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Island Blog – Swans in Dark Skies

I just couldn’t get to sleep last night. I did go to bed early, closing my curtains as others dressed up for a night out. I spoke, out loud as always, my thankyous to the beauty of the world around me, the hours of the day, the way I am still alive and well and for so much more. It can take me many minutes to complete my list. I settled with my good book and read for a couple of hours as day gave way to the dark, the precious dark, no street lights, no flashing anythings, no glow from any electronics. Just a glorious and natural dark. I realise this is rare and there’s another thankyou.

As eyelids droop and words swarm on the page, I turn off my light and courie in to my soft pillow. That’s it, I think. Morning will wake me, although even as I think this, I know it to be nonsense because I am now left alone with my thoughts, no longer inside another story but back to my own. And here, there be dragons. Over many many decades I have worked to affect this and without any success. I don’t know why. Nor does anyone else.

I bring to mind, in my wakefulness, images of all the good times, the wonderful in my life, the happy faces of my children and theirs; the moments, the adventures, the successes and the way we carved out a life in difficult circumstances, a wonderful and all inclusive life. I see faces of the students who worked with us, the randoms, the ceilidhs, the spontaneity of a Tapselteerie chaos, the way we sorted, fixed, fed, accommodated a gazillion people. I like that movie.

As the midnight hour ticked in I must have dozed off. Then I heard them. Hundreds of them and I know the call.. It took 20 minutes for them to fly by. Shouldn’t be Whooper swans, not now, I thought. They are happy in the Arctic enjoying the feeding grounds. But I am sure it was them, and their longsong, the way I could picture them in the black of night, supporting each other, encouraging each other other, shifting leadership, all that, as they cut the night in half. I heard them gone.

Then I slept.

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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 – 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 – 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.

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Island Blog – Beginnings

I meet them all the time. Here’s one. The trolley thing which holds an entire orchestra around lunchtime in the cafe has one swivel wheel twisted out. I skinny around, loaded with dried bowls, whisks, palette knives, sieves, whisks etcetera and my fast foot meets said twist. I remember, in a nanosecond the dancer in me, old yes, but innate, born in, fast and determined. Another is when I lift a load of heavy plates and their etceteras from the wishdosher, lower than my knees, mentally connecting,, with a eye-rolling ‘hey!’ to my strong core. We have to do this, I have to do this, because she, the core, can so easily fall asleep, thus forgetting herself and I need her, sleepy or not. These tiny beginnings I notice. I notice that I can do this.

All through any day, a cafe day, a not cafe day, I can hear so many spoken thoughts, random as skitters, flying wild, just spat out because there is that chance, that moment, that connection, that beautiful second when someone listened, heard, stayed a moment or two. As I wash up, walk out, serve, clear tables, chatter flies above us. Nothing lands, not for me, not for us as cafe workers, but there are times when a word and a table stops me in the buffers. I can see myself halt, heavy tray of china, detritus, cups, glasses, positionally armed and wondering if I will actually make it to the stackeroo and seeing without any connection, a new beginning.

I have many thinks about beginnings. I thought I did, that the only one I would go through was the day I said yes to marriage to a man, and it was easy. I fell in love and even though I completely don’t agree with falling, it happened. But in the now of my solo now, I look for more and find the beginnings in moments and interactions and connections I may well have missed before. There’s a something in that. There is so much, so much out on social media pushing out the unrealistic as if we fail if we don’t have perfect nails. I know that’s not all of it.

I begin with being open, aware and noticing and right where I am. Yes, I am on a beautiful West Coast island. I do not live in urban tricky. I don’t live in abuse, control, fear. I don’t even know how that feels beyond imagining.

The way I see beginngs is this. Angry spoilt middle class teenager thinking she could escape her life and the morning after. We are born where we are born. Identity grows and dishevels and what? I don’t know.

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Island Blog – The Grannies, the Shelf and Doorways

We are many. We are legion. We step back having been the quickstep for decades. We hold the walls, hold to the walls. We keep the balance, we interfere, we quicken and we falter. We don’t know who the hec we are a lot of the time, apologize and curtsey in doorways we never knew existed before, not in this house of endless meals, of welcomes, of beds made up short notice, late talking, of searching without the right language into the new world, one we really don’t understand, the lie of the land all around the home, bodies everywhere, party detritus tidal in its curve over a once ok carpet. Of a lot of holding back, of rubbing old tinsel lips in ponderance, of confusion and inexellence, where once we were excellent, the ones who bandaged, made fast decisions, even overriding the hesitating grandpas, who btw were astonished to find themselves on that high shelf, in my generation. In the laughness I see exactly that in the generation after me. Nobody is ready for that shelf.

For me, oh I know I am lucky, fortunate, blest, whatever. But I do remember the full stops, the commas, the parenthesese which came like a blow. It was never that I was eradicated, never that, but I sensed the invitation to full stops, commas and doorways. I was suddenly not who I was. Not excluded, never that, but there grew woods and motorways and lifestyles that rose up between us, between me as the feeder, accommodator, welcomer, and the new woman in his life, the new man in hers. It thinked me of those shunting trains on tracks, always going backwards. And I did. I curved away, into foetal at times, unsure of my voice. I had never even thought about my voice before. I lived in chaos, beautiful chaos, exhausting chaos for many many years and I was she. I was She. I lost my voice. Not the actual voice but the knowledge of it, the recognition for me. It had been an usual, ribboned, rainbowed, musical, gifted and now the hesitation to emit anything vocal spun me into a hole in the ground.

Something rose me, rised me up. It was the acceptance that you, young person, now my child’s beloved, is a generation below me. I want to learn from you. I also see your welcome. I am aware of doorways. I respect you, see your dreams, love that you want time with me, invite me into your video games and endlessly bleeping iPad or whatever trackillion light tracts. And your beautiful children, real humans with a truant of consilplisit emotions and longings and dreams. And I am still Granny, or one of them. There is always a welcome, warm food, bandages and no judgement although I might twist a tea towel at you if you don’t help with the washing up.

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Island Blog – I Matter

I do this checking body language thing, watching people, wondering and knowing, even though there will be never be proof of what I surmise. She is the controller in this relationship and he doesn’t like it but never found the courage to say and now, bowed as he is, it’s too late. Or He is bloat-chested and very chuffed with himself as she follows obedientally, agreeing to his choice of her coffee rather quicker that I’d like. However, to my delight, a pizzicato in the mathematics of this cafe running thing, a young family changed my daily stuck. Young parents, looked easy, together, although I did clock the male as leader. That’s ok and fine and wonderful as long as it doesn’t mean domination and control and, looking at her, I think that’s a Never. They came together the beautiful (I thought) parents of 3 little ones. They bought this, that cake and then, as i washed up for Scotland, I heard their children, their play in the area with a rug and safety with draws of toys, for definitely an hour. We worked on in the washeroo and in the kitchen, serving soup and focaccias and this and that herbal tea, for two, with oat milk, no milk, cold water, and so on, with scones, plus jam, without, lemon cake, flapjack, banana loaf divide into two, add this, possible?

Everything is possible. So we’re told. I think we learn ‘possible’ through difficult times. When everything is easy, we don’t seek anything and certainly not a change option. In fact we actively avoid that. But in the mostways of our days we do seek change even in little shafts of light, just a tiny something, a lift, a beckoning. I met the wrong people at such times, followed the wrong beckoning. I think many do and then those brilliant strong and compromised people become beige at best afraid and hiding, but so slowly and over time. Life calms to mouse quiet and so very lonely.

I am fighting self doubt daily. It doesn’t matter what I have achieved. It’s never about that. It’s always about someone I admire, and respect telling me I matter. Even now.