learning

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Island Blog – All About Light and Laughter

There’s a thing about the old year heading into our past, what with Christmas excess and access just a week or so away. It dillies us. Many are considering big things, big changes, altered thinking, all of those tiddleypoms. I don’t mean to minimise the intent behind them, not at all, but it does wonder me because in my long experience of a gazillion changes in a long marriage, long life and an absolute whammy of inventive children, nothing big happens overnight. Not sustainably so. It thinks me. Do we imagine we can transform as happens in lovely but completely unbelievable films? I think we might. Because we have this deep longing to be who we aren’t, with all our mistakes, even as we may happily allow them in others, proffering encouragement and even support to bring them up and out of those clutching chains. So what holds us in brackets, a definite halt in a sentence, one which might have developed on and on with the odd comma? It wonders me, even though I flipping know every graphic on this hoodlum nonsense. It’s not grammar that holds us in chains, but people, awkward relations, expectations, fixations, and not one of those bring light, nor laughter.

I stood on heights today, affixing twinkly winkly lights as the afternoon took hold of a bright morning and brought in a shroud of cloud, a darkling rain. I growled. I did. It’s as if the old year hasn’t peed for months. I look up as I go fo fill my bird feeders, the goldfinches, blackbirds, dunnocks, sparrow, tits all cheeping and swinging like gymnasts on wires and through skinny branches, and I say, quite loudly, Well Damn You! There is, as you might imagine, no immediate response. The birds still fly, even as the wind buffets them awkward. It lights me and I laugh. I know that they can live without getting their knickers in a knot, because they work with what meets them each morning. I want to live that way. I do live that way. I didn’t always, not with all the youngstress of kids and work and business and what-the-hell- is-happening thing.

But what I did know was that I was always going to be about light and laughter. It was a choice. I had seen too many others go into the dark. I knew about the dark, of course I did but when I met it or it met me, I pulled back eventually, recoiled. You are not for me. You have no power over me. My favourite people? Those who have found the light, through endless searches, looking for help, guiding lights, those who were broken and who decided to rebuild from, sometimes, nothing. I look at them and it definitely thinks me because I have everything, I have enough, I have it all, and there’s a new year coming after the gorgeous Christmas hooha, a new chance to be who I am with light and laughter, for anyone to be who they are with confidence and the right to write their own name across 2026 with a big fucking pen.

With light and laughter, of course.

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Island Blog – Look like Ballet

Another busy week in the Best Cafe Ever, and it isn’t just me who says this. In between the days, family stuff, although ‘stuff’ is the wrong word come to think of it. In other’s lives, there are happenings, not great ones, in fact not great at all, but wait. See that ‘wait’ word? Always bugged me. What is immediate and all consuming spirals a mind, every time. The encouragement to wait is, from my experience, very Buddha, and I like it, just don’t always know how to buy into it. The urge to run, to travel, to support, is strong, very strong. But……wait. It thinks me. As I’m faffing about with thinks, all blind in the clouds of it all, I do get it. There is a time to go and a time to not go, although not going sits like a burr under my arse. Ah, bless the olding times. We seem to get better at knee jerk, even if we can knee jerk like the best when required. So I feed the birds, tend the plants, scoot off to to the Washeroo and work, notice my thinks, notice how my team mates are dealing with their own lives, retain a strong hold on the present whilst sending prayers and great visuals to those who can do with them, big time.

I am open, wide open, and I know it. It has taken many decades to arrive at this point. I believe in equality, in inclusivity, in compassion, kindness, friendship, in action. And the last is important to me. It is wonderful to spout the prior beliefs, but without action, they’re just pointless words. Would I stand against injustice, my voice clear? Would I move forward, or against, something or someone who didn’t? Do I remember old Sally’s needs as she pines for her long dead husband, her dog, her cat, her rabbit? Am I so busy with my own agenda that it’s as if these ‘poor’ people are as of nothing? Or have I trained my mind to be aware, way beyond my own thixotropic ‘stuff’? As I notice something that bothers me, in any situation, do I shake my head and continue my dash for last minute food and the bus, or the train, or the whatever that consumes my thinking? Do I?

Back home from work and a pecan coriander pesto to make. A shower to be had. A list for tomorrow to be made. A twisty cloud sky to watch. From full moon, the half moon is sudden. In the full, there is turbulence, big winds, huge tides, a load of show-off in my opinion, not to mention all those who get no sleep while this showing off is going on. Talking to my African son, suddenly, and jerkily, a red deer hind and her very young calf walked by my window, all unsure, alert, their skins healthy and their legs long and strong. They looked at me, I looked at them. Go safe you beauties. Go safe. You look like ballet.

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Island Blog – Tergiversator and Future Hope

This watching of grandlings growing into themselves thinks me. Although I only see them in explosive bursts, in holiday mode and intent, so intent on buzzing about on my quad, sometimes well overloaded, I can see they are moving into a new state. To me it looks like a very big space, full of questions like bluebottles around their heads. What they once believed unequivocally, they now challenge such as rulings within the home, opinions proffered which cause them to stop, confused, unsure. ‘I don’t agree with this’ can be flattened by one slammed fist of an authoritarian, carelessly dismissed and mocked. I remember that place. We are changelings in these awkward and spotty years, knowing what we don’t want but without the language to communicate. We have, in short, yet to learn the rules of the game ahead. We feel anger, frustration, a lack of recognition, but then even we don’t recognise the self we are fast becoming.

Change is a wonderful thing, in its perfect state, which doesn’t exist by the way because change is always upsetting for others. Think on it. If a dot in a perfect line of dots decides to drop a millimetre down or up, the line, once confident and assured now faces a void, a loss. Chaos ensues. What we once were…. that damn dot has ruined, ruined! This line has stood strong for weeks, months, years, generations, and now look. No, don’t look. There’s a hole in the straight line, in our understanding, in our confidence, in our family, in our workplace, on our street, and we are wringing our hands, lost, confused, angry. And why are we angry? Because we now, thanks to this Dot Dash, have no idea who we are anymore. That’s why.

In the Oxford Dictionary, there are many words for change, but what I have noticed is that there are many more swerves to the negative, and it wonders me. A definition begins with all that is good about change, slipping almost immediately into the gutter, into the dark, the menacing. This tells me quite a lot about how culture has, and still does, control wordage , language. Tergiversator, a word I might use now as light and lively once meant fickle, scheming, menacing even, and there are many more such definitions. This is because words shift and change shape and meaning, all the time and with every generation, with the infusion of new cultures, new beliefs, new aspirations towards a freedom, an escape from the structure of what once was so solid.

As a new young person grows beyond the langauge learned in childhood, there must always be some level of confrontation. The pillars and posts of the buildings that once stood strong (and controlling) will crumble because they must. New ideas burst in, new thoughts, new people. We need these new people, careless though they may be, crazy, certain of themselves, blundering and breaking rules, just as, once, the world needed us for exactly the same reason. Future hope.

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Island Blog – Lightening and Just Me, Just You

Same sound as Lightning, but with an E. It seems that just one E makes all the difference to the meaning of a word, spoken, that is. Written, all is clear. How confusing is that! When we write a text message, this can mean that, and ‘that’ can blow your pants off. We must be so careful with words. One message, meant to explain an inner drift, shift, split or maybe just inviting understanding, can send someone into a swirl of inner doubt, into childhood, when who I thought I was, wasn’t, pretty much. It thinks me.

I play with words, with wordage all the time, but I am canny, cautious, and still make mistakes. We all do, and, as we observe A. N Other living out their lives as best they bloody well can, who feel the ok enough to tell us about what they did with this, or him, or them, we might think before we text back, if we feel a judgement coming on. That damn judgement, that speaks in the voice of a long gone parent, grandparent, teacher. That is our own thing, and thus irrelevant. I always want to bring in an elephant here, I can see it, the mahout, turbaned and brown as a nut, and grinning through betel teeth, the elephant pondorous and on a steady trajectory, but that, also is irrelevant, for now.

How we did this or that, demands questioning. So many do not, question, and so the pattern continues patterning. Until someone stops it, just like that, in a lightning strike. Where does that intelligence come from, being as it is a newborn in their lives, in any life? It seems that, if we are open for change, asking for it because we are tired, so tired of living in a loop, meeting ourselves over and over and with no change in sight, and someone will just shout. SHOUT. And, as in a lightning strike, something falls.

Today I went to visit dear friends and we talked (or I did) for ages over tea and a beautiful dog and a view across forever, had the mist allowed. There was a lightening. I have known these two for a very long time, met them here and there, now and again, and yet, today, I was there with them, in their home and I felt so connected, so happy. We talked of dementia, of caring, of the village, of our beloved island, of bees, of woods, of trees, of the times we remembered dancing in the village hall. A lightening. I drove home in a different set of thinks.

Although I have always known my place is here, my people are here, over past times, I have felt isolated, of my own doing. I look for both lightning and lightening, but it was dark. I made it dark. And, in the dark, for all its shadows and demons, an essential part of the damn process of recovery is birthing from any number of wotwots. Not one single one of us would choose to go through it again, but we have learned to believe than light exists, and more, that we are needed in that light show. Just on our own, limping, awkward, with our own broken hearts, just us, just me, just you.

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Island Blog – Inspiradiation and a Zap Map

Many things inspire me, people too. Something said out loud or communicated through eyes, and in silence, but received, nonetheless. Moments, sounds, lyrics, intuitions, experiences, and many more besides. If I catch these inspirations, like butterflies in a net, they all hold a beauty and intensity, a teaching. But, only if I catch them. I know how it is to barge on through doorways and over sills or along pathways with only a to-do list. Chased by Time, and always just this side of utterly exhausted, it is easy to miss much. When focus is on the familiar, the to-do list, the endless corridors leading to yet another bloody doorway that opens on to more tasks only I can complete, intuition and the chance of inspiration getting so much as a look-in, is unlikely at best. Not now, however, now that I am old and alone and when I have endless time to catch butterflies in the net of my mind. Beautiful things, butterflies, although sometimes I might catch an earwig or a toad, so broad is my sweep. But those critters also bring opportunities for reflection. Perhaps that throwaway comment or that too-quick turn-away upset someone, and this earwig or this toad also have something for me to take in and to consider.  Not all catchings are pleasant, at first. Of course, the key with anything I catch is to eventually release it, be it the beautiful butterfly of epiphany, or the unattractive and dully coloured body of a uncomfortable realisation. One which demands humble action. 

Soon, I am offski to the cancer clinic for a ‘planning CT scan’, where the professionals will create their Zap Map. Through the wonders of technology, they will see precisely where to point the radiotherapeutic laser, ensuring, so they tell me, that all trace of cancer, if any is lurking, will be zapped unto death. Five days is all, and not even the whole of those five days, but a few minutes. Although unpleasant reactions can list bigly horrors, not one of them will affect me, because nothing ever has before. I am blest with ridonculous health, and a big inspiration net, always to hand. I will pay attention to everything and everyone, sweeping a wide catchment area wherever I go. Across the road, in a bus queue, in the hospital amongst others being zapped, the nurses, the doctors. Inside the hotel, the lift, on the stairs, through a window, along the street, butterflies abound. I just know it. And I will return, as I always do, humbled at what I see. A homeless girl, a weary bus driver, someone I meet in a doorway, a harrassed business man in a big rush, a fraught mother weighed down by a cling of children. I will hear sounds I never hear in this wild place. The chatter of a train on the tracks, a colourful hue of voices in languages I cannot speak, the cut of someone’s jib, the smell of exhaust fumes, of perfume, takeaway food and so on. And I will sweep it all in, catch it in my net.

Even the radiation will inspire me, for I am always curious like Alice, eager to learn, not facts but what is really means to be human, to be wonderful, lost, broken, keen, kind, and an integral part of all those ties, colours and stories that bind us together.  

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Island Blog – Fanacadoo

Do you ever arrive of a morning having travelled into weird worlds all night long? Or so it seems. All impossible things, unlikely people, extraordinary happenings happen inside the hours of sleep, none of which would survive five minutes in earthly mode. Beyond the borders of ‘possible’ lie these worlds, a convolution of stories read, tales told across a table, films seen, random encounters, daydreams, worries, fears, doubts and delusions of grandeur. I can fly. Sure you can. I can save the world, blow it up, murder (in a good way) stand watching a happening without moving into action, put out a forest fire all alone, win a house in Malibou, all possible in the depths of night, when my mind, which was programmed to sleep, chooses her own adventure series and plays it out all the way through.

Of course, I barely remember a sequence of plausible, believable events, oh no, but just patchy catches of the whole fanacadoo. As I lift from bed and move into the day, the images scatter, fractal, smokey, spiralling into the bedroom only to skinny through the gaps, as if they never were at all. Could this nocturnal experience be a helpful clearing of a cluttered mind, I ask myself? Or, was that unpleasant image, still inside my head despite my attempts to turn it scattered, fractal, smokey and spiralling off to skinny through the gaps, some sort of prophesy or warning? Over the years, I have learned to decide for myself the answer to those two questions. I say that I am not at the mercy of either of them, horns as they are of a dilemma, a waste of daylight to finger through such confusion with no chance of an Aha moment. I decide that my subconscious mind is a superior being and not in my control as I might like. If it can produce unbelievable scenarios in such brilliant technicolour, structured on nothing I have encountered, nor ever will, then it is at work on my behalf. Although I know that, at times, my own piddling worries and concerns can leak into my dreams, the costumes and scenarios fantastical, I trust there is a point to it all and not one my tug-boot daylight person is ever supposed to understand.

How freeing it is to address the night larks thus! I can dress and prepare for my day, knowing that a deal of fanacadoo has been addressed and processed. None of it is my business. It’s as if an inner counsellor has beavered away as I fitfully slept, lost in the story of the night. She has tidied up my mental loft. It is done. My remit is only to allow, accept and move on into the ordinary. But, with different eyes. This is important. If I can fly, save the world, turn into a mermaid, murder (in a good way) or even stand rooted and impotent in the face of something horrible, then I am delighted all this gets sorted in the safety of my bedroom. What I will never do again, having done it for many years, is to believe I am a bad person at heart, that, by dreaming this way I am showing my true colours. I refuse to accept this. I know who I am and how I will be around all other people, so that, even if it might be fun to turn into a mermaid, or to save the world single-handed, I do not relate to the backside of those (im)possibilities. My subconscious was simply filtering out, clearing away, processing and settling the who of me, the how and the what of this small human woman. I have a very vivid imagination, that’s all, and it is the work of the night counsellor to level my balance once again so that I can rise from it all with a chuckle, forget it all by elevenses and, most of all, know for certain that all is well, I am safe, my mental attic is swept and clear. This doesn’t deny the night stories, oh no, but it does put them in perspective, and one more thing………instead of moving into the day saying I didn’t sleep well, I say, instead, and mostly to the dog, What larks Pip, what adventures I had last night! She may look at me blankly, having curled into a slumbering danish, fast sleeping till a yawn at dawn, but I know how it was and I was there, I saw them all, even as those midnight images slip away like the steam from my coffee..

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Island Blog. – Raindrops, Curiosity and Change

I watch the rain. At first I might say it is cascading down the thatched roof, falling differently according to the turns and flats of a house with corners, and I am right, at first. When I study closer, I notice that the fall begins with individual drops, a whole line of them just at the point of falling. This is when they conjoin with other drops and become a straight line of water as they had in the moment they landed on the roof, way up there, where one slide of thatch joins the other, one this way, one that way, a steeple of fingers, protecting, sealing, a cooked snook at the sky. At first, individuals, these drops, then, it seems, merrily and inevitably becoming one body of water. They were singular as they fell from the clouds, for a long time and over a far distance, and then they met the roof, the apex and sighed into one. But did they sigh or did they happily connect with all those other solo drops, chattering and sharing space, knowing they would find themselves once again at the next fall, the one under which I stand, my fingers feeling their cool and somewhat dismissive diffidence to my skin, my palm unable to contain more than a few of them. Tipping my palm, they fall again as drips, as drops, individuals once again. Perhaps they are changed by their encounter with others and maybe more than once on their journey. It thinks me.

Although an individual’s journey through life cannot be defined as a fall, no matter how many falls may be encountered, the business of connection and, therefore, change, is true for us all. Whether a bonus or a pain in the arse, each encounter holds possibilities, for friendship, for fury, for joy, for outrage, a mind change or a mind set confirmed. Any which way, if taken seriously and with an open heart, these encounters may throw us together for a while, happily or not. When I find myself in a crowd of people, say in a busy market, inside a lift, a bus, train or plane, I have little choice beyond where I sit or stand. I have felt the irritation of bumping people unaware or uncaring about the amount of space they take up or the toes they squash and felt a rise of outrage. I have also, in those situations, felt glad I am not a bumper, not intentionally, being ever ready to flatten myself into a pencil, to take care not to invade another’s space, if space is even possible in such confinements. From my corner I have watched faces, read body language, agreed with myself that every one of us is not enjoying this one bit and then the outrage gentles into compassion. I know that soon we will become individuals once again and no longer a rush of people joined for a short time, not condemned to it forever, but what have we learned from this? Is it just something we have to bear, to re-story as a horrible experience, or did we really take in those around us and learn something from the whole experience beyond the perceived ‘nightmare?’ On looking back there were endless chances to make someone else feel better, a smile, a stepping back, an unspoken forgiveness offered, going possibly unnoticed, when a backpack thwacks a shoulder, or when an old person needs a seat and you give your own even though the young person next to you stares pointedly out at nothing. They know what they might offer, but they don’t. I get it. To be young is to fear rejection and it would take courage to proffer a seat in a public place with everyone silent and awfully busy just ‘getting through’ the so called nightmare, intact including toes.

We all need space. I certainly do. However in these times of squash, rush and bash we must all find ourselves at times. If we step into or onto them with curious interest, the whole situation is softened. A traffic jam can see us furious, finger tapping the wheel, crabby with others in the car, furious at life herself, or it can have us out of the car and walking up to the next equally compromised driver for a chat. We can observe the wildflowers on the banks, wonder at the magnitude of designing and constructing this highway, consider and reflect on our own lives, what we might change or develop. We can pick up a pen and a journal to write down some thoughts or read a book, or think hard about what this must feel like for all the other drivers and their passengers thus imprisoned. Endless, as I have said, opportunities that lift us out of our piddling little problematic world where we think we are the lead actor, the stage set just for us.

The raindrops drop, join to run a race, then divide again, into the same body of water, or forever changed because they were, just for a short while, a part of something bigger and way more powerful.

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Island Blog – Nowhere to go but Here

I am gradually learning the art of engaging fully with the day. Yesterday is gone and we all know tomorrow never comes no matter how fast we run. I suspect this engaging thingy may be age-related. It is also a time in my bonkers life when there are few demands on either my time or my superwoman skills, although a dash of those colours is always welcome and I am the first to leap on my motorbike in order to save someone’s day. But living fully inside the warm arms of this day is key to peace of mind, a softly pumping heart and no need for the Rennie packet. And the arms are warm. The weather is just weather. The hours are the same length they always have been and always will be, the ordinary daily tasks much the same even if I sometimes hoover/wash up/ repot geraniums or make soup in my neon tutu and top hat, at others in my dressing gown. I am a thankful woman. I have learned how to be that woman and she, me, is so very full of gratitude for all that comes my way, be it the excellently wonderful or the totally shit. All of it. And why is this? Because I have woken up once again, can spring, more or less, out of bed, choose my breakfast, watch the birds and the garden, the sea-loch and the sky taking not one look for granted. There are millions of ghosts who would give everything for just one more day in this beautiful world.

Worrying was what I did when my kids were, first, around my feet and peering up my nose or skirt, then later as towering sort-of-adults, able to wheech me over their shoulders. I worried, oh I worried. They are imaginative, enterprising and full of mischief, just as we taught them to be, but we were sensible and they absolutely weren’t. However this worrying was never a good thing, mainly because every disaster I imagined never happened at all. Also the art of worrying is not a pretty picture for the one being worried about. It indicates to them, quite clearly, that they are not to be trusted, that they don’t really know what is best for them. It turns their straight line into a curve at first, rounding into a circle of control in the end. Not healthy at all. And, for me, it unfocused my mind, addled my brain, upset my kidneys and unsleeped my nights. In short, worrying is always a pointless exercise, no exceptions. Oh I get the feelings of fear, anxiety and sometimes sheer terror, of course I do, but worrying is a choice and above all a method of control, even though most of my worries back in the day were more than justifiable. Just putting them on the school bus did not necessarily guarantee they arrived and and the simple act of coming home from the village was not without hazard. They lay in wait for each other with weapons of mass destruction and many a bruise or cut called for the nurse in me, the soother, the sorter out of complexities, the cool angel of peace, moving like Florence, over a wilderness war zone. A tapselteerie childhood and motherhood by the way for I was right in there, enmeshed in a time when compassion and fury lay together in my heart like unhappy bedfellows.

The truth is, and always was, I want my children to fly free, to make their own mistakes, sort their own lives out, find their own paths through the tangle woods even if this letting go wotwot is the hardest of all letting go wotwots. I know I don’t need to watch their every move unless of course I have made chocolate mousse. Dunked finger holes in the chocolate mousse, particularly if said finger kinks into a curve for maximum effect, is not a good look either for the mousse or for me, the cook. There is a limit to how much whipped cream can disguise such mining.

Needless to say I am always there if my help is needed and always will be, but that isn’t worrying. Instead it is an awareness and a readiness, boots at the door, my mini fuelled up, cash in my purse and a clear head to help sort out a problem; my ears open because I know that just by listening to the issue, asking the right questions and keeping quiet (a lot) will find them their own answer. It will also tell them without saying so that I believe in them, that they know how to deal with this, that I know they can sort this, because haven’t they sorted such warsle many times before? As, indeed, did I, this clueless wife, mother, nurse, storyteller, sorter of problems, such that threw me shapes I did not recognise at all. However, the temptation for we mums (and dads) is to think we are IT and without this IT, our children, friends, anyone we love who has just been blasted into space without a rocket, or a parachute, or breathing apparatus, is first to worry ourselves into a tremble of an eejit and then to buck forward with rocket, parachute, safety net and hot soup instead of what really works.

I see you up there. I am watching. Can you feel your toes? Look down and aim right. How does this bit of ground look to you? Do you think you can point towards it? Yes I know it’s the unfamiliar but you have moved on since yesterday and, as we know, tomorrow is a right pain in the neck because it absolutely never comes, no matter how fast you run. Yes, I am watching. I’ll be there with a sandwich and a flask when you land. No, I am not going anywhere. It’s ok this bit of ground, this new bit. There’s heather and saltgrass, orchids too now that it’s spring and birds…..you should hear the birds and you will. Soon. Then we will sit together, marvel in the moment and you and I will walk, not back into our lives, but forward. Not yet, thought, not yet. For now we will sit quietly in the present moment and say our thank yous to the love in the sky, the love that is always there for the asking. After all, there really is ‘nowhere to go but here’.

(not my words but borrowed from another)

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Island Blog – This Day, This Ice, This Learning

The morning almost capsizes me. I blame the ice. There I am, all ready to venture forth in the arm-crossed and defiant black of a winter’s dawn, one that seems unwilling to appear at all, and I find myself confounded. Mornings should be mornings. That’s what I think. Winter has no respect for human comfort, nor for early venturing. I find my car an igloo. Beneath my skittering feet, slip-ice threatens to upskittle me in a most undignified way. I keep thinking, what if someone comes along, eventually, after some hours considering the unwillingness of the day to appear at all only to find me all spreadeagled, my skirts around my ears and my body cracked and held in frozen gravitas? Well, that’s not going to happen. I turn but slowly, holding onto gate and fence and inch my way back into the warmth of the house. You should not have gone out, said the house. You old eejit. I concur.

Light comes, and most welcome. You are, late, and I don’t do late, but it seems you are quite fine about it. We may need to have a word. It is always intriguing, nay infuriating, when things or people feel quite fine about not explaining themselves or at the very least proffering apology. Perhaps Dawn is above such rulings. I may have to accept it. I turn towards my ordinary tasks. Clean out and light the fire. This requires another traverse across the slip-ice to the wood stack. I know the rules. I studied, if you can believe it, Posture Control now renamed Adequate Motor Output (if you don’t mind) at school. I know, scary. Keep your body directly over your feet. Heel first, then toe, no flat foot. I hear the voice in my head and it comes to me now because I am one who is utterly determined to remain upright for as long as she possibly can. We manage it, me and the wood, even though it distremebles me somewhat as I take in the humph and lumph of a lift of snow laden logs in my arms. This imbalance requires intelligent correction for it is not just me keeping me directly over my feet. I now have a big armful of insensitive logs to accommodate and before me, thus altering my centre of gravity. See how complicated life can be?

The morning passes without incident. I sew and listen to an audio book, warm in the firelight and, later, blazed by a sun who is thankfully melting the slip-ice, I watch it melt, hear it crack and fissure, leak and then disappear randomly. Why this hole and here? Why not there, or there? I walk midday. The ice, it seems, is having fun. The chutzpah of something so fragile and yet so powerful during its short reign! I admire it even as I dint and divvy my way over the stumbleground of latent snow fall, still crisp but not as ice distilled as this side of the track or that where the wide tyres of massive vehicles have rendered walking an impasse, even if I am learned of Adequate Motor Output and a confident student. I am always looking down. Watching, heel toe, no flat, catch the stones, heel, toe, no flat.

Beyond this, once I am no longer engaged with the ice control, I walk more freely. Here is mud, pine peat sludge, ridges melted, squelch, and I follow the dog. When she is not sniffing every trace, every track, she is bonhomie. She is my guide. Even without any school training, she is in complete control of her manifold feets. She can skid and correct in the face of any ice challenge. Here she chooses a lift to the left, a change of choice there and I follow her. I know that animals have instincts that we have allowed ourselves to forget. Some places on the track lie frozen, still, silent. Others lift back into exhaling ridges of peat sludge, airy when I tread them, rised, it seems, by frost and then abandoned to their thawing fate. Prints are widening. That big dog is now a wolf. That confident bicycle track the backbone of a Titanoboa. The ground is spreading out, losing definition, becoming a new self, becoming nothing until it reforms into another something.

I love this about life. Something is here, yes, it is here, for I can see it, and then it melts and is gone, and something new comes in its place. Unless we are watching we will miss this. Perhaps we don’t mind the missing, nor the rebirth, but for me, to see it is essential. This is why, despite my eye rolling and my puffs of derision around Adequate Motor Output, I will remain upright for as long as I possibly can and I will keep watching and learning.

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Island Blog – Buzzard One

Earlier in the Summer, there was a young buzzard that wheeled and crash landed in trees, all a-feather and gripping talons and noise, floundering, gathering itself together as if nobody had taught it how. I marvelled it didn’t flip 180 degrees at times and considered how interesting and how bizarre the world would look like when upside down and hanging on to a tree. I remember it. Not as a buzzard, but as a child, upside down, held fast by my knees, on our metal climbing frame at the end of the garden, far enough away from the adults so as not to cause them noise. It was beside the hut, that place where apples and onions sat on wooden slats to keep them air-flowed and individual. Individual, it seemed, was critical to survival. As it is, now, for this buzzard, as it is for me and for you.

In the world of buzzard, the parents have flown. Or, is it that the mother and son/daughter have flown, or the father with a ditto combo? Who knows? The buzzard does not speak to me. However, I can report that it no longer lands all a-feather and with no speed control. In fact, it is mellow and effortless in the air, lifting and luffing with the capricious winds and the bend and flex of the sea-blown trees, as if it had learned their language and can now speak it easy. It leaves me behind. I can only watch it lift and luff and spread its glorious wings to protect it from both the ground and the sky. I watch the way its feathers flex to deflect and to catch the wind. Flowing down from the hill on which I live, it will meet catch-winds, sideways blasts, warm air rising and cold air pulling down and it adapts to that with barely a murmur, without a sound.

Where did that sound go? It mewled and mewled every day in the early Summer. Was it calling for mummy or was it asserting its dominance in the reign of the sky, taking its place, demanding it? The mewling sounded so plaintive, so pathetic and yet my ears don’t know what they hear around animals. I cannot speak their language. And, yet, it teaches me. And I learn this; that life lives herself on, moving from an old body to a younger one, and that is it life herself that teaches. We all have to crash land, all a-feather in our lives and, some of us many times, as things change and as what we knew as fact crumbled into dust. Now, this magnificent creature is silent. I watch it every day for it seems to want to stay and that tells me this is the young one sticking with what it knows, what is familiar. It flies low. It flies just above me in the trees as I walk, just watching. It might stay there, watching me, watching it, if the noisy terrier didn’t chase it along the track, barking as if barks would scare it away.

It thinks me. Barks, wind, lift and luff, life and being alone. I’m ok with all of it for it reminds me of me. If I can do all of the above and still hold on to who I am and what the world is, then I have all that I need. If, in my grounded mind, which, btw, has never been all that grounded, can move through the air, through the change and the moods of wind, sky, tide and tree-stops with. conscious grace, always learning, always adapting now matter how old I am, then I am akin with the universe. I know that I know nothing. I know that I must always be open and ready to learn. My old ma would have sniffed at such nonsense. In that generation the telling was that you learned, then accepted and fixed. I think, like the wild things, that my generation is different, more aware, more ready to live mindfully. And I celebrate that. I may be alone, as many are (or feel) alone, but this does not take our strength from us. In fact, it might just make us wilder, more questing, more adventurous.

The mewling buzzard is silent now. Not subdued, not at all, but living completely, in itself, in this world, as it is and as the world is right now. I’m in.