breeze flow of wild grasses, the imprint of horse hooves in sucky mud, even the shine on my jack boots, so much glisten. If I am looking I will see. If I am aware, present, engaged, I will find the art. When I look back on the gull thing, I know that, had I not felt watched by the crowd of tourists, I might well have stayed my ground. I wish I had. I wish I did not give a hoot about being watched. However, I was right in front of an outside cafe and there is only one way to look when the sea beckons and there I was, sat sitting on the harbour wall plus chips. Plus gulls.

In the grey lies endless opportunity. I tell myself that and myself knows it to be the truth. Grey is my life right now, of course it is. When a life goes into grey it has options. Think grey, dive in or flipping don’t. I’m a flipping don’t sort of woman. Even as I flounder and plod, wonder and dither, fill up endless hours with a this or a that, I know that this grey has colours. It isn’t that I must needs grow beyond grey because that says grey is dull and grey is far from dull. To make good grey on an artist’s palette I must bring in rose madder, cadmium red, ultra marine, cadmium yellow, maybe, cobalt, maybe, plenty maybes’ to be honest. Just a touch, just a tiny touch and everything changes. Just like life. I am working with the grey, looking deep into the eyes of it, the currant eyes, and saying, I am not afraid of you. In fact, I like you. Shall we walk together?

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Island Blog – Unicorns, Bananas and Hope

I wake with a wobble this morning. I suspect I am not the only one. I know there is a big shopping list downstairs in my cosy kitchen, plus a couple of things to post, and, yet, I don’t want to go anywhere near people who still breathe. I make tea and drink it, watching the day rise like Venus from the troubled waves of the night. She looks good. The usual fly-by of geese, loons, swans and garden birds entertain me for a while until I hear the sounds of the seventies overhead. That’s himself getting up. It thinks me of a first drum lesson, all bangs and thumps and with no rhythm to speak of.

Although I am not nosophobic at all, I have a healthy respect for an invisible enemy. Who doesn’t! So, after a ridiculous and chuckly conversation with a girlfriend about what bananas remind us of when baked and floppy, I decide not to shop this morning. We have enough in store and besides I can cook the sole of a gymshoe and make it tasty, or so I tell my grandchildren. I decide to inhabit the day with an attitude of ad hockery which feels rather racy and sounds loaded with opportunities. First, I bleach the door handle after a delivery of unicorn poo. For those who have never encountered a unicorn, never mind its poo, let me explain. These pellets, prettily gathered into the depths of a little hessian pouch, ribbon tied, are, in fact, wildflower seeds. You just push the pellet into the earth, not deep, and wait for your unicorn to grow……should take between 4-6 weeks. I can’t wait. I bake the bananas and cover them in custard. They may taste lovey but, naked, they are far from eyesome. Listening to tunes of the 80s and dancing along a bit, the day moves forward in a beamish sequence of start, middle and finish. Many tasks complete themselves this way and all I do is walk beside them, mindfully, of course. We sort it out together.

Walking, I see the larch green above my head, the little primroses peeking out from sheltered dips, yellow as sunshine. A pair of mallards lift like an eruption from the burn as I startle them into the air, the drake a rainbow of colours. Two otters cavort in the sea-loch, pushing out from the rocks, from the safety of their holt, out in the wide open on a fish hunt. I watch a huge fish jump although it seems too early – maybe not. Horse chestnut leaves look like green fingers against the sky, now a mackle of clouds in shades of grey. I see nobody. For a whole 40 minutes as I walk through woods and along side the rocky shore, I am alone, just me and the little dog. By this time, visiting walkers would be all over this place like a pox, and welcome indeed, but not this year. Maybe not at all this season, for who can say? We are, after all in the incunabula of something we cannot explain nor define and that’s enough to wobble the sturdiest of us.

I light the fire for it is still chilly, even if the sun does shine down his generous warmth. Flowers are pushing through the earth, shrubs throwing blooms and trees beginning to spread their canopy. It’s a time of hope and that is one thing that never runs out. If one person loses it for a while, someone else can bring it back and it doesn’t require physical contact to spread. It just flows between us like a soft breeze and we can safely breathe it in until it fills us up once more. Then we can pass it on to another who needs it.

In 4-6 weeks I hope to have a garden full of unicorns. What larks, Pip!

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Island Blog 149 Fire and Ice

 

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149 – another Prime Number – indivisable by any number other than 1 or itself.

I like that.  That’s me.  Others may suggest alternative descriptions of something or someone so resolutely singlular, not many of which would raise me high on any Christmas card list.  Words like Selfish, Stand-Offish, Stubborn, Thoughtless, Narcissistic, Ego-Centric and so on and so fourth and fifth and sixth.  You get my jist.

But (and there’s always a few of them) in order to carve a furrow along which I am happy to walk, I have to be the one to carve it.  No, no, not that way!  they might cry.  Look, see, here’s a nice womanly path, one full of other nice womanly dudes with behaviour manuals and clean tea towels in their well-ordered drawers.  One look is enough for me.

How I have managed to love love love being a wife and mother of many, whilst maintaining my singularity is a puzzle to me.  Actually I didn’t manage that maintaining thing to be honest whilst living in the melee.  It was a question of forward motion at all times to avoid being crushed, but now, with hindsight, I can see that my intense and consuming need to be singular, even in those times, kept talking to me – an internal sustaining dialogue, despite the requirements of hostessing, mothering, catering and, against humungeous odds, domesticating those in my precarious care.

Anyone who has forged ahead in life has to be of singular persuasion.  Forging ahead and tidy tea-towel drawers probably argue with each other.  Now, shall I forge today or tidy my tea-towel drawers?

Some might say there are those who could do both and in the same day, but I doubt it, because the whole thing about forging is that it decides not only what you do or where you go, but who you are, your choice of path.  Consequences arise inevitably.  For example…..if I choose not to cook supper because I am busy writing, which is important to me, this ‘me’ who is completely forging and not a bit hungry, I may well upset you who are:

a.  Hungry

b.  Not a little irritated that I have abandoned my post.

c.  Alarmed at this turn of events, and concerned that, if ‘allowed’ this turn may take an unhealthy hold on me.

If I continue to walk this path it will eventually become the norm, expected and, to a degree, accepted.

Really? Well my mother never told me that and nor did anyone else by the way Jimmy (certainly not him), but it doesn’t mean I can’t learn it now.  Anyone can learn it now, any now, however grey and worn and old and tired.  People who decide to make a change will always find a guide when they need one.  Thing is, you have to take the first and scary step.

When a volcano erupts, it doesn’t ask permission.  ‘Oh, now, sorry to bother you, but would it be okay if I erupt next Tuesday night about 10pm, hmmm?’

When a glacier decides to move along a bit, causing masive tidal chaos, seals to flip overboard and huge ships to bonk their noses, it doesn’t check with anyone first.  It just moves.

These are prime events, huge events with consequences for us all, and, of course, barely related to any human ‘forgings’, but they illustrate my point to a degree.  If I wait for permission to forge, when my internal voice is hot enough to bend steel, then what on earth is my life all about?  I may well be remembered at the wake as a Good Woman (with tidy drawers) who was kind to everyone, never said NO, and certainly not in capitals, and who always put others first, which, in my opinion, says only a small thing about me.  The BIG THINGS are :

What did I do with my life?

How did I make a difference?

What legacy do I leave and who will learn some wonderful new freedom for themselves, by observing my work?

If the answers are Not Much, Didn’t, and Not Much, then all I have done is make a sandwich.

We are born of Fire and carved by Ice, like mountains.  We might take a little trip inside ourselves and remind ourselves of that.

 

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Island Blog 93 – Tapselteerie Dreams

Tapselteerie

 

 

 

 

Last night was an awfully big adventure.  Sometimes nights are like that. Short on sleep and long on dreams; dreams that skitter away in the process of waking, so quick as to leave me with the odd snapshot, and a depth of emotion I can’t necessarily fix into a shape.

Whenever I dream there are a couple of venues that consistently provide the backdrop for the drama.  One, oddly, is a little corner flat in Glasgow, where I only lived for a short while after Tapselteerie and before moving back to the island.  Those dreams are often good ones and I walk through the park or sip coffee in a busy café and there are no obvious lurkings of menace in any shadows.

The other and main venue is Tapselteerie, I know it is, although the stones and layout of it are often wildly wrong.  For example, we had a roof over our heads there and walls and floors, the usual household structure, but in dreams, they are often shaky if not completely absent.  When I am inside one of these dreams I am always looking for my children, which, for those of you who have read Island Wife, will not be a surprise at all.  The stones are grey and cold, the plaster walls missing, and there is often sky overhead instead of a white ceiling.

In these dreams I always have to fly to save them, my children.  I always know that I can fly, but each time I must find the courage to do it again.  I have sat myself down to think deeper on that search for courage, once the morning comes and strong black coffee brings me in to land.  Is it courage to take on the ‘saving’, I ask myself, or is the courage to fly again?  And, if I know, as I do, that I can fly, why would I need courage?  After all, I don’t need to think twice about walking, running, skipping, now do I?

And I find no answer to that.

One dream took me into the empty ruins of the place, cold it was and abandoned, the grey stone bared, the layout changed beyond my recognition, and yet I knew where I was.  I was alone.  The crunch of fallen debris under my bare feet echoed around me and I could feel my heart beating fast, hear my quick breathing.  Looking up, I could see my children way up high, higher than Tapselteerie high, flattened against the walls, no ground for their feet.  Each one was hooked to the wall by their clothing, and they just hung there, making no sound.  Much younger and smaller than they are now, they looked like friends of the Artful Dodger, all raggedy and torn and grubby.  There were no stairs, no structure, however skeletal, there to allow me to climb.  There was only one way up.

I had to fly.

The resistance to just taking off, knowing I could, surprises me every time.  It seems, in my remembering, to take a lot of wasted time, dithering about in the ruins of a broken house, when I could be up there gathering children off hooks.  But I always do it.

Then, suddenly, I take a deep breath and lift and the feeling it wonderful, the process effortless.

Once, I met Shrattle (Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake), or his lookalike half way up, but he was balanced on a spindly ledge and quite without wings, so no threat to any of us.  I lifted each child, light as a feather, off their pegs and into the sky, waking with that glorious light-hearted feeling that always follows flight.

Last night is already leaving me, the memories of the dream, but I do remember one thing.  This time it was in colour.  Never before has Tapselteerie shown herself in colour, and yet she had bucket loads of it.  She gave me walls and ceilings and laughter and spiders and bats in the cellar.  If I came down all those stairs, during a sleepless night to make tea, I had to remember to make light, because in the dark I would have ploughed into the huge migration of slugs from somewhere (I never knew where) to the wine cellar.  Sometimes a dozen deep and many feet long, the army flowed in silence to wherever they were going.  It was a marvel to behold and much less of one to land in the middle of it in bare feet.  People said salt will kill them.  We said, why would we kill them?  We lived with a good number of wild creatures and managed to do so, in the main, without disasters, although the floor in the back hall always needed a wash of a morning.

Dreams I know have symbolism.  Mine are often a chorus of many influences.  My past, my fears, the book I’m reading, the present circumstances, the last thing I watched on television. Add to that something on my mind, a new truth learned and understood, a forthcoming event and so on.  But whatever the graphics, however bizarre and unbelievable the storyline, the emotions of it linger longest, so, to a small degree I can understand what my imagination played out for me and why.

Tapselteerie looked just fine in colour.  It may be 20 plus years since I moved inside her walls, heard her song and moved to her rhythm, but she is alive and well and with her own place in my heart.