life

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Island Blog – Ordinary Life

There’s still a lot of waggle and shiver going on here. Shrubs slewed sideways, drunk on the gale, tree limbs felled by it. It wonders me, that felling thing. Obviously the fallen were already showing an inner weakness, unseen by me, or anyone else, for that matter, but known by the tree. The limbs fall higgle piggle, downing others who, or is it whom, were probably astonished at the invasion of their space, and who(m) were not ready to fall off their perches quite then. There are always innocent victims. The shrubs, well, they had to go. When you are already stemmed up to three feets, you don’t lookd good at all, collapsed like a load of young vicarious hopefuls at a hen night, blooms bashed, squashed. I am so glad I never had a hen night. The thought of one of those sads me. Just to think that any about-to-be ‘bride’ is already missing her freedom makes no sense to me at all.

I went today for lunch with a wonderful friend. It is the last week of this fabulous cafe being open for the so-called summer. I love my friends, our meets and chats and laughs. From our ordinary lives, we lift into an hour or two of random, when anything can happen and everything can be said. And then, we part, and return to our own ordinary lives but with our thoughts changed, shifted, eased, recognised. A powerful time. We all have troubles, but in the talking of them, in the sharing, even in the not sharing, just that connectivity is dynamic and changing. I come home along a road (track) that dips and dives, the sides deep enough to sink a mini, watching a waspish sun-god pushing (I can see it) against cloud bullies, his light diamonds sparkling on the surface of an incoming tide, all salt and salmon hope. And I am home.

I walk beneath shiver trees, gold and red, or what’s left of all that spectacular. We never enjoy the autumn colours as others do in places where the gales have no room to flex their full span, nor expand their blow. Our leaves are stripped quickquick here. It thinks me a bit. We have trees here. At least we saw a bit of autumn colour. I have been to islands where no trees can grow, and not far from here. And I am thankful for the glimpse of such beauty. The sky is a wild grey bonkers, clouds shifting sideways, wind pitching like a bowler. Kids barrel noisy home from school. Folk walk by. Ordinary life.

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Island Blog – Cacoethes Scribendi

I believe many of us have this condition. It’s not like cancer or a chronic disease and doesn’t hurt the body much, but mostly, the brain, and we all have one of those. However, the urge to write can play havoc with every other part of a living soul, itchy fingers, running feet, sweats, chills and a strong desire to escape from a perfectly ordinary confabulatory experience because you just have to get this down; what she said, what his body language told you, how the atmosphere shifted from a warm fuzzy into an arctic abandonment. And, if you don’t get gone, or cannot, or if the whole being gone thing would turn everyone else there into statues, you will lose capture. I’ve been in that oh damnit to hell place many times before, but even if I followed my own advice and had a wee notebook concealed somewhere about my person, I doubt I would have pulled it out, because the invasion of an interrupta femina (allow me, latin scholars) pulling out her quill and slate would, I am sure, have had the same upsetting effect. This situation is rather constipating.

So, to be able to remember and to retain the lift and twist, the moments before and just after the ‘noticing’ is a giant skill. Not only do I want to remember the words, the way they swirled and ebbed, lapsed and spiked, but I also want to remember how the whole whatsit made me feel, and that is the part which slides away like mist, because there will have been a resolution, or a stop, or a happening, and all of those are as round as a full stop. How fickle is my mind, how easily does it move on to the next moment and the next? I believe distractions are my problem. Someone says something unrelevant to the time I just left, with all its vitally connected feelings and emotions, and it is as if I have let them all go, some forever.

I find the same with memories. I can vividly recall the events, according, I know, to my perception. I know who said what and to whom. I know how I felt about it, the rachet resulting from that human encounter, the lift, the slump, the delight, the fear, but the depth of these feelings have become splat over time, levelled like sand on a beach, flat, a straight line. It isn’t the truth at all because, back then, I was purple with rage, set to take somebody’s head off, my feet ready to run, to save, to murder. Well, maybe not that, but nearly. So, to relocate the feelings around a memory, even if that memory is minutes back or decades, is, as I have said, a giant skill. I could make it up, guessing here and there, and sound quite plausible, although I have an issue with those two words conjoining. You are either plausible or you’re not. There is no ‘quite’ about it. I find the same with pretty amazing, or slightly curious, or vaguely interested. Such placid nonsense. You are, or you aren’t. I digress.

As I write a bigger piece of work, I am going back into memories. I scribble over many of them, my pen helping me to dilute my astute; to cave in, untrusting of self, reminding myself that my brain may well have added, subtracted, divided and multiplied; that others will not (I absolutely know that) have seen this and that through my eyes, my experience, and here’s a thing for anyone who has the guts to write their story. Nobody knows how you felt when you saw what you saw. Nobody knows how you felt, and for so long, about your life. The thought of speaking that out, of owning it, of sharing it, is very scary. However, and nonetheless (can’t resist lovely words) if you don’t tell, if you don’t risk judgement or rejection, if you don’t step out into the unknown, how will anyone ever know how life has been for you? And, in this stiff upper lip bollix that thrives in this country, a country, I might remind you, which once owned half the world and is now feeling rather skinny and alone, we need brave voices to speak out, better, to write.

If you want to write, never think nobody cares, or wants to know. We need you to speak out. Begin.

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Island Blog – Like Wild Birds

This is how I see it. Tidelines create as I watch, an incoming huge force meeting resistance, another super force. Sailors call it wind over tide, which sounds like a tablecloth lifting teacups, a shatter of inconvenience and mess in a street cafe, like an ‘oops’. The incoming Atlantic is striped as a deckchair, the recalcitrant wind fighting a pointless battle. The tide will in. But the wind is no less of a player. And she is no fool. Any voice against a mighty force can make a difference. She may concede defeat, for now, but she will blow on.

In my ordinary life, I did a lot of blowing against an interminable tide. Life was as it was, and my timeline was my timeline. Many will know this for themselves. I gave my all, as so many did, and still do. And I regret not one minute, well, maybe a few. As those I knew and loved die, it thinks me, and remembers me, of the times I knew they were riding right with me as a wind over tide, and the laughs we had, the way we turned back into our lives, the way we just damn well got on with it. Of the way that connection kept us all going on, no matter what, and with joy and laughter and mistakes and a fierce attitude.

Like wild birds.

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Island Blog – Wording

Words are my thing. I am no worder, powerful within the pages of research books, no academic Brilliantine. But words are my thing. They fly about my head like birds, assault me, trip me up, wake me in the night, confound me in the day when I’m scrubbing the loo. I am a word vessel. So, when words bugger off, their absence is like I’m naked, which I am so not. I can walk deep into my Mother Nature, feeling my way, searching in the brush, the fallen, the ancient, the rising, and find no words at all beyond Wow, or Thankyou, or Shit I just soaked my Boots. Not enough, not good at all. And, yet, resting in the ‘how it is right now’, I consider. Perhaps i need a rest. Perhaps the wordness of words need one too. Everyone is always actively searching for a word, the right word, as if words tumble away into the vast void of everything lost, for now. Right words must be exhausted.

In my younger days, I freaked out if I couldn’t find a word, when, inside my head I had this clear and beautifully perfect one somewhere just behind the bins, behind the confusion and questioning of my life, one which refused to grace my lips. I would leave an encounter, furious at my lack. It thinks me, with a wonder. Maybe it was not for me at that moment, infuriating as that felt at the time. We humans seem to think we are in the upper echelons of pretty much everything, thus, in control. Maybe words don’t want to be controlled. I certainly don’t want to be, so, maybe I get it. Perhaps I am being taught a life lesson, because this is not the first time, and I will be wise to notice.

So, I can flounder, for now, abject myself to a considerably higher power, and wait for the words to fly back in, as the Redwings will soon, the Mistle Thrush, the Autumn visitors. There is no loss, as long as I don’t buy into loss. I know who I am, and there is no weakness in bowing down, in letting go of ego. In fact, I believe it is a strength.

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Island Wife – Lift and Slideways

I love the way they lift. Birds. It gasps me every time, the sudden sight of a life that can do that lift thing, all feathers and aerodynamics and who the eff cares, thing. I’m behind the wheel of my sassy mini, one, bless her, whose brake pads are skinnyrink. Not her fault, of course. It’s those tourists who have no clue about passing places, reversing, spacial awareness, nor a care in the world for the big ass drop on my side of the single track road. I digress. Back to the lift.

As I watch the Little Gull lift without any sign of a run-up, just an effortless rise from Terra Firma, I not only feel my own body lift, even from within the clutches of Matron of Seatbelts but I also sense a deep longing in me. To fly like that through a whole life, to lift from standing when something bothers or threatens, or just from boredom, must be truly wonderful. I watch the white and grey touch the sky, slide sideways, cutting a line, a definite line, then scooping up again, and around, and all of it in silence. It thinks me.

I can do that, I whisper to my home. I can live that way, just not exactly that way, being featherless and weighing a few stones more than that wee body of lift and slide. But, in my mind, my attitude, my chosen direction, I can. Yes, it is a damn pain in the arse being a thinker, I agree. These beautiful elevators, and the animals grounded, don’t think at all. They respond to instinct, our own fight or flight part of the brain. They just respond to an outside stimulus, and they are always on the alert for danger. That part must be exhausting, although, and this thinks me too, how many of us live that way, feeling so under the power of ‘someone else’ that their innate sense of independence and choice is quashed into mud? I suspect too many beautiful souls.

Every single morning, and through each day, I self-correct. The Terra Firma of my thinks, could sink me in that mud. I kid you not, and here’s another thing……those of us who really feel, Really Feel, for others, for the world, for our future, for our even now, for our self image, and that’s the biggest pull to ground, feel bloody everything, question everything, are consumed by everything. We need to remember our feathers, even if those around us just don’t get it. My advice? Don’t bother to explain. If you are a creative, recognised and acknowledged or not, know this…….you will find your place among others who recognise you, even if they never met you before. Trust in this, through all those awful lonely times, those dark places, those rejections and mockings and nightmares. I have no idea why I went there, but perhaps someone needed to hear the hope in my words.

Back to the lift and slide. In this ridonculous world of rules and behaviour parameters which seem to close in like jaws at times, there is, for the brave who just say, Enough, just once, and stick with it, a new flight. Yes, it will be tough, dangerous, all of that stuff, but who wants to live the one life under another’s control? I watched a big predator lift from the sea-loch, all 8 foot wings, big ass, confident, the queen of the sky. She rose up and up and frickin up until even a cloud gave in with a sigh and a divide, so intent was this big lady on full exposure. Then I saw the Little Gulls, wee smouts (look it up) in an immense sky, skinny wee things, intent on moving this big lady on and away. I heard them talking to each other, You go this way, You round on her, You tackle her, You deafen her with that dreadful squawk of yours, and so on. The Whitetail lifted, slid, lazy, like I’m in charge here. But the gulls, the small people, were having none of that shit. Persisting for a whole skyline, they moved her on. I’ve seen it many times, and have always wished that the ‘small people’ in business, in the world, could band together like Little Gulls, and not just in business. I think of a book I have with me always. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, by Richard Bach, a slim book with fat wisdom. One gull decides things are not right. Just one.

Please never believe the shit inside your head. It isn’t you. It’s learned lies. You, too, can fly.

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Island Blog – Reflectology

It seems to me that, once way ahead of an unpleasant thing, I can see the, heretofore unseen, benefits hidden in the turbulence, sadness and pain. At the time, in the thick of the thick of it, I am no more than a tumbleweed in a vast empty desert. All my supports have abandoned me. I am left entirely alone, and yet not alone because my thoughts, often my enemies, stick super close. Child, teenager, young wife, mother, disappointed dreamer, et la and la, all morphoses requiring me to change more often than I do my knickers. Life, anybody’s life, is like this. I sincerely doubt a single soul can say, truthfully, that everything that happened to them was just what they wanted and, better, predicted. Looking back, I can settle, somewhat, swatting away the bluebottles of Why and How, quick sharp, so they have no time to lay eggs in my brain. At this end of a long and adventurous life, I can see so much. Rejection strengthened me. Neglect taught me to love myself (eventually). Abandonment, judgement and loneliness made me resourcefulness, a respect and love of my own company. In short, I learned tactics, found tools, good tools, ones I can always rely on because I always keep them sharpened and greased. This is Reflectology.

The study of reflection is a good thing but, and there is always one of those, it is essential to remember that one life is just that. One change, one ticket to the dance, and balance is everything. To fall down and to stay down is a choice, presuming appropriate limbs are still strong. Something in me, deep, deep inside me, probably a bloody connection to my parents, will not let me stay in that down place for long. Oh, I can go there, all mawkish and brimming with self-pity, sinking into the black, the sadness, the regrets and the rage against any dimming at all, and then this Get up and Go does it’s thing anyway, patiently waiting for me to do the same. It stands there above me, all calm and cocky and that ‘we’ve been here before’ look on its face.

Go where? I whinge.

Who the frick cares, comes the reply. Just do it or that bus, see that number 38 rounding the bend, will flatten you and then what?

I’ll be flat, I say, defeated.

And useless, comes the eye-roll answer. I can’t make you, can’t lift you. You have to do that.

This has served me for decades. I could tell my grandchildren this, and they would puzzle. They expect someone else to lift them back up again, bring them back into the light, love them again, just as I did. It wonders me, the fairytales we read them, much as I love a fairytale. However, to read them ‘reality’ might just turn them into tumbleweeds on the spot. We learn slowly and by experience. We learn how strong we are only in times of war.

I fought everything and everyone as I did this tumbelweed thing. Not openly, covertly. I internalised the bad stuff. But it seems to have done me no harm, not when I reflect on the utter brilliance of my bonkers life. Yes, there were cuts and bruises, yes I felt rejected, abandoned, all of that, and very sharply, but here I am a septuagenarian, and still ready for whatever comes my way. The key, my key, is that I am thankful for all of it, even the shit times, and I honestly believe that such a choice, because that is what it is, means I can keep getting up, even if I have no idea where I’m going.

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Island Blog – A Man, a Horsefly and the Itch.

He came into my life like a complete surprise, as, I believe, I was for him. A random and unlinear sequence of events collided us. It was exciting and wild. For a week. He spoke of a possible future, at least while we got to know each other. A mid country meet here, a trip away there. We laughed a lot, moved easily around each other, shared many interests, and appeared to be on the first part of a journey. We are not teenagers, not fools, both with a long and, at times, uncomfortable past, a lot of which we shared. I felt a flicker of hope, the chance for a new adventure with, possibly, him. I had believed that my life with a lover died with my husband. So many years of caring, of being mummy and nurse to a man who, once, could just look at me and I would melt. I had tidied her away, that ‘on fire’ woman, that reckless abandoner of anything sensible. My body worked as she should, but she was just functioning. I had even resigned myself to a lonely old woman line of same-old, making myself rise to bright and bubbly, to being the clown around those who needed a laugh, to uplifting everyone, even though my trudge boots shouted at me to chuck them in the sea-loch, just to put them out of their misery. I didn’t dance so much, rarely sang at all, performed domestic tasks with a sigh. Who needs this getting old and lonely thing? I would ask my Marigolds, my blue hoover, the birds in my garden. I found it, at best, tiresome and quite unnecessary. We should be shot at such a stage in life and if another person tells me that I have a lot yet to give, I just might be arrested for my response.

A week of holding hands, of walking on the beach, of lunches out, coffee in the sunshine, a nice Rose at sundown; an emotional sadness at leaving. His. Then, nothing, but the odd text. Still, I knew he was working, and in areas without mobile reception. I knew that, because that is what he told me, and, the dutiful little woman understood. In fact, this dutiful little woman, on reflection, missed a lot of hints, but, with hindsight, it is often easy to join dots dismissed at the time as just dots. After work was completed and I still believed in the ‘let’s meet mid country’ or the ‘we could go away for a few days on a trip’ I was firmly dumped via a text, one I have deleted. It was so teenage, so self-absorbed, so dismissive and disrespectful and did not justify any response at all beyond a snort of laughter. However, this is a first response. I know that others will follow, anger, sadness, the confirmation that I am a complete idiot for believing at all that any man would find me attractive at 71. Etcetera.

But, and there is always one of those, all this teaches me, and teaches me well. I don’t mean the nonsense I have heard from the man haters, because I do not hate men at all. I think they are wonderful, love to be with them, hug them, laugh with them, listen to them, and the latter is how it was with this man because he only ever talked about himself and, I recall, rarely asked me a question about me, my loves, my passions, my dreams and hopes. Man is man, for sure, working very differently to women, but most men I know are strong, sensitive, and emotionally intelligent creatures, even if they cannot find the words for good communication beyond golf, boats, science, things that function with a motor and the vagiaries of spotlights, cars, politics, economics and how bluetooth works, to name but a few. And they can learn to ask questions and to listen.

Last year a horsefly bit me. That bite, as you may remember, led to danger, to cellulitis and possible sepsis, and then to the revelation of breast cancer. Had that horsefly not carelessly bitten me, I would, definitely, be growing a cancer right now, one that doesn’t show in a lump, but in a silent spread. Since then I have embarked on a fitness programme, the right food, exercise, and, most importantly, a re-understanding of how precious my life is to me. This man inspired the same, the man, the horsefly, the catalyst, a lead into more and better and, importantly, a reset of boundaries and the opening of, heretofore closed, doors. I dance again, suddenly, sing more, feel alive and beautiful. And, I am.

The horsefly and the man. Both bit me. But I grow stronger for those bites, however much they itch.

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Island Blog – Moons in her Mouth

I find that there are as many ways to respond to change as there are people. I recognise resistance, fear, exhilaration, denial and many more unspellable words describing the palaver of response. Trouble is, change is invariably frick all to do with us. Someone or something else initiates this change thing, muddying still waters and messing up picture perfect landscapes. It’s like the world without or within just shifted a whole 45 degrees whilst we, busy doing the same thing in the same way for ages, remain rooted to the spot and staring at nothing. Where did what I know and understand, go?

The answer is, Not Far, in my experience, but why life has to do this irritating shift is, well, irritating, at best upsetting/confusing and scary at worst. But wait……..if I can see that in my security I was just an automaton, performing tasks in the usual way and without questioning anything, and, thus, not really alive at all, then perhaps I should take a closer look at what change has on offer. We humans have been gifted elevation above all other living creatures, and, yet, any animal, bird, reptile or fish knows more about adaptation to change that most of us two legged bright sparks will ever know. And, yet, change is wild around us, moving in on a storm, in stories, in the turbulence of extreme weather, the warning loud and clear to all others, it seems, but us. I can see that we have depended too much on a material infrastructure, trusting in impermanence, thus gradually losing our natural abilities as intelligent and sentient human beings.

Even as a young woman, well, girl really, I knew I wanted the insecurity of the traveller. It scared me, the thought of the riptide, the undertow, the wild and desolate landscape, an unpredictable sky, but the call was strong. Thankfully, I found a man who had more experience, more knowledge on such travelling whooha and who reckoned I could be a good travel mate. I learned so much from him, thirsty for the knowing of how to react when encountering danger, for example, or of what physical and mental strengths I needed to develop in order to be, not unafraid, but canny and unpanicked. I did panic, a lot, in the process, but I also learned a gazillion lessons on survival, and I don’t mean living on Mars, but more just living with constant change.

And then I learned to love becoming a dynamic part of Life with all her shifts and shouts. Sometimes she whispers, and I turn my head to hear. I know that businesses fail, that shops go bust, that hackers grow like weeds, that war is a boundary away, but I also know that I am a survivor. This is not arrogance, safe behind a locked door of smugness and control, but just one woman, spinning in harmony with the world, vigilant, always learning and with moons in her mouth.

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Island Blog – Diving the Deeps

Today I worked at changeovers in the sunshine with a fablious team. I had to learn my way around the check list for each property, four tea towels here, two there, one for glass and one for otherness. The store cupboards, floor to ceiling, hold super king duvet kit, king, double and single. I did, momentarily wonder where the hell are the queens in all this! Well, I know where they are. They’re plotting in the dark spaces, along with the cobwebs, not that I found one of those. That is how it is, even now when we might all do well to acknowledge the fact that queens and women who never got the crown will not be kept in the dark for long.

I buzzed here and there, cleaning windows, scrubbing loos, working impossible duvets into the resistance of their covers, as if they had tasted freedom for just a few hours and were dead pissed off at the thought of, again, obliging into a well-ironed confine for yet another week. What might be the word for someone who gives life to things? I have no answer. Anyway, I am digressing, madly. I was somewhere else for about four hours with wonderful women in the team, with no mobile reception and the sky blue, the wind very Sahara, blowing leaflets and sticky information sheets off their blue tack restraints, and visitors who stopped by for coffee and stayed for ages. We watched, from the laundry, a line of classic cars thrum by, their bellies way to low for our island potholes, and then, later, big bikers on big bikes, turning in, all leathered up and grinny, for big ass sandwiches and the chance to swelter in the very focussed sunshine. the doors to the cafe stayed open, until a Sahara blast thwacked them shut. Folk came with dogs wearing shorts, the humans, not the dogs, and for a short while conversation lifted from the sort of sheltered outside bit and up into the sky, stories and laughter flying like birds. A conjumble of fablious. We don’t have many such days here and we know how to celebrate the fun of the moment, to grab it, but not to expect a hold, for it can so quickly be snatched away.

I knew I wanted physical work. I can still jinx and bend, not only with my body, but also with my thinking. I have dived deep throughout my life, seeking what I could never have, and finding that which I never sought, a sudden surprise, a something that stopped my flow and caught my breath, like a new understanding. And that, I now know, only comes over time lived, experiential time. We sort , (I say ‘We’ only because I have talked with others on this), our expectations and our disappointments into an acceptable line like a track we know we must walk. We know there are potholes and, jeez, there are some spectacular ones here. My mini could disappear completely in one, although, and here I go again, she has no intention of losing anything, never mind herself. We talk. I warn her, or she, if I am suddenly zooming, warns me. It works, this communication I have with things. Someone once said to me, they actually did, that I cannot talk to plants and I did give an eye roll at that. It isn’t such a stretch to ‘things’. Not for me. If I need something to work with me and I with that thing, my garden gate, for example, which refused to shut properly until we had a chat, then I need to initiate conversation. Had I been born in Westmoreland in an earlier era, I have no doubt I would have been burned at the stake.

Depth in life is asking to be dived. I know the surface is safe but it is also boring. I cannot see opportunity beyond what is under my control. I want to risk, to dive, to possibly struggle, but isn’t this living, isn’t this fun? I have no interest in control, although I am definitely me and the definitely me is still wild.

Who would choose less?

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Island Blog – Survive, Flourish and Life

I watch a robin cling to a fat feeder, wings dinging. It can last just long enough to get a mouthful, pinging back onto the fence and looking around as if to say ‘ so?’ I smile. I think it smiles back as its wee black eye clocks me doing this watching thing, but I’m unsure about the ability of a beak to smile. I see sparrows do the same, their feet adapting to feeders, their learning pivotal to survival. And, it thinks me. We do it too, we humans, adapt when survival seems beyond our understanding. We become inventive. And, thus, we survive and flourish. At first, the robin floundered and wobbled and fluttered as if gravity had won, but not now. Now it holds, steadies, self-corrects and stays, as I said, long enough for a mouthful. I think of my own life and all the adapting I have undergone, and it makes a perfect sense, for I have encountered many, many of those who, or is it whom, I just knew were not going to make it. And that saddened me and still does.

From a young age, well, about 20 years old/young, I knew I wanted to be a survivor, more, a flourisher. I had no substance to support my knowing, no experiential wisdom, but I just knew. That, may I say, is a tough thing to hold inside, because everyone wants facts around any such pronouncement. I did not pronounce. I had no facts to support my ‘theory’. It just grew like a newing and a knowing in me until I found someone who, older than I by a decade, had tried out a few of his theories and was equipped with some gravitas. T’is a shame, in my opinion, that we don’t listen to the young and their beliefs, and still now we don’t, because our culture decides them into schools and subjects and noise and ‘success’, confizing a sunburst into a tiny, and ‘acceptable’ light. Just saying.

I walked today beneath gale-strafed bows, the trees quiet but I know what’s going on inside their heads. Kathleen will return tomorrow, the gale thus named, resurrecting the waves, upsetting the fisherman, turmoiling the ocean into lifts and spits and deeps and discordance and none of us need it, not even the great Atlantic. I notice nubs of new growth littering the track, and it used to bother me. I thought, Oh No, the new growth is gone! Not so. The trees know what goes on here. The first fruits of growth push out anyway, the birds, hungry, long winter (and still not gone) pick off the growth to find the juicy life beneath. Their long hunger is lifted and I can hear them sing from those branches, inviting in a mate, life all over again.

And that is what I knew, without a damn clue, way back when I was 20, that life does that over again thing. We get through shit. We keep going. New life is beckoning. Trauma, bereavement, enforced change, even a move into a world we have never encountered. We can adapt. We can. And, we can not only survive but flourish, because we are strong and intelligent and an important part in what happens next.