mental health

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Island Blog – Flick the Indicator and Sing

It’s windy. and rainy. This is so not news, not on the way-out-there of us on this almost most westerly point of the UK. Wind, rain are a thing here, loads of both. I can see it in faces, wrinklewrapped but in straighter lines than those on mainland skin, as if continuation actually fixes anything in place. Which it does, when my thinks think me. If somebody continually focusses (too many esses) on gloom, doom, disaster, failure, then guess what manifests? I remember an ongoing conversation way back about being a realist as opposed to a ‘fantasist’. The latter was the term applied to a positive thinker. It laughs me now, but it was a furious one-thing-or-the-other bargument back then, as if there was no opportunity for the in between. Nobody then, nobody at all ever even considered the power (definitely not that) in the electricity of the mind, the fact that it only needed a human decision to fire up the electrons, particles and all the other stuff about which I know zip. I learned it early and I am glad of it.

Anyway, back to lines on faces. I meet the curved lines of dissatisfaction, the downturn, the defeat, the settling, mostly on visitor features. I also meet the ‘scars’ of women and men who have lived here, faced down the wintersmith and laughed back into a hesitant spring and for decades. We can notice, if we care to notice. Life is tough and for all of us. However, and here’s a thing. In any conversation between two ‘solids’, there are many opportunities to divert. There is a wealth of colour, tone and hue between black and white. It’s about belief, and belief is a choice and a confidence and a decision. I’ve made such choices often without a scooby, no idea what might come down on me, appear for me, many, many times. I recommend it.

Flick the indicator. See what happens, and then deal with it, holding tight to your own song, because if you don’t sing it, who ever will?

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Island Blog – Long Shadows and a Someone

Here is something I really don’t understand, even as I sort of get it. First part of that sentence, good grammar, the latter ‘now speke’. Just saying. Although I have lived all the way from grammatical stripulation, something which drove me right up into mini-skirts and the climbing out of windows after 10pm to hook up with a market stall owner and an E Type soft top, to the now of ‘like’ being the first word before pretty much every single word. It used to be ‘Um’ and that meant a knuckle rap, even in my day. In a moment, She said (all of 4 feet tall behind her desk) of hesitation, hold the silence, use your eyes, lift your chin, make it seem as if you are about to come up with something utterly profound. Your brain will catch up. She was right btw. And I thank her. She cast a very short shadow, but I remember her longer.

I walked today, this afternoon, and noticed that the grasses interrupted the track. It stopped me. I hadn’t noticed shadow before. The light is shifting, the balance too. The dying fronds luffed and danced in shadow talk. I could see it across my boots as a soft swish of goodbye for now. Onwards and into the woods, I see anew the arse end of a fallen pine, the roots highwide and skyward, a curve shadow which was t’other side before the Autumn arrived, which seems very sudden. After that I did a load of noticing, shadows longer, strange, almost confusing. Maybe shadows always are and maybe that whole confusulation is what notices us as we notice. Now there’s a happy thing. There is a theory that we miss places and times, but what if they miss us? I have places in my mind, pebbles in the wilderness of my story, which halted me. Still do when I remember them. I smell decay, the erupticus of the land taking back. The leaves turning, almost happily into red, gold, brown and falling. It is as if the earth rises up in welcome hands.

Perhaps it is something to do with the colding, the change into the dark and away from the endless summer light, when the shadows finally get their say, longing. And they do ‘long’. They are longer than the one who actually walks the earth. We are finite, minute, temporary and yet we are extraordinary, magical, pivotal, powerful, and we make a point, a mark and each of us is a Someone.

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Island Blog – Go for it…. The Green Light for Risk

Pre 1974 the British never said this, the Go for it bit. In fact, and I remember well, there was none of that wild nonsense. In fact there was far more Don’t you dare go for it, for girls anyway. And It was never going to change. Breaking out was a big risk. Many did and I admire them. But I am not talking about historicalness, more about cooking and about the way I cooked for all those years without a clue. I had musical talent, I knew that. I was a creative, I knew that. I had one recipe book. I knew that too. It was the birthing of 1980 on an island in the wilds of wilderness with shitfaced gales and striated rocks upholding the peripheries and intense freezing cold and no fricking fires in the homestead, or none that would stay alight without bellows and a load of swearing. About floors so cold it was impossible to walk without boots on, about ice in the threadbare spouts of carpet. I remember them. Going up to bed, a mile of stairway, I saw those ice spouts glint in the moonlight. They did smile me even though they solved not one of my problems.

I remember the mile long stairway.

There were times I walked up and times I walked down. On each journey, mostly, I conversationed myself. I knew steps to be an opportunity for change. I hate this, I am cold way beyond my bones, I want out. I am ready, I can do this, How many pack lunches today, how many dinner guests, how many knocks on the door to say Here’s a lamb. That’s the only one that angered me.

Positioned before the big blue aga, I found inventions. Each evening from April to October, we worked together. She was testy, up and down with the blow of the switchy winds, puffing out and pulling in, but we got to know each other. She helped me produce a load of made up recipes, the go for it green light strong in me as I pulled back from a book recipe thinking no, not enough lemon, garlic, whatever. Guests were happy, effusive, booked for next year. I cooked intuitively, and as I grew more confident and less doubting, I became courageous and a good cook. However, it wasn’t just in cooking that my intuition served me well. When the next disaster arrived I trusted my quick decision making and took action. Oh, I am not saying I didn’t doubt myself because I always did, and nor am I saying that I was always right because I absolutely was not, but it seemed to me to be the only way I could operate. Unlike many who spend a long time thinking things through, something I wish I could do even occasionally, I jumped in the deep end immediately as if I was the only one who could save the day. This is obviously ridiculous. There are many things which do require a lot of thinking through and those things were undoubtedly startled at being brought firmly to a conclusion they had neither expected, nor needed, but I would have missed their startlement completely. Where did this not-thinking-through gene come from, I wonder? When I do force myself to think for more than a few seconds about a problem, my mind wanders off in any number of irrelevant directions. I try to pull it back but this wild horse is determined to bolt. Perhaps my brain was inserted upside down.

Now that old bones tell me just how old they are and that Time is also slower on the move, I consider all of the above and it wonders me, the way we are made, the influences of our childhood, the genes we inherit, the talents we learn in order to be Somebody among millions. I suspect we will never be able to unpick the fabric of ourselves, will never understand everything, or anything much about how we are who we are. The most important thing, I do know this, is to value and be thankful for all the things we have achieved in our life and not just to focus on the failures which I do, a lot. I blame school reports. ‘She has too much imagination.’ She has considerable difficulty in sitting still.’ She is disruptive in class, too cocky, too badly behaved.’ and so on. These told me, of course they did, that I was someone undeserving of all the glowing congratulations bestowed on those who would never have disrupted anything and who could sit still for days if required. I was bright and intelligent, funny and mischievous, witty and daring, but none of that came home with me at the end of term, so it’s understandable that I misremember myself, even as an old woman. I sincerely hope that my generation is the last, or almost last of subjugation and the disinterest in individuality, for there is brilliance out there in our children and their children and we need them to grow into themselves, ready to risk, to Go for It, whatever ‘It’ is for them.

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Island Blog – The Disappearing Road

I like pathways or skinny roads which disappear beyond my vision because they invite me on. I like conversations which tail off in the face of interruption. I like the look on someone’s face when there is no chance of finding out more. I like chance encounters at a coffee kiosk, on a walk, in a shop doorway, in a luggage collision in an airport, when faces tell me so much and voices tell me little, if anything. I remember, as a child, hearing words from older mouths and looking up into faces to see something which made me suddenly unsure. I had no language to explain it, even to myself and, chances are I just skipped on as little girls do, but now it thinks me. What I saw when I did look up were the scars of life, the lines of worry and the brilliance of learned concealment. I have them on my own old face but instead of giving me issue or a rush towards an appointment with a cosmetic surgeon, I love them because they invite me on. To look further. Where will I go now? Where do I lead myself? What does that twisty spindrift of a barely drivable road lead next? I am still curious like Alice.

I like the seasons, the way they take for fricken ever to arrive as if not one of them has ever learned to be assertive. We, down here, winkle our landlife through indecision for weeks, cardy on, cardy off, thermals needed one day, becoming a fitted boiler without thermostat the next. Windows open until they slam shut in the fist of a gale. A clear blue inviting a gentle walk until, not quite half-way through, the sky closes in a grey whooha and a million clouds dump their load as if they had held on far too long.

I like the way the islanders respond to all of these things. I met the same acceptance in the 70’s among the wonderful men and women who worked at Church Farm in Martham. I had never, till then, met truth from mouths which connected with the expression on a face. I remember a light in my heart then. Here are people I understand, even though I was the farmer’s wife and they were workers, it didn’t matter. I could see where that disappearing road lead. Here, in my island life, there is a shrug, a nonchalance, an acceptance in pretty much everything and yet with a curiosity, a mischievous challenge, a ‘let’s go’ thing.

When we are born into a family, there are plans made for us before we can piss straight. This is normal and everyone does this, including me and himself, even though every single baby proved enough for a dissertation. As new parents always believe they hold the reins, and they do, for a short while, even as a new and often uncomfortably independent spirit is born with every child. This can prove awkward, even embarrassing. Oh, we all know of teenage angst, of hormonal turbulence and think, as we laugh through it all around a table with parents going through the same thing, that it will pass, the whatever of the whatever of it. It may not.

I, for one, found my way. I say nothing against my parents, my loving safety, their patient opportunities for furtherance. I was loved. But I always longed for escape, to follow the disappearing road. I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was the million miles between words and truth, perhaps the carefully defined road connections, the marked out parking spots, the rules of controlled living. I live no longer under any controls although I find my own both severe and opportunistic as if I have to choose. Ok, I will. I accept the severe, the self-judgement, the list of my crimes and failures.

I still love that sleek and slim disappearing road.

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Island Blog – I want to be

  1. Compassionate, so that when I am tired and fed up and in an inner hurry to get back to myself, I have enough to stop me, just enough, to remind myself of my ears for listening, to expand my heart, to feel the human music of my pulse; to bring about the reduction of hyper nonsensical blood flow like a sliver-river of me me me, to dam it, to bring the beavers in.

2. Welcoming, when I seriously wish I had a shotgun in my hands; when I am interrupted mid snip of rose blooms, when I thought I was alone with this rose snipping thing.

3. Kind, as so many have been kind to me.

4. Thoughtful, when most of my thoughts are about how old and limited I am, or think I am.

5 Loving, when I am here alone and my family is/are miles away and I do wonder about that, the collective ‘let’s get far away’ thing.

6. Curious. Well I am definitely that. And, as 6 is my favourite number, I am sticking.

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Island Blog – Tearaway

We start with a plan. I did as a young mum with a tumble of kids. In my plan, in our plan, we were excellent parents, mother, father, we were. We weren’t. In the melee ensuing of business development, of invasive strangers, of things collapsing, falling in, stopping, as in water flow, of freezing pipes, of bat invasions, mice, cold, we did falter, our dream did sink somewhat. It felt boggish. But we were not going to go there because, even though we dreamed and thought deeply, we were above ground people. If you are a person of the land, the field, the marsh, the emptinessof soil and space, who know the fear of drought, of flood, of loss and gain, the singularity of joy, the sharing of it, then you will recognise something. Possibly more than something, because everyone knows what it feels like to sink, what it feels like to choose ‘above ground.’

I employ the above ground as an adjunct. Today was remarkable at the Best Cafe Ever. No, it was overwhelming. There must have been hundreds of customers, in line and for 5 hours. I did feel like sinking. I didn’t check with the others in the Servery because to be honest, we barely met beyond a pull back or let go in a narrow space as we served and cleared and tried to make the soup last. I did turn into the Washeroo thinking, I can’t do this. That lasted not even 5 seconds. I have great inner talk. Don’t be ridonculous, ya eejit, rise, RISE. It works.

I like to tearaway from, well most things if I’m honest, but on this one, from inner giving up. Too many do this, too many times I have been tempted. and then the Tearaway comes in, like thunder, like a smile from Joe the new postie, from a word of recognition, a smile from eyes really connecting with my own, and a tune with lyrics which stop me, the tune that takes me to my piano, makes me pay attention.

Tearaway. From old confines, from old controls, from old myths and mistakes. Tearaway.

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Island Blog – 3 Day Streaker

My blog tells me I am on a 3 day streak. After 14 years of writing blogs, this is a disappointment, and feels like a sort of criticism or judgement, as if not being ‘there’ once or twice or even thrice is a failure. Reminds me of childhood, of school when if I or my peers weren’t constantly ‘there’, failure was subtly suggested, the outfall inviting judgement. You found yourself in landfall, smelling bad and very unsure. I know enough, now, of the confusulation in such forums, in the anywheres of social media, to ignore such trite nonsense. But, and here’s an admission, it still sets me back a step. It seems that what others think or how others judge matters and possibly a bit too much. This thinks me. It does matter in all the right ways, but in the possibly wrong ways it, the mattering thing, can become confusive, and here, where all I deal with is my daily blog fight with grammar, spacing and comments or judgements, I do have to laugh at myself. Out there in the Out There, ordinary women are fighting for life, saving flooded homes, grieving at the loss of everything. I know this, we all know this, but it is too much to take in when something assaults a life, here, now. My irritata on a robotic comment, in the aforesaid light is embarrassing to be honest, but I don’t believe it should be denied, swiped away as nothingmuch because it matters to me in the right now of now and it has an effect.

And this is my point. I feel the judgement because of some ridonculous conclusion I came to. What brought me here? It should be a laugh, a coffee, a fix, a nothing. Ah……not nothing, oh no. Childhood and child experience is a raised head here. I see the rise, the face, my young face, and she is me some decades ago, no freedom of speech and no idea what to say, no idea who I was, no confidence, no voice beyond the one which got me into a big dose of trouble and more than once. Just a rebel, they said, she’ll calm down. I didn’t lose the rebel, but I did ‘calm down’, did learn to conform, to fit the space proffered and allowed. I birthed five children, I was mother of this number before I was 30. It was all I wanted, even though, I am sure, I was way less than the ideal mother. I was absent/still in the room. Disasters came daily, mostly out there in the ‘Out There’, man overboard, calls to search for a missing canoeist, a life possibly lost on the arse-side of Tiree or Gunna; or the woodburner going on fire, pipes burning, rattling, and guests panicking and me flapping everything down with the promise of scones, a warm fire and my competent husband who made everything better and with such inner confidence.

He saw me. He left me to deal with damn well everything a lot of the time, fixing, in a state of immediacy, always en pointe. Always. I’m not sure he was aware of the exhaustion, nor the legacy it left. I remember being told, in my childhood and often, to look after the Little Ones, my wee sisters. We might have been packing to go north for our summer holiday, or anywhere. Look after the Little Ones. It’s loud in my memoric ears. It’s what big sisters do, isn’t it? It’s what you do. But, not once, not ever, did either of my parents ask how that felt for me. A tip for parents nowadays. It’s often the older kids who get lost in the mist of whatever ‘disaster’ goes on in a family. The expectations weigh like tons and the older kid gets lonely, feels invisible. And ‘invisible lonely’ grows. It has a voice which won’t shutup.

On a good note, when I began this after recovering from the slap of judgement, I noticed that spacing went wild, twice here, thrice there, and letters jumbled, making interesting words now and then. I fixed it.

Still off-pissing for a 3 day streaker blog. I’m still here.

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Island Blog – Just Flying On

I did my own housework today. It’s so damn boring, my own housework, whereas I am like a woman on fire when it comes to someone else’s. I am can-do, let’s do this, even if the job appears magnifluent with horribleness. What is that all about? I ask myself this as I lug stuff for washing to the washing thing. No answer comes beyond the flip dash of swallows madly encouraging their second brood to fly, ffs. I feel for them, not that I ever knew resistance from my kids, as they almost went without a lookback. I pulled myself back to myself, as they say in SA, and grabbed a hoover, then a bucket and mop and sorted things that needed sorting. I like my home to be clean even if nobody ever sees most of it. This is about me and how I care about me, my personal standards.

Bring that back, roll it right back to the core. I have standards, yes, but just for myself. I feel no judgement when I meet others who don’t share what I choose to be my level pegs. It doesn’t annoy me. I cock my head at this. Really? Well, yes, probably, but I contain it. I have five grown children with five grown partners. I have met walls and fences. I have learned. What haveI learned? Acceptance, obviously. Was that easy? No. So How did it become the normal in those relationships? Did you remember yourself in these new dynamics? Not always, no, although once I got to know the partners, I found myself loving them and that was me being me. How did you do that? Asking questions without agenda, just interested in their life, their own thoughts, the she or he of she or he. And, I interrupt my questioner, of continuing that through the years. Instead of the easy homey conversations with primal children, elevation is required, I have found. To show interest and to ask about the partner of my beloved, the one, let’s be honest, who took that beloved out of the maternal/paternal sphere and into a new ellipsis.

I made chappit tatties just now. It’s a Scottish thing you might need to google. I also made a salad and all of the before was delivered on Friday, fresh island produce. I can smell the island on the lettuce, salty, safe, wholesome. I love the ground of this life, the wild, the silence and darkness at night, the safety, the community, the song and strength of it, the way we move to help each other, the way we can step in or fly out when it’s an urgence. The way we understand that the earth breathes, the sea breathes, the world is changing. We don’t know what to do next beyond the fact that we don’t have a clue.

In the now of now, we are flying on.

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Island Blog – The Before of Us

I have a big pile of books on my kitchen table. If I wasn’t at work on a Tuesday, I would gather them up for a swap, but I am working and so the level rises in tales of other lands, other times, of those whose lives I have never lived, of whose pain I can only catch in sentences. Most stories talk to me in a voice from the past, of challenges and overcomings, of loss and mostly, of moving through and onwards. They all inspire me because of just one single thread, the one that securely connects most of us, all of us, to the before of us, to the insertion of a generational electoid in a daily script. I know this. I picked it up with my own children, spilling out rulings that often confounded me, as if I had no control of the spilling. As soon as the electoid had deflated, I regretted. This is how we learn. We make mistakes because we just do. Without our acceptance, or acknowledgement, we spin the same tale and, in a place of authority, we deliver it. I did. Do I regret? Oh yes. But the damage was done and flifflewaffle is redundant here. The before of us is what every generation must learn from. This one in this generation and in my experience is a lot about chasing money, no, fighting for it and against everyone; It’s about mothers at school gates looking beautiful, sharing tips on well-being spas, nail decorators, hair stylists, the answer to all internal dilemmas costing a gazillion an hour. It’s about looking beautiful. Looking. Beautiful.

Looks fade. Just saying. My book pile is fingered and bented. Some pages are blobbed, twisted, stuck together. This is life. The sun is out now after twinglerain, sharp shards of it, the sun diddling about up there between cloudal shenanigans. It’s cold, it’s hot, it’s windy, it’s a party game t’ween the weatherness and our attitude. We must adapt, move on with new tunes, new attitude, new intelligence. As we must beyond the before of us.

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Island Blog – Emerging and Engagement

We are in a seasonal change. The mornings are cool, the light less light, less strong, the mornings darker. I love such changes, all of them because it involves me and my attitude. It also reminds me of my mother’s big ottoman on the landing, wherein she would carefully fold all summer clothes, bringing out the scratchy woolen jumpers, the thicker trousers, the warmer underpinnings. Not sure we can do that anymore, even if we do own a landing big enough for an ottoman. Nonetheless, the temperature does lower as Summer gathers up her swishy skirts and dances off to Africa. Seasons don’t stop being themselves. They just move on to do their thing on the other side of the world. I love that too and it thinks me.

I hear, oh god we all hear, the moans at the loss of Summer as if nothing will ever be right ever again, as if cool mornings heralds the end of everything. Such nonsense. We have all lived some years knowing that nothing at all lasts, that everything changes and never stops doing that change thing. I suspect that too much talk of ‘loss’ can, and probably does infect a community, a workspace, a family situation, There is nothing like a single voice of misery to bring down the most dynamic team. But this subject is on no more than a change in seasonal flow. I do understand a sense of loss, nonetheless. Those heady days of frocks and bare arms, of walking for hours beneath glorious sunshine, of taking warmth for granted, leaving doors open and not shouting about it; of dry dogs after long walks, of mud solidified enough to be just dust on boots; of standing for a conversation, of sitting on a balcony with a glass of chilled something-or-other and of trusting all of the above. I get it.

The thing I have learned is that attitude makes any change shift into opportunity. As those of us who are getting old get older, it is our essential choice. As joints stiffen and shout, as it gets harder to gauge the level of bumpy land, as the cold sneaks in knife-like, as self-doubts grow mighty and decisions flounder, we cannot help but remember how vibrantly we once swashbuckled through our complex lives. A seasonal loss? Yes, definitely yes. A different seasonal change, one of a life long lived. When we began it was Winter. Then we met someone and Spring began to flower up, cautious, yes, but little blooms pushed through the cold. Then came Summer, the crazy warm long hours of sunshine, the swing of it, the fragrance of hope filling the air, the dance of it, the wild long hours of daylight, of hope, of dreams. Then Autumn, golden, still warm, the light like a chiaroscuro, elevating what was already there, sharpening its edges, pulling the distant closer, reflections brighter, calls stronger out there in the otherness. Then Winter again, but a different one from before, before the commitment to the one, to children, to family, to decades of hard work and laughter and sharing and agony and loss and gain and goodbyes and hellos.

I like the word Emerging, not that I thought for one minute I would be still doing it, not at this age, but I am and my attitude is absolutely IT on this. I don’t like being alone. I don’t like being old. I don’t know anyone who does. Ok, so that’s the bottom line. Let’s think up. I do. I wake every morning and say thankyou to my bed. I won’t say I plan my day because, unless I have work in the Best Cafe Ever, I don’t. I just wake up and that’s damn good. I wash, dress, make-up my face, eat breakfast, clean up, look out. And whatever is going on out there, I choose to go with it, up the warmth if required, call for help if I need a big gas cylinder attached, download an audio book, hoover (boring), wave to walkers, plan supper, make hummus or something like that. I have the urge to emerge.

I can’t change the loss of me, but I can rise above everything if I choose to engage with change.