hear

by

Island Blog – Still Curtseying

I went to work today on my day off and here’s why. I skinny through, that’s what I do. In these days of living alone, there is just so much of it anyone can do without demise. As a child I thought that meant ‘curtsey’ and I probably did, living in the times of bad girl, good girl, behave girl, don’t speak out of turn girl, look away girl, say nothing, got it, nothing. Those times. Now I see it more as demist (to clear condensation, cloudal blindness, anything that stops me seeing the next thing or anything pretty much thus preventing clarity). Ok, I made the last up, but there are a few thinks there, little birds fluttering, lifting, looking squinty at me.

I don’t curtsey anymore. Wish I’d learned it years ago. That obedient (not) befrocked girl is ready for anything. I can see ahead. To be honest, it’s the olding times for me and I am fine with that, the feist in me strong, the play, the humour, the yes to life and to all her moments, all her offerings. Yes, yes.

I watch the play out with the generation below me. I read the rants, the shouting at the stars, I hear the local chat. I hear the disappointment, the childhood neglect and worse, I smell the burning, the decay, see the curtseying. I see the tough fight for independence, for recognition, for allowance, for acceptance, for love. I don’t know if it’s just me, or if all us oldies feel this. I just want every single human being to be who they are, without fear of judgement. An old dreamer, maybe, but I can remember feeling this strong when I was 16, when I was powerless, and still curtseying.

by

Island Blog – Sense ability

We forget, don’t we, to notice what our natural senses tell us, unless someone. shoves a fragrant bloom under our noses? So busy is life these days, so disconnected from the beauty of the wild. Where once fields scattered in glorious disarray, there are housing estates. And it’s all very well to shout about the loss of ‘green’ but where would all our people live? In caravans, wicker shelters? It’s definitely not an easy conversation piece, nor a simple decision for the big cheeses in our world, our cities, our villages. I remember a time living in Glasgow, in a flat. So not my thing, but there we landed, short term. There was a ‘washing green’ for all 6 flats. A stumbly plastic spidery thing stood in the small patch of grass, a few pegs attached. One sunny morning, after washing a load of boy stuff and with nowhere in the wee flat to effectively dry anything bigger than a couple of boxers, I lugged the basket down to the back door. I had already bought pegs and hoped the thing that looked like a big umbrella with plastic connectivity and the ability (apparently) to move with the breeze, not that there was one, would never be one, not in this square of overgrown grass, fenced in like a punishment, would dry the load.

I pegged and swivelled the thing. It squeaked and creaked and tipped and I just knew that nobody, from any of the flats which, all of which proffered a scummy window view of me out there being a loon, used it. I stood back to check my affixings. All seemed pegged up. A window opened. A woman poked her head out. I looked up. Hallo, I smiled. Just pegging out my washing. Aye, she said, and chuckled. You won’t do it twice, she said. Everyone takes their dog out there and never clears up. She was right on that. I remember that moment, as I moved back into the confines of a flat, having known the fly-freedom of a west coast home, all space and nature, most of the latter moving in with confidence, and felt an overwhelming sense of loss. I won’t live this way anymore, I said to myself, even though it seemed there was no way out.

Life is different now, and it thinks me. I would have diminished there, starved, lost myself. I am a wild woman, a creative, a solo. Returning to the island gifted me, eventually, a reconnection with all that was familiar. Instead of traffic noise, I came back to the birds, remembered their songs. Instead of grey pavements, I returned to peat-foot, to a ground that bounces with me as I walk. Instead of incessant chatter, I returned to conversation. Instead of a thrum of people, an assault, I met individuals.

Today, just today, my five senses lived, really lived. I watched a young otter dash to hide under my car, a fleet, yes, but I saw it. I watched sea eagles cut the sky in a spirograph. I heard the loons way down there on a lifting tide. On a walk I saw wild honeysuckle, blousy and determined, create a bouquet of delight from the roots of a huge fallen pine. I stopped to touch the delicate but feisty blooms and breathed in the fragrance. Home again and I sat to taste a home-made hummus, salad, a wild garlic Tapselteerie pesto, toasted seeds. I heard the loons again. They’re down there somewhere.

by

Island Blog – Susurration, Perhaps

Outland, Outsea, this unpredictable giant of salt water, gluttoning on random rivers, streams and a million other acolyte trickles of water, bursting from deep, deep within the belly of earth, all desperate to conjoin with the Outsea, the glorious escape from endless confinement. They cannot resist the ancient call, no matter how Man levels and compromises, poisons and redirects them for new housing, for a wrong forestation. No matter the poles thrust deep, no matter the planting of invasive species just because nobody educated us in time. These bodies of water will find a way, however patient they might need to be.

I watch it all through a reach of glass. Gannets slipside a wind I cannot feel, sitting here behind a double shot cappuccino with chocolate sprinkles. I cannot sense the slant and shift as they rise and float so close to an unforgiving granite cliff. Below I notice seaweed flopped over the stony rocktops like mermaid hair. When the tide rolls back in a great big yawn, the patient weed will lift again and float away, always on the move, a survivor in a deeply awkward life. And then cometh another storm, or the oceanic and angry response to the way we humans are making life very difficult for the flow of water, and that weed will look like a victim as it is blattered onto rocks by the fist of gravity and into new places. But don’t be deceived.

Ice white spume froths around the rocks, falling away, back into the green. Under-sea blow sends shadow pulses then takes them away. Catspaws echo each puff of wind, a feisty wind, footsteps. Gulls crowd on a spit of rock, a jagged tooth. They look like jewels from here. A shag stands sentinel right on the end, sea-facing, wings out like a black angel. None of these know I am here, high up on the cliff. watching the wind taunt the water willow, the scraggy grasses, watching the long reach of every wave push across the sand; watching each one retreat, return, repeat. Across the poppling water, the Outlands are clear, striations on their rocky faces. I can count them and see a peppering of cottages, a mast or two, a ship hugging the far shore. The gulls weave a sky web, the gannets dive, the shag stands dark sentry, and up here, behind the double shot cappuccino and that reach of glass, I can hear nothing. Susurration. perhaps.

by

Island Blog – Macaroni and a Hag Stone

I hear calls, here, inside my ordinary life. Birds in trouble, a catch of a mew from a feral kitten, lost and hungry. I hear the rumble of boats way out at sea, the whirr of a coastguard helicopter, the call of a lamb being an eejit, even the high-pitched squeak of a mouse in my drystane wall. I hear it all, even, and above the noisy interior of a home on Radio Two. I don’t think my ears do the hearing. Can’t be. I think I hear because I care so much about them out there, fighting for their lives, every single minute of the day. I remember, in that short spell of living on the Glasgow streets…..well, not ON the streets, I was super aware of the timbre of passing conversations, recognising trouble. It caused problems, as you may guess, as I launched myself towards a young woman lying on the pavement and crying out. I heard her pain and that was enough for me. I just held her hand for a moment, and she looked up at me and I don’t regret that one bit, as her eyes said many things. Thank you for caring, no hope here, please move on. And I did.

My kids liked to eat three dishes. Macaroni Cheese, Shepherds Pie, Sausages and Mash. The End. Now, I may have bored myself to death preparing the same old in a weird triage, but it happied them and all plates were cleared in seconds. Life was ordinary then, as it is now, but I know something, something I had no idea I was teaching them….the ability to listen beyond the noise of Def Leppard, of Super Mario, of the shite and spite of secondary school, because, even if they don’t all admit to it, they do listen, they are aware, they do hear. So many times I can walk with someone who just talks all the time, listens to nothing, hears nothing, unless I arrest progress and say, Stop. Listen.

I can hear mice in the undergrowth, the chatter of baby tits inside a drystane wall. I know the call of a young buzzard, the way a mother woodcock reassures her chicks, hidden inside a stone uprise inside the woods. I can hear when a huge beech limb is about to give up and fall due to water ingress. It isn’t magic, just practise and an open mind. There is a wonderful place in-between the sensible worldly science and the Otherness and I can embrace both, and I like that very much. I think being stuck is a choice. Not mine.

Still, in my days of the now of me, I can be cooking something, dancing to something, listening to something, and the ‘else’ calls from outside, lifting me there, taking me out, barefoot, with a cheese-coated spoon in my hand, to hear more. Living between two worlds, if that is what it is, is for me. And, I have a hag stone. Oh, I don’t believe I can see faeries, or even through them. I don’t believe looking through the hole will give me illumination. I am no fool. My feets are firmly grounded. But I am open.

Always.

by

Island Blog – We Can Too

There’s another hoolie blowing here, strafing the daffodils, splitting the petals into suncolours on a lewid grass. It isn’t really lewid, the grass, I just found the word and it would out. The grass is, in fact, growing strong and upwards, but only the latter bit when the hoodie pauses for breath. I swear we are all bent over these past months, the taller ones, like Jim and Archie are almost paperclipped. We work with the gales, that’s what we say, as we cheerfully take fifteen minutes to unfold from the driver seat and take another ten to straighten, pre entering the local shop. This bit is very important, because the paperclipped could well be in danger of leaving with all the wrong products, thus being unable to stick to their diet plan. A terrifying thought.

It thinks me, this wind, Kathleen or Jinx or Indigo or whatever is the sequential naming nonsense applied to ‘just another bloody gale’, which is what we called the whole damn lot of them when I was younger and when we believed in a world that talked straight, unencumbered by the ridonculous need to put everything into prettily labelled boxes. I sincerely believe we understood wildness, back then. I digress. My thinks, spiralling away from the whole gale-ness of things, make me consider disruption. As, indeed, a gale disrupts. But when something disrupts us, as humans, we respond in so many different ways. Some hide away, some rise in latent anger, some observe and consider, some run for higher ground. I’ve done them all. Trouble dropped into a community, a family, a couple, a crowd, dissents, if that’s a verb. It is now. If we can allow any respondents to respond in their own way, without judgement or, (or is it nor, Dad?) and we are not saints, not at all, but simple humans, then we have cracked it. I don’t say it is easy when challenges to said trouble comes thwack attack and feels personal. It hurts, until, if we have engaged in a lot of personal (and personally uncomfortable) inner work, such that teaches us about empathy and acceptance and humility, we just let go and listen. No, not just that, we actually hear, and grow.

Gales flail daffodils, tulips, anemones and narcissi. And, next Spring, they rise again. We can too.

by

Island Blog – See That

That’s what we say in Scotland. Well, in some parts of this wonderful country. We say ‘See that’ and it doesn’t necessarily mean we see what remarkables us. We might smell it, or hear it, or feel it or notice it, but the verb is all about vision, as we know it. And even that ‘as we know it’ thingy can confound others who stick to the senses as separate and well defined over long years whilst the ‘See Thats’ trickle like water over the human boundaries of the sensory divide.

I remember meeting it in a bus shelter in Glasgow. I heard one woman to say to another ‘ See Him?’ I looked around but she did not and nor did her companion. Both knew he was nowhere near and I quickly learned it. She went on to list his weekend crimes, omissions, commissions, et la and la. I was captivated. The rain lifted all but the pavement from beneath our ill-clad feet, theirs in heels, mine in flats, and my eyes fell to those feet, the way they moved in perfect tune to the active movement of their bodies, arms, fingers faces, eyes, spines. It was as if I was watching trees in the wind, the bending, the swing this way and that, and the connection between these two. They caught branches, tipped back their heads, laughed, hugged, and I could see that. See that.

Since then I have felt at home with a ‘See That’ knowing as I do now that there may be no actual seeing. See that can, and often does become the prologue to a story that only one in the mix has actually experienced. It can come out other ways. See Him? See Her? See This? See That? See Who? See What? And there the story begins and it can lift and rise, pull up colour, crash into grey or black, but it begins every time with vision. Vision experienced, vision proffered, vision received, a communique, a connection, vital.

See that smell? See that sound? See that touch? All visionary in its presentation. I love it because it thinks me. Our eyes are so very precious, our looking, our seeing, our vision and the way we can see means everything. I don’t know what it is to be blind nor losing sight but I do know that a deal of my adventures, understandings, my sorting out of self angst and fear has grown through my inner eye. We all have that sight.

When we eventually caught that bus, the friends still chattering, me silent and alone, I watched them. They were two women leaving their home lives for a day at work, no doubt demanding and exhausting. My stop was before theirs and as I wobbled down the bus (driver didn’t slow) I paused and turned to them. It was a risk. English, or so they thought (so very wrong) and proper spoken. but they had the grace to look up. You taught me something today. Thank you.

They probably still think of me as that weird ya-di-ya woman. See her………..?!!!!!

by

Island Blog – True Communication

The weather here in Africa changes every day. Yesterday was too hot for toffees and bare feet on the deck, burning, broiling sun, the need for shade essential. Inside the weather stays much the same until load shedding when no air-conditioning cools the skin, when it becomes a sweat-fest, when moving around at all must be performed slowly in order to avoid a meltdown. Unusual, they tell me, those who live here. I can walk out in bright sunshine beneath a perfectly blue sky and return after one cup of excellent coffee in a deluge of warm rain, as if the clouds all agreed to dump their load and all at once. Just as quickly, it changes again. I am forever dinging back and forth with anti-mosquito spray only to have it showered off, reapply, shower, reapply. But this is a small problem in the face of the continuing elevation of power offs. For those who need power in order to run a business, it is a big deal, unless you have a noisy generator to fire up at such times and even that harrumphing beast won’t run everything. It wonders me. Is this a worsening thing or just for now? I believe the former and not just for Africa. It will come to all of us eventually. The key is in preparation, alternatives and attitude, much like everything else in life over which none of us has control. The only control we all have is over ourselves, our choices, our attitudes.

The Ha-di-das awaken me early each morning with their cawing. I am certain that they line up outside my window like a choir with tonsillitis, one, two, three, now! and I am blasted from sleep like a rocket from a bottle. They are big birds and everywhere and it is impossible to hear what another person is saying when they ha-di-da overhead. I decide they’re the crows of Africa but without crow intelligence, all that fleeing’ aboot and yelling the same stuff around the houses, following or chasing each other from tree to tree as if that’s all they need to do to justify their existence. In between their cawing chaotics, a sweeter song, the bulbul, smaller, softer of voice and considerably prettier of hue, lift and flutter between the branches preparing the second nest of the year. One bulbul calls, another answers, so politely. There’s no everyone-shouting-at-once thing with bulbuls. Other beautiful rainbow birds with floaty tails that arrive on a branch a few seconds after the body lands, petrol on water, aurora borealis, blood red, butter yellow, sky blue and emerald, the birds delight. None of them shout at each other. It thinks me of communication and the different ways we use it in our own lives.

We all have our colours, our voices, and we all want, no, long, to be heard, to be listened to. Sitting with another I want to hear what they say and then respond, probably with a question, thus making it clear that I have heard what you say and want to know more. If I am being a ha-di-da at that point, I may fall into the trap of counterpoint by bringing up an experience of my own. This, I have learned, is not what you want from me, not at all, because what I am doing is to dilute your story, thus indicating that I know how you feel, which is, of course, a nonsense. How can I know how you feel when I am not you? I can’t. So I ask a question based solely on what you have told me, a question that encourages you to continue. It is odd that we seem to need to compare stories as if that brings us both into a shared place, but we all do it. When himself died, so many people told me they knew how I felt and it was like they had taken out a great big eraser and rubbed my experiential feelings off the page. I stood my ground, said nothing, but felt myself disappearing because all of a sudden, the moment was lost to me and claimed by them as their own. I smiled but wanted to leave both them and the so called conversation which had suddenly become a competition.

I feel the same when someone keeps their mobile face up on the table between us, their eyes darting to look, their eyes off me. I just go quiet because I feel I am now unimportant and definitely unheard. But don’t we both have agendas and busy lives? yes, we do. However this moment we share is the moment to share, to listen to each other, eyes on each other, body language relaxed back and welcoming. You are here with me now and we are not ha-di-das but bulbuls or any other bird that has learned how to communicate softly, listening for a change in tone, in colour, feeling the story and learning from it. You tell me, beneath your words and if I am really engaged, that you are troubled about something, something that is of import and concern. You honour me by sharing, whether it be beneath your words, in your body language or clearly readable on your face. I want not to fix you because what you want from me is validation and a listening ear. Often my mouth doesn’t open at all at such times, because the urge to ‘suggest’ my solution to your problem is full in my mouth and I must needs keep my teeth firmly clenched against the spray which, if freed, will only serve to soak your story, to dissolve it.

Learning learning learning! It bizarres me oftentimes that I still have to, want to, learn a better way to communicate. When I was young and full of my own ha-di-da shrieks and rants, I never considered the rights and wrongs of conversation, my own agenda loud in my mind. I knew the way to solve this problem for you and I rolled it out like a wonderful bright carpet for you to walk on. Ridiculous, I know now, although I was mum of five and that brought a whole gamut of problems requiring immediate solution, but not now, I don’t ‘solve’ now because by not solving, not interrupting you with my marvellously mind-blowing idea, I allow you to find your own way through. And isn’t that all we want as we spread our problem out like a faded map across the table? I believe so, nay, have found it to be so as I listen, question gently and without challenge, without my agenda or my marvellously mind-blowing fix, I watch you light up with an idea, one that just might work for you, and all because I listened and paid attention, sitting firmly on my ego, my need to be the one who sorted you out.

You called. I responded. You spoke. I heard you. Mobile off, eyes on. Rain, sun, power off, power on, none of these are important when someone is vulnerable and trusting enough to tell me of their troubles. I am here. I hear you. I don’t solve you. You do. I know it. Keep talking for I am listening as the faded map between us begins to colour up.

This is true communication.

by

Island Blog – I hold the balance

I watch the rain. A constant, a steadying. I am not overly fond of endless rain but there is little I can do about that. There is also little I can do about long evening darkness, one that holds on like a black fist for way too long, well into what laughingly is called My Morning. Sleep is a friend, yes, but fickle. She soothes me for a few short hours but she allows in dreams, nightmares, startlements that shock me into waking and leave me still shocked even as the dream evaporates. I am not good at ‘still shocked’, won’t stand for it, get up, go downstairs to watch the darkness, try to love it at 4 am. I remember trying to love something when it defies the rules and it was never easy, my skin prickling, my mouth empty of words, my body longing to run, but if I could do it once, I can do it again. Let it be.

But. When someone who has no idea about widowness, my widowness, says something that doesn’t even come close to the depth of my feelings, I snort. I hear all the advice, the platitudinal fiction that spills from lips and eyes and I want to roar like Aslan. I don’t, naturally, but that roar held in my small body is wild and dangerous. I smile and thank them, the grief counsellors, the Facebook lovers, the ‘friends’ who write another supportive line pinched from a book they’ve read, but the within of me belies the without. Thank God for skin and good manners! Deep down I am grateful for kindness, nonetheless and all those words of uplift and encouragement come from good warm hearts. I know this and it thinks me into a questioning.

What is it that bothers me when I hear or read words that are just birds around my head? I consider the question and it comes to me as a flash of light. It is my inner speke that needs my attention, not the words I hear, the intention behind them. Oh dear, that can feel so impossible at times when I am busy doubting and fearing and self punishing, even as I know the truth of mind control. I decide to step into my own head and there they are, standing like sentry guards at the door. We can’t let any positive stuff in, they tell me as I confront them, not when you are busy nourishing us in our negative space. I sit down to consider the situation. Ah, so it is up to me to select my thinks? They nod. Are you telling me, I continue, that I am not at the mercy of negativity, regardless of my loneliness, my fears around Covid, my lack of confidence without my husband around to confidence me up? Again they nod. So, I fake it, pretend, kid myself on? Yes, they say. You keep feeding the uplifting words, the light bright beautiful birds. You receive all of them both from outside and those of your own making and you catch every one, lifting them gently into your mind and your heart. They are all light and flight. They lift your spirits into a positive orbit. They are all true and they are so much stronger than the loneliness, the fears and the self doubt. They are your true power, and we are tired of sentry duty. It’s time to change the guard.

I begin with ‘I am strong, happy, powerful and all light.’ I hold back the guffaw and the candle burns bright. The sentries fall, one by one and the door opens wide. Welcome holds out her hands, pulling me into a warm, light room, one I recognise. What on earth made me walk away from this! Well, says Welcome, life is not a straight path. The path winds every which way and everyone can get lost from time to time. I make a list so that every time the negative looms, I can hold it back with my own light. I might feel I am at the mercy of negative thoughts but it takes just one candle to illuminate a darkened room. Just one. It doesn’t matter that the doubts are there, the fears and the regrets. They are there to guide me, I know that.

But it is I who hold the balance.

by

Island Blog – Diving for Change

This morning I woke to a deeper understanding of an old thing, a truth I already knew at a lighter level. Funny that, how we can hear the same thing at a different time and hear it as if for the first time. The lift of emotion is the giveaway. Going below the surface changes the view, as it does in real time. Above the surface, and even at its level, there are sounds of the world all about our ears. Diving below brings silence, at first. We leave the world behind as it were and sink into the unknown. From where we were we could probably see something down there, maybe a few somethings, but in allowing ourselves to move among the somethings we let go of control. Down here in the swirly depths, the fish, the imaginary sea creatures, we are vulnerable and we feel it. The colours that drew us in from up there become vibrant as precious jewels. Closer now and we can see movement and lives being lived. We can reach out and touch a shell, brush a tendril, catch the filtered sunlight on the diamond back of some fish or other, feel the rush of its escape as our body invades space.

It was the same for me this morning. Somehow I had allowed myself to sink below the surface, I had let go and I was vulnerable in that. And, you know what…..it feels wonderful. I realise that I have been holding onto a pattern of living that no longer serves me. Joining the dots of hindsight I see that I have known this for some time, for look…..there is a shape to it now; the hindsight dots have shown me that. How did I not see it from the get go? Because it wasn’t the right time. Time knows herself. She’s a keeper. She will illuminate the right thing at the right time for me, for everyone. She also knows when to suggest a dive. My emotional response to her is the giveaway. Learning a truth, puffing out an Aha is one thing. it is also devoid of emotion. It is understood at the level of sensibility, of logic, of the world. But, when I respond to it again at a deeper and more vulnerable level, my eyes can make rain. This is the real Aha. From this point I can never go back because once my heart gets it, it stays got. And it is such a peaceful thing. No fireworks, no need to call a friend all excited, no need to teach it, not my thing, not my new understanding.

I probably longed for this to come to me yonks ago. I wish, I wish, I wish, but it didn’t come no matter how much yoga I imagined I did, or how often I walked mindfully through the fairy woods; no matter how many books I read on the subject. This process of learning and letting go of something is out of my hands once I start wishing for it, start doing the work, and, believe me, that work is demanded of me. Wishing is for children. Wishing adults just die of an overdose of unfulfilled wishes. So my trudging along for all those yonks has finally paid off. Nothing has changed and yet everything has changed. And all I did was dive in and let go.