I profess to being absolutely disinterested in any written rants, particularly on social media, although in my day I would have said by letter. I am almost as disinterested when standing a few feet away from a verbal rant. Now why is this? I have many thinks, but the one that sticks up like a pole in the desert is that this ranty person wasn’t listened to in childhood and the subsequent frustrational decades have taken root, like a tumour. Only one person can heal that deep wound.

A rant is a speech, really, and it goes on until the end. The ranter is fixed in his or her opinion, no matter any reasoning voice traversing the few feet. There is no solution, no turning, but only escalation if rebutted or at the suggestion of any level of understanding. It’s basically Don’t Bother. However, being completely in love with all people, I cannot just redact nor dismiss what someone is obviously in a right stooshie about. Conversational tactics are learned, usually as a result of noticing, observing through a singular and silent thought process. As I wander around the world, sorry, Island, reading books, hearing real life stories and really hearing them, eventually returning to the gentle tick tick of my wood burner munching old trees and the bashing crash of yet another night of an angry wind, I carry the arias of questions like a swirl of songbirds in my mind. (Way too long a sentence). I do wonder about my mind because it never rests, not even at night. It never did, so chances are we are stuck with each other at this late stage. I can wake amidships of the darkness, tossed and turned in some bajonkers seacrowd of sky-wipeout waves with a thought, an Aha, as if something wonderful happened whilst I sort of slept and I must needs grab my goonie and spiral down the stairs into the glorious pitch dark only wild places enjoy, and write it down. When dawn finally manages to push up the night, the heavyweight that she is, I read what I wrote and laugh out loud. It makes no sense at all and here’s why. This mind of mine, this extraordinary muscle, if that is what it is, has already moved on to another sphere and that means I got left behind. I remember this feeling as a young girl. A very high IQ is not necessarily helpful in life because unless it is gentled and respected and very carefully cared for, some ambitious parent will start pushing. Moving on……

I did digress there, I know. Back to where I began. Understanding people with different views to my own, with opinions and agonies and childhood wounds when in the shape of an adult is never easy. We like, we don’t like. We love, we hate. We want to be with this one but would run miles to avoid that one. Division. Exclusion. Judgement. Don’t like any of those. Saying Hallo and being open without bias, without sussing someone out from the way they present, isn’t easy. Our culture nowadays is so invasively critical, so knowledgeable on body language, on verbal dynamics, on fear and suspicion, thus not honest with ourselves, that we come to any new meet dressed in Kevlar.

I know we are fortunate here, despite the endless gales, because life is real. Rural places all over the two countries know what I mean. We learn to live with each other, even though, yes, we may tattle and maybe rant a bit, but so does any living creature who resides in a collective. Sparrows are a great example. If we want the end of war, we need to live that way. We know it even as we expect not to have to pay it forward ourselves. It takes one, two, consistently refusing to unfriend, to be open, welcoming in the spite of rejection, over and over and over again, listening to the angry, the ranters, those who are pinned to the wall of pain, just sharing time, gifting it, not as a fixer but as a fellow faltering human.