now

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Island Blog – The Now People

November 11th and the Christmas Tree is up in the shopping centre. I know that Africa runs two hours ahead of the UK, currently, but this big-ass glitzy tree did stop me in my tracks. I am no sour grapes on this or on any other marketing decision, swallowing them and allowing a timeline settlement, plus the subsequent period of indigestion. In my day, this. In Nowday a very different this. Old people did it one way. The Now People do the same thing very differently. But do they, I wonder, in their hearts? Is this what the Now People want, this massive pressure on purse strings and expectations; the ghastly thought of all those hideous relations determined to arrive for the feast, with a suitcase full of grumbles and judgements? I sometimes/often hear folks my own age, teeth long gone, arches sunk, bewhiskered and still hoping their yesterdays will get better talking about the Now People as if they hadn’t a single scooby about how to live, work, raise children, break boundaries. None of us did, by the way, not one. We all fell at the first hurdle, and the second, and some of us, I included, fell at most. They got higher, that’s why.

Materialism used to mean, just saying, the gathering of cloth for a sewing class. I remember the feel of cloth, the weight of it in my palms, the soft ticklefinger of backthreads, the clogs and shawls saga depicted in the pattern. I thought of the initial design work, the dreaming and thinking, the thin lines spidering between one truth and another’s; the lift of a paintbrush or pen, the subsequent push of a needle point through virgin cloth. I saw the dying process, the scrape of lichen off magma rocks, salted and blasted by story winds from pole to pole. The beginning of mythos. I wonder about stories now, hoping, and I do hope, that the Now People ask about our time and the time before and before and before, because how life is for them in all that really matters, is not so different.

It is people who matter, not things, although things, and their acquisition, do seem to have topped the charts these days. On our yesterday wine cruise, through beautiful vineyards way up in the sharp-stoned mountains in an old tram with wooden seats, an open bus, also vintage, and ending on a trailer pulled by a more than vintage tractor (just like the one we used in the days of Tapselteerie), we met people. Guides, sommeliers, tram, bus and tractor drivers, waiters, other wine tasters……oh we laughed and talked and learned and said farewell. The dynamic day was done. We had tasted the best of South African wines, learned how one wine-grower amalgamates grapes, how another whose land stretches from sea to high peaks, plants vines to work with salt, with clay, with wind, with sun, with shade. But, the memories sugar spun into those encounters are what remains, because they are animiate, animated, alive, and inspiring. I watched black faces, white, coloured, bejewelled, simply dressed, awkward and easy, all smiling in the vine-world sunshine. I will forget the wines long before I forget that laugh, that smile, that little conversation with two women on the bench in front of me.

In my perfect world, life would slow down, marketing would calm its britches and those who demand complete ownership of workers in the workplace would be required to swap shoes with those souls for one year. Just one should do it.

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Island Blog – Gallus Respectacles

We don’t get these evenings much, the warmth breathing in chance, dance and opportunity. A sudden, it is, from a cold thrifty catchy tunnel of ice to this. To this. A swing dance in the altercation t’ween winds, and the warm has won. For this evening. Trouble, is, in this place, if you haven’t planned something bloody marvellous, like dinner booked or a picnic or a trip on. a boat to watch the sun set in the the out there world, then you missed. Tomorrow might be pissing stair rods.

I know this place so well. Living here has Taught me J ump. Taught me Go. Taught me Now. I’ve learned this, and the this of this has guided my feet and the feet of my my mind and heart so many times. It was tough. I resisted. I fought and reasoned, standing on two small feets, on a cold floor, with the wit of a woman in the making. But, and the but is important here, I love that I learned what I learned.

I’m here now, still loving the Jump, the Go, the Now. I live this way. However, when one of my specs lenses fell out, I did have to recognise the whole thing about olding and specs and eyes and vision. I am still gallus, I tell this flipping collapsed thing. Takes me a while, but with copper wire and dedication, and a good twisting thing, we get there. Still Gallus, still out there, always.

With my respectacles.

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Island Blog – Alpha Zeta

I quote……’ What’s the greatest thing a woman should learn? That, since day one, she already had everything she needs within herself. It’s the world that convinced her she did not.’ Rupi Kaur

Trouble is, we, born with vaginas listen to worldspeke. We do, and it can confound and punish and confine us. I so wish I was 20 now and not 70, because I would have been a frickin menace. I had, I confess, hoped, that somewhat more of a freedom would have become a norm as my own daughter moved into the world of man control, and it has changed, but not enough. Perhaps, as our planet sucks her gasping breaths, the old structure might just collapse into a new alphabet. 

It oftentimes struggles me that the allowability to shout out truths only seems to come at the time when there is a load of ‘there,there’ in our ears. We can be ridiculous, inappropriate. How come it’s not ok when we are 15? The world says, ‘It was the Time’ as if that makes it alright. They turn away at that point, I have watched them do just that, as whoever ‘they’ are, or ‘is’ move or moves onto the next painting, choice of pudding. I have felt absent all my life, as if the norms within which I lived missed letters or numbers, as if the alphabet and the math would never find solution. I still do, but in the now of my now, because I have become an old frickin menace, with a vagina, I can say what I like. I have seen what I have seen over 70 years, and I am often pissed off with the whole alphabet. A is alpha. Z is Zeta. Are we saying that one is greater than the other? Are we even bothering with all the letters in between as if they have no significance? Think of the in-betweens in your life. Do it now. Those sitting on the pavement in the face of a night right there. Think of the waitress who is slow to serve you because she is on minimum wage, feeding kids and holding tight to her meagre home. Those, as you walk by on the way to a concert, theatre, a film, dinner, where you plan champagne, a proposal, those who unnerve you, swerve you. 

Shouting out is good, but that way of thinking can become a thing. What we need, and I hesitate to use that word (history), is inclusion, (too wordy), love. Might we forget the old alphabet and move, regardless of letters, word shapes and sentence approval? All good things are wild and free. (not my words) ‘The fire inside me can either warm or destroy. The choice is entirely my own.’ Thoreau. So much of life is about words, the way they are stroyed, the random way they stray, the weight of them as they land. Words. All constructed and constricted by the alphabet. 

I have learned this. I can go from A to Z without the rest of the alphabet knowing. Again, not my words. Writers, painters are nothing if they don’t pinch bigger ideas.

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Island Blog – Revenance

It’s been a while, awhile. Interesting, is it not, how words play with our brains? Two words mean one thing and when conjoined, another, pulling me in to play their game, feeling me free to challenge the shapeshifters, as I oftentimes do.

I am a revenant. One who has returned, and I quote from the dictionary, ‘especially supposedly (no commas, I notice) from the dead’. I recall meeting no dead folk during the process of being nearly dead, although my day and night visions were somewhat weird. It was all cat. A cat curled into my suitcase in broad daylight as I slapped ice packs on my swollen body, hearing the fizz like a water drop on fire. Another two cats, differently coloured, walking through my hospital room, reassuring. The End. Or so I thought with the whole cat thing, fever, sick, one of the nearly dead.

Now, and now, here I am back home to the island with two big sons. One breast is, like (!) what’s the fuss all about? T’other looks like the surface of the moon. The op was a ‘wide excision’, in other words the spider legs were a distance apart. A scoop was required, and the wotwot pulled together, hence the strange shape. The old girl has the usual sag. The new girl on the block sings a different song. I wonder how she will look once she gets over this puffed up, bruised, attention-seeking thing? I smile.

I do my exercises. I am tired, rest often, keep doing what I can do which is mostly hanging my twinkly winkly lights now that the sun goes down like a crashbang. I can reconnect with my frock stash. It’s like meeting old friends and we all love the Autumn and Winter, my frocks and me. The cold brings out our colours, layers and revenance. We can carefully layer, we who refuse to go un-barefoot, always bare legged and feeling, really feeling the seasonal change. No protection. It is a choice and one I made a thousand years ago. I need to feel it, feel all of the all of it, of everything. Wild, yes, but not to me. To me it is a rising into whatever comes next.

This life with all her fears and worries, her slapdash, her punches and losses, her sharp cuts and traumas, all give us a wild card. (I have no idea what a wild card is, but ‘wild’ works for me). I will always play mine. It doesn’t matter what a soul has had to face, has come through. There is no competition. We all face shit. We all have the rising in us. All of us.

We are revenants. All of us. And, ‘Revenance’, the process, will be a word in the dictionary one day, telling out that all of us have, and still are, rising from whatever became dead to us, another, a thing, an understanding, a relationship, a valuable something. I have not met another soul who hasn’t lost something, someone, an heretofore (!) understanding. We are so shit at taking this out into the world.

In the breast cancer ward, giggling with the surgeon about a load of wotwot, pre-op, I watched a cat, white and grey, move easy away through the doorway. I don’t have a cat. Or, maybe I have four.

Let us rise. We are revenants.

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Island Blog – A Rightful Name

When I ask someone how they feel about whatever is going on their lives, almost without exception, I get answers of logic. ‘It will be alright in the end,’ they say, or ‘this will heal, eventually,’ or even ‘I have nothing to complain about. I have enough food, a home, friends and work.’ Invariably, but kindly, I will round on them. I asked you how you feel, feel, FEEL about what has happened or is happening to you. Can you tell me that?

It is the toughest question, I know. Many of us ignore our feelings, so jumbled and ‘illogical’ are they, so messy and loud, so scary to name. If I say I feel afraid, I will, inevitably, be ‘fixed’. If I say I feel angry, the room goes quiet, as a room does just after lightening and just before the thunder crash. In my young days, feelings were allowed, providing they were ones of joy and delight, and even those must not be allowed to erupt. You can spin around, arms wide, in sheer delight, but don’t dislodge that vase of roses, or step on the dog or knock the musical score off the piano musical score thingy. And, this mustn’t last more than is bearable for the ears of all others in this confined space.

Feelings of pain, sadness or grief, such as the abandonment of a trusted friend in P3, is something you will get over and laugh about one day. She wasn’t such a great friend anyway now was she? Yes she damn well was, and now I go to school feeling sore and vulnerable, ashamed and brimming with self doubt. Who is there to hear my agony? Well, perhaps someone will ‘hear’ it, but who will sit with me whilst I burn and drown in this unbelievable flood of feelings? It is no surprise to me that, as ‘mature’ adults, most of us suppress what can only cause inner damage eventually, those deep feelings of rejection, abandonment, neglect, cruelty. We all know what I’m talking about, but too many of us keep burying the undead. They will rise again and again, twisted now, neglected for too many years, layered over with logic and life. The undead are not dead, not unless we dig and dig until they can finally rise into the light of our Now. Who is brave enough, I wonder, to admit (why ‘admit?) to feelings of pain and fear, shame and doubt, anger and resentment? Because we just know we will be ‘fixed’.

Feelings are the one thing we cannot, never could and never will, control. They come, unbidden, sometimes as tiny whispers, sometimes as a tidal wave, bowling us off our feet and into the gutter, upside down, knickers showing, wounded, bloody, feeling like a fool as the rest of the world checks their watch and hurries on. How we deal with our feelings, however, is completely within our control. It is not the fault of the world that it rushes on by as I lie here broken and tumbled. It’s not my fault either. It’s nobody’s fault. If I have the courage and the guidance (very critical to healing) to dig deep down for the undead feelings from childhood, from before the Now of me; to dig and to unbury, to lift into the light and to name, I am on the road to freedom. If my current pain relates to neglect, rejection, abandonment or cruelty in my past, I will overreact to the world in which I live right now, but, if my deepest longing is to be seen, acknowledged and celebrated for myself, to be valued just as I am, then I have to dig, have to unearth the undead. I can do endless goodly works in my Now, but I am kidding myself if I think this is going to eradicate my strong need to be seen, acknowledged and valued. I will meet rejection, lack of respect, careless or neglectful behaviour but it is not because I am ‘nothing’. It is, simply, complexly, the result of buried feelings as old as I am, pushed down, labelled foolish and ignored.

So, when I ask you “how do you feel about what just happened?’ might you pause a little before answering, and might you have the courage and trust to give your feeling its rightful name?

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Island Blog – Along the Way

On my road to recovery I learn many surprising things, see much through a different lens, complete old puzzles that I had thought missed an essential piece for decades, the very one that would show me the whole picture. It bothered me, this missing piece thingy and I would find myself going back over and over again, my fingers digging through the dirt for that chunk of gold as if I believed everything would be just as I remembered it way back when my ass was pert and my feet fleet. It smiles me now, for nobody can piece together their past from where they stand now. Not nobody. And also I recall recalling memories with himself and seeing that ‘what are you talking about woman’, a statement not a question on his face. He wasn’t there apparently.

When I say recovery, I don’t mean me coming back to me because I will never be that me again and because I have nobody to remind me of that me, I am free to build, foundation up. First off I need to find that foundation and I now believe that this is the hardest part. When there is a ‘we’ in the mix, there is discussion, argument, tantrums, acceptance and solution, not least because the digger is revving impatiently just a hillock away and costing money. So ‘we’ decide and there it is. It begins.

It is the same within a shared life, sometimes tantrums, sometimes arguments, hopefully acceptance and solution, but nonetheless, each ‘I’ affects the shaping of the duo dynamic. When he is in this mood, I keep clear. When she is slamming doors and honking horns, I look out at the birds and say not one word. And so on. We change each other without even knowing we do. We can tear down and we can build up and most of us do a bit of both, but as we grow above the foundation we alter each other, smoothing down edges, rounding them into a learned shape that works, even if only as far as the next volcanic eruption.

Alone is not lonely. Alone is powerful and free and scary at times. Nowadays there is no other close enough to perform any shaping manoeuvres on the one of two. Just the ‘I’ is left, an ‘I’ with complete autonomy, absolute freedom of movement and thought; a singular soul who can, and has, felt both utterly bereft and warmly supported. Happily, if this person is curious about life even if he or she finds the whole thing terrifying, he or she will find others along the road, surprising others. In my afterlife I have met with kindness I never expected, such as offers of help and then those who actually see what I need just by walking by and who turn up to do the job. I could think that this is just the way islanders think, the community strong and bonded through winter gales and no ferries running but I don’t believe that. I believe, as I always have, that although this world is broken, she is beautiful because of her people. Of course there are those who choose greed, corruption and worse and who’s actions cause terrible consequences but they are in the minority. They do not define the human race. I see community and kindness everywhere because it is everywhere. And I for one am a very grateful beneficiary of that kindness.

We all have some kind of shit flung at us, but along the way we will find those who give of themselves just so we can rise and shine once again, and in a shape we are still working on but one we rather like the look of.

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Island Blog – The After of Now

I suspect that sounds a bit weird, but I do love to play with concepts and absolutes and, if I am honest, I feel a girlish thrill as I envision the face of my Eng Lit teacher. If you actually think about it, there is Now and then there is After. There is also Before. Before the Now, which is in my case, now After, there was a Before. I am now stopping the capitals.

The anticipation of my singer songwriter friends coming to stay lasted a few days. The beds ready and ironed, the wood ordered, ditto wine, the house cleaned, although not by me #veryblest, and endless lifts of doubt. Will they feel comfortable? How will it work? Do I have the right food? Bla, bla,bla. Offs, I know these people as longtime friends! What is all this faff? Good question. T’is normal, I have heard and even more so since Covid swiped our freedom to move, to share, to connect.

They swing in a few days ago with smiles and hugs and a ton of music making instrumental kit. I am already buzzing, remembering the days when arriving musicians, including them and often them, was an everyday experience. I just know we are going to gel even though I couldn’t find any good harmonies for the songs they sent me. I thought, at first, that I had lost it. (No comments please at this point) But it took just an hour or two of settling in and catching up for me to feel the electricity between us. It was the same as we put together my music CD. Most songs were written in under an hour and adorned with a musical skeleton an hour after that. The rest was building, swapping ideas, changing this, developing that. It was the same here, in the now. We worked for four days on two lovely songs holding a poignant storyline captured in musical collaboration. Dynamic is too small a word for what happened during those days.

Now it is after. We have recorded, laughed, racked up the fire, sung before breakfast and they have gone. But not really, because the before of now is a functional surface thing and the now of now a whole multi-depth experience, as tangled and as complex as a lift from the before with all its house cleaning nonsense into a surprising and sudden connection with the whole universe, with the rain, the gales, the stars, the tides and a surprise of gulls making ribbons against a wide grey sky.

And the after of now will live for a very long time.

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Island Blog – The Admiral and a Flag

Please excuse my absence from this page. Although I seriously doubt that my blog is a lifeline for anyone, I do feel a bit odd when I don’t scatter my thoughts across a page to then fire it off into the ether.

Things have, in truth, been a bit diplodocus of late. A urinary tract infection has the power and the subtle and silent energy to turn a flat pancake of a time into a spiralling ball with intent. It upskittled us all, not least the one with it. However, the doctor is a wise and intuitive man, working out what the demise might mean, and it seems he was right, to a degree. Nobody can stop a dementia decline and each blow will manifest itself in that decline. The old Admiral is a frail thing now, still aware and still smiling but much quieter and much more unable to work the field independently. It is very hard to watch. It’s like bereavement, only not. The one slowly disappearing is still very visible in the room. It can go on for years. I hope not. We all hope not. Once a good quality of life morphs into existence, there really is nowhere to go. But there are wee chats, albeit mostly me ‘wee chatting’, and there are laughs when I co-ordinate wrong, or misunderstand a request, guiding him cheerily in a southerly direction when it is clear to him he was headed true north.

He has humour and acceptance. We have talked about the after life. He believes in one, as do I, although neither of us give it a name. He says he doesn’t want to leave me, and I said, well you have to go first. If it was up to me to stick a flag in new territory, we’d end up in a bog with no view and the local shop 10 miles away. He chuckled.

T’is good. For now.

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Island Blog – Shift, Fly and a Dog’s Questions

This afternoon I walked into Tapselteerie, as I do every single afternoon, small terrier bounding afoot. She is always full of ridickerluss bounce as if we have never walked this way before; as if she and I are about to discover a gruffalo nest or a ferocean of fairies. I pointed out the conkers to her, the star moss, the positive pebbles I hid that someone has moved on, but she just looked at me like I was a weirdo. Her plan is to locate the biggest and longest stick she can find and then lift. She waits for me to forward, then runs full tilt, whacking the backs of my legs with half a hazel tree, thinking it hilarious and most satisfying. I don’t mind. She thinks I don’t know what’s coming, but my advantage is my human brain. I have worked out the math of this particular pole, considered the level of scratchy branch activity, the then width of the track, the level of recent rainfall and its ability to soak my calves. It’s a daily game and only infrequently I am required to say enough is enough. This day was one of those times. The pole would have held up an elephant’s weary head, no bother.

Up in the woods I heard childlaughter, my favourite sort. Poised on a rock and looking like a dream, a little girl squeaks with delight as her father completes the construction of a swing. I can see she will begin on the rock, but the fall away of the hill and the subsequent leap into the sky takes her 20 foot off the ground. She is tiny, wiry, slim and excited and I want to hide. I see a thousand disasters, but she sees none of them and nor does her father. He has swung many times higher in his time, almost to the moon and back, and, for all I know, touching moon base. He is, after all, my son and all of my children are risk takers and always were. I have no idea where they got that from. After successful launch, momentary panic as she looks down to see the blue planet below her tiny butt, followed by a happy landing back on the rock, the game is on, the shift from land to outer space completed.

Back home there is a shift. A sudden shift. In the journey that is dementia, this is oft how it works. Plateau, shift, level out, plateau and shift again. Everyone involved needs to catch up, learn, accept, take action. This is where we are now. Just 2 weeks ago the plateau felt like it was staying flat, for some long time, with only little skips and twirls that showed a gradual demise. But now on this road, the pilgrim has met landfall and it seems there is no way around it for him. He doesn’t want to eat, cannot move anywhere or anyway without help. We, his family, are coming to terms with that but I won’t say it is a natural nor an easy thing to come to terms with nor accept. How could it be? This is Dad. This is the strong provider of 50 years and then some, the one who knew the answers to everything and, if he didn’t, never let on. I remember a violently horrific North Sea crossing when I was so terrified I thought I would faint clean away (but didn’t), with a force 10 gale battering our boat, full sails up because it had come in so fast there was no time to reduce, nor crew (me being terrified) to strap on, walk the slippery deck in lashing rain, and then find the strength to work the winch. But, and but again, he never left the helm, navigated us home to within a few maritime feet of home harbour, using his skills and whatever stars he glimpsed. 17 hours of rocking and no soft cradle in sight, but he got us home and intact. This is the Dad who took risks, flew high and taught all of us to trust in him and to shut up and fly.

This shift is tough. I want to reach out to anyone and everyone who is going through this end game or who has gone through it. My utmost respect and admiration to you all.

Even the dog knows something’s up. She keeps looking at me, a million questions in her eyes.

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Island Blog – All Change

I remember bus conductors calling this out, or hearing that remote voice through the speakers in a carriage as the train touched the buffers. Nowadays trains ‘terminate’ which I always feel is a bit of an overstatement. The first time I heard that word in relation to a train plus buffers, I laughed out loud, startling the quiet around me and drawing attention to myself. I wanted to explain. I wanted to question the use of that word in this context, but I said nothing. Just grinned foolishly and gathered up my chattels. On the platform I did look back, once, to see what might happen when a train ‘terminates’ but the old engine just sat there, puffing a bit, and not, it seemed, in any danger of termination.

In life we all have to change and sometimes all is in need of a change. The old ways of doing things, even the things themselves, demand to be released into the past. We know it. We resist it, at first and if you are like me, at second and even at third. Sometimes I have got all the way up to ten in my resistance. Welcoming change is easy when it doesn’t require much of me, doesn’t tell me I need to do yet more inner work, write yet more plans of action, or to step out of my comfy slippers and into jack boots. It is bothersome to say the least. I mean, I was fine, wasn’t I, doing things this way? For ages, in fact. So many ages that I don’t have to think about my doings or beings around this thing. I just do it and I just be. And who says I need to change, anyway? Some high principled god figure with a pointy finger? It never sits well with me when I sense a pointy finger until I realise it is my own.

So this change I apparently need to make is a pain in the aspidistra. My aspidistra. How irritating is that! It seems I am required to improve myself in some area of my doing and being. I tell myself that the benefits will resound like a gong in the empty room I am about to create for myself, that one I have just cleared of all furniture and drapes; the one with only spiders and dust. The gong will sound marvellous, echo-ey and with a boing that will bounce off the bare walls for some minutes, filling my ears and rumbling my breastbone. I will feel it, as well as hear it. This is my new beginning. It is very tempting to lug the furniture back in but with my own pointy finger pointing, I cannot. Besides, the air is clearer now and the room without geography. A blank canvas. Even though my fingers are twitching, my yearn for the old design strong-voiced and persuasive, I resist. I walk around the room, touching the walls, seeing the marks of what once hung there, rectangles of grime. Cobwebs loop.

I call out my hoover, attach myself to the non-business end and press ‘play’. Within moments all signs of the past have gone. I have nowhere to sit, nothing to look at, no place of rest. So be it. I make a cup of rosy lee and lean against the door jamb. I look around me, try my voice out in the empty space. Who am I now? now, now,now,now.

Answer comes there, none. Apparently, that’s ok. Whatever change I have requested from the great high Out There is, as yet, unknown to me, its benefits a guess at best. But I do know I asked for this, no matter the flaming inconvenience of it actually arriving at my door. We all ask for change at times. What we don’t all do is welcome it in and trust, no matter how scary it may feel.

For now, I am on ‘pause’. Something wonderful will come, because I have cleared the way for it. The next bit will be what it will be, and Lady Providence is always standing at the crossroads. I see her up ahead, her hand held out to me.

And so, it is.