me

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Island Blog – The conundrum of calm

Just last week the island was in turmoil, the noise deafening, the whole house groaning as massive trees fell like skittles in a bowling alley but without the cheering and the burgers and cokes. It was a gasp of breath, a sudden, with fear at its back, and dark, and long, and with a whole lot of looking out, of revving up a belief in hope. They’ll fix it, I thought/hoped, whoever ‘they’ are.

And they did. For now. Till the next time, and here’s a thing. Up here, in my very long experience of uphere-ness, none of us can forget nor deny the change in weather. I’m guessing and without a clue, that up here might be something to look at. We are way out there in the Atlantic. Because we stick out as we do, all sassy and I’m ok, we do seem to invite wind stuff. We also get the best sunsets, the wider skies, the thrill of being that close to a storm and a calm. I love it. It’s life to me, even if I can be terrified. I still love it. Even if massive trees fall, even if roads are closed, even if the local shop cannot open as their freezers thaw with tons of food, even if just walking out into the woods is a risk, I still love it. It’s like a skin over my own, a knowing, a melody I sing or hear, a something way more than anything the out-there world could ever offer me.

And then in comes the calm. A conundrum. I was scared, nay terrified as a wee nothing in the big something of that storm, of four days silence, no fridge hum, no power, no pings on my phone. Just me and candles, birdsong. When nothing moved as expected. Everything stilled. The fear a nudge. This will go on. No hope. Too much damage. All of that stupid shit. And then, freedom. Was it? Well, yes, power back was lovely; lights on, yes lovely. Wifi and connection to my kids, yes lovely. But here’s a thing, here’s the conundrum. That time, on reflection was a calm I hadn’t expected. I remember candle lighting my rise to bed. I recall reading my book by candlelight until my eyes were tired enough for sleep. I remember waking in dawn light, padding downstairs, boiling water on the gas flame for strong coffee. I remember watching the day lift. No radio, no noise, just birds and sky watch. And me. Just me in the turmoil of it all, as if I was the calm.

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Island Blog – Celtic Sea and Me

We were born, before the wind, some of us. We are irrefutably connected to the mystic, although there’s nothing mystic about it, not for some of us. We’ve always known it. Trouble is, with all this concrete covering over earth, all that burying, that disguising, turns our land into, well, Pleasantville. Watch the movie. It has much to say about the falsehood of our lives. We, out here in the blast of the thrawn Atlantic, still bumping over tracks, still able to walk barefoot without (sort of) any fear of broken glass shards, used needles, cutting things, are still connected. It wonders me, as I think back to my time living in a flat in Glasgow after so many years in the wild, that pavementing damage to a human connection to what once was (and still is) so vital for a goodly life. Over years, over time, the strive for money success, the building over bones, over history has taken us up many miles by now. We are lifting ourselves beyond oxygen.

At work today in the cafe kitchen, working with the team, filling the quick-steam dishwasher over and over and over again (and more), we fried, all of us, but we knew we would, and we kept each other cool just by asking “you okay” a lot. It’s a very uplifting question. My thoughts as I sank my old fingers into the deepsinksink scrubbing pots and pans and kitchen whizzy things went to the oceans, the seas of the world. I don’t question my thoughts anymore, nor did I much as a young woman. I know I am connected and it is a warm bond, like a cord, like a chord. I saw and see what those caught on pavements may well, and do, dismiss, although not so much these days.

My thoughts today as I batted away a persistent wasp sailed on the Celtic Sea. I love that name, feels me at home, my sea, although it isn’t. However I came home and studied a bit. This Sea, which immediately tells me it is confined somehow, like the `North Sea’ and thus, a possible grump. However, this sea, a big tradeline traverse, has the blood of the massive Atlantic in her veins and that smiles me. She will be feisty for sure. I check more. Celtic Sea, Basin Countries (the ones she bangs up against) Ireland, Wales, Breton France, Cornwall. She follows a tricky coastline and, knowing skippers (sons) who have launched into the Bay of Biscay in slight trepidation, she has a temper. She is also the minder of part of the Continental Shelf, where land falls away into scary depths. She curls around landfall, so she needs company.

I love her already. She sounds like me.

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Island Blog – Adventurers

When an adventurer decides she, or he, is fed up of unadventuring, there’s a thing, a stop, a catch a fear, a big kick-ass scary one. Can I do this? Who am I to think I can? What if I fail. let down, feel stupid, fail, fail, fail? The ‘thing’ brings restless nights and all clothing feels too tight, too awkward in all places where shift and motion was, heretofore, simple. It is as if a new dynamic has infiltrated my boring, and bored self, a sort of dancer, a fluidity promised but without a manual for the new moves. I sort of rush in, awkward, over keen, in the wrong shoes, my body still on its way to here, the here which is now my absolute here. I want to be altogether with myself, to be completely present, even though I know that not just my body but my mind are still both on their way along that winding strip of single-track.

Well dammit!. I had a strong conversation with them on departing the mother ship. Ready? I asked. Steady? Shall we? It doesn’t seem to work that way and not just because this old adventurer is arriving in the right tee-shirt and on time. None of us here really know how we will work together. We have never been squished into a cannon of lunch blast, folk arriving hungry, asking for vegan, asking about allergies, about takeaways. Asking for 6 soups with sourdough, for quiche with bits, for two cheese scones with extra cheese, for fruit scones with jam and cream and for many more combinations. I watch the new owners work with kindness and can-do. I watch my co-workers welcome old and young, dogs and babies, serving with smiles and spectacular baking. I am proud to be one of the team. Very proud.

Back to the adventurer. She, me, has been very spiralled, very tired. This is not my point. Of course she is. She is old and has sat on her skinny butt for, what, almost four years since the only himself she will ever want, decided to die. I talked to his photo today. I do often. He believed in me. You can do anything, he said, and more than once, and I could and I did, I did, I did. Still am, mate.

Right now I have strawberry jam a-boiling for the Calgary Cafe – so worth a visit, and a mushroom risotto. I’m also prepping a Pasta Puttanesca. I love the story in that dish. All those women, the adventurers, who chose to work on the streets, had to, to feed the ones they loved, and then, in the rejection and cold of the night streets, the kindness and respect they found.

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Island Blog – Moon Heavy Dreamer

I’m watching the sky today, just now, cloud capped, closed. I’m remembering the Snow Moon pushing them away with her bright breath over the past few nights. I woke with her, heavy across my bed, the loud of her a steady night voice, colour, timbre, the whole firking orchestra, around 2, 3, 4 am. Days gone by, nights gone by, as is always. There’s no holding them. I love the moon, the new and the full, because they make me uncomfortable in my jeans, in my life. There’s a holding, a containing I fight, as I always have, and yet, and yet, it thinks me different because, precisely because of this discomfort, I honestly don’t want it to change. If everything set simple, like a milk pudding in my life, then so would I. Disturbance is essential. Yes, it does upset me, feels me contained and restricted, sends me in a spin for easier jeans, thinks me that I am finally achieving what my mum always feared, an increase of bodily self. Funny how that still has a voice.

I know I have choices, always had, always will. However that knowledge is a truth, and not a feeling. It’s the feeling bit that confounds, surrounds, compromises a day, a night. Without the belief that I, or anyone, has a choice, the right to choose, we can be caught up in the twizzle of a twister, a disturbance we deny, allowing outside control. I think that life is a dance, and I think that being energetic, dynamic, is essential, to say no, to say yes, to move, to stay put, and so much more. Trouble is, that the old thinking gets tangled in our knicker elastic, halting movement. I remember it well, the confusion of it all. And, although I am hopeful that times have changed, see in so many ways that they have, I still notice a holding on from my generation of parents, and beyond. Such judgement, no allowance for flick or fancy. It saddens me. All people have choices, and, better, the opportunity to change a deeply rooted belief that says…….what you look like decides whether we approve of you, or not, how you speak, how you present yourself, your qualifications (on paper), your family background.

I get that so many slide down into the swamp of unbelief, and, that others rise up into shapes that don’t fit them at all. You can live a whole life, the only one you have, in that unfit shape. To a degree, I did that too, hoping for approval, for recognition, for acceptance. It worked pretty well. However, at this end of my life, widowed and in the evening time, I do hope that one day choices will be for everyone, for men, women, children, and all of those choices will be welcomed, discussed, guided and supported.

I may be a dreamer.

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Island Blog – The Pretend and the Real

There’s a thing after a big occasion. It’s a bit of a down in the boots. The build up to something takes frickin ages, months of thought and prep and unholy panic. And, then, the day comes, as it always will, skidding in too fast, knocking those who aren’t prepared right over on their butts. We get through it, love it, hate bits of it, and then the night comes like a full stop to all that thought and prep and unholy panic. And, even though it is done for another whole year, there’s a wistfulness squirking around because for one day everyone got together, rising above the ordinary, the boredinary, the slough and chuff and scuff and dribble of the next bit, which is much longer than a bit. It’s going to work again, to school again, to facing the weather again without the lift of pretence. It’s like stepping out of fairyland and back out onto the street, wetter and colder than before.

I get it.

Oh, I know I am in Africa and Christmas was super hot and sunny, no need for a merry fire in the grate, no need for candles, which, by the way, would have melted into puddles by 8 am, but I still need to come home to the ‘street’. It wonders me, this whole shift, not just mine across timelines and a gazillion air miles, but for everyone else. Life will never stay still. Such a damn nuisance, that. But, it is how it is, and the slump after two days of festivities will affect all of us, no matter whom nor where we are. We love to celebrate, to have fun, to lift ourselves up and away from the pressures of our lives, to pretend, just for a short time. I believe this to be a strength, because I have met many, so many, who say MEH to celebratory felicitations. That saddens me. You, my friends, have lost the child in you, and that is a massive loss. We love to play, however stiff and starchy we may become, through pressures, hurts, wounds, damage and disappointments. Good news is that the child still lives in there, somewhere. And, the most playful people I have ever met, have always been the most broken.

We make resolutions. We break them. We set them too high, way above the beyond of what we can reach just now. We want to change, or we would never set these damn things, these Don’ts and Do’s that may never be us. I just decide to be more playful, to see the fun or to initiate it. To laugh more, to share smiles, to say hallo to anyone, everyone. To bring out the little girl I once was, before the pretend became a conscious decision, when it just happened because it was real.

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Island Blog – And it Did

When time stops for someone else, it also stops for me. If I don’t know them well, it stops for a little while, a gasp of shock, the ensuing ripples and thoughts and rememberings of the time we shared, upsetting my natural flow, and I understand and accept it. However, if it is someone much closer to home, this time-stopping thing courses like a virus through my mind and body. It’s as if my days are uppity wee shites, refusing to walk the way we have always heretofore companionably walked, through an ordinary routine, however dull, acceptable and, above all, recognised and known. I can wake without the day, out of kilter somehow, but not in a somehow I can re-jig nor whack into submission. It’s a stumbling, and it disorientates me enough to rise a roar in my mouth.

Because why? Hmmm, perhaps because all my thoughts seem to collude with the ‘stopping’, a timeline snipped like a ribbon, that fragile, when you think of it, the Big Scissors and the delicate ribbon. My thoughts, like all honest folk will admit to, are for myself. In the gone of someone, my own Gone thwacks me in the face. I can feel boundaried when I didn’t before. Of course, it isn’t about me, and why do I say that, because the me in this situation is definitely loud as a claxen? When any sadness comes, I battle with the elements therein. The reason, the why, the what, the what if, the how, the where. I am a strongly emotional woman. I am unable, nor do I want to be ‘able’ to take any loss as a ‘whatever’. I know those who can, and I find it odd, weird at times, that anyone can just shrug off anything that happens to someone else, to the over there of their lives, and just move on, light-foot, confident. Confident in what, I often wonder. In the immediate truth that nothing such as this will ever come their way? Or is it that their inner wiring is right and mine is faulty? Looking at that sentence, I know it’s not true. There is no Right. There is no Wrong. There is just a different wiring. It isn’t perspective, because I know about perspective. I lived with a long-term husband who never saw anything as I did, beyond the obvious mathematics of lambing, or the positioning of the massive Christmas tree. It was in the area of emotive intelligence that we found ourselves on different continents. I don’t say he didn’t feel emotional, because he did, but all that ‘mess’ was kept firmly under wraps and almost never turned into words of communication, whereas I could bleed noisily and copiously over the death of a lamb, a cat, a dog, a friend, even a notreallyfriend.

It wasn’t that I was a damn fool about death. Everything has a timeline, everyone dies, I knew and know that, and it doesn’t enfrighten me. I just might not be ready for that delicate ribbon to be cut, is all, because it comes on an ordinary Tuesday morning with the day mapped out and things ready and the linchpin working just grand on all four wheels of my wagon. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there’s a cut, a stop, a finite, and my hold on the hours ahead falters, hours and hours escaping my fingers like a jail breakout, and I am left here on my sturdy wagon, fingers splayed, mind blown, alone and thrown, suddenly pointless. Shopping for groceries, visiting friends, laughing gaily, all of those a stop, as if the curtain just came down, which it did.

And it did.

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Island Blog – Fiddling Sticks

My favourite music, the fiddle. The word alone lifts my feet into dance. Fiddle, rhymes with diddle, piddle, widdle, skiddle, and I could add a few more. All of them traverse me into lift, laughter my aide de buoyant. That might be French, might not. I’m not for caring much right now about semantical language shifts, nor their accuracy. Actually, fiddling is rarely an accurate science. I know because I had stood standing (a rare thing for me) at a ceilidh, just to watch the wild crazy sawing of that bow across four strings, the bow and bend as the fiddle and the player become one with the dance. I hear more beats to the bar, more sudden shifts into minor, into major, I hear it and it wilds me too. Even if others don’t get the musical seasonal shift, I can sense their excitement as it happens. Needless to say, there is often chaos in the field, a lot of crashing into each other, laughter lifting like spice and sugar into the over-breathed air above our heads, and we forgive, as our toes sting like hell. We just dance, we just move, we just collide and apologise and move on. We have to or we might end up as part of the single track road.

Sticks. After all the winds we have buffeted against this summer season, we find sticks every which where, spun off from big limbs, like they are no longer useful. And, on the picking up of them, I get it. It’s a bit like clearing out a wardrobe (such an ancient name) and shucking away those dodgy frocks and blouses (another ancient word) for the moving along. That’s a season in a word. Move it along. It seems to me that nature is much better at this than we are, we daft humans who hang on to what was fine in the past, and is no longer. Nature just spits out. Maybe there’s a lesson there. However, and notwithstanding, (sorry, indulgence there) it is not easy, because we have this propensity to hold on to our past. I was young, looked good in this, once, thing. It wonders me, even as I know the feeling. And not just in bodily coverings, but in mindal (my word) acceptance. If we could, can, spit out the dead sticks in our lives, just like that, how might we free ourselves? From past pain, from regrets, from the feeling of pointlessness (way too many esses in that), how might we be able to enjoy the seasonal changes in our own lives? And our lives are seasonal, not as an accurate science, no way, but as a random crazy unknown thingy. Which it is.

In our turbulent times, as we try to navigate the yet unknown, who the frick are we? We have seen Sea take Land which seemed solid. We have been there when the light died and the black came in and held. We have danced with the reckless and longed to stay in that moment. We have loved, we have lost, we have done bloody well by the way. So what now? Who is caring, who is in charge, and what is it about that which tells us we need a leader anyways, beyond our own ability to flick and flex with a new dynamic dance? I say we need only ourselves, and that might need inner work, but that is where our power lies, not over anyone else, no way, no, no no, but over our own selves.

It’s a fiddlesticks sort of desert, seasons shifting like waves in a menace, sudden, unexpected, wild and infuriating, much as life is now. Meet you there.

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Island Blog – Risk, Wild, Adventure, Lipstick

My roses are ridonculus. This year, despite being cut down to their knees last Autumn, they have risen like blooming lamposts. They know, they have to, that wind and WIND cometh, and daily, along with slews of rain, a veritable slam-dunk with potential collapse. But, they don’t do that collapso thing, not like the beech limb, that sweet strong gone-thing that prevents my traverse in the most polite of ways in that it fell whilst I was not beneath its massive tonnage. I see the black, the ingress of rain for perhaps decades, the finite a silent given, but not to me, not to all of us who wandered beneath the bow and the beauty of this superb and wonderful spread. We, human we, didn’t think at all. We just lifted an overhang, leaf heavy, and for so many walks and talks and unthinks.

Today, returning from work, I saw something, a definite some-thing at the side of the track, and moving. A buzzard low and just above this moving thing, taunting, dunting, a significant part of the moment. I slowed my mini (she doesn’t like to slow, so there was a tussle) and looked. An otter, an OTTER, right there beside me, slid into the ditch, then paused and looked right at me. It’s face, its eyes, my face, my eyes, we collided. Then, it grabbed the hen it had pinched from……where for goodness sake? There is nothing and no-one here, not for miles. That eye connection champagnes my insides and, for a bit, whilst Mini grumbled, I could not press play. I was in the wild and I didn’t want to leave. The. otter did, lifting over ferns and rocks until all I saw was the nothing I had expected pre this sudden eye-catch, this adventure. It thought me.

Adventure, risk and the wild is not for some, but for us all. We just have to see everything and to seek something beyond and above the usual, the what we’ll have for dinner, the whose turn it is to take the kids to their groups, the grind of expectation and disappointment. I remember being there, but please don’t think that just because my kids are born and gorn that everything becomes marvellous, because that is a myth. I began being ridonculus at 21, deciding to see the wild, to risk adventure, to find connection with my people, who were not always my family. It is a choice. I ask myself, and daily, Who Am I in this Here and Now? The answer comes. You Know Who You Are. And the voice is right.

One day I drove to the harbour, knowing one of my boys had parked there. I also knew I wouldn’t see him, but that didn’t matter. I found his big ass buckie and pulled out my pink lipstick. I drew a huge heart on the driver window and wrote I LOVE YOU, right across the windscreen. No-one saw me. Chuffed, I walked back to my car, passing, oh dear, passing, his buckie, I knew it, his stuff, his order, his things and thought, oh holy shit! I just defaced an unknown’s glassware. Then, the wild in me, the adventure, laughed me and I did it all again. As I hiked my wee car up the hill and away, I did wonder what the other guy felt as he came back to such a message.

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Island Blog – The Bog and Lifting

Mostly, I am coloured up and cheerful as a chipmunk. Then comes a day when it is even a pain in the arse to get dressed. I don’t like these days, and they know it, because I can hear them grumbling and muttering each time I push myself on and up. And I do. I think it’s because I know about being in the bowels of a depression and how vicious and controlling it is. Thankfully this time is way back in my past, but the body holds the score and we both remember the control of it, the way invisible octopus arms smothered me, held me down and down some more until I forgot who I was, and why I was. The scars are there somewhere and when the past puts its finger on the trigger, I tense, I remember, and my inner fighter rises, stronger now, powerful, even if I am not. She will protect me but only because I call her up from sleep, and that is the key.

When someone has known the ghastly of a mental bog, the knowing never goes away. But, once lifted from said bog, something rises as a teacher. Do you want to learn, survive, bloom again? If, as in my case, the answer is yes-but, then out comes the sunshine of hope. Yes…..But….? Indeed. The but bit is important because you are up there, Oh Teacher and I am slimy and hopeless and full of self-hatred and remorse. How on earth will those beliefs change? Ah, says the Teacher. Just follow me. And I did, and I learned and I was a keen student. I remember faking cheerful, faking ‘sorted’ because in my day, depression was something to be ashamed of, something imagined. ‘This is all in her head’ they said, and they were right, but the dismissive way it was whispered in corridors, was not right at all. As if I had manufactured these days of darkness and fear, just for attention.

I am not depressed now. I have learned much over the years, discovered many wonderful inroads into intelligent and compassionate support, walked them, learned the routes to feeling worthwhile, important, valued. T’is a goodly map. I also know, and believe in, the tactics for arising from the bog. I understand that the bog is still there, but I have found footholds. I know where the Pull Grass grows, that which I can grab a hold of, should I slide down. I have learned the weather patterns around a possible slide, and to avoid going out at such times. And, avoidance tactics are pivotal. On days such as this, when I can’t be arsed et wotwot, I am careful to do exactly what I want to do. I may cancel a meeting if it insecures me. I may decide to stay behind my four stone walls, light a fire, read or listen to an audio book. After all, who is judging me for my hiding, my declining, my indulgence? Only me. The critics of my past are long dead, all of them, parents, teachers, husband, so those voices are just dust in the wind. I know this now.

But, when such days wake me, confabulate me, I cannot dismiss them. A day is a day, after all, hours of it. But I can cock a snook at it, swish my sword, say I Am Important, I Have a Choice, and, most importantly, I Am Me (and that’s just dandy). I may not do this or that, those things my imaginary ‘yous’ keep banging on about, and, even if it feels odd at first, the more I do this, the bigger I grow and the further I walk from that damn bog. And my judges.

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Island Blog – The Snow and a Wink

It came down, the snow, yesterday when I was washing up dishes at the twice monthly Lunch Club, organised and devised by the best soup and pudding makers, surprises always a happening, like the profiteroles this time. Who on earth makes them? S’not me, not never, but there they were all perfect and breathily awaiting that chocolate rum sauce. The folks attending scraped their plates, begged for more, loved every mouthful. The snow fell on, warmed just a twist, slushed up into icepuddling and then kept its mouth shut as the next freeze blew in like a breath. We, the kitchen staff checked the window, the out of it, The snow and ice checkers. Our guests are tricky, need sticks. I’m washing and rinsing and watching the snowfall. The buzz in the kitchen is warm and laughing, alltalk, village, community, life, health, loves, all of it. My back is to the room, but I hear it all, the glorious buzz of friends, of community. 

I rise, or my trusty mini does, up the twist hill to the gape of the road. I swing right and then take the slide right and down into the village. Down always works, no more hills, no matter the slide shift of snow and ice. I will get home, even if it is a sort of sledge thing. The snow falls on, and, later, I walk with a stick, just in case. I keep walking daily even if it has scant fun without the wee dog. I purpose myself, watch everything, notice each change, check footprints, see the chunnels of slewed freezing rain trying to find its way back to the sea, halted by fallen leaves, sticks, sludge. I cautious my boots along the slippy track, keeping middle ground where nobody walks and where the road fill has elevated like the ridge on a badger.

And on it snows. We don’t know this non stop snow thing, not here on the west. I watch the morning, the garden birds zing and slew around the feeders, as the snow lifts the ground into a new level. I crunch out in sand shoes and almost disappear, or they do, to check the mailbox. This takes me a wheech and a fight with the flip lid catch thingy, gloves on, to reveal nothing much. The sky is a wildscape. I see highrise winds luffing the faraway clouds, a reveal. There is argument up there, so far up there. Closer, the snow clouds fluff up like boys at a disco, all puff and promise. I walk out and stand to look up. Whatever is coming will come and I, me, small unimportant old woman, am here. I say this out, and just as I do, there’s a skedaddle in the clouds and the sun winks at me.

Ha! I smile, and crunch my way back home.