perception

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Island Blog – Cacoethes Scribendi

I believe many of us have this condition. It’s not like cancer or a chronic disease and doesn’t hurt the body much, but mostly, the brain, and we all have one of those. However, the urge to write can play havoc with every other part of a living soul, itchy fingers, running feet, sweats, chills and a strong desire to escape from a perfectly ordinary confabulatory experience because you just have to get this down; what she said, what his body language told you, how the atmosphere shifted from a warm fuzzy into an arctic abandonment. And, if you don’t get gone, or cannot, or if the whole being gone thing would turn everyone else there into statues, you will lose capture. I’ve been in that oh damnit to hell place many times before, but even if I followed my own advice and had a wee notebook concealed somewhere about my person, I doubt I would have pulled it out, because the invasion of an interrupta femina (allow me, latin scholars) pulling out her quill and slate would, I am sure, have had the same upsetting effect. This situation is rather constipating.

So, to be able to remember and to retain the lift and twist, the moments before and just after the ‘noticing’ is a giant skill. Not only do I want to remember the words, the way they swirled and ebbed, lapsed and spiked, but I also want to remember how the whole whatsit made me feel, and that is the part which slides away like mist, because there will have been a resolution, or a stop, or a happening, and all of those are as round as a full stop. How fickle is my mind, how easily does it move on to the next moment and the next? I believe distractions are my problem. Someone says something unrelevant to the time I just left, with all its vitally connected feelings and emotions, and it is as if I have let them all go, some forever.

I find the same with memories. I can vividly recall the events, according, I know, to my perception. I know who said what and to whom. I know how I felt about it, the rachet resulting from that human encounter, the lift, the slump, the delight, the fear, but the depth of these feelings have become splat over time, levelled like sand on a beach, flat, a straight line. It isn’t the truth at all because, back then, I was purple with rage, set to take somebody’s head off, my feet ready to run, to save, to murder. Well, maybe not that, but nearly. So, to relocate the feelings around a memory, even if that memory is minutes back or decades, is, as I have said, a giant skill. I could make it up, guessing here and there, and sound quite plausible, although I have an issue with those two words conjoining. You are either plausible or you’re not. There is no ‘quite’ about it. I find the same with pretty amazing, or slightly curious, or vaguely interested. Such placid nonsense. You are, or you aren’t. I digress.

As I write a bigger piece of work, I am going back into memories. I scribble over many of them, my pen helping me to dilute my astute; to cave in, untrusting of self, reminding myself that my brain may well have added, subtracted, divided and multiplied; that others will not (I absolutely know that) have seen this and that through my eyes, my experience, and here’s a thing for anyone who has the guts to write their story. Nobody knows how you felt when you saw what you saw. Nobody knows how you felt, and for so long, about your life. The thought of speaking that out, of owning it, of sharing it, is very scary. However, and nonetheless (can’t resist lovely words) if you don’t tell, if you don’t risk judgement or rejection, if you don’t step out into the unknown, how will anyone ever know how life has been for you? And, in this stiff upper lip bollix that thrives in this country, a country, I might remind you, which once owned half the world and is now feeling rather skinny and alone, we need brave voices to speak out, better, to write.

If you want to write, never think nobody cares, or wants to know. We need you to speak out. Begin.

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Island Blog – Candles, Perception and Stories

I love candles. In the dark times, and it is here, the dark. On this beautiful island, once you know the heartbeat of the rocks of it all, the shush and crash of Atlantic flow, the sog and bog and drench and feist of wild weather, you buy boots that will allow you in and over and through. You do, trust me. Not many folk will tolerate so much rain, such trixy winds, gales even, that rise just when you reckon peace will reign for another day, and we, who do, have watched them barrel in, tearing down trees, flattening grasses and relocating washing left on a line. And just as suddenly, they move on. I wonder, these days, where they might go. The perfect weather is a gift I would buy, but that gift is just a gift and not a given. There are weeks of rain and no rain for the odd day, pretty much.

Here, there is a load of dark and that has a lot to do with the rain. If I look at the weather for the next 4 weeks, it says Rain, Rain, Rain, all day long. Of course it never is. If you have a fox intuition, you just watch the clouds and grab your moment for a scoot oot, as I do. Funny that……I notice and hear from those I notice, that they don’t get how spontaneous they need to be up here. Some visitors leave. I watch them go, all angry and with faces set in judgement as if we islanders deliberately brought in the rain in a witchy sort of way, the sideways in-your-face blattering soak that challenges their choice of walking boot and melts their mascara as they wheech a puddle into a tsunami. Do they think I/we have control? We don’t, I assure you. It thinks me. Sunshine all of the time, I tell myself, would just be so ordinary and island life is anything but. Folk who live here and last here become as flexible as dancers in both mind and body. We learn, living in the wettest place on earth, to make something out of everything, even to smile at the rain. We call ourselves pluviophiles and proudly. We laugh at the days to come and let our words be snatched away in the gales. We light candles in the dark and say we are lucky, so lucky, to be living in a beautiful and safe place. Privately we roll our eyes at the whole thing, sigh and cuss but that is only done, as I said, privately.

Dynamic living is not something that comes naturally for us all. It is more of an inner choice, a decision to celebrate whatever life sends our way and in the very place we make our home. Sadness comes, of course it does, but that is the same for every single human soul, the wishing for something different is universal, no matter the weather, location, a person’s material wealth or lack of it. I learn these things daily, remind myself to be thankful for whatever I have and to ignore the doubts and fears, all imagined anyway. The most wonderful people I have ever met are those who have endured and survived situations, people and events that I cannot even imagine surviving and it is all due to a strong spirit, that invisible power that refuses to give up or give in. I aspire to such strength as my life has been tame by comparison. That doesn’t negate the impact of inner darkness, inner rain or an inner punching gale inside my own head and heart, but it does help to know that ‘this, too, shall pass’ as it always does and the key is perception. How I see something, anything, decides my response to it.

I walk among the sodden trees, the crushed coppery bracken, negotiating the fat puddles, the lift and squelch of rain soaked mud and I know, again, that I am free to just let life be, the dark, the rain, the wind and then that sudden bright day, the sky open, the burns gurgling in spate as sunshine sparkles the bubbles. Clean, clear mountain water rushing down, carving yet deeper into the rocks releasing stories long buried. I hear them flutter around me like birds, lifting into the sky, higher and higher until they turn back into rain, falling once more so that we who still live will not forget how life goes on, and on and on. We are here but fleetingly. Let us leave our own story behind when we go, the story of a life lived to the full no matter the weather, the darkness, the burning sunshine, the rain, because there will be a future someone who will need to hear it, someone who needs our light for their dark. How do I live with what I live with? There’s a story there, just waiting to be told.

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Island Blog – A Wasp and a Think

There’s a wasp. With intentions. She flies into my garage-cum-woodstore at this time every year. I know exactly what she is up to. She is planning to build a nest but I am not having that. However, I am no killer of anything, even if I am sorely tempted to thwack her with my niblick. Envisioning, as I am, the shrieking of grandlings at barbecues or picnics, the panicked swatting and the wasp in the wine thingy, I do some research and what I find is a lookalike hornets nest, made of nothing hornety but giving out a clear message to this small and dangerous zeppelin that this spot is already taken by folks who would actively discourage, with stinging precision, any such property development near their own. A pack of four is already ordered. If it works, my forays into the garage will no longer need to be at night and I will be free to walk through my garage-cum-woodstore and on up to the back garden without having to don my wet suit for protection, because no wasp, hornet, nor bee will happily sit back to observe a human, dog, deer, cow or horse moving close by their home without having to have a few words. I know this well because once, and only once, I walked a little too close to the front door of a bee hive.

It thinks me about perception. The aforementioned insects see their world through their own eyes, as we do our own. Then (break it down) a bee, a hornet, a wasp also see their own world through their own eyes, each perception different to the other. Just imagine, then, all the people who also see life according to their own experiences, colour, culture, age, creed and opinions. Unless we all allow this, we will not find unity, nor peace, for we are obliged to live close together unlike the animal kingdom who will not. Each of us seeks safety, love, acceptance and friendship amongst a zillion other things but we don’t all necessarily see X as X. It might be Y to this person, A to another, 9 to a third and 257 to a fourth. Stepping back from this chaotic melee, I can see Banksy got it right. He sees this clearly and probably wonders why on earth we are still expecting others to think the way we do, to live the same way, work to the same principles, when this will absolutely never happen. No. We must learn to observe only and then to respect without judgement. Some people eat with their fingers. So what! Others stick their knees under dining tables that need constant repair in order to hold up all that cutlery. Again, so what! If we simply observe, learn, acknowledge and respect, then now we are talking. And we probably are – talking – instead of muttering opinions just out of or just in earshot, our backs facing that which we don’t understand and are not prepared to allow, not on this street, in this school, at this event, inside our own home.

The thing about radical change is that it doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t come through a new law. It comes through one ordinary person deciding to change his or her own heart around this issue, then another, then another until a whole street is so busy acknowledging, allowing and respecting and living in harmony with a zillion differences, judging none, that people come from further afield to see what is making this street so much happier than their own. The ultimate power, the game-changing power lies exclusively with us, the ordinary people. History will bear me out for it has aye been thus. When resolute people join together they can topple anything and anyone but we have forgotten this. Settling comfortably into the confines of the nanny state, our voices have grown hoarse at best, silent at worst. We have grown weak. But none of us really want war, not against another country, another creed, another culture, another vulnerable human being. Our world is changing. The peoples are moving whether they want to or not and we must learn to live well with that or nothing changes.

We might want to think about it a bit.

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Island Blog – Perception and a Blackbird

I sit in the darkling. Clouds are gathering like a people to church, some big and full of themselves, others following shred-like but I have no doubt they will puff themselves up in followance this night for there is rain forecast.

I watch the wintering geese fly in, fly in chatter and in synergy with the leader and with the nightfall. For me they fly right to left. I see the home-lights across the sea-loch, all warm and welcoming, a pipe of smoke from their chimneys. They are warm. They are cooking, chatting, cajoling and considering each other over there, a big swim away. And, they see the geese fly from left to right.

It thinks me beyond geese and tidal flow. It thinks me of how we see things, any things, all things. If geese can fly from right to left for some and left to right for others then what complexity lies in other of our seeings? Ah, it must be manifold. I can see this and you can see this, but you see that, not this. My perception of any one thing may well not be yours. I would like to be able to allow yours and mine and to consider neither one as an absolute, even as I am certain of my right to left of things.

As we converse, you and I, on matters from how to fix this or clean that, on the rights and wrongs of raising children, on the clarity of our shared memories, we move along different paths. What astonished you about something that happened meant nothing much to me and vice versa. We find it at best bothersome and our minds work like dingbats to convince the other of import and impact. But I still see nothing to upset me. Now why is that? Well, if we agree that my experience, my baggage, my history all come to bear on any given subject, as do yours, then we must also agree on a division of paths. We can both see the situation, yes. We can both recall to a degree what happened back then, yes, but where I see right to left, you see left to right and that is simply that.

How long a life do we need in order to come to such an acceptance? I am fed up of learning things like this. I wonder why it is we don’t finally arrive in that lovely place of complete understanding. I thought I completely understood years ago and yet here I am with my feathers ruffled and my heart beating too fast and my good manners thoroughly challenged as I watch your mouth insist on left to right. Although I write this with no actual cause, it is something I have observed recently between others and it intrigues me. To move freely and happily along an individual path of life, it is necessary to merely observe each other without dishing out labels, however silently. We can all learn from each other at every meeting if we decide not to judge. Every living soul has history, baggage and opinions, either learned or personally constructed, based on their experience of what worked and still works for them.

On returning earlier from slathering honey on young fruit trees, ring-barked by hungry rabbits, of which we have the lion’s share and adding a wrap of hessian to simulate new bark that will allow water to be drawn up the damaged trunks once again, I find a male blackbird flipping and floundering on the track. I gather him to me and feel the delicate softness of his feathers as I calm his wings. Is one broken, I wondered? His leg? Was he hit by a car or attacked by a predator and dropped? No, not that. The predators here are accurate as mathematics and there is no evidence of talon damage. I put him in a box in the garage to calm down. An hour later I return to give him water or seed or to find him dead. He wants none of it and is bouncing up in attempt to fly beyond the mesh that holds him down. I push in my hand and gently bring him out. Shall we see if you can fly? I ask him. He turns his head and looks at me through ebony eyes, then turns back to the great wide open. I lower him to the ground and to my delight he lifts and flies, a bit wonky-chops at first and then up up and away over the fence and into the sky. I watch him until he is a black dot in the blue.

Fly! Fly! I call out but he doesn’t look back. His path is his path as mine is my own. We come together and then we part and as we do, we are changed, just as we are changed after a human encounter. As I held that bird, I noticed his soft feathers, the majesty of nature in that trembling body, the perfection of design.

We can see each other that way too, if we so choose.

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Island Blog 154 Reality Check

Rumi wisdom

As I sit here tapping on the keys of a laptop, waiting for my friends to wake up to another glorious morning in Argyll, I consider our conversation last night over dinner, on Perception and Reality. We had spent the afternoon developing depth and texture on one of my songs. Again, they said, sing that again, only, this time, shorten the vowel sound and give it more breath. Slowly but surely, a single line of melody took on colour and light. There were six of me in the end, in as perfect a repeat as made no difference. It’s interesting how difficult it is to sing exactly the same over an original melody line, not so much the rise and fall of the notes in sequence, but more the length of beats in a single word, such as ‘gold’ or ‘right’. If the consonants don’t land at precisely the same point (and a nanosecond matters) then it can sound like a shower of bullets. T-t-t……etc. I considered bringing the importance of such perfect repetition into ordinary life, hence the conversation. I may walk through exactly the same situation as you, but our perception of it can be chalk versus cheese.
Why is that, and is it okay, good, even, to have different slants, sometimes as many as there are people involved? Of course, it can make for war, and often has, and will continue to do so as long as people walk the earth; one that seems to be managing to extinguish rather a lot of its inhabitants. On a goodly sunshine day, and in a warm, easy, light-hearted situation, such as a merry meet in the bakery or on the street, our differences in perception and ‘reality’ matter little. We can walk away, wave, think what we like once the meet is done, but life isn’t about merry meets all the time.
Sometimes we butt up against an opinion we do not share, but however skilled we are at marketing our own, however loud we talk, however clever our words, we can never change the perception of another soul. We do not live their life, share their dreams and longings, feel their pain, know their joy, understand their song. And we have never looked through their eyes. We may try to do just that and call it empathy. We learn to listen, some of us, and then to mindfully consider that our own perception of reality, the one we are absolutely convinced is the blue print, just might be a blur to another.
At the moment we are all facing a Perception/Reality check, as the country moves towards election day. Some of us will shrug it off, not bother to vote, asking What’s the Point when Nothing Changes? We are bombarded with arguments, one party shouting its promises, another berating those promises as so much rubbish. Accusations of past failure, one-upmanship, clever quips and outright slander is all around us. Who is right to lead us and do we believe in the depth and texture, the perfect unity of their song, or do we feel bullet-battered and uncertain of the melody line?
One thing is for certain. If we bother to vote, at least we make it clear that our own reality matters to us, however we perceive it.

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Island Blog 116 To See Darkly

 

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I saw this large white thing on the sealoch, pushing the water into a triangle with the rocky shore as the third median.  I peered for a bit through the paint-spattered windows as the cover of the night slid back to reveal a new morning.  I always do this ‘peering’ thing first, actually not just first, but second and sometimes third, in a vain attempt to kid on that, overnight, my eyeballs have grown young again.  Ah, halcyon days….. when I could see so much more, often too much, and sometimes that which would have been better not  seen at all, and certainly not by me!

Anyway, I waffle away from the large white thing.

Before it disappears completely, travelling at a fast lick through the frothy tide line, I grab the hefty set of Zeiss binoculars, or ‘bins’ as I gather they are fondly known, and nearly fall into my coffee with the weight of the things.  I don’t believe any bird watcher ever held these up to their eyes for long.  I would need to consider the employment of a personal trainer for at least a year just to manage a period of time longer than 35 seconds.  However, being a woman, I can achieve a great deal in 35 seconds, so I stick them onto my face and focus quickly, to the usual no avail, because why?  Because, as well as giving me instant arm ache and the beginnings of a shake in my ulna, well, both ulnas to be honest, the flaming glass bit mists up as my hot eyeball challenges the cold lens.  Vital seconds pass, as does the large white thing, into the trees that overhang the near shore.  Hmmm.

I call it a Snow Goose.  It was too big for an eider duck and too small for a swan or a flamingo.  Snow Goose it is.  There!  I feel dead chuffed and highly priveleged and can live this fantasy for days.  I saw a Snow Goose today!  That’s what I say in the shop to a resounding chorus of envying OOhs and Aahs.

It makes me think.  Of how we can see things that aren’t there, and not see things that are there.  How an un-misted glass lens can show us something we think we can explain, and how a misted one can talk complete pants to our human brains.  When we ‘see’ something through our eyeballs, we bring a process into being.  First, we see, then we fix this vision into a place, and then, without any conscious decision, we pad it out with all manner of daftness, imaginings, past baggage, phobias, indoctrinated beliefs and hopes.  When I see a beggar on any street, I see someone calling for help, and I will always give something. I follow my own heart in this matter.  When another sees the same sad sight, they may feel angry, begin to judge, or see laziness, bad choices, weakness – in other words, they might look down on the beggar as less than human.  It’s called ‘perception’ and it is in every one of us, however much inner work we might embark on to learn humility and compassion.  We can’t help it.  It is part of who we all are.

When I decide, which I sadly do, now and again, that someone else is heading in the wrong direction, I say so.  And then I learn a new fact or two about them, and regret, deeply, my hasty judgement.  I work on, to soften my perceptions, or, rather, to shut them up, but they can rise unbidden, un-called for, and always at times when I am not mindfully in control of that sneaky little set of wires that run from my brain to my mouth.

One area of perception, that never fails to cause a stooshie, is that of Boundaries.  Whether it is between black and white, the Ukraine and England, England and Scotland, or the African States, there is this thing about boundaries that could curdle milk in a nanosecond, one that everyone has an opinion on, based on personal perception.  Oftentimes, I hear folk talking heatedly on a ‘boundary’ subject. It can wire up a whole shopping queue once it gains momentum, but what saddens me is that I so often hear not what any individual really thinks, but what someone else has said on tv or written in a newspaper.  When you actually consider the other human beings involved in these situations, with only theories posturing as reality, how can anyone opinionate?

My world may be laughably fantasmic to some, even to many, but if we all  (and I believe we all do) want a life of peace and neighbourly-ness, then our arms must be open, our hearts too and, one day, our countries.  Voltaire said, ‘It is sad that, if we are to be a patriot, we first have to make an enemy of the rest of mankind.’

I think a different way to you, and you, to me.  I feel differently about the whys and the hows and the whens of things, but this can either be a glorious Snow Goose pushing through the saltwater of a new tide on a new morning – or, it can be ignored as something I couldn’t quite see, through my glass, and darkly.