natural

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Island Blog – It’s a Choice

Yesterday torrential rain, the burns roiling brown and spit, lifting almost to the tipping spot, yet not. Driving back from work I saw it, the inching up and the not yet thing. I would have paused awhile, just to watch the boil and fold, the coming back to the confines of the channel, the space allowed if it hadn’t been for this big eejit in a four wheel drive who was pushing me back. ‘You reverse around three corners and uphill in your wee mini because I don’t do reverse, nor corners, and definitely not uphill’ was said without words, but through the big shiny fist of that face with a bespoke registration. I did chuckle. That beast could have run me over and not noticed more than a wee lift and a wee backdownagain. As I did the easy peasy reverse thing, swinging sassy-ass up and around a couple of times with a smile on my face because there always is one, I thought only this. I am happy to be who I am and you obviously are not. It reminds me, this modem of thinks, the one without anger or judgement, the natural me in the me of things. Sometimes I share this with others who do rage, do stand against, do challenge. I am not weak. I just don’t want a fight. However, and here’s a sassy-ass thing. If I meet one of those big-ass craturs which has momentarily passed a big sweep of pull-in, I just might hold.

Today big sunshine beginning with birds and pinky light fingering across the hills. Not to upset the shepherds, but the world was seriously pink. Everything pinked, the hills, the sea-loch, the garden, and the pinkers began in the cloud lift and shift. As I drew back the blackout curtains, I laughed, I did. Pink was sucking all the other colours into her maw, and swallowing. It was her dawning. It thought me. Dawn doesn’t last, no matter the wow of pinking. It evolves into the day, the day swiping it into memory. Then, despite a day’s hold on the hours, day also defers, eventually, to the bite of night. Like life, like moments in life. Not everything holds, not people, not memories. I can lose them all. And that brings in a think. What is important enough to keep a hold of? And, more important, do I notice enough to make that choice?

Back to the spin back skinny road stand-off. It’s taken me decades to notice my response to a perceived threat in a conversation, on a skinny road, in my aging, my lonely times. It’s like climbing the wires of music score, so easy on a page, so not in reality, when you doubt your voice, your place, your pretty much everything. I have learned this. Laugh at yourself. That’s what I’ve taught myself, in any situation, in the need to be valued, acknowledged, valued, respected, heard, seen. Just see it light, like a passing dawn, like the person who didn’t wave nor smile, the fact that your warming stove isn’t working, that the crazy rain is flooding your garage, that there are mice in your frying pan cupboard and inside your walls, that dark days are coming, the Winter King in the wings, all of that, and more. I’m not saying I don’t take action on all unexpected tributaries, and warm mother stoves who, after decades of faithfulness, now decide to choke, because I do, but it’s not about action. It’s about how it infects a mind. And, I decide, no matter the choke-hold of my life, the constraints, limitations, confrontations, the losts and the founds, I will always laugh at myself.

It’s a choice.

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Island Blog – Moons in her Mouth

I find that there are as many ways to respond to change as there are people. I recognise resistance, fear, exhilaration, denial and many more unspellable words describing the palaver of response. Trouble is, change is invariably frick all to do with us. Someone or something else initiates this change thing, muddying still waters and messing up picture perfect landscapes. It’s like the world without or within just shifted a whole 45 degrees whilst we, busy doing the same thing in the same way for ages, remain rooted to the spot and staring at nothing. Where did what I know and understand, go?

The answer is, Not Far, in my experience, but why life has to do this irritating shift is, well, irritating, at best upsetting/confusing and scary at worst. But wait……..if I can see that in my security I was just an automaton, performing tasks in the usual way and without questioning anything, and, thus, not really alive at all, then perhaps I should take a closer look at what change has on offer. We humans have been gifted elevation above all other living creatures, and, yet, any animal, bird, reptile or fish knows more about adaptation to change that most of us two legged bright sparks will ever know. And, yet, change is wild around us, moving in on a storm, in stories, in the turbulence of extreme weather, the warning loud and clear to all others, it seems, but us. I can see that we have depended too much on a material infrastructure, trusting in impermanence, thus gradually losing our natural abilities as intelligent and sentient human beings.

Even as a young woman, well, girl really, I knew I wanted the insecurity of the traveller. It scared me, the thought of the riptide, the undertow, the wild and desolate landscape, an unpredictable sky, but the call was strong. Thankfully, I found a man who had more experience, more knowledge on such travelling whooha and who reckoned I could be a good travel mate. I learned so much from him, thirsty for the knowing of how to react when encountering danger, for example, or of what physical and mental strengths I needed to develop in order to be, not unafraid, but canny and unpanicked. I did panic, a lot, in the process, but I also learned a gazillion lessons on survival, and I don’t mean living on Mars, but more just living with constant change.

And then I learned to love becoming a dynamic part of Life with all her shifts and shouts. Sometimes she whispers, and I turn my head to hear. I know that businesses fail, that shops go bust, that hackers grow like weeds, that war is a boundary away, but I also know that I am a survivor. This is not arrogance, safe behind a locked door of smugness and control, but just one woman, spinning in harmony with the world, vigilant, always learning and with moons in her mouth.

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Island Blog – Natural Colour

I am seeing people, the ones who walk by, changing colour. I ‘m not saying I see auras, because I don’t, but the colours they send my way from 6 feet away remarkable me at times. I knew them as one colour, or one set of colours, and, now, they have changed. The look in their eyes has changed. No surprise there. One month of lockdown is manageable; we know we can do it. We can do dry January, after all, or Lent which is even longer, and we can see the end. Not now. We have no idea when the end will come and it is beginning to bother us. Maybe not our innate tigger mentality, but deep inside, we are changing colour. We look out, feeding like greedy, on the the new life, the migrant birds returned, the lush of wild violets, the unusual spread of primroses, anemones, wood sorrel, trip tides, new moons, that twisting eyelift chance of an otter in the saltscape. But we can tire of life, if we are not in renewal. Long term, anything dodgy can become a prison warden, bad relationship, wrong home address, a lockdown. I watch faces as they pass. They look at me, and I at them and we see different. And, you know what……this is good. The chasms in between mountain ridges make us pause for thought, and think we must.

Early on, in this lockdown thingy, we brought out all our colours because that is who we are, and who we will always will be. We saw and loved the alpine frocks of pink and blue, clutched in the fists of a crevice and holding on to life by a skinny holdfast, and we smiled. We saw the insect life, the colours of beetles, the jewelled flit of butterflies and other beautiful things without names; we watched sky born spectaculars cut the sky in two on their way to somewhere else and we snatched their colours for our own heart palette. We thought we could use them, and we did for a while, but now is the tough time, the time of pall and frustration, and all of us feel it to some degree. This is the long haul, like mid term for schoolers, except they know the end date, whereas we do not. Now, it is, that we must go back to those colours and remember them, notice how they have changed, as we have all changed. As the whole separation from loved ones takes root we plant new seedlings in our gardens. We decide to hear, anew, the rise of a wren song from a random fence, watch the flounce of goldfinch in fight, see the slowflow of a gannet draw a wavy line across our looking, because we must continue to find the beauty in everything around us.

Before she whipped our ordinary lives out from under our feet Mother Nature sent all these glories, free of charge, to every one of us. Perhaps we see, now, how much we took for granted, for it has been a long time, and as Mother Nature knows only too well, we are impatient. Not yet, she reminds us, not yet. Stay well and just breathe. In breath there is a rainbow. Let us consider this. It may be a long time before we can walk out again, never mind fly, never mind colour up, but Nature is working with us, not against us. She is Mother, She is Earth and she knows more than we do. We are down here, small, fretting, bothered about chasms, but she is not. We can trust her. And, if our colours change as a result of this new way of living, then that just may be in her long term plan, and we are wise to thank her for opening our eyes to our precious earth.

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Island Blog 17 – Moon Talk

What I like to do around this time is step outside with a glass of red wine; any time of the year, makes no odds to me, for what I am wanting to  join in with is the evolving of day into night, when bustling daylight gives way to the gloaming (Scottish word) and everything around me begins to settle.  The only bird not already in bed is the blackbird, and sometimes, a late robin.  Even if I can’t see them I know their song, and their song changes at dusk (explanation of Scottish word).

Actually, their song changes at other times, like in early Spring when they are rivaling for a mate.  But that’s another blog, another time.

If it is raining hard, I may only manage stepping into the garage, with its open maw, but, in the main, I can stand for a little, watch the sky and let myself both absorb, and be absorbed, by the coming night.  Tonight the moon is wonky, not that she feels in the least wonky, but she looks that way to me, for her fullness is coming, but not just yet, making her an oval in the black heavens.  Full moons mean something when you live by the sea, and I don’t mean beside it, but ‘by’ it.  When your next move must shift to accommodate the powerful pull of the moon and she, the moon, is always guaranteed to make a big statement.  The tides are very high and very low at ebb and flood, and if you work with a boat, you have to know this, or you land in trouble.  Big winds, grumpy weather leading to grumpy seas, high winds and sudden squalls all work together at full moon, to unsettle mankind and remind him he is not in control at all, however much he may think he is.  And women change at full moon.  Have you ever worked that out?  I know that, when I did, it made me laugh and that knowledge settled inside me like a loving hug (for me) and a warning to my man.  Now he knows, and so do I.  I am a creature of the moon mother and now that we accept this inevitability, we can both be sensible, most of the time. In real life, that is, the life where we accept, even if we don’t understand, the balance between our physical and metaphysical selves, we can move easily within that life, without trying to fix or alter it, but, instead, to love it and claim our part in it, for it is wonderful indeed and, by the way, our only chance to shine like the moon in someone’s sky.

 

One man and his dog