mountain

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Island Blog – The Familiar and My Mountain

This day they moved, left the island, all girls and hair swinging and a big moving van and hopes dancing in the headlights of the car, skittering before them, lifting the road like ribbons of light, dancers. I stay here, solid, porridge. No, frollocks to that. I wave them off, I am strong, weak, old, young, lost, found, me, me always me and now it is just me in a very big me sort of way. Everyone is somewhere else living their own lives and the Familiar shifts yet again.

I remember all the times when the Familiar turned her cloak and swished away, leaving a big scoop of nothing, a potential fall, a gouge into well-known footland, a fall threat. I have damned her for decades and yet, and yet, she is my guide, if not, quite, my friend. I see her eyebrows beetle at that, her eyes slant up and to the right, a sardonic question. She is slanty at best. There were the times I realised that my wifely role was already written up as script. It was a freedom for a while, a confidence, a familiar. Each change uncomfortabled me. My children leaving home, one, two, three, four, five. Each time a fist-wringing farewell to the familiar.

I have no smart answer to this. Letting go is easy to say but not to do, not to live out. So what is the living out bit? It is, to my mind, the ordinary. The get-up, eat-breakfast, stack-wood, walk-dog, clean-bathroom, wash-clothes, wipe-surfaces ordinary of life and although it may feel very off-pissing and my fed may be up on hide legs and yapping, it seems to be the best way to skid into some sort of rainbow thinking. I want dancers in my headlights, hope in my loss, laughter at the foot of my mountain. Does anyone else see my mountain?

That’s a no, then.

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Island Blog – Lilliput and Gulliver

I stand beneath an eagle. It hovers, canting on the high wind, still as anything can be up there in the blow. Wings spread 8, 9 foot wide, only its tail to adjust balance. It ticks, the tail, this way, that way, sensing the windshift, balancing. My mouth is open I realise as I watch the flick flick of white beneath its tail feathers. It sees me, I know it does, but I am of little interest being not prey to this predator. Its eyes scan miles whereas all I can see is what I can see from my pinprick of limiting ground. Up there, if I was up there, mountain high and just beneath the clouds (or so I imagine) what might I see, how wide might be my vision? People, roll the eagle eyes, ach People, those straight up and down groundlings, a mass of useless cells, no flight, no feathers, no ability for lift: rabbits, plentiful and foolish, grazing, earthlings: other creatures I could snatch if hungry enough, determined enough, desperate enough. But what might I think if I was up there? Not thoughts of prey. Then, of what? If I could look down on an eagle, a kestrel, merlin, goshawk, buzzard floating on thermals, its entire body line flattened like the pinned down body of a collectors butterfly on a board, would I feel something?

I would. Awe and reverence come to mind and more, the way things, creatures, situations look from the antithesistic viewpoint. When facing a situation, a set of old beliefs, a family tradition or condition from the ground, not much is changeable even if that is what I want and I very oftentimes do want. I must climb higher. The higher I climb the better. So what am I climbing from or to? I don’t know the answer but I do know that, in the process of climb from all the aforementioned limitations not only the view changes. I begin to see things differently as new ideas roll in on the backs of the clouds. Hope rises on the thermals and opportunities I never imagined from ground level lift into my mind. I grab at new breaths as the air thins, my lungs inflating like bellows, igniting new fire. I can feel it in my belly, the endorphins that think me of dolphins, play before me, delighting in the bow wave I create as I push on up and up and up and there it is! I am here, looking down on a flight bird, on groundlings, on chimneys blowing smoke, on skinny snaking roads, on dark valleys that, heretofore, rendered my circular thinking to nothing but a swirl of leaves on the forest floor, so easily twisted away underfoot.

It isn’t always possible to climb a hill. I get that, but an imagination can lift you anywhere, into the sky, onto a mountain top, even into flight. The best adventures of all are played out in a mind, everyone knows that. The point is not of physical but of mental prowess #courage in battle and most battles are played out in an internal theatre. How would you direct such a play, your play? My choice is to remove myself from centre stage, the super trooper blinding me as I stumble, forget my lines, fall of the limiting boards of my life and to step elegantly down and into the front row, and to observe. How different the whole looks once I remove my fretting, fretful and irritating self! Now I see and not through a glass darkly. No, I can see all the flaws, most of which I brought with me. Perspective is powerful and illuminating.

And so, and and so. So. What do I do on my descent? I am just finding my way down after all. I have looked down on an eagle, on life, taking in the Lilliputian life I had considered so very Gulliver. Truth is, I do nothing because my inner mind is way more powerful than I give her credit for and she never sleeps. If I banish (off you f**k!) my groundling interferer and just allow my experiential change to, well, change the whole of me, it will. All I have to do is trust and wait and, after all, I have looked down on an eagle.

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Island Blog 158 A Missing Mountain

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Yesterday the top of the mountain was missing.  Cloud cover was low, thick as my mother’s whipped egg whites.  I sat watching it, missing, for quite some time; a whole mug of coffee, to be precise and it thinked me of how my eye is drawn to something that was there, always there, and now, is not.  Sometimes, as I scan the morning, spreading out in fingers of light across the grass and down to the sealoch, I know something has changed but, for a while, I can’t say what.  Perhaps the greylags are grazing, blending perfectly into the willow scrub and the stands of wiry old grass, and, then, one of them moves.  All I am aware of is change.  Walking along the Tapselteerie tracks, my attention is drawn uphill, to where the tall pines wave their arms at the sky, their bodies a shining deep red, wet still from the rain last night.  I look and look but they are all there……ah. no. One is missing a rib.

As I walk on, move on into the day, I consider how easy it would have been for me to miss this change or that.  All I have to be is slave to my to-do list, my plan for the day, the caterwaulings of my mind, the pressures I feel I am under to achieve. My alert button is on mute.  Knowing, deep within that I want to stop and notice missing mountains, I keep going.  The mountain will either return or it won’t, isn’t that right?  What is it to me either way when there is shopping to be shopped for, admin to complete, emails to respond to, rooms to be cleaned, washing to be washed?

Well, I’ll tell you what it is to me.  It is something mysterious, something beyond myself and my piddling little life, and it begs consideration.  When life teeters off balance, which it always does just when I think I have it all levelled up nicely, I need the acceptance of mystery to carry me onwards, because that acceptance brings in new game players, hope and faith.  If my life is all about lists and control then I am set up for a fall.  There are books and essays, wisdoms, poems, short stories, plays, documentaries, novels and memoirs all addressing the bizarre human failing to celebrate the unknown, the unfathomable, the unexplainable.  Even if I know there are geese grazing, or tops of mountains lost in cloud, and I study those subjects in intricate detail so that I beome an expert, something will take them a step further without me, for everything is changing all of the time, with or without our involvement.  And yet, and yet, we fight, daily, to control all of life, not just our own.  We justify and explain as much as we possibly can, and those things we just can’t, we dismiss – even if we agree that there has always been ‘imbalance’ in nature, chaos in nature.  We call it the natural world, and behave around it as if it were completely unnatural to us.

And still we long for it.  There is inside every one of us a deep connection to the wild places, to the mysteries of life, to the impossible, the unbelievable. People sigh with green envy just hearing me speak of the view from my window, the wild all around me, but you don’t need to live in the wild to know that it is all around you.  I believe that, although we fight to be in charge, the desire not to be in control of everything is strong.  Besides, if we are really in control of it all, then what a mess we have made, together, or alone, for nobody is really smug about getting everything right.  You can think you love your children without judgement but they will still feel judged at some point.  You can think you are the perfect boss, until someone hands in their notice because you expect too much. You can think all sorts of things for years and be oh so horribly wrong.

Most of us are taught to find our best way to walk through our own lives, to know our enemy, to keep our house in order, and yet overnight, however strong the walls, however well-kempt, that house can be whipped away from us, metaphorically and literally speaking. We can have money in the bank and lose it all.  We can think we are well and find, in one moment, we are far from that. When we root ourselves in what we can control, can organise into a perfect order, we are looking at the wrong things. I hear people tell me they have no choice about their lives, and I always challenge that, for it is not the truth.  We all have the choice, nobody controls that but our own selves.

My question is what have we done to ensure personal inner strength, in order to cope with disaster?  Have we read good books, watched mountains re-appear, paid attention to what our loved ones don’t say? Have we watched a whole sunset, or just taken a quick look and said ‘Oh Wow’ and gone back to the email telling Mr Whatnot just what we’d like to do with him? I am not saying we should loaf about waiting for mountains to disappear or for suns to set, but I am saying that we don’t give the mystery and wonder of these sights the time they deserve.  What happens when really watching, really engaging with nature working her magic, is that it changes my thinking.  It lifts my thoughts beyond my piddling little lists and into a greater mindfulness. If I spend time each day watching, noticing, stopping the car, walking down a country lane, I will begin to feel differently about the balance of important/not important inside my life.  If I really stop to really watch a pair of cherry-breasted bullfinches in scatterwood, or really listen to the sound of the wind making music in the branches of an old beech tree, or stop to chat with an old man on a bench, then trust me, I will be a much gentler person on my return to my ordinary, explainable, controllable day.

I think we need to pay serious attention, and right now, because  balance, as the hapless world teaches it, is not balance at all.