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Island Blog – A Crap Day Imagined and a Good Start

Waking in the night for no good reason, I took a peek inside my head. After a few moments sorting through the dross and toss of thoughts, reminding me of my merry days when five kids lobbed their dirty washing altogether in the laundry basket leaving me to sort the blues from the lingerie, an idea for a writing exercise stepped proudly up to the lecturn and announced today’s reading. A Crap Day. Well, I said, this isn’t a crap day and I haven’t had one of them for a while now, no, for ages, because the day is never all good nor all bad but only in bits. However, the challenge was on and I am meeting it head on, feet beneath my desk and to the accompaniment of raindrops plopping through the hole I made in the ceiling with a barbecue skewer, and into a big green bucket.

‘ Yesterday was definitely a crap day. It began when one of my contact lenses took off on a round the eyeball trip. I could feel the damn thing floating behind my nose like a lost dingy at sea. I wondered if it would stay there for ever or come back around again, or if I would blow a hole in my tissue after a sneeze. It might hit someone I didn’t plan to hit, ping them in the face, a tiny frisbee. It might hurt or even damage. I apply another lens and this one is on its best behaviour, remaining more or less in position even if it proved more difficult than usual to apply make up in all the right places for all the swimming water between me and the eyeliner. Dark mornings are bad enough for such shenanigans at the best of times. I check my bedside clock. Damn, I’m going to be late. I head for the stairs, catching my bare foot on the head of a nail which, overnight, has twisted free from the boards. Blood. It drip, drip, drips as I yell abuse into the empty house and attempt to hop down the stairs holding tight to the bannister. Into the kitchen, just time for a coffee, I flick on the kettle. Nothing. Curses! I check the big fuse box on the wall. All switches up. I bang the plug further in the the kettle begins to hum. While I sip the black strong brew I apply a band aid, pull on my socks and shoes and go in search of my car keys and phone. No phone. Where is the damn phone? I dial my number from the landline and hear it ringing from the sitting room. I see the light of it from the sofa, slightly hidden beneath something, a something that turns out to be a cat which startles me as I don’t own a cat. Thomas, how the hell did you get in? My eyes go to the window. Ah, it’s open just wide enough at the very top for the slink and slide of him to relocate his favourite cosy place. My neighbour’s chuck him out at night for some daft reason as if the poor old fellow is expected to catch his weight in mouse, just so the parsimonious bastards don’t need to haul up from the sofa and go for Whiskas.

My foot is aching now but I can still drive, even if I am now a walking dead woman about to succumb to tetanus or sepsis. Will anyone bother to visit me I wonder as I pull out into the rain-soaked traffic. Nobody wants to do this driving to work thing. I can hear their fury as easily as I can hear their angry horn honks. I don’t honk. I don’t even know where my horn is. Nearly there now. I indicate into the carpark and find no space beyond the ones for The Chairman, the Director, the Manager and the yellow ones for the disabled of which there are none in this crummy office. In a fit of pique I swing into the Chairman’s space. He never comes in anyway unless there’s a board (bored) meeting or when Marian from Hair and Make-up is in with her rolling bosom and her packet of chocolate hobnobs, and that thrilling combination only occurs on a Wednesday. Today is not Wednesday. I lock the car, spin on my sore foot and swear. Running for the front door in order to avoid certain drowning in this vicious deluge of cloud water, I punch in the combination and explode into the foyer. “You’re late Miss Moneypenny.’ he says, without even looking up. I hate it when he calls me that as if he thinks he’s Bond himself. He is very far from Bond, I can tell you. ‘Sorry.’ I mutter and pelt for the cloakroom. All this rain stimulates my bladder. ‘My office for dictation!’ he barks to my disappearing back.

The morning is arduous and painful. My swimming eye makes my shorthand almost illegible and the coffee is both disgusting and cold. I have left my delicious packed lunch at home with the cat and by 2pm I am fed up and tearful with all the extra work bloody Daphne left me because she couldn’t ‘make it in today’. My time of the month, she told Reception but I reminded Reception that she had already had one of those just 2 weeks ago. Perhaps she has run out of excuses to ‘not make it in’ After all, her rabbit can’t die twice, her mother break 3 legs, nor the 7.50 from Kings Cross derail again. The rain rains on, transparent tadpoles against the windows almost wiping out the view of the park, my sanity on work days. Finally it is time to go home and I cannot get there quick enough. I head for my car and my heart sinks as I see the wheel clamp. Damn it all to hell! I scream out causing some passers by to rearrange their glum wet faces into either sympathy or smiles. I march back into the office and demand an explanation. Reception looks at me blankly but I know she will have arranged this. I march up to his office, whack open the door and, to my complete surprise, give in my resignation. I quit! I yell and then I tell him to stuff his job and his completely ridiculous Bond fetish somewhere dark and smelly.

Eventually, after paying a week’s wages for the unclamping of my car, I arrive back home and breathe a sigh of relief. Although I am now badly in debt, without either job or reference, I feel free in a sort of lunatic way. Perhaps, I muse, as I light the fire and sip a glass of red wine, everyone needs a crap day, that ultimately crap one that makes a person finally get up off her arse and make the change that will change everything. I can apply for jobs, any jobs. I’ll go to the job centre tomorrow and chat with Daniel. I like Daniel and haven’t seen him for weeks. Might be a good start.’

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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 – Playing with Autumn

Yesterday, in the strong sunshine, I decided to clean my windows. Actually it was they who decided because I realised the whole world could have ended and I, within my four stone walls and filthy windows, remained oblivious. I scurried to the high shelf of eco cleaning thingummies, grabbed the window one and set to. This task is almost at the top of my Most Boring Job list so it is always essential to strike without too much thought when such an impulse impulses me. I worked on the big picture window, relieved to note that the world was and is still in situ. Moving on to the conservatory, another 8 big windows, I sprayed and scrubbed and wiped with eco cloths in an eco dance of considerable arm rotation accompanied to a timpani of snorts and puffs complete with staccato swearwords. Now it is done. Well, the downstairs is done. Upstairs can wait now that I am assured all is still standing out there.

Then comes this morning, blown in early by a massive hooligan punching well above his grade. This is Autumn! I yelled through the back door as I wheeched out the unwilling dog, as if Autumn gave a monkeys when she drenched me with a blast of heavy rain. This heavy rain thing went on all morning. My wheelies danced off down the track and the bird feeders swung pendulums, throwing birds, nuts and seed into the wild and volatile air. I lit the fire, made breakfast and then, as the dawn light dawned, looked up at my windows. I could see less than yesterday, much less. Each pane was a swirl of greasy mist. I confess I swore at the ineffectiveness of Eco products wishing and wishing that I still lived in the fluffy world of decliningplanet ignorance, when products I will no longer buy, nor name allowed minimum arm action, less cloths and marvellous results. I spent the day inside this harrumph, distracting myself with an audio book, my sewing project, locating a gather of buckets for the leaks and performing a merry sweeping out of water from the flood in my garage to the fullvolumeup strains of Del Amitri. Then I put my specs on. I should have done that yesterday. The Eco product I used to clean my windows is not for windows. Not even at a pinch, for windows. Not even “I’ve nothing else, this will do’ for windows. Never for windows. I look at my faithful windows who, in the main, keep out all blattering hooligans, and I feel, I honestly do, an apology rushing into my mouth and not just for the windows but for all the Eco products that sit on my high shelf. I said so. I will need to deal, re-deal with the swirling mist of my own making, at some point but not today. Today I laugh at me and my spec-lack mentality and it thinks me of the olding years. The way I refuse to concede to any sort of perceived decline, the way I forge on against hooligans and the reading of small print in my ‘show’ to myself that I am NOT DONE YET. It chuckles my children, this mindful flailing against what seems to be receding and I honestly believe they admire it. I am not alone in this and that chortles me, uplifts me, tells me there are so very many who are happy to make fools of themselves in the autumn of our lives when hooligans blatter, when leaks appear, when spec-lack alters the truth of something. In short, it makes life fun in a way we never knew before. We had observed it for sure but now it is ours to own and to play with.

I’m playing.

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Island Blog – I am alive

And so it rains again, sideways and spiralling like wet smoke. I watch islanders walk by attached to damp dogs, legs all a-skitter. The humans are water clad, their faces shining rosy, their laughter lifting into the sky as they share a chuckle, again, about the rain, again. Visitors drive by, droop-faced, vision misted, windscreen wipers tick-tocking to keep the skinny road clear ahead. Where will they go today to see notverymuch I wonder? Inside the heating warms me, the fire curling amber red flames around the dry wood that spits and crackles; timpani. This is the island, the one that tongues far out west, dividing the Atlantic with its basalt and granite determination. I am content.

Walking out to feed the jittery birds sinks my feet into the sodden grass but no weather stops the need to feed their hunger. They scoop and swoop in, wary of the neighbour’s cats, of the sparrow hawk dive. I watch them cluster around the swinging feeders and am thankful that my meals are easier to access and without danger. I hear the drip drip of a ceiling leak, the plink of the drops as they land in an enamel jug. I used to need buckets, four of them, but not now, not since the ingress was located and bunged shut. And so I am thankful for that. Soon the day will kick off, unfold, pull me here and follow me there. I have music, words, timpani, birds, windows and rain. I am alive.

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Island Blog – More than, less than

I am all about words, concepts and life choices that augment. In these times of so called lack, even if our gone generations are currently sniggering, we all need to believe in growth, personally. Mostly personally. Spring will come. Sun will shine. Streets will clear and flights will fly. But we, we, must look to ourselves as we have never done before; not in our lifetime #gonegenerationsnigger. There is much talk about connecting with nature, from me too but it thinks me of those who have no nature in their immediate grasp. Where do they look? Surrounded by concrete and gang troubles, where do they look? I cannot answer that but the thought of them arrests me. From the position of privilege, aka warmth, safety, food, money enough, I am a veritable baby in this world. Although I have seen poverty close up I have never lived it.

From my place of privilege, I can write, walk in safety, talk to the trees and many other things that, I imagine, would swingbat a head bash from one who sees me as a princess; as I must be, to them. So many layers of life, so many and most of us who whine about dog poo along our verges or the lack of produce in our local Co-op are only highlighting our ignorance as we whine. Our problems are so First World.

Nonetheless, all of us within our very different layers must needs find ways to grow from the pandemic. I write ‘grow from’ because we are all affected by its many-layered tails, the loss of confidence, the fear, the anger, the isolation. All of us, privileged or not. We are all pandemic babies, no matter our age. All of us. And, as babies we can augment, we can grow and we can outmanoeuvre ‘going back’. I never got that. Nobody ever goes back, not to work, not to school. We move forward, always, with what we have encountered, learned, understood and refused in the interim. We can decide to walk a different way, choose a different direction, make good the old gaps in our relationships. We can augment, be more than.

This day the rain slew sideways. It skimmed across the tidal loch, the sky, obliterating the far shore. It smoked away the trees, big pines, altercating their place in the skyline and yet not causing a riot. I noticed that. Such an altercation in a pub might have led to a punch up, but not in nature. There is allowance. An augmentation, a rise, a raise. I watched the rain turn into rivulets, trickling through thicks of coppered beech leaves, spinning off the track and down down to a burn, already bubbling and singing its way back to the sea. I stopped beside a stand of hazels, noticed their reaching out boughs, the gnarls, the reaches and I wondered. What stopped you there? What gave you the shine to reach out there? I will never know the answer but I/we loved the asking moment. Beneath the pines I enjoyed a pelting of raindrops. It laughed me, and, I believe, them. I stood beside stand water, noticing the sticks fallen and longtime floating, how ebony they are, how slick black and how well they catch the light even in death. I encouraged a Silver Birch, rooted in the water. Go well, Girl. You have a lot to work through, not least a 12 inch puddle of endless rain. I saw how raindrops create ripples, how they augment the stand water, not just visibly but with sound, with a beat. I waited until I connected, stamped my sodden boots to the rhythm. Laughing my way home, I came into warmth, safety, home.

Not everyone can say that.

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Island Blog – Dancer

This lovely day I am aswirl with thinks and memories and some very deep hurt. Bereavement, however much of a relief it might be, does not adhere to a timeline. Recently I have gone through the however many stages of grief backwards, flip side up, out of order or all before lunch. I make the mistake of berating myself for this chaos but only until I literally wash my hands of any control. This chaos is not birthed from me. This chaos just snuck in and is currently picking away at wounds and digging the black hole even deeper than seems possible. I had no idea there was so much space inside for black hole-ness, one I cannot navigate nor have a conversation with because any questions I send its way just echo back to my ears in triplicate minus an answer. All I can do it seems is to trudge through the hours of light and the longer hours of dark until this chaos gets tired of chaoting and moves on to bother someone else. If, I tell myself, this process actually looked like one I could understand, I might be then able to formulate an algorithm, one that would guide me step by step up and away from the turmoil. But I can grasp a hold of nothing. All is smoke, mist, cloud wisp and yet so heavy and solid around me. I cannot run from it, nor hide. I change my thoughts but my mind is colluding with the chaos so quickly does it shift back to the black. I get the Amy Winehouse song now because I feel it, just like she did. It takes huge and determined focus to remain in the positive when I am not having to pretend to the Out There, a role I can play with ease. A song, a phrase, a catch of light, a lift of birds, among my beloved trees, all can shunt me back to a memory that cuts like the sharpest of knives. I remember, I remember, I remember. I remember that song, that disco tune, Chain Reaction, the one you always played for me when the dance floor was empty and it was up to me to bring the kids off the walls. You grinned and watched me taking over the whole floor, spinning, moving, electric, fiery, wild. Many years ago, yes, but it comes back so clear, that smile from the stage and my smile back.

I suspect this dark time is a good thing and I don’t fight it. I sit with it, walk with it, let it flow through me, no fight, no fight. It is exhausting, upsetting, deeply painful and my mascara is invariably decorating my chin, but when I remember saying to my counsellor about 4 years ago whilst in the thick of caring for a man who still looked like my husband (sort of) but who was not that man, that all I wanted was to cry real tears, so taught and fraught and caught up was I in controlling my whole self, I realise I have achieved my goal. And there is a feral beauty in that for it has been a deep longing for many decades.

I smile as I realise how drawn I am these days to running water, a waterfall, a trickle, rain, a slow tidal dance as if my eyes are glued; it takes something loud to snatch my attention away. Walking this sunshine afternoon, I found my favourite tree. Looks about 100 foot tall, its topknot fingering the clouds, a softwood, strong and with the girth of half a country. I remember it holds water after rain until the water pools in a holdcup where two great limbs conjoin. Then, all of a sudden, the level raised to meniscus as it hits the air, it begins a spill and a walker by is soaked. I stood beneath the massive giant and looked up. Drops from way up there landed on my mouth, nose, eyes, head and shoulders. Ha!! I chuckled. You minx! I moved back a little only to be pelted once again from another branch. Game on! I said and for a few moments, a few playful moments, I and the giant made each other laugh out loud as he stood still and I danced, just me, alone on the floor moving to the song of the singer and the rhythm of the rain.

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Island Blog – Drips, Droops and Defiance

I got drips. No, sorry dad. I have drips, less than of old but drips nonetheless. I quite like hearing the plash of each one falling into the enamel jug placed in place. I had to poke a hole in the plaster above the window recess last year. Actually, I have to do that poking thing every year until the plaster sags like an old woman with little to define her younger contours. I pull it all down, revealing the hen stone, the beginning of this sturdy place, the stones that protect me and many before me and then I reach out to a plasterer and the whole thing begins again. However, there used to be buckets here some 19 years ago, and everywhere, in doorways, mostly in doorways where an old 3 foot wall argued with the efficacy of whatever modern attachment attached itself. Poorly, it seems. Windows allow ingress, depending on the wind direction and puddles appear on floors. I look up. Seems logical but nothing is logical around drips. Water will in, no matter how clever you are and in homesteads built circa 1830 you are battling with just too much and it is so much better to catch the plash rhythm and to dance with it.

I empty the jug once, twice daily depending on the wind direction. It slightly bugs me that the wind has all the say in the matter, but then there is always someone who has all the say in the matter and I know that place. The rest of us work around the sayer, to a degree. We are canny, nonetheless, finding a dance that works for us, that makes the situation less rigid. I look around the rest of my room, of my home. No leaks. Just this jug-gler one, controlled until the plaster comes down. Accepting what is, even recognising and then acknowledging it, is what works for me. I have, with builder help, found the source of many leaks. This one is challenging me. She, must be a ‘she’, is telling me something. Check the outside. Check the mortar. In the olden days, there was lime in the mortar. This building could have housed King George 1V, had he travelled to the islands. Lime was a marvellous thing back then, as all new things are marvellous until they’re so not.

As we move from the old to a new we really don’t want, there will be leaks. I leaked today, here, in the wind and rain and alone. There is nowhere for these tears to go. I drooped, I confess. We face, and we do ‘face’ an uncertain future. Our fears, our lime mortar is crumbling. Our resolution is to dance but we also need to dig deep into the truth of what life is, this new life. We can decorate the inside, jug up the leaks, play positive and all that is really important, just as long as we get what is happening and grab it by the throttle. This is how it is. This is Defiance. The knowledge of what is and the fight for freedom in spite of it.

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Island Blog – These November Days

It rains here a lot and never mind the November thing. It just rains. We have too many hills and we stick out too far into the Atlantic and we are used to it. But I am hearing from other drier folks that rain has confounded them. It is the way it is in our times. For those of us who know it, expect it, we are prepped. We already have the boots and the wherewithal to counter any walk in any weather. It thinks me.

At what moment did we ever think things were stable? Back to our forebears, when danger was all around, when nothing could become a very big something just when we turned back to the pot of soup, the comfort of a fire, the predicted course of the evening, I question the complacence of nowadays. When we moved to this wild island, we did because of the instability of things. I wasn’t paying attention, just following my leader but I get him now. He knew there was a big change in the coming and he responded early. I’m talking late 70’s so he was wise before his time. In the turbulence of moving, of shifting kids and location, of heading out of the comfortable warm and into the cold was not pleasant, not at all and I whined a lot and fussed more, demanding the same as was before, the safe warm of a southern kitchen, but his shoulders were broad enough to shut me up.

As I walk out this day inside heavy rain, I think. Not cold, should be. Leaves still on trees, almost. Whipping rain yes, abundantly so. The pines are falling, the land eroding. We are here. This is now for us. Will we scrabble for the past or will we recognise our now in these November days?

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Island Blog – The Nothing

It rained today. A lot. The track is more like a little stream despite the culverts, now all clogged with copper leaves, hesitating the flowaway. I stop to watch the trickle that should be a steady flow. This rock, this island, is good at sloughing off water and it needs to be for we would all drown otherwise. There is enough height, enough of the waters need to return to Mother Sea, to ensure we just require wellies and macs and a good attitude. Our skin is good up here, less drying wrinkles, more flow and adjust, much like the land upon which we live. I skim the puddles where the land lifts like a shrug, just enough to allow a sort of dry footfall. My old boots, my beloved boots, are more than happy to share the wet with the wet and I can often squelch homewards. No matter. Things can always dry unlike sad hearts, hearts that just recently have filled with salt tears with nowhere to go. Not my heart. Mine is dry as a desert and there may be a problem there, but this is not about me. This is about them, the ones who cannot see beyond the rain, cannot see the bright light in between clouds, the geese flying black against the darkling sky, the swing and waggle of some shrub grown way beyond its boots and needing a cutting reminder of its place in the garden.

I see the old pines out back, quiet now that the stripping wind has exhausted itself. Larch and pine needles thicken the steps up to the compost bin as I walk them today. The burn is loud and wild with peatwater, brown and luscious and thinks me of whisky. So fast it falls, crashing down into pools and slowing like a slug as it builds and bubbles golden froth in the waiting time. I hear it at night as I try to sleep, listen to its song. I love to hear living water, I love the tidal crash. I love the argument between land and sea and I love the way they work it all out. But it does think me of where something stops and another something begins, such as a life, a death.

As I diddle about with should I, shouldn’t I in the confines of Covid fear I think of those who are in the place I was over a year ago. They are there right now and I can do nothing to ease their pain. They will be feeling everything and nothing at the same time. They will be numb and practical, baking, cooking, serving, anything to fill in their moments, anything to keep their feet moving, their smiles bright. I know this place but I know nothing about their place. It confounds me, thinks me of the crash of the burn as it falls into a pool, almost a relief, about the slug in the waiting time. It is, in a word, tapselteerie and yet they will be fighting to hold on to normal because for decades normal was normal. Effortless. She knew who she was and he knew who he was. Now that he is gone, who the heck is she? What is normal?

And Nothing is waiting at the door. Nothing is but a bit player on this stage. But, for some time she will give him the limelight. As I did. As I still do at slug-froth times. My respect to her, to any of you who know what the heck I am talking about.

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Island Blog – Flowing Free

I hear the drips plopping into my little jug below the hole in the plaster. It used to infuriate me. Ach, another leak, even though it was not ‘another’, but instead the only one after years of buckets catching loads of leaks. How odd it is, when I think on it, that my leaking past jumps into my now, irrelevantly. I pause and rejig myself. Always a good idea and certainly for me. It is so easy to wear the gloom clothing, after all when Gloom is busy elsewhere and quite fed up with the fact that yet another human is calling him back. I wonder about Gloom. Is he actually an okay sort of person, one who had no idea when the gods gave him the Gloom job that he would be so busy and for so long? I have one small leak in a place where the rain falls like it just has to barf and the only place that allows is it in is here on the very Westerly West of Scotland; the last place before said rain makes no impact whatsoever in the wild expanse of the great Atlantic Ocean, an expanse of so much water that any amount of rain spill goes unnoticed. And we all want to be noticed.

I see the mosaic of infracted plaster overhead and I see art. Soon, I will need to pull it down, again. But, for now, it is rather beautiful and it thinks me. This morning woke me different. Yes, I had been up within the night, padding down for a cup of herbal and to leave my worries behind. Why they all tangle in the bed sheets is a mystery to me, but they do. If I walk down the stairs, I leave them behind and when I return, they’ve bored themselves out in the waiting and I can lie down without the damn things. I secretly believe they have no substance, hence the frishing away so quickquick. I have learned this technique over many years of believing they were the truth and holding on to them, thus allowing them to define me, to trip me up, to collude and to coagulate so that breakfast is always, was always, a guilt trip. To hell with that nonsense now. Here I am, dancing alone to Mr Beaujangles, in my kitchen, remembering the days when I could actually dance, catching my face in a passing mirror and seeing an old white haired woman who bears no relation to the one I know myself to be, and I rest and I chuckle. A So What, rises in me. And I like So What.

I spend the day completing a tapestry. For me, there is a story in every one. I give them away. I don’t sell. If someone identifies with the mountains, the tidal flow, the moon, the little home tucked away behind rocks, a safe place, then their story connects with mine. It was all I ever wanted and I got my dream. I am lucky. Folk say that we make our own luck and I agree to a degree but they miss the point. It is gratitude I am feeling, communicating, and the rest is just semantics. Words change, meanings change over time, over generations, and all of that is just as it is. Flow is key. Moving on with whatever comes at us, no matter how much value we put on the past of our past, means we don’t die wishing things were as they were. And I am so not doing that. Was is, not is. Can never be.

I walk inside the sheets of rain this afternoon as the light dims with two friends. We laugh in the rain, the diversity of dogs and their boundary shouts. To be honest, the only shouter was Poppy, but, thankfully, my friends were kind about her issues with any dog walking on what she considers to be her patch and her patch alone. No matter how often I tell her we do not own these lands, she is strong in her confidence, but it slows and calms quite quickly and so we walk together through lashing rain and bright fallen beech leaves coppering our path, larch needles like exclamation marks, crushed rowan berries, blood drops beneath our feet. We talk of village matters, of a strong and wonderful man who died yesterday, and, at that, we pause. This man is gone. His wife is in shock. We are not in that place. She and her children are not in free flow, but we are. We cannot change their situation but we can change ours because of their situation. We do it as we come through the kissing gate. We hold the news, together. And, in a few seconds we rejig our own lives, our own petty angst and we flow again, we flow free.