nature

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Island Blog – The Wild

I remember the shout. Reef in the mainsail, now! I didn’t hesitate because with him at the helm, there was only me and that me was down below hooking a Moses basket onto a gimballed hook with a baby nestled within. I was fast, no hesitation. As I scooted up the steps onto the deck, I could see why this reefing mainsail thing was not something to be considered, nor questioned. There was a black cloud threat and building. Grabbing and affixing my safety harness and with rain already slicing the wind in two, I got to work. He risked a tilt into the quiet space between the was-wind and the now-wind, two very different creatures for sure and the huge mainsail flapped and crackled, bucked and heaved. I had never felt so alive, so valued, so very the It of the situation. Skidding, sliding, grabbing, holding, I used all my strength to crank the crank thing, bringing the huge mainsail down to the boom. I remember watching the sky appear above each reef. I remember my arms aching, my fingers flexing, turning, holding and that moment when all was safe, that massive sail contained and that sky glowering at me like she just lost at checkmate. I slid on my butt back to him, grin wide, eyes full of rain, and unclipped.

I remember the wild. The buzz of being so essential, so needed, so valued. He smiled me in. Well done, lass, he said and those words meant everything. The hanging baby slept on. The storm was nothing of the sort, just a teenage tantrum. The sky cleared, the night began and stars came out. Ha. I said, as I looked up at the wide expanse of a gazillion constellations. I got there before you all, and I did. It remembers me and I don’t say that lightly because even when we forget the feeling of such wild times, our body remembers. Water has a memory and we might do well to accept this as we, those of us whose wild times might seem beige and back then and of no import and no longer possible in the shape of what is. I have to challenge this, in myself for starters. If there is wild, was there once, it does not die. We will eventually die but the wild is like a fire within, a sparkle, a crackle, an opportunity, a magic. I don’t like to see it allowed to fade in someone’s eyes once health limits barrage in. However I also get it and it is so easy to believe that the wild was then and now I am compromised and afraid and kind of stuck with a stick and all I have are the memories of me doing crazy things I couldn’t do now.

Where’s that wild? Where’s that dancer, the one who was spontaneous when others dithered and who danced me till I was dizzy and on fire? Where’s the one who said yes we can do this, who made the fire on the beach, the one who said ‘ just lie here and see the stars’, the one who sang, who told stories, who always made something happen, no matter where nor what, nor when, nor who(m)? The wilders who always caught the magic, grabbed it, reefed it in at times and then let it fly. They still do and you don’t have to be young to grab the ties of that kite. T’is only fear that makes us pedants.

The wild is in you. Keep her fired up.

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Island Blog – Borderlines

The tide is high. It’s a May thing. Two full moons and she is sassy with it, building already, shifting tides, lifting beyond established expectations already, anticipating something new and inventive, a space to wide out. I remember that feeling, the opportunity to break through a line drawn in the grit and spit of childhood when I wanted to fly above the whole map and redraw it. There are many lines and I probably don’t need to draw them because anyone living within those confines feel them like chasms or buffers. Either way, you fall. Until you don’t, until you have the courage to ask for help, or to jump, or to just run. Nature does it all the time.

We meet borderlines everywhere. At work, in a community, within a relationship. Some we have to allow and accept, many we don’t. Within our lives, so very much is different. Some of us do have the choice to argue, to demand our own space, our own thinking, our own beliefs and to hear that they are considered despite generational beliefs and accepted confines. Not many, I’m guessing. But in my feral world, in my so called recalcitrant childhood, in my difference and my confusion, there is always the chance for a voice. If it would just find the courage to speak out. I didn’t, but I did find someone who would and did. It happened to be my life partner, and I was lucky in that. Borders did not bother him. He broke borderlines all of the years. But even now in widowhood I remain cautious until I stop and think. And that’s important. In simplicity, this is it and there is me. We don’t match. Obviously it begs the question. And?

In my long life I watch many borderlines shift and pull away in a curve, a gentle thing, a giving, a sharing of space. In communication, within relationships, in moments. Someone chooses not to follow the line. Someone decides to curve and bend, to allow and then to move on beyond the border with a smile.

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Island Blog – The Immaculate Lawner and a Splinter

I just got one, a splinter. I went up my mosaic steps to the hilly garden behind my home. I had no mission, no compost to empty into my worm-tastic bin, no purpose beyond this, just to see what wild flowers are drinking in the sunshine. Gazillions. I took them all in, had a wee chat because they might think I was some wandering weirdo. I went barefoot, feeling the soft grass like clouds, watched the green spring up between my toes, felt the sun on my back. We had a wee revel, the grass, the moss couched on rocky bits, the wild flowers and me. Even the black honeybees joined in, although they’re more about their own stuff I find. Then, on descent, and holding the handrail as I choose to do these days, a splinter decided to come with me, sharp and into my palm. I need my palms for work at the Best Cafe Ever, and I swore. I did. It hurt and I can’t see it without binoculars, let alone remove it. My specs are, well, shite, as we say on the island. There’s a ‘could do better’ here, I know it.

The experience thinks me. We make plans and then get a splinter, something we can’t quite see, but definitely know it is there, because it hurts, disrupts and alters our direction. This, I have learned, is Life. I know we are encouraged to make plans, but rigidity is no friend. The words, Always and Never, for example are in my opinion, obsolete. We make a promise and break it. I have done so, an so have we all, even as we may quote the Always and Never nonsense, because we are human, soft, flexible, adaptable, dynamic, fluid. We have to be and particularly now. Things change every day, every hour, every minute. The way it was is not the ‘is’ of things.

I look at my view, one I never take for granted, the tidal ebb and flow, the woods out back, the sound last night of Barn Owls. I see the grass longging, lengthening, cupping wildflowers random in their rise and I see the chaos of that, and the order. Think of a baby. We watch, observe, marvel, encourage, laugh at the random. And, then, we control. We become the splinter. Why? Ah, yes, to conform with the rules handed down. This is how you do this. But not anymore. The innovators are all over us now. We have Autonomy. We have Choice. We know what is happening in our world. If we do nothing else, let us keep the green, the life-flow that feeds us, mind, body and soul.

I know, when I drive somewhere, even here, that I will see immaculata. Gardens synched in, controlled and statuesque like women of the past. The colours will be gorgeous, all in rows and all controlled. Immaculate lawns. Not here. I am already in a dither about cutting grass at all, taking the heads off those lions and cuckoos, the daisies, the others I cannot name. I probably will cut just once and avoid any cut in May because the bees so very much need us to stop tampering with their lifelines. And not just bees, but all the flying insects considered swatting material, pests at best. Do we actually realise how important they all are?

Splinter moment.

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Island Blog – Mud Heft and Stone Humping

It annoyed me, the scourge of mud below my wee pull-in. It used to be gravel but I am letting it return to itself, to that grassy green naturality. To be honest, I am displeased with those who seal the ground shut. We have little enough of it left, after all, and all that healthy breath is paved and suffocated. I know that gravel isn’t so clever at closing the land, but it dims the light. Folk moan about moss in their lawns and yet moss is essential in so many ways, and, by the way, moss is way more beautiful than sticky-up grass, mown into controlled order, like Dickensian pupils.

The sun was freed up, all of a sudden, and the wind grew warm. I pulled off two big jumpers and felt quite menopausal for a few minutes. The weather is bajonkers, but this smells of warm stories and hope. It inspired me to do something. about my grump. See, when lorries or big vans deliver they just scoop onto my not-gravel, digging nothing less than. a whole ditch. Those wheels sink so down, I feel like I am looking at the topsoil of hell, not that I. believe in that. I selected my least rusty shovel from my fishbox of chaotic garden things with handles and marched forth. It took me ages. I stabbed and jabbed, scooped and dumped and all beneath a warm(ish) sun. It wasn’t a big scoop, just a deep one and I felt a butterfly of excitement once I hit the tarmac.

Now, stones, I thought. I have some big ones, old as Eve in my garden, fallen from drystane walls of old. I grabbed my wheelbarrow and bent to hump three big ones onboard. Heavy. they were and still are, but they are beautiful. Ancient basalt, naturally formed and willing to help. I placed them in situ. Now, if a van or lorry thinks it might cut my corner off, it will regret it.

I wondered if I should paint them white and then dismissed that nonsense as so urban. The moss growing over them is so beautiful. No white paint here. After all, drivers on islands might consider the fact that we are island folk and also that they should be looking for rock trouble, as we all do.

I hope you have sunshine too.

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Island. Blog – The Insprits and the Mostly

Life is mostly ordinary for us, We might think it is different for those with solutions to everything, but, in truth, nobody does. Rich or poor or in between we find solace in the ordinary. In this ‘ordinary’ things work, wifi connection, light bulbs, fridges, washing machines, bus times, clocking in to work, locks on outer doors and systems we trust. Night is night and day is day and daffoldils are early spring and bins are emptied on the right morning. Mostly, it works according to. Mostly. And we like ‘mostly’ because we can ignore any inner doubt, any mind-fiddle that awares us of the fact that this is not as stable as once it was. And this we ignore, mostly. But there are nivits in our world now and I have met a few. Actually they have been here for many years.

I watch the tide rise bejonkers, too soon for the full moon. It slips determinedly over grass and rocks either side of the sea-loch. The Insprits are here. To be honest, it twinkles me because there is no sustainable ordinary in island life and I know this. I have lived with them for many decades. Mostly Folk could not live this way, but this way will be the way one day. The weather decides ferry access to the mainland. And, since Covid, there are many happy homes here, those who love the. shenanigans of the Insprits, who work from home, who dance with the ditzy dynamic of everything ‘island’ and who are patient.

I’m looking out at a full tide, the rise beyond itself. I hear the call of whitetails, watch a canto of buzzards, see the black lambs cajink over new grass. There’s rain coming, again, we all know that, but there are those wonderful moments when it stops and there’s a sunblister in the grey and then we see all the beauty beyond the insprits. They were always here and always will be. The sudden upsets, the unexpecteds, the terriblest awfuls.

If we can hold to loving the ‘mostly’ but prepared for the insprits, and we can teach our children this, well then, we are wise.

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Island Blog – Walking over Acorns, and a Green Lung

We walked this morning, before the sun burst into flames, through an Arboretum. It’s a wide expanse of trees, divided into countries. Today we moved from Africa to Asia. These trees, roughly 2,600 of them, were planted between 1959 to 1971, an inspirational Green Lung beside the River Berg in Paarl. As you can imagine, the trees in Asia are very different to the Indigenous ones in Africa. Long and wildy limbs with pompoms of bright green needles and fir cones large enough to knock you out, were you to be directly beneath as one fell. The shade is glorious, a softening for walkers and hot dogs, and the tracks wind on for miles, red sand, buffalo grass, benches for a sit down, bins everywhere and no rubbish. There is even the occasional security guard on his beat. It’s completely safe, unlike other such areas where big trees and bush proffer many hiding places. We wandered beneath the massive sequoias and gums, so old and so fat in the girth as to look as if they will last forever. I swear I saw clouds in the top of one of these giants on another day, one with clouds. Birds abound, skittering through branches, oblivious to us in their busy hunt for food. Sunbirds, sugar birds, such delicious names. Butterflies too, big and rainbowed . Everyone says hallo in passing. This place is a place within which to breathe and to ponder. The river, depending on rain, is either sluggish and silent or tinkling like timpany over huge rocks, white and sunlit.

Under the myriad Japanese oaks lie a gazillion acorns. Not small ones, the usual size, but easily an inch long, and just as we walked beneath the far-spreading bough, the wind luffed. It rained acorns. Pinging down, they made us ‘ouch’ and lift our feet in escape. We stood in safety to watch the fall until the whole wide circle of shade became a thick carpet of hopeful seeds. So random and so impactful and we laughed and thought of Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet and the others in the 100 acre wood. It was that magical. Walking back over acorns I thought of all the ground my feet have walked for 70 odd years. Through thixotropic mud, over pine needles and fallen leaves, over memories, rocks and mistakes, along dusty tracks and busy roads, over pavements and concrete, bad thoughts and poor decisions. Always moving on, no matter the journey, no matter the challenge ahead.

It’s what we do, those of us who decide to keep moving on and I was never going to sit for long. What inspires me, being among those trees, any trees, is that they have no care for our slightly ridiculous rush towards all the things which give us no nourishment long term. The way trees work is silent and beneficent, gifting shade, nutrition, food, homes, protection, love. We can only breathe because they do.

We can learn from that.

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Island Blog – Skinny Bathroom, Piddle, Little Things

After the rains, the air is fresh and smelling of citrus and sunshine. Last evening friends came to share a delicious lamb shank tagine, plenty wine and a load of laughter. We talked news of our week as many and diverse subjects flew about the table. Faces glowed in candlelight and the embers of an equally merry fire. It’s always the little things which uplift us most, even though they aren’t little at all. In this troubled old world it is what people can do for each other that truly counts, leaving legacies, memories and glimpses of how life can be when those who plan for war finally understand that they plan for the wrong thing.

Looking far out, beyond the garden, the huge eucalypts, oaks and other green-leaved old guys, across the huge expanse of grass and towards the lines of vines, now all harvested for the year, I can feel hope. I think we have to look for it and then see it, a wide open offering of beyondness, beyond ourselves, our own little prison walls, our own prickly thoughts and perceived ideas of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’. Beyond the line of slow-moving traffic when we are in a hurry, the things she said, he said, the way someone looked at me in disdain, the deadly daily headlines, the neighbour’s barking dog. All of it, piddle, and about as useful, but, like piddle, it is there whether we like it or not. Our choices gives us voices, over which we have complete control, unlike most other things out there. It all begins with that choice, a cerebral decision not to drown in piddle. No special talent required. We all are gifted with that choice.

My little home away is in a different building. Across a lumpy brick-laid courtyard, where the earth refused to be accepting of all those bricks on her back, is an interesting journey, particularly after dinner and wine and hilarity and in the glorious pitch dark of an African night. I have the hang of it now, my feet have learned the ups and downs of this short traverse, and that makes me smile, because I love to know how connected I am with the vagiaries of Nature. My mind may be full of piddle, but my body knows the way and the way is not always a literal body walk. Oftentimes the traverse is more neural pathways with signposts as I navigate my way from complicated to simple.

In my skinny bathroom I have the usual equipment and a very efficient shower. However……..If I close the slide door which affords me privacy whilst naked, it is impossible to squeeze myself between basin and said door, en route to the very efficient shower. Impossible. So I gingerly de-slide, peek around the corner to ensure no unfortunate farm worker gets a scary shock, and dive into the shower, re-sliding it. Afterwards this performance is repeated in reverse. It has become a daily nonsense and no two days are the same. I am quite certain I have been glimpsed on occasions, and this smiles me too. After all, I am hardly ever going to hear “Morning Ma’am, I saw you butt naked yesterday’, now am I?

Last evening, pre lamb tagine and vibrant people, there was a tiny frog, obviously not of the voyeur variety, if, indeed, such a frog exists, which I doubt. I was already partially un-clad. I stooped to wonder at the spectacular markings on its tiny back, so intricate, so perfect and so not ‘just’ a frog. How extraordinary this big life is, for those who stop to notice. I bunched a bath towel around myself, picked it up, cold in my palm, soft, gentle, and opened my door without a single thought of farm workers nor maids with bundles of washing and wide smiles. I opened my hand among the pretty ground-creeping thingy with orange flowers and felt the frog leaving my skin, my palm empty yet still echoing that connection again, to all things, all people and all of Nature.

It’s always the ‘little’ things.

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Island Blog – If there’s a tree, I can nest in it.

I watch Sunbirds today fluttering like trills of music as they build two nests in the squidgy looking not-palm over my head. I am sitting just upwards of sunrise on the stoep, my head thrown so backwards it just might fall off, but I cannot stop looking, watching, as their outflight feathers catch pink, gold, blue. They couldn’t give a damn about me, mere inches away and thoroughly grounded. I am no threat to them nor their nest building and they seem to know that. They perch en route to said nest building thingy, on the framework of the stoep shade, caught pistol sharp against the sun, almost a silhouette and perfectly formed. It’s breathtaking. I forget time, the pain in my neck, my thoughts and any distractions. My entire focus is on this four, and that thinks me. Are they like sparrows, nesting in a commune, or do they select another pair with whom to coorie in, or am I reading this all wrong? Their slender shape, the black cap, the perfection of body shape and wing spread is marvelling and maybe that’s more than enough. There is so much that is not right in the human world. You are right or you are wrong and that ‘wrong’ word has followed many of us into our own protection caves, silencing our voices and nullifying our opinions on pretty much everything. It is good to be reminded that beyond the rules of life for us, life is more instinctive, freer somehow within the mysteries and the magic of Nature and her unstoppable evolution. Living wild and dynamic, yes. Watchful and adaptable, yes. Able to shift and change when there is yet another deforestation to make room for a housing complex, a luxury hotel, a tourist haven, yes.

I like the Yes in Nature. However limiting the options, positive plans are made. In our world it takes hundreds of years to adapt and there’s a deal of gloom and moaning on that journey, as if everything is all rocks and dried up water beds. We could do with Yessing more, looking out and up. To keep showing up bringing our talents with us, leaving the ‘wrong/right dichotomy in our caves and stepping out into the light. What do they say now…….?

What you look for, you will find, or something along those lines. Like the Sunbirds did.

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Island Blog – Bundu bashing and a Cockerel

They’ve suddenly got hens, the owners of the Landaround. Even with ear plugs in to drown the roar of aircon, I am waked as if my mother had just wheeched off my duvet, which she did. That voice is sharp enough to cut through steel and it, He, is right outside my door for some reason, hurtling his testosterone into an early dawn. I rise and yank the door open in my Notverymuch and there he struts, coloured up like a whole day on legs. He eyes me. I eye him. Jaunty he is, proud of his strut, reminding me of someone I once knew and who was not a fowl, or maybe he was, but with a different spelling. I watch the dawn sun rise just behind him as he stands his ground on my doorstep, flightlighting his feathers, lifting the rainbows as he fingers the air with his wings showing me orange and magenta and purple and butter.

Hallo, I say and he quirks and takes a squiff at my bare legs. No eye contact I notice, I say quietly because my neighbours are still in bed as I should be. He ignores that, his head performing moves that would snap mine. Finally he struts away, tail feathers sassy, but he doesn’t go far. Why….I can’t resist asking him this….aren’t you with your women? He just moves away, pecking in the dusty dirt, shrieking out now and then. Later, as we drive out for a morning walk, I see why he is alone. Across the sandy space there is a hurry of hens and a big Chanticleer as their owner/protector pecking about quite joco. It wonders me. What does a single cockerel do in such a situation?

We walk in the winelands, moving beneath blue mountains and through baboon lands. At times we bundu bash, although it isn’t the same as in the Real, where Bush/Bundu is dense and positively quivering with possible bites or stings, where my fear levels could stay me back in camp amd thus miss me every exciting thing, even bites and stings. These walks are wild, yes but in a very polite way, the sort of place that Englanders will walk through in frocks and flip-flops with loud voices and a certain entitlement. It is a gift to walk here any day, quietly, respectfully, noticing everything, seeing the baboons, hearing their wee ones shriek in play down by the river, to greet the workers, to notice the swell and fall of the river, hear it bubble and trip over stones older than anyone can map; to notice the growth of the second spring, the pulse of risepetals from just yesterday, to smell the wind and to hear her stories.

Evening still. Watching the sun dip, casting flames all around the blue hills, the tall grasses, our faces. And so, another day. Tomorrow could be anything but I absolutely do know that it will begin with a cockerel.

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Island Blog – The Little Ones

They’re here. They’re always here if we just care to notice. Right now it’s loud fun little ones in the pool after a very hot day. In fact, we barely went out there except to move between buildings, or from house door to car and, in that instance, landing on a seat fit to burn our whateverness. But it isn’t humid, not wetsweat, not fly food, just caught in the tumble of a fire wind. And so we worked indoors, loving the coolth of aircon on the rocks. We shared ideas, played with words, made new ones, honed and distilled until the flow became a whole 8 bar phrase. So musical.

As we walked early morning, the dog and we, through the winelands, flanking rivers and spectacular flowers and conifers, baboons skittled and flew from one side of the red dust track to the other. We heard the squeals and chuckles of their young somewhere down there in the river. The play smiled us as we moved on. To be honest, I would rather not meet a baboon but, as I never have, it might be a good thing for my inner scardey cat. I did notice that we slowed once we saw adults above us on the track, the young below, when my African son called in his retriever and slowed his pace, always watchful, always aware. To get between parents and young, even among cows on a windspite cloud-collapsing west coast island is dangerous. I have learned here that the protection of Little Ones is top of the agenda and no human should walk on, unaware.

Tiny flowers lift their heads to the sun, basking in its warmth. The colours are rainbow and mixed on an over-excited artist’s palette. Primaries, sedge mixes, ice on green, the tang of lemon on blue, an aubergine slice on scarlet, black full stops circling the stamens, louding them, an invitation, a landing pad. Grasses spindle and wave in the rising heat, dry, sharp, peppered with tiny beads of life, Sprangletop. I bend to watch them, my sandalled feet dust red, sunk in sand, warm. I think of friends dressed in endless layers, bodies white-faced, amidships starved of light. Scotland is cold now, rained off and not just Scotland. The dark and the rain can diminish. It is hard to remember the little ones, the Ones that lift and shift the gloom, like tinkerbells. It is so easy to swipe, so easy to deny, to decide that this little one is a nothing much. A big mistake. If we notice, welcome and celebrate each ‘little one’ then, t’is only then that we actually engage with the life we lead, and often for the very first time.

The pool is empty now. Wet little ones scoot behind my chair as if they are sure they will never trip up. Bare bodies, wild energy, wary and confident in equal measure, following the light.