human

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Island Blog – How we really feel

The day dawns fresh-breezed and sunny and we have jobs to do. We bought sticky tape, non-sticky tape, varnish, oils, turps and scrubbers, many things hardware, for we are preparing this house for letting and leaving. As the lists are made, we see how much there is still left to do, and remind ourselves how much we have already achieved. The five indoor cats watch us through the windows, follow us from room to room, sensing some change is afoot. The jacaranda trees beyond the walls bend and flip in the breeze whilst vervet monkeys leap the branches, sure-footed, swinging like acrobats. Perhaps they watch us too, curious but uncaring. Sunlight lifts the newly oiled deck boards into a shiny conker warmth, one coat complete, a second to reapply, hot work under the broiler in the sky. Various bits of furniture are advertised and sold, little holes filled in, taps re-washered, walls brushed and touched up, door and window frames varnished to a shine. Moving forward, ever moving forward. Sometimes a task presents as too demanding so we break it down into smaller parts until the whole thing is complete. At others, we sail merrily along, buoyed up by sharing the process, bantering, laughing, pausing for breath, discussing the best way to achieve the end result. We allow for rests and diversions such as going out for Eggs Benedict with avocado and strong coffee, or a trip to the dog park to throw ball for the big soft retriever to catch and chase after. And all the time we talk on many things, not cabbages and certainly not kings, but on concepts and reflections, mind-mapping and acceptance of self, gatherings and solitude, our observations on everything Life. We have always talked that way. Not for us the idle chatter of wasted words. We are sentence makers, thinking people, curious and interested in a new way to see old things. We ask each other, How do you see this, or that? and then we listen to and consider the response we hear.

When we join others, I sit and listen to their discussions on what appears superficial to me. It isn’t that I judge, because I don’t but when the subject under the lights is only about a situation they all know and inhabit, the words just seem to circle pointlessly to me. Unless there is curiosity and reflection, the subject remains solid, unmoving, stuck in time, with the inhabitants thereof stuck with it. There is no right or wrong in the way we converse, but I always want to dive beneath the surface, to discover the depth, texture, movement and flow of this subject. It could be all about bin collection or the lack of it and that could take up a whole evening, resolving not at all from where I sit. It could be any number of similar issues under the microscope, until the minutiae has been thoroughly talked out and absolutely nothing has changed and my legs are itching to move on, to move beyond the tiddleypom and out into the wide open spaces, curious like Alice.

Sometimes I think I am an onlooker in this life. I love people and gatherings, conversation and laughter, sharing a meal and so on, but give me anytime the meeting of true minds, of thinkers and wonderers, of those who live on the edge of all truths accepting none of them and all of them at the same time. I am a loner, a weirdo, different, odd. So be it. Although I have met only a few differently odd weirdo loners, we know each other immediately even if we never met before. We connect instantly and then, as is our nature, break apart. I used to want to change myself, to find complete happiness in evening-long conversations about bin collection or lack of it, but I cannot change so instead I accept who I am and who you are and it is a peaceful warm place in which to live. And, over time, I have learned that to initiate a conversation by asking the right question can result in a shift in direction, in content. I can ask, as the chat on buying carpets is wearing me thin, Have you ever made a carpet, dyed wool, walked barefoot on a silk Persian rug, been to Turkey, or anywhere else, for that matter, to watch a carpet story being assembled in full technicolour? Oh yes? How did you feel watching that, do tell, all the details please. Ah, no, not facts, not facts, not pronouncements, but feelings. How did you feel?

After a few blank stares and some throat clearing, my gaze fixed firmly on my target, a tentative response trickles out and I finally get to hear the voice of the person before me instead of the repetitious rote, the factual quotes, the I-agree-with-him platitudes. I get to the real beneath the mask. It’s exciting and informative and suddenly I am engaged, fascinated and gently questioning further until I see you, oh there you are, just you, no pretence, a warm lively interesting human being.

How easily we bend to a shape in order to fit in, with our statements and judgements, and yet how soft and vulnerable we really are, and how very beautiful we become when just one person shows true interest in how we really feel about something.

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Island Blog – Fiddlesticks

On this, the first day of a whole new year, I awaken to snow. Not thick as in other thick snow places, but the ground it white and I very nearly fell on my aspidistra when walking out barefoot to feed the birds. That’s good enough for me and the world seems magical. Well, it is magical most of the time and in between those times I usually need to tell myself to get over myself. I was probably thinking too much on imaginary fears and the concerns of agism, such as falling downstairs or running out of firelighters or of driving into a moose in the darkness. In other words, nonsense. And I like that word, most of the time, but didn’t love it all when I had just told the longest story to my mother, all excitement, bright eyed, my arms flapping descriptively. Nonsense! She said. I might miss her but I don’t miss her astonishing aptitude for turning a firework display into a popped balloon. My husband had the same talent. Some girls can’t half pick ’em. I digress.

I spent a merry morning dancing to Abba singing Happy New Year, avoiding my to-do list, the dusting, the hoovering and the photocopying of my last will and testament, although there’s nothing ‘testament’ about such a document. It says nowt about how wonderfully I have lived my bonkers life, nor of my achievements, nor (and this is ok with me) of my crimes and failings. So, Abba and I danced on, sang beautifully, or they did, and then, as the afternoon wandered in slow and icy and full-bellied with sunshine, Me and the Poppydog went a-walking. I startled and stopped at each spectacular view. The sun low through 180 year old Scots Pines, the shimmy of ice melt on bare branches, the trunnels of sunlight, pathing away into the woods, the brazen lime-light of moss, steady still despite the winter death all around. Tall grasses and reeds stand in stasis, held, held in the Ice Queen’s grasp and for some time to come until, that is, the next hooligan barrels in to lift my wheelies into the road and my frocks skirts flying out like flags most inappropriately.

Walking through the Fiddle trees, I watched them and for some moments, so absolutely still, so calm, so guiding. Thank you, I say, and Happy New Year, I say, out loud because this is not the Kings Road in London and therefore I am (currently) saved from being lifted. The ground is white in places, slippery as a threaten and beautiful, the ice forms like puddle art. In other places footprints and bike tracks muddy the track into lifts of rich brown, the rounds and slides of constant change. See here? Someone slipped a bit. There a size 10 I think, a man from the depth of the print, and here, oh look! A silent flow of deer tracks, one behind the other, followers of a good strong leader. We could do with one of them in parliament. Another digress.

I consider my occasional woodenness as I move through a whole grandeur of wood. It’s okay for you, I tell them, to be wooden but it isn’t okay for me to be wooden? How is that alright? But I know the answer, even as they say nothing back. You’re grinning, I tell one Lady Beech as I whack her midriff with my staff. In this life, the one we all have, this is what I believe. We need to think fiddlestrings, fiddlesticks a whole lot more than we do. Not as dismissive to any other person, never that, but to our burn thoughts, the ones out to pop our balloon. However, in saying this, I am very aware of how vigilant a soul needs to be. Many live in very de-embracing situations, dayfeels of unloved, unlistened to, uncared for, unnoticed, un, un, un. I know it. To believe in self when nobody else does minds me of the tale of the Ugly Duckling. Impossibly ugly until just one other says something. That’s it. So tell someone something that hears them they matter, they have a voice, a presence, an importance. Then go work on yourself. Eish…….that’s flipping hard, I know. Kicking my imaginatively embellished list of self punishments is like launching my small foot at a medicine ball and expecting it to fly like Tink. But there is always hope and she, Hope, is what makes us real, we non androids, we intelligent, beautiful, important changers, developers, powerful creatures, loving, soft, dangerous, wounded, broken, alert and learning.

I collect the fiddlesticks as the sun louers. Dry, brittle kindlers for tomorrow, the second day of the new year. Second fiddle, I think, and chuckle. I’ve been one of those for most of my life and it was fun. I never need to be first although that’s a lie. I will always be first to lift up another soul. Will you?

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Island Blog – We are an I

The dusk falls like a cloak, rumpled, full of holes, quick if you turn away, look back and gasp. It is down now, this cloak, this wizard velvet, mouse-lit velvet rumple, allowing starlights to arrest my thinking, stop me, turn me as they poke through, thrust their death light into my looking. The sun, fighting still against his slip from stage right, thrusts a backlight so that those way-over-there trees, skeletal now and with limbs reach-stretched for maximum effect, stand silhouette against the indigo of a winter sky. I watch and watch as the new moon fingernails across the almost darkness, stars brighten and faraway, and this night, if I go out barefoot and goonied, I will see lace patterns in the wild space above me, above you too, although yous with streetlamps will miss a lot. I remember missing a lot whilst living in Glasgow and it was there I knew how the song came to be, Blackbird Singing in the dead of Night, because we had one of those, right outside our flat, singing and singing and exhausting himself and I felt a big shame for the wild ones who knew something once, for sure, and then became confounded by a change that might take generations to become okay with a species.

Transition is a fine thing for us, even when it sticks spikes into an ass every time you sit down in a place that used to offer ‘sit-down’ as a thing expected, normal and oftentimes visited. From one state to another. That’s how it defines itself. From cocoon to butterfly, from larva to god-knows-what that will eat your cucumbers and primulas and wonder you why you ever bothered planting the damn things. But who has a map for the bridges? The ones, like me, like you, we and many ‘I’s who must and will exist between loss and friendship, between existential pain and the light of new hope, between the doubt and fear of young age and a possible future, and the old agers who would love a rainbow beyond bent fingers, weakened wrists, and faulty legs. Both transition generations seeing what? A bridge?

There is no answer to that question and there may never be. So, we find our own answers, fumbling, faltering, seeking, searching and, in all my reading, my miles and miles of reading, our generational congregation is no different now. Centuries of searching for the absolute brings no reprieve from the ongoing thingy of human-ness. We can watch the sky and think our thinks. We can submit to sulks and huffs and the refusal to communicate within a relationship at home. We can reject or connect with ‘difficult’ children. We can walk the dog or let it die of the lack. We can dress in jewels despite the rain. We can lift old mothers-in-law into an evening of smiles, ask them of their memories, lift them back home into the empty bed of their lonely lives or we can hold to the fact that we don’t like her, nor ourself in her presence. We can enjoy a puddle with little children or claim tiredness and the need to be home to watch Countdown. We can decide to live out our whatever life, no matter what the inside demon tells us. We did not fail. We lived our best. Yes, we failed, made mistakes, have regrets, let no-one hide from that big truth. However, we can tell ourselves, even if nobody will ever tell us, that we did what we deemed right for the family, we were/are a character created, a personality shaped and formed, wonky and faltering. Or we can hide away from a anything honest and watch some celebrity nonsense on TV.

But we are an I.

We are.

An

I

And with an I lies all the power.

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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 – Candles, Perception and Stories

I love candles. In the dark times, and it is here, the dark. On this beautiful island, once you know the heartbeat of the rocks of it all, the shush and crash of Atlantic flow, the sog and bog and drench and feist of wild weather, you buy boots that will allow you in and over and through. You do, trust me. Not many folk will tolerate so much rain, such trixy winds, gales even, that rise just when you reckon peace will reign for another day, and we, who do, have watched them barrel in, tearing down trees, flattening grasses and relocating washing left on a line. And just as suddenly, they move on. I wonder, these days, where they might go. The perfect weather is a gift I would buy, but that gift is just a gift and not a given. There are weeks of rain and no rain for the odd day, pretty much.

Here, there is a load of dark and that has a lot to do with the rain. If I look at the weather for the next 4 weeks, it says Rain, Rain, Rain, all day long. Of course it never is. If you have a fox intuition, you just watch the clouds and grab your moment for a scoot oot, as I do. Funny that……I notice and hear from those I notice, that they don’t get how spontaneous they need to be up here. Some visitors leave. I watch them go, all angry and with faces set in judgement as if we islanders deliberately brought in the rain in a witchy sort of way, the sideways in-your-face blattering soak that challenges their choice of walking boot and melts their mascara as they wheech a puddle into a tsunami. Do they think I/we have control? We don’t, I assure you. It thinks me. Sunshine all of the time, I tell myself, would just be so ordinary and island life is anything but. Folk who live here and last here become as flexible as dancers in both mind and body. We learn, living in the wettest place on earth, to make something out of everything, even to smile at the rain. We call ourselves pluviophiles and proudly. We laugh at the days to come and let our words be snatched away in the gales. We light candles in the dark and say we are lucky, so lucky, to be living in a beautiful and safe place. Privately we roll our eyes at the whole thing, sigh and cuss but that is only done, as I said, privately.

Dynamic living is not something that comes naturally for us all. It is more of an inner choice, a decision to celebrate whatever life sends our way and in the very place we make our home. Sadness comes, of course it does, but that is the same for every single human soul, the wishing for something different is universal, no matter the weather, location, a person’s material wealth or lack of it. I learn these things daily, remind myself to be thankful for whatever I have and to ignore the doubts and fears, all imagined anyway. The most wonderful people I have ever met are those who have endured and survived situations, people and events that I cannot even imagine surviving and it is all due to a strong spirit, that invisible power that refuses to give up or give in. I aspire to such strength as my life has been tame by comparison. That doesn’t negate the impact of inner darkness, inner rain or an inner punching gale inside my own head and heart, but it does help to know that ‘this, too, shall pass’ as it always does and the key is perception. How I see something, anything, decides my response to it.

I walk among the sodden trees, the crushed coppery bracken, negotiating the fat puddles, the lift and squelch of rain soaked mud and I know, again, that I am free to just let life be, the dark, the rain, the wind and then that sudden bright day, the sky open, the burns gurgling in spate as sunshine sparkles the bubbles. Clean, clear mountain water rushing down, carving yet deeper into the rocks releasing stories long buried. I hear them flutter around me like birds, lifting into the sky, higher and higher until they turn back into rain, falling once more so that we who still live will not forget how life goes on, and on and on. We are here but fleetingly. Let us leave our own story behind when we go, the story of a life lived to the full no matter the weather, the darkness, the burning sunshine, the rain, because there will be a future someone who will need to hear it, someone who needs our light for their dark. How do I live with what I live with? There’s a story there, just waiting to be told.

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Island Blog – Relichenship Opportunity

Lichens. Those pretty white or yellow, green or orange growths on rocks, fences, tree trunks, that’s Lichen. A symbiotic combination of two very different life forms, one Algae, one Plant. Neither, in this environment, in this beauty, in this force of life can survive alone. They only ever make the One that they create by combining forces and turning that meld into a whole new thing. How extraordinary is that and yet it isn’t extraordinary at all. Think Man and Woman: think opposites, or apposites. Moving on.

I watch lichen daily, the flower of it, particularly now in the Autumn wetwetwet. For me it says Opportunity. But for what? Well, in the natural and Algae-Plant world, it means a new entity, a new persona. It can be, usually is, the same in the human world. After all, isn’t it true that when a couple are together, each member behaves as one instrument in a duet, each accommodating the other for mutual benefit? She might run around his needs and wants, allow his faults and failings (as she sees them) in order to keep things running smoothly, or it might be the other way around. I have witnessed both and those of us apart from this symbiosis will take our lead from them (or is it ‘it’?) with the same smooth running thingy as priority. It is also impossible to judge the inner workings of any human duet. Nobody else knows the real truth or can explain it any more than the most of us could explain the lichen dynamic.

However, where lichen lifts the eye into marvel, it isn’t always that way with a couple of humans. We can see what we see and shake our heads at the seeing, or we can shine up into a smile at what we imagine is the truth. Both times we are way wrong. It is better by far to observe, to only observe, without comparison and particularly without comparison to a romance novel, a Disney film or the soaps we might watch on a daily basis. I can find myself doing the judging thing, nonetheless. I can, also, feel the rise in me of the strong feminist but be careful, I warn myself, very careful. Men snicker about women and women snicker about men. I am great at snickering, but also very aware that what I allow to infect my thinking can grow long roots and become a very judgemental belief, a big tall tree that throws all the seedlings of hope, faith and love into a killing shade.

Relationships are driven, to a degree, from experience, from observing parents, from television or idealism. So, how do we refresh our thinking, my thinking, supposing that is that we want to? The way I work it is by noticing my thoughts, feelings and retorts that rise without my bidding, it seems. Triggers trigger reaction and the good news is that those reactions to something or someone observed can stay silently internal at first. The choice to opinionate without caution is my own. I may witness yet another downtrodden woman on the end of a short leash and feel a burn of fury rise from my boots, threatening conflagration, a forest fire, but I know the danger of speaking out and the pointlessness of doing so at all. Who am I, after all, to think I know all the details of this so called symbiosis? Nobody, that’s who, or is it whom? What I long to see is a tidal turn and this will only begin when we as mothers and fathers teach our girls and boys never to accept the leash, short or long, from anybody, man or woman, without aggression, with respect, with surety and confidence. Perhaps I dream. Maybe I do.

Lichen manages it and lichen is billions of years old. I live in hope that we humans will finally get it.

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Island Blog – Shadow, Biting Ants and Shoulds

The sun is lower in the sky. I know this from the dapples cast along the track. This is the time of year when shadows become more evident. I don’t want to step on them. I stop and stand to watch the way they shimmy in the light breeze, shifting shapes like a moving work of art. As I move on, butterflies flit across my walking, fritillaries, peacock, black harlequins, painted lady and even a red admiral. They flow through the sunlight alighting on scabious, moon something, meadowsweet, supping the last drink of nectar before the season snatches the bar away, pulling the flowers back down to rest for another year. Skitterbugs buzz and hum, scoot and lift around me. I don’t know their names, there are so many. Some hover, some whine, but all come close to check me out. I don’t swat. I say hallo you. Everything and everyone wants to be acknowledged after all.

Down to the shore of memories. I hear the memoric voices raised in excitement, a whale watching adventure ahead. I think I might have to push through the gorse but someone has scarped a space enough for a human to pass through without a single scratch. I see the water appearing long before I reach it. Low tide, new moon, a good time for the oyster farmers to be out on the shore, tending their cages. They have worked here for days, I heard the rumble of tractors, the lift of male voices on the breeze for a few days now and they are here again. The gorse pods pop as I walk through a canopy that once was an irritation to my feet. How quickly pass the years. I stand to watch a pod explode, sending seeds up into the air and watch them land. More gorse next year. The coconut smell is heavenly and I breathe it in, then move on down to the shore. There will be no otter to watch this day. The tide is wrong, the water somewhat poppled on a land breeze. Otters, I have observed, choose a calm incoming tide for their hunting.

A heron explodes from the bow-backed hazel crowd. These benty trees, known, somewhat disrespectfully as ‘scrub’ were tots in the days of my memory, the granite boulders trojans, all biceps and resistance. It seems even they can be compromised. The heron explosion startles me. So much squawk and crashbang, and that’s just taking off. It reminds me of those I knew who never went anywhere quietly, needing to announce themselves. Across the low tide I notice a cormorant standing on the sand. I watch the first tractor coming and watch it sit some more. When it eventually lifts into the sky there is no sound. Gulls wheel and squeal around like gossips, keeping close eye on the action. A fish jumps. The salmon are running, that instinctive push to recreate, even though death calls just as loudly. When the tidal flow begins, as it will soon, the waters will thrapple with jumping fish, the otter beneath and threatening an early demise, like being fired just before retiring.

Home, and I question that. I know this is home for me. I know it. So why do I want to run and run when everything sacred to me is right here? There is no logic to these biting ants that rise in me. It thinks me. I am not the only one feeling this. I believe we all do, we all feel the desire to run and run and run. But from what? I will not swat the feeling away because it is a teacher, a guide. Perhaps none of us really understand what it is to be human. Current culture teaches endless ‘perfect’ remedies for ‘sorting us out’. Once and for all. But, and I am a questing and curious student of life, I know there is no ‘once and for all’. There is no remedy for human-ness. We all know moments of completion and days or months or years of wanting to run. This is not weird, but we pretend it is and label the so called ‘lost’ as if they had leprosy and we might catch it. But this is not Truth. I have a million times of completion and a thousand times that million of biting ants. It is only possible to accept and to love being human if we can allow this in ourselves, in others instead of expecting everyone to ‘get over themselves’ in the spreadsheet timeline we write upon ourself.

I meet other grievers. I hear the same from them all. ‘Well-meaning friends and family ‘tell’ me I ‘should’……….. I just wrysmile at that.

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Island Blog – A Wasp and a Think

There’s a wasp. With intentions. She flies into my garage-cum-woodstore at this time every year. I know exactly what she is up to. She is planning to build a nest but I am not having that. However, I am no killer of anything, even if I am sorely tempted to thwack her with my niblick. Envisioning, as I am, the shrieking of grandlings at barbecues or picnics, the panicked swatting and the wasp in the wine thingy, I do some research and what I find is a lookalike hornets nest, made of nothing hornety but giving out a clear message to this small and dangerous zeppelin that this spot is already taken by folks who would actively discourage, with stinging precision, any such property development near their own. A pack of four is already ordered. If it works, my forays into the garage will no longer need to be at night and I will be free to walk through my garage-cum-woodstore and on up to the back garden without having to don my wet suit for protection, because no wasp, hornet, nor bee will happily sit back to observe a human, dog, deer, cow or horse moving close by their home without having to have a few words. I know this well because once, and only once, I walked a little too close to the front door of a bee hive.

It thinks me about perception. The aforementioned insects see their world through their own eyes, as we do our own. Then (break it down) a bee, a hornet, a wasp also see their own world through their own eyes, each perception different to the other. Just imagine, then, all the people who also see life according to their own experiences, colour, culture, age, creed and opinions. Unless we all allow this, we will not find unity, nor peace, for we are obliged to live close together unlike the animal kingdom who will not. Each of us seeks safety, love, acceptance and friendship amongst a zillion other things but we don’t all necessarily see X as X. It might be Y to this person, A to another, 9 to a third and 257 to a fourth. Stepping back from this chaotic melee, I can see Banksy got it right. He sees this clearly and probably wonders why on earth we are still expecting others to think the way we do, to live the same way, work to the same principles, when this will absolutely never happen. No. We must learn to observe only and then to respect without judgement. Some people eat with their fingers. So what! Others stick their knees under dining tables that need constant repair in order to hold up all that cutlery. Again, so what! If we simply observe, learn, acknowledge and respect, then now we are talking. And we probably are – talking – instead of muttering opinions just out of or just in earshot, our backs facing that which we don’t understand and are not prepared to allow, not on this street, in this school, at this event, inside our own home.

The thing about radical change is that it doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t come through a new law. It comes through one ordinary person deciding to change his or her own heart around this issue, then another, then another until a whole street is so busy acknowledging, allowing and respecting and living in harmony with a zillion differences, judging none, that people come from further afield to see what is making this street so much happier than their own. The ultimate power, the game-changing power lies exclusively with us, the ordinary people. History will bear me out for it has aye been thus. When resolute people join together they can topple anything and anyone but we have forgotten this. Settling comfortably into the confines of the nanny state, our voices have grown hoarse at best, silent at worst. We have grown weak. But none of us really want war, not against another country, another creed, another culture, another vulnerable human being. Our world is changing. The peoples are moving whether they want to or not and we must learn to live well with that or nothing changes.

We might want to think about it a bit.

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Island Blog – A Wonder and a Mystery

During these past two days of almost warm sunshine, no rain and blue skies, I have loved walking among the trees and along the shore. Gulls wheel above the tidal dance and it seems to me that every tree I pass beneath is bursting to push out leaves. However, the night frosts are sharp and I get their caution. Primrose leaves are now showing along the banks in sheltered spots, sheltered that is from the still cold wind and the daffodils open with big buttery smiles as the sun brings his warmth to their soft petals. I dare to believe that Spring is almost here and I am glad of it, not just because February tried to drown us all but also because of the long covid cloak that has darkened our days, months and years recently. Like others I have spoken to, the covid time is a blur. When I am asked how long ago Himself left the planet, I have to think hard. It’s as if time didn’t count herself. She just laid herself out before and behind us, not interested enough to make any particular mark.

However, during these timeless and dark days, the colours that shone bright and sparkly came from us, from human endeavour and resourcefulness. Instead of everyone playing sheep, individual enterprises and personal challenges rose up like flowers in the winter and were no less surprising. I heard about it on the radio and would find myself leaning in to really hear what this or that person was doing, stretching their minds and bodies in order to bring encouragement and inspiration to others. It has been tough, all of it, the dark, the fear, the lack of information, the doubts and the dithering but we have got through it, and well. Most of us. Of course there are very sad tales to tell, I know that and I am sad for the sad ones who endured bereavement and pain. But what excites me is the rise of human endeavour, not just by a few, but by millions. This is who we are and how we can live if we stop wishing the nanny state away whilst buying into it ourselves.

Any day now the larch buds will appear like tiny purple grapes. The horse chestnut, often the first to bloom, will show that gloriously uplifting snatch of green way up high on myriad branches. Then as if given permission, the other trees will follow. Delicate lurpak coloured primrose flowers will thrill passers by, including me. Then the garden will erupt and careen into real Spring allowing no time for me to catch up with the weeds and I will sit on the old bench, remember Himself who used to sit beside me and smile because whatever comes and whoever goes, Life will live on and there’s a wonder and a mystery in knowing that.

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Island Blog – Sid, Mary and Just One Tree

I am reading my favourite sort of book, a novel about human life with the natural world as a backdrop. I don’t mean the story of Sid and Mary who have a big garden and chickens, although they could indeed be the humans, providing one of them has a spiritual connection with nature in ways yet to be learned, understood and accepted. This story spans great swathes of time, from 1700 to 2000 and they connect through nature. The trees he (maybe Sid) planted as a young man, he now visits as an ancient wood, alive with stories, bursting into memories each time the trees throw out leaves of laughter for the sun to nourish. Many many suns, many springs, autumns and winters; many land battles never won by the land. Trees felled for no good reason, for Sid and Mary, perhaps, for their big garden, for their chicken run. Inside such a story, I am Alice. I move effortlessly from 1700 to 2000 along with those who make the storyline into a long rope, a connector. The writer makes it easy for me and I get it, so clever a scribe is she. To many this story would invoke a scoff. I don’t do fantasy, he or she might say and it is beyond my ken and my level of patience to attempt an explanation, the one that is so clear to me. It is no fantasy, merely an indication of our undoing. We have forgotten how to listen to the trees, lost the ears for stone stories, turned away from the rhythm of the sea, the cries of the winds, the percussive tap of the rains. But, for those who still want to believe that nature is not ‘out there’ but deep inside every soul, let me tell you this connection is only parked in some dark tunnel, and not lost at all. Nobody knows quite how to reconnect but all anyone has to do is to refuse the worldly chortlemongers and to whisper, I believe. Show me, talk to me, let me know you again.

I am no guru, no wind whisperer, nothing ‘weird’ at all, but simply a child of spirit who cannot and will not accept that nature is just there for us to manipulate and manage, to control and defy, to desecrate and deny. Nature is not about big gardens, nor chicken runs. Nature is a magnificent mother and we all know to our cost that to defy a mother is always dangerous in the long run. It thinks me. Although we humanoids are required to live in our worldly world, we can lose ourselves in the plastic. We can be too busy to study the extraordinariness of a beech tree growing out of a rock. I watched one this afternoon and for some time. I saw how the tiny beech shoot must have pushed into the light and been momentarily blinded, puzzled too, as it came out sideways. The sky should be above me, the ground beneath. That’s what I know, and yet I am slid out like a sardine from a tin and nothing makes sense. Hmmm. Ah, well, I know this too; my branches, once I manage to grow some, will need the light and so somehow I need to turn a corner, employing full belly strength in order to lift upwards. Might take some time, like years, but I am here now and there is no stopping me, even if I don’t make it. (Good attitude, beech).

When I study the belly of this twisted but upright fighter for light, I see the girth. It’s fat and strong but stopped short, telling me that beech baby made a decision once the turn upwards showed more struggle ahead. There are big pines on the bluff above her, already snatching light, ditto another massive beech; Mum, perhaps. So she wisely gave up on trunk height in favour of a three way split, for maximum photosynthesis and at the earliest possible moment. I stepped back a pace or two and smiled and bowed in respect. Survivor! I said out loud because you can say pretty much anything out loud around here and only the trees, stones and birds will hear you. I went on….thank you for calling out to me today. I walk past you every single day, in all weathers and for decades and only now have I heard your voice. Respect.

My two big strong sons leave in a couple of days. I will miss them both and for a long time. I will miss their strength, the way I feel small and safe inside their arms, the way they love me, the way they laugh at my daftness, my fears, my doubts and the way they show me I am stronger than I ever believed and someone they look up to. Well, no not that any more. Either I am shrinking which is probably true, or they grow taller as they fight their intelligent way through the shrieking, demanding, worldly world. But you know what I mean with the looking up to thingy.

We are here for such a short time and for the time we are here, we have a duty to not just our families but to our world, all of it. We can rant and do nothing, fret and wring our hands about the state of it, saying it’s too much. What can I do when there is so much corruption and destruction? I cannot save the rain forests, nor the whales, nor the starving, nor the abuse. And this is true. One person cannot. However one person can speak to someone homeless on the street. One person can recycle, stop buying plastic, pick up rubbish. And, as my African son says, one person can plant one tree.