life

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Island Blog – The Crevices

I’m watching a slide of cloud folding down into the crevices between the hills, like smoke through the trees, moving like a whoosh to cover over the hill road, the altostratus holding above, the cumulous confident. It thinks me about a load of things. There will always be be levels, the lower, the confident upper. Always, even in nature. Definitely in nature. My children have gone now, all their dynamics with them, all their longings, all their dreams and needs, leaving their roots once again and driving through blocks and hold-ups and ferry issues all over again in order to push their lives forward, to hold up their families. I feel old as I watch them go, even as I know they must. They are now in a place we were in once, very scared. I think everyone can admit to scared in these times.

The thing about being old and alone is that nobody wants to hear about it. I have been thinking much about my husband as he felt himself losing himself. I thought that, had just someone asked him, someone beyond the family fear of it, the clinical response to it, asked him, genuinely and whilst he still knew himself, ‘Tell me about you. You have lived such an extraordinary life after all.’ We didn’t, they didn’t. I have nothing but respect and thanks to the carers and the ‘officials’ who came, but the system forgets or denies the ‘crevices’ as the smokecloud descends over the strong tree-lined hillside of a longheld life.

This situation is everywhere. I get the fear when things wobble and sustain. I walked through it all and, to my regret, I formed myself into a clinical response. I forgot who we were. I miss you at Scrabble, at Cards, at the chuckle on your face when you got me. I never learned Chess. I tried, you said ‘It’s easy.’ I wish I had asked you about your life, so much bigger than mine when we lay together. I wish I had not turned into mother/nurse so quickly as if I could fix everything, bring you back. Even though I could never have fought this awful life sentence, I still can find ways I could have been more than. I could have shown you the clouds, the way the hill road disappears in cloud swoosh.

I’m laughing now. You would be. It is as it is. Yeah.

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Island Blog – Confusoball

I flip on a light as I head for a shower. That’s a first. It’s been light for months and now light is shifting. I don’t need the light, but I choose it, I want it. As I curve, like the staircase up to the next floor I choose that warm glow. I almost heard the light, the wee thing, chuckle. I am back. Yes, I said, and paused and by the way you will be pivotal for endless months because Spring is like a teenager who never wants to get out of bed. I’m not sure she got that, but we do. We can bow down to the unknown, to fears, to olding pains or to the sense of living in a world we don’t know, nor understand. I am very aware of the bow-down capitulation. It gets me every single day, no, doesn’t get me, but it rises like a rising thing and I am very aware very aware that it is just me against it. And I am, against it.

Most people I know about live on the surface, paddling like mad, looking for shore. Think about it. How often have you actually have a real deep conversation with anyone? Quick hallos on the school run, eyes checking for how you look as ‘mum’, the quality of your clothes, boots, makeup. For men, the whole ‘right way’ to look, to impress, regardless of financial constraints. Surface paddle. I see that it is important, but it is only sustainable if a person decides to be owned.

I am with those tho swim against the current because that is where something happens. It is never about money, nor greed. It is singular. One person just swimming the other way, brave enough to risk, wild enough to break out. As long as we bow down, as long as we believe what ‘they’ say, we will be safe for a while, but not for long.

Buying, social media, all of it, can consume a soul.

It isn’t real. What is real is connecting with granny, lighting a light on the stairs, minding the chickens, covering the bee hives in a storm, sensing that storm, forming a cupola. However, I completely get that I would have wanted the best high-top sandals, the lowest cut skinny shimmy of a dress. Such a confusing time.

I’m a confusoball.

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Island Blog – Senses, the Truth and Repeat

The whiplash of waves against basalt rocks; the slamdunk of a ship’s bow against a punch of ocean; the pipe and caw from seabirds as they slew by; the whistle and moan of wind; the mourn of seals; the skidoosh of incoming dolphins, spray-swiped, bursting the waves wide open. We have heard, seen and felt them all, and more, and each of them overtake our thoughts, which, in my case is always a good thing. My bent toes are no big deal, my concern about not enough knickers, my doubts about olding life, all twist out of my hands like feather wisp. In this environment where everything is wild, the stupidity of human thoughts comes home with a thwack. It thinks me.

Even as we talk together we learn from each other. First impressions fade as layers of protection fall away. A voice speaks, the timbre now familiar, the words, the stories only just emerging as confidence grows as it can do in a small group and in a wild place. We risk our truth, the revelation of it, at least in part because once we say farewell to each other in a day or two, we will travel back into our insecurities, our doubts, our diminishing thoughts, albeit changed to some degree. And how did this change come about? It came because we were here altogether inside an experience, strangers at first, sharing the sounds of each other, feeling the sharp edges of another’s life, learning the musicality of another’s voice. We heard the sounds together, the whiplash of waves, the squeak of dolphins, the creak of a boat in a bumpy sea and we saw the glint of diamonds when she was calm and silky smooth. The lift and dip of sounds, of sights, of touch, the smells of wildflowers as we walk over island tracks, each foot absorbing old stories and the effect they all have upon us is a twosome. We notice and take them home with us, or we forget them and go back to our daily worries and concerns.

However, as our lives become more and more controlled and as we (or most of us) buy into that control, we do have choices if we decide to to notice the times we really connected with a moment, with a person and with how we feel about ourselves within that space; the way it can change us. Not for the the better of everyone else, but for the bettering of our own self, our own soul. It isn’t fuelled by comparison nor resistance and nor is it immediate. It grows slowly and gently, still respectful of others, still working away at life, but with a new rainbow inside, quiet, perfect, pulsing with colour. We are not one of a number and we are one of a number. We are not like her nor him, nor them. We are all unique and way more individually and independently valuable than the controllers would have us believe. They don’t like it, of course not. But we do.

So take each experience, lift it into your hands, notice every detail and keep it close. Shake it up like a snow globe and watch it until the last flake falls. Make it more real than all the marketing control, the fear driven rulings, the invisible pressure to be just one of a number. Say ‘I am unique, valuable, important just as I am.’ And say it every day, a zillion times till I sinks in and sticks. Nobody cares about bent toes nor any other hang-ups which mean damn all because the only person who cares is you. Anyone else, on seeing another anyone else looks for something way below the obvious. You look in the mirror, you scrutinise and judge your own geography, geology, physiology. All irrelevant. Someone else is looking for friendship, a welcome, the light in your eyes, the hint of a story that isn’t their own because their own is probably dull, in their opinion. Often it is only through another’s eyes that we see ourselves as we actually are.

And so we can learn from each other. We can stop our circular thoughts, cut the spiral, spin it off into the ether. All that judgement, those ridonculous negatives that float without ever grounding into truth. We can say ‘I am unique, valuable, important, just as I am.’

And repeat.

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Island Blog – What is real

The sgurr of Canna rises in rockjag, granite layered with larval basalt and dressed partly in a lush green. The late and welcome sunshine lifts it into a story, People have lived here for thousands of years, working with what they had. They climbed these cliffs, fed their sheep, their cattle, themselves. They had boats or didn’t but either way the only connection to ‘civilised’ life was over the water, the oftentimes complicata of tidal conflict, of adverse weather. They didn’t run out of milk because someone had a milk cow. They made butter, cheese, curds and more. They didn’t run out of green because they collected ‘green’ and made something healthy. They kept pigs, those who could afford one, and sheep and they shared. They had wool for carding and spinning, clearing off the lanolin in stored barrels of urine, and then washing the fleeces in fresh spring water from rushing burns, drying them on hillsides. They had clothes. All around them moved healthy air, sea blown, pure, unpolluted. Even today, this day, in times of human foolery and folly, this place breathes clean and clear. The island has a strong community ethic. We can feel it. Unlike so many ‘civilised’ places, with instant everything and an uber a quick call away, this place, like so many Hebridean islands has so much more to offer.

I watch those who live an island life with interest. Although I do live on one such island and have done for over 4 decades, these remote places, inhabitants from a mere 40 to perhaps 400, I notice things. No woman is bothered with her eyebrows, the shape of her nose, nor what she ought to be wearing. When life is paired down to what is actually important, such fricking nonsense is just fricking nonsense. It teaches me. Although the ‘patriarchal’ control is supposedly diminishing, it seems to me that women still uphold it, maintain it.

Where life is truly lived, engaged with fully and is tough, challenging and deeply fulfilling, may well lie well outside and beyond ‘civilised’ lies. I watch the sun light up a curve of cove on Rum, its tail fire dancing over the stacs of Canna and then gone in a cloudsnap. I see salt peppering the windows of the boat as we swing and sway at anchor in this bay. I feel stories, ancient stories flow in and out of me, words in gaelic, auld scots, and understand not one word even as I understand it all.

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Island Blog – Transition, the Familiar to Adventure

Moving from one state to another, one location to another, equals transition. Prior to one usually feels me anxious as if I have stepped off a familiar path and into the scrub. I need my navigational skills, skills I always doubt I have. Do I have the right boots? Are my eyes sure of sight, of their looking power, their clarity? Is my case too heavy or too light? Do I pack a sandwich? Stupid nonsense like that, and then some. I have always wanted to be the sort of feral woman who just gets up and goes, who doesn’t care about the right boots nor the damn sandwich and who is so childlike as to simply adventure on, scrub or rocks or cliff edge or bog notwithstanding. I never was, and yet, and yet, since I turned 70 a while ago, I am learning. This in evidence as I unpack my lightweight suitcase on board the Lucy Mary. I have four pairs of knickers for 6 days. Never was good at arithmetic. Actually I had packed 5, (still a lack, I agree) but one pair fell apart on removal. I sit on the bunk in my cabin and look at them, see quite clearly that they must be a decade old. Oh dear. The other guests look so well assembled although I confess I have no clue as to their knicker situation. My clothes, the few I had brought with me, are a touch threadbare, my usual island kit, but it’s as if I am seeing them for the first time in stark realistic reality. I also forgot mascara, essential for the other end of me. All this thinks me.

When I meet with strangers I couldn’t give a monkeys as to their outward appearance. I notice it, of course I do, the well-heeled, the tatty bedraggled, the somewhere in between, but how someone presents rarely has much truth in itself. It doesn’t tell me who you are, what you are really like, your innermost innerment. Thus, I tell myself firmly, it doesn’t matter what I look like either, and I gently slide myself into another transition, one that leads me back to myself, the real inner me, the truth of me, open, vulnerable and ready for adventure. Over the next few days I will learn from the other guests. In this sea-blown cloudscape, among these ancient rocks and twists of history, we will join in a mutual interest, risking ourselves enough to open up in ways we never do when walking through the familiar.

Right now we are heading into a mildly lumpy sea and I am thus in danger of missing my keyboard one letter at a time, so I will stop now and lift myself into the adventure.

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Island Blog – Windswept, Wildfires and Hope

Life is often a surprise, what happens, when it does, how it does. The thing I have learned over many decades is that we only learn from mistakes or happenings outside of ourselves. In times when we make no mistakes or don’t encounter outside happenings, we learn absolutely nothing because the human ‘cosy’ inside us just keeps moving on without thought nor question and most definitely without learning a thing. And that learning is not outside of us, no. The important learning is within, and if it is a mistake, we evaluate, feel the shame and guilt and make a change. If it is a ‘happening’ outside of ourselves then we learn from our response to it. Did we fall silent, slide away, or did we grab a tool and run to help? Did we show up or were we a ‘cosy’ human, all fear and ‘what can I do…..I am just little me, cold and heading for the safety and the denial of home?

These questions flutter around me like butterflies at times, at others like ravens (I love ravens) or vultures. I skinny through all the gaps in between, alert and watchful because, and this is simple enough, I want to be a part of whatever is happening around me and well beyond me. If I don’t understand something, or when I mistake myself into a pit of regret, I want to learn because I can always research, can learn, can step up to say ‘I made a mistake’. I am sad that so many have been subsumed into the isolation, the refusal to admit that they just might have been wrong. However, I am not about sorting anyone else out. It’s a full time job sorting myself out, or in.

As our world shifts uncomfortably within the strains of the corset we have strapped around her pregnant belly, she is talking to us, she is telling us, she is shouting, she is showing not what we can save because she knows we cannot, not now, not with powerful leaders still greedy for control of lands and seas, still killing, still ok with it all. But, and there is always one of those, we can do something. We can learn new skills, we can research, we can stop believing all the toxic nonsense on social media, the platforms which only exist on the surface of real life and yet which control immense depth and wide geography. At home, one home, we can teach our children. And they are our future, their future. They need not fear but must be taught emotional and practical intelligence.

In the cafe one day, families came in. One family inspired me. A young couple with one boy, about 8. We are used to a chaos of crumbs and spills from a kiddy controlled table and as long as they enjoy their experience, we are happy to sort things out. However, this family lifted me like a butterfly. I was leaving after my shift and met them in the carpark. They recognised me. Thank you, said the dad, holding the hand of his boy. I didn’t see mama. As I pulled out I called, ‘you are so welcome’ through my window and at that moment, the wee lad turned to me and called out ‘Thank you!’

Ah, there is hope.

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Island Blog – Spirit and a Thumbs Up

I’m back from work, a busy one, many lunch and tea/coffee customers, all served well. With my new eyeball I can see which table needs clearing and out I go with a scoosh thing and a cloth and a wide tray. I talk to folks along the way, notice the ones who don’t do ‘talk’ and those who bend in like willows, easy, open, smiling. All cafes have all sorts.

I meet people. People with ready smiles, drivers in cars who swerve and reverse, who acknowledge me in my car. I meet others who don’t. There is ridgity everywhere. I understand it, I do. A holiday, too hot, wrong accommodation, just doing this holiday thing to save something. Been there. I think many have. I have no wisdom here, only experience. And here comes another thing.

I met a beautiful chef and his husband. I see how life can be now in the now of now and it skitters my heart. I work with him, laugh with him, wash his pots and pans and bowls and spoons (too many spoons) serve his food, honour him. I think that my own spirit, my inner rebel just loves and thrives on this and other such connections. I have seen so many faces on the other side of the counter, asking for lunch, for bespoke teas, for incredible cakes and pastries, for soup and salads, for hot chocolates, all from here or nearabouts, and then there comes a sparkle one, dynamic, curious, fun. Could look like anything, or anyone. No code, just that sparkle. Hallo you.

Spirit is strong. It rises my own, confronts my wrinkle thinking and reminds me how I am still very much here. They laugh at me, the young, but they laugh and I will absolutely take that as a personal thumbs up.

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Island Blog – My Face, I Think.

Jeez but it gets harder to click onto my own writing page. I have to caterpillar my way through botstops and signposts facing backwards at best, nowhere at worst. However, it is as it is and this automaton fantasia will not leave me behind. I can feel my face lifting and falling, twisting and flexing as I write this. I have such a face. To be honest, it seems that my face works as a singular whereas one might suppose I was, at least partly in control. When I hear something someone says or reveals, my face is right there, showing off, definitely that, long before my considered response, with appropriate facial confirmation ,has a flipping chance to catch up. It’s like holding back a wild colt on a fraying rope, and that might just be a good piece of imagery.

It isn’t that I can’t control my face because I can….ish. It takes longer now with all the wrinkles, each with their own opinions, their sense of place. They are not just ruffles of skin, no collective. They are independent runnels, valleys of ponderance, elevations of realisation. It’s exhausting managing them. And it is my face by the way, not that they give a toss about that. So, when someone says something that rises a response in me, one which I absolutely know how to hold, to control, to banish into complete annihilation, my face takes over. It shows. And, if my face is busy considering, faltering perhaps, the eyes have it. Darn. I can spend many awkward seconds flicking away, looking for something giving me time, me, not the rebel face, not the eyes, not the truth.

Ah! The truth.

We live so much in lies – a word which creates immense trouble but it isn’t a long one, so easily tackled. Over ‘polite’ time it has become a white dissolution, barely there at all, a wisp, a nothing. But we all notice, we all see because this……our innate connection to ourselves is strong. We know what we know. Don’t need affirmation. Don’t need acceptance. If we are ‘outsiders’, considered disconnected, awkward, different, weird, hold to that. It is a gift.

I have a word for you. Aspectabund. It is long dead in dictionnary world but I like it. It means he/she/they who wear emotion on their face/s. It was understood then that emotion carried import and a certain control over logic of the day. I rest there, as does my face, I think.

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Island Blog – Authenticity, Honesty and Fun

Early this morning, as the sun warmed like a surprise, I was out cutting some sweet peas, cornflowers, pink things, yellow things and some green leaves from a Somebush, when two men wandered by. I know them. They are islander friends. Because it wasn’t raining, we talked awhile. One of them commented on the piece I had written in the local paper, said how brave I was to be so open about the truth of me. Me, behind a huge climb of sweet peas, still clipping, smiled and said, Well, I am an open book, nothing to hide and honest about tough times, because we all have them. Two thinks after they had merried their way along were, one, what the hell did I write, and two, why isn’t everyone honest about the tough times? I have spent the day ruminating like the sheep in the field below my home, pondering these two. Of course, the answer to the first is easy to answer because I dashed inside, found the page and read my words. Okay, I thought, no big deal, I just was authentically honest about how I felt at that time. The second question dithered me a lot. It is a big question and also a little one. I see the little one like a skinny thing on a cold street, running barefoot whilst the big question is in the minds of those who don’t have a clue about that experience, even though they do because everyone knows the skinny street runner within, hungry for something or someone, cold and lonely. Everyone.

Pretence, however, is what we are so good at. The fact that the answer to How Are You, requires ‘Fine’, is evidence enough. That it is immediately accepted is unfortunate, to say the least, but the secondary fact that we morph into the Fine responder so easily, is scary. It becomes a thing, denying truth, denying authentication, dissolving honesty. Oh, I realise that nobody wants to hear the troubles of another, not randomly. In this crazy and blinkered (my opinion) race for ‘success’ we are too busy and too forward thinking, aka on our own trajectory, to bother with whimpers. Words there to think about. Troubles, Another, Blinkered,Success, Busy.

Back to me. I listen to many songwriters, read many poets, listen to many innovative speakers, hear the honesty and the involute complexity of the way they work words into a beautiful tangle of authenticity. There is no fixing, words and passions, truths told, honest reveals, truthful presentations. I am he, I am she. I have failed and failed. I have walked the wrong path, fallen many times, been lifted up, lifted myself up. I have followed the wrong leaders, sunk in endless bogs, felt fear and cold and shame and guilt. But I have learned this. The world brings in a synapse of wild complication. There is this way, there is that way. An inquisitor will try them all out. That’s me. I know the cold fear of valleys and the elation of mountain tops, but I find the pretence that valleys don’t exist hard to allow. Nonetheless this is not a challenge I would bring to a falsehood I clock in nanoseconds on meeting anyone. I just wish it wasn’t there, wish that the great British stiff upper lip nonsense had melted away into history, that people could just be honest about their lives, themselves, to be truly and bravely authentic, and then to take action, to have fun. Fun. Remember that?

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Island Blog – Connections and Fairytales

I notice, as a blogger in these new days that if I don’t blog for a while, I am forgotten. It is up to me at such a time to relocate myself and to get through all the other Judys, a definite and determined swim from the depths. At first I felt annoyance, then a sense of dismissal, of loneliness. I wasn’t important, noticed, valued anymore. Frome where I am right now, I laugh at this. Of course we are forgotten, of course connections move on and up and over and return, although the return bit is always down to human connection. Everything is fluid and nothing is a given and this swirltide is how it is. Personas are shaped and twisted, photos of real people are synced and redesigned according to the accord of the finger or the brain working with the outblast of inter-intelligence. Hush, now. A lot of all of this is really good. Many more trifocal revelations and understandings. Many more bots and trolls. But this isn’t new, people. They were always there.

For centuries good folk have lived with such an alternative dynamic, worked with it. They connected. They met, together, laughing drinking in island crofts, isolated places in the outer wilds and also deep within cityal streets with pubs welcoming and shops selling veg and material for your curtains and cheese and eggs and kindness. I met many of them. I met their determination to keep on keeping on. I was a furious middle-class 16 year old and pounding the streets. I came to the market and we talked. I will not forget those marketeers, for they wound me web stories, talked of families, of hope of fun, of fun, of fun, of fairies, of stories.

Even in these forgetting times, I still believe we need connections.