married

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Island Blog – Silence and She’s Green

I found my old mum’s mood ring today. My jewellery box is mostly full of stories and not worldly wealth. I like that. I am not interested in worldly wealth, nor ever I was and nor was himself. We were all about stories, learned from them, made our own, spun them out into other times, other lives, like frisbees. Catch if you want, if you can. I put on the ring, a little finger fit, and noticed the changes, from green to blue to black to purple to amber and that was just one morning. I thought some about what goes on inside my mind and heart, and paused to notice and reflect in the early morning light. To be honest I have eschewed any rings and for a very long time, even though I love rings, because, for me, they denoted a control over the self of me. They actually itched and had to go. I remember being on a ferry back to the island, yonks ago, and an elevatory conversation between me and himself on the aft deck, and I flipped. I yanked off my wedding ring and tossed it overboard. A moment. Will you replace it? he asked. No, I said. I know I am married. I don’t need to show that. I never wore one again, but did stay married and for decades thereafter.

There’s a gap in my noise thing. I listen to Radio 2 and mostly love it. As the afternoon shifts into a difference, birds flying out, flying home to roost; as the tidal shifts and swifts, bringing in new seaweed, new fish flow, a change of the sea-mind, I listen to silence. Visitors may drive by, but mostly everything stops on the cusp of dinner plans, everyone showering, dressing up, timing departure for the table booking. I watch it, distractedly, as I make a new salad dressing with a load of inventive stuff. I also sense the tense of it all. I wish I could say I remember it, a family with young ones, but I don’t. In the days of running Tapselteerie, we went nowhere much. Five kids and debt will do that for you.

However, I did learn and that learning has held me up ever since. I notice everything. Everything. In the absence of television, no wifi, no mobile phones (none existed) there comes a deep need to find something beyond self, beyond the washing of plates, the providing of experiences for others. The Self demands a voice. I took myself on walks in the wild and at crazy times, and suddenly. I thank my reckless and colourful self for pushing me on, in the wrong boots, ill-equipped for the slam-dunk of west coast weather, in the silence and the shout of blast weather, among wild and growly cows, over lichen-slip rocks, over shell beaches, squishing through bladderwrack, kelp, sugar kelp, dabberloks, all wonderful as I sink into their gush of salty tannin. No nowadays visitor is going to like this. I love the connection. They will just angst about stain. I’m watching this happen, the distancing from the real, even as I know there are those who will listen in the silence, who will research, who do care about the beyond of worldly hoo-ha, the strive for monetary wealth, the need for ownership. the hunger for dominion. I know it.

I watched a young Osprey today, being hassled but gulls, all full voice. I saw it dip and flip across the sea-loch, giving no aggressive response. It thought me. There are times we just need to accept that the hecklers win, and we move on in silence. I look down at my mood ring. She’s green.

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Island Blog – Fickle Dance/ Wonderful Hearts

Some days pass, a few in quiet silence bar the rattle of my fridge. She is an old girl, second hand when she came to me oh so many years ago. At times I think she feels like she is part of the wallpaper and I recognise that feeling myself, so I don’t mind so much when she stops her mindless humming and thinks herself Eminem, even as it startles and then concerns me. I thump her fat belly as I pass and she halts for a second or two only to resume once I have moved on. I smile. Go girl, I tell her. I am so noticing you now. You are not just a ‘white good’. You are my ‘white good’ and I appreciate all you do for me. It seems to work for she has hummed now for quite some time and in a somewhat merrier way, a key or two above her usual drone.

While she maintains her position (thankfully) Life moves on. Someone important dies. Someone important is born and someone important is married to her lover and friend. Across the world this dance goes on, second by second, moment by moment and we who are bothering about who did or did not empty the dishwasher have the chance to get real. So which is fickle, you might ask, the fridge and dishwasher thing or the comings and goings of breath life, the strangles of it, the insecurity of it, the risk the fall the rise and the sudden full stop or full birth? I think all of it is both important and fickle but not either/or, never that. Within each moment of our living we can easily be upset by a grumpy fridge or the fact that the dishwasher was not emptied which then causes us to anger, to resentment and to rage. We will be late for work. According to the rota, this one clear upon the wall, it is your turn but you did not bother to complete, nor even begin the task. Inside a family life, a team life, this really matters and I remember it. If one person does not turn up for their part the whole play is pointless. It collapses. This much is obvious. Juliet without Romeo would look like a right ninny. Moving on.

We are so very quick to hook our grapples onto Either and Or. I should be doing this, I should be feeling this, I should not be thinking this way, I should not cry in public because my fridge died, not when thousands are being maltreated, trafficked, abused. Not when ethnic cleansing is alive and well across the world; not when there is poverty and war. But wait. Wait. We who can afford a fridge, or a wedding, or any such choices are bound to have invested our trust in that thing or that experience. It isn’t something about which to feel guilt, false guilt (in my opinion). As long as we keep our minds wide, think laterally and allow the whole world with all her joys and all her pain to flow to us and through us, we are still saying You Is Important.

I know, I know that there is an imbalance within our world, the divider between lack and wealth. It isn’t new, people, no way. This imbalance has lived and thrived for millennia and I cannot see an end to it. So, to those of us who do stop to notice, who refuse to get caught up in Either/Or, I say this:- Let it flow. Let Life and living grow to dying and Death. Let us open the eyes of our wise hearts and let us see beyond the pale. Forward, backward, up, down and around. Let us breathe it all in, notice everything and most important of all, not make it all about ourselves. We are small, we are finite and yet within our living years we can be powerful just as long was we leave our own little agendas behind and walk together into new observations, no judgement, just looking with the eyes of our wonderful hearts.

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Island Blog- Rule of Thumb

The dawn turned the far hills blood red. Although Father Sun rises behind my home, he makes his presence known in casts of colour, short-lived but marvellous to see. The sky, flat and brushed with Payne’s grey, Rose Madder and Ultramarine looks like it is unsure about what to do next. Threatened storms may roar around us as they often do, we who stick out into the Atlantic like a determined finger, independent of any weather forecast. It thinks me.

In a few days I will have been married for 48 years. We both will. A lot of what happened over those years were not as I had dreamt, nor planned. My ideal of a marriage is not so unusual. White knight, independence, the freedom to make my own choices, take my own actions, sing my own song and all under the loving and approving smile of a benign king. I would share the throne, choose my own frocks, laugh loudly when I wanted, speak out my truth and be heard. I’m not saying this never happened because it did, but where I thought this would be a rule of thumb, I found, at times, that I was under said thumb and unable to rise to my full stature.

Did it damage me, this thumb thing? It did not. Instead I have learned that on many of those remembered and unremembered times, I had a lesson to learn. I would have been, and can still be, too quick to respond, to act, to speak out. My vivid and often unrealistic imagination could have launched me into trouble without that thumb. I thank the thumb owner, that’s what I do, now that I can look back and join up the dots. I married a man 10 years my senior for a very good reason, even though I didn’t do so consciously. Somehow, my sub conscious knew what was best for me, what or who would keep me safe from danger, from myself.

I would never, even in my wildest dreams, have lived the live I have lived, the one I shared with my king. I would never have known the exciting highs nor experienced the awful lows without him and his thumb. In balance, and this is where the dot joining comes in, my life, our life together has been extraordinary from the beginning and all the way up to the now. When I recall our adventures, the spontaneity of them, the sudden Let’s Go thing, the way we led our children into independent thought, creative action, kindness towards all living people and things; the way we laughed and partied, invited and welcomed, shared and made ourselves known in the work we collectively undertook. The way we steadfastly marched on through bad times, poor times, times when our inventive strengths pulled us through. And the way we made a difference, made memories that so many others share and still remember with fondness and a chuckle.

It was never plain sailing, not for either of us. I doubt that marriage ever is, for anyone. But, to survive and thrive through such a vast ocean of years is to have made many sail corrections. Thousands. Millions. And we have, and we still are making those corrections, working with the winds of time, rising over and over again, no matter how big the waves, how fickle the chop, how far away the next peaceful harbour.

I feel honoured and proud. We did it. We got through. And we are still here, still breathing, still sailing towards a new horizon. Together.