school

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Island Blog – The Fly, the Mouse, the Rat and School the Next Day

An eclectic combo, I’ll give you that. They all arrived today, slotting neatly into my log. I should, perhaps, give some background. It begins with the mouse. For decades I have dealt with mice indoors, scrabbling through the scuts of plaster behind the walls, making innapropriate homesteads in my halloween of a loft, helping themselves to lagging, which no respectful neighbour would ever consider, and diddling through and over my frypan cupboard. The last is unacceptable. However, I am no killer and that’s the tricky bit, but there is also in me a refusal against invasion. I have seen myself, in my wild pioneer dream, as a woman who would stand against invaders. They weren’t mice, of course, but big fighty men with bludgeons, no compassion and with a determination to take over the homestead, one fixed lightly down in a rickety space where wolves and bears, snakes and marauders were as regular as clockwork and the neighbours 20 miles away on horseback.

There was a housefly, no, two, on my window, and they aren’t the only ones to get stuck against glass, banging themselves into failure and refusing to be caught and freed. It’s late for them, so they are slow, but a slow fly is not slow at all. the gymnastics are impressive. I know they will die out there in the torrent of cold rain, the freeze of the night, but, if I can, I will ding about with a tea towel, catch them soft and let them go. Not so the mice. Oh, I have done, in the past, long past, humane traps and they are a laugh because unless you take the sweating and terrified mouse at least 3 miles away from your home, their home, they just return. Poison is not an option, although I tried it once when the mouse invasion was so alarming as to be overwhelming, and the way it takes them is slow and horrific. So, I set a trap in my frypan cupboard.

The first morning, I can barely look. It takes hours before I can brace my pioneer self, she who has seen dead everything, including humans in this wild place, and check. Clean, gone. I am no killer but and but again. This is my space, not yours. The next check was a little easier, the one after, ok and now it is normal. I am not immune to it, to finding a life gone, but I am easier in my skin. It will go on because they are hungry and it is winter beginnings. And I know this place. I know that creatures will come in to the warmth. I remember it when we lived wilder, on Tapselteerie, when it was normal for me, for my kids, to welcome in the coldings. We couldn’t save them, but we gave food and warmth for a while. We didn’t have rats in the house, and. I am thankful, but they were in the byre and the barns. I have only met one once and its confidence terrified me.

I was staying overnight with a schoolfriend on her parents farm. I was under 12 and not a good guest in that I had no experience of country life at that point and had yet to connect with the wild in me. In short, I was scared of it all, the confidence of my friend, the way she swung from ropes in the barn, danced among the pigs, marched confidently into a map of cows, pushing at their flanks when they growled at her, shouting words and laughter. I was put to bed in a cold room with damp sheets and the dark was immediate when the light was turned off, although I had my wee torch. I lay there, tried to sleep and it took ages. I felt something heavy move over my feet, jerked up awake, flicked on my torch and the movement stopped. Two bright eyes clocked mine. A big rat looked at me from the end of my bed, I felt it’s weight on my feet. A second, and it was gone. I yelled. People say they scream, but they don’t. They yell. Someone adult came. I wan’t to go home, I sobbed. Insisted, despite reassurances that the rat had gone. My dad came. We drove the miles home. It was almost morning. I was never asked about my trauma, only told, in a kindly way, that I was over reacting.

School on Monday was interesting.

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Island Blog – Take the Risk and Fly

The Rose Bay Willow Herb (I’m so glad my parents didn’t weigh me down with this name) is waffling, backlit with sudden sun. I’m watching it doing this waffling thing and I get it. You beautiful lot, all purple and strong and waffling down there upside of a sealoch, are stalk stuck. For all you sway, that’s the it of it for you. The next bit is a windthrip of petals and then the aftermath. I close my windows for that. A thousand piloted seeds float in. Any window open and opportunity knocks, although it doesn’t, not for the RBWH. Indoors is not a beginning. It’s more a load of sweeperoo, and even that requires a lot of dancing about with brush and dustpan and for days. But, when I stop to catch these seeds, hold them in my palm, I am brillianced by nature. These seeds, flighter than dandelions but with a similar modus operandi, can go for miles and miles. How clever is that! We stop and start at traffic lights. We queue politely (heaven help us on that nonsense). We pause before speaking. We say ‘Sorry’ way, way too often. We can float, we can, in silence.

Trouble is, we are grounded and within a thoroughly controlled environment, rules, queues, strictures, opinions, cultures, or we believe we are, and, thus we limit our lift and our fly. Of course, I realise that plants don’t have parents, nor do they go to school, nor work, and that trio can define and control us. And, we cannot fly, not like seeds, not like birds. However, I will challenge this, not in ‘realism’ but in mind belief, in dreams, in the longing of those who just know there is something more than the grounded This.

I am old. I am experientially so. I have lived a bajonkers life. still am. I see, still, an upper age control, at times domination. I see, still matriarchal and patriarchal chains suffocating. I see, still the confines of religious beliefs, the social expectation, the racial bullying. It goes on. What I would say is this, only this:-

If you have a dream, a real focus, no matter your place, your state, your anything. Take the risk and fly.

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Island Blog – Transitions in an Ordinary Life

A lovely blue sky morning it is and the wee girls are being nudged and encouraged through breakfast and into the car for school. I notice their natural resistance to a Monday morning which comes like a crashbang after the easy weekend. No deadlines, no shoes required, no hurried breakfast, no questions. I get it. I also remember my own young mother days when nobody thought that going to school was a good idea, in fact, it stunk. One shoe on, the other lost, in the dog’s bed, in the bike shed, anywhere but on the other foot. Teeth to brush? You are kidding, mum, it’s about 3 days climb to relocate the bathroom, this is Tapselteerie, remember? It was undoubtedly raining so the very thought of cycling down that track of potholes and potential deviations was an anathema. We are young and lively and want to play, not sit in that bus riding the switchback under the judgemental glances of the driver. We don’t want to sit in class to learn about the life of snails or the names of body parts or the history of a world we cannot begin to imagine. In fact, best not to imagine anything much because Mr This and Miss That are ancient and boring and quite without a head full of dragons that fly with fire, or trees that tip the clouds, and who don’t have a clue as to where all the wild things are, whereas we absolutely do.

Suddenly, they are gone, the silence a gasp as the front door closes between us. I know they will move beyond the transition, their little minds open to the next thing, as always, even though they resist. I also get that, the resistance, but in adult minds, it takes mental strength to live in the moment when all past, and imagined future, moments swarm together in a buzz of chaos. It seems to me that this is the primary work for us, to let go and to keep moving, through each uncomfortable transition, allowing it, just allowing it. When I wake, my head is already in connect mode, connected to every possible aspect of my life, present, past and imagined future. It is logical, of course, to divide and separate, I know this, but the chaos can overwhelm. Will I, should I, did I, can I? I know the past is ‘another country’, just as I know the future is a mystery. I can plan wee bits of it, such as my choice of clothing, my attitude, my next forward step, but the vast expanse of any future is beyond my control.

Perhaps, even as children, we know this. Perhaps this is both exciting and terrifying. Perhaps. Although I don’t remember how I dealt with my inner chaos as a child, I do remember loving a fantasy world, living in one as much as possible until I had to find my missing shoe on a Monday morning, eat breakfast quick and head off to the school bus. Actually, I would have done anything to lose both damn shoes, so miserably hard and uncomfortable were they, so clumpy, so hideous. I wanted fairy wings and ballet pumps and a lift up to another planet where greens were optional, where trees tipped the clouds, and where nobody wore shoes at all. Now, this morning, as I write into the silence left behind, I remind myself that what lies ahead is beyond my control. I must needs float along with it, listen, keep alert, ask questions, accept and then decide my attitude, for today brings in transition, the leaving of here and the moving into the next here, which is only ‘there’ for a few more hours. Not another country, not another state, just a few steps, a few miles, a few adjustments to my thinking, that’s all it is. Not a nothing, but an ok something, an inevitable something with opportunities for laughter and conversation, observation and fun, all nestled in the folds of this new day, this Monday.

Whatever you face today, I wish you fun and laughter, no matter the circumstances. There is always, always, someone out there whose transition is troubling, scary, alarming, terrifying, someone who could do with a smile, a ‘hallo’, a kindly gesture, a reminder that they are not alone in the chaos of an ordinary life.

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Island Blog – I’m In Charge

I light myself a candle. Today was a waiting day, one that wakes me with an inner fog. Thoughts rise but fall again before I can set them in order, unlike other days when I am the one in charge. Even in a voluminous nightie, I am in charge. Even before my teeth are brushed and my dragon breath is extinguished, I am in charge. You stand here. I’ll need to think more on you. As for you, thanks but no thanks, not today. And you…..well I have no idea where you came from, perhaps a deep bog, a sinking, stinking one. Begone! However, this morning’s thoughts just swirled like whispers around me, uncatchable, turning to air whenever I reached out for a grab. The ones I haven’t mentioned? Throttled at source. I could tell, just by their colour and smell that they would serve me no purpose.

Waiting is tough. Waiting for a bus in the rain is tough. Waiting for a baby to emerge through the intense agony is tough. But this waiting, this cancer waiting, is definitely up there with the best/worst waiting thingies. I’m not surprised my thoughts have trouble thinking me straight. I am all wonky lines and inner wobbles. Even my walk down the stairs is old-lady cautious, as if my feet might miss a step regardless of all this foot attention I’m giving them. I even count the steps for goodness sake, as if, in forgetting one, I might not arrive in the same house I left on the landing. I’m not hungry, not anything much, until, that is, I hear the chatter of little girls. It is then that I recall myself, remember who I am. I may be waiting but I can do something with it, fill it, distract myself from it, begin to see through the fog of it.

I check my phone every 30 minutes. 15, actually. Just in case the consultant or nurse has called with an Oops we made a mistake you don’t have cancer after all. I read until my eyeballs threaten to abandon ship and my head can no longer sort out the protagonists of any one of the stories, merging them together until the mesolithic Scots tumble with the Harare prisoners on death row. Not a movie I’d recommend. But that doesn’t matter, the tumble of characters, because to read is to escape and I can think of less healthy ways to do that.

We, those of us not attending our first day back at school in smart green sweatshirts and black breeks, go out to visit a farm shop a short distance away. There’s a wonderful cheese counter and we ogle the selection from Stinky Blue to Not Stinky Goat and everything in between. We sit for a panini lunch whilst Little Boots, the smallest girl not yet at school, enjoys a multi-coloured lolly, on my knee, plus multicoloured drips and multicoloured chatter. I laugh. I now look like an abstract painting. This and other little distractions distract so cleverly. It thinks me, now that my head is fog-less.

I light myself, that’s what I do, that’s what I can do, all I can do whilst I am waiting. It’s me taking charge even though I am not in charge of anything outside of me. But I am in charge of that bit, and that ‘bit’ is me, the Bit Part in a huge production called Breast Cancer. I read that actors in such huge productions spend most of their time inside a trailer, waiting to be called. Waiting and waiting and who would know it once the finished film is on screen for our pleasure? It looks complete, everyone busy all the time, as if that is how it was put together. But it wasn’t like that at all. Nor is this. I will, I know, look back one day and forget the pain of waiting, the length, breadth and depth of it. It will just be mentioned in a sentence. I had to wait. That’s all. But now look at me, all bright and cancer free and filled with my usual overload of beans! And not waiting any more, not for nobody nor nothing.

I watch the candle flicker, the flame waver and wend in the airflow I create just tapping out words. I see the glow of it inside the glass jar, the shine of the melted wax, and it smiles me. This candle may snuff out, but so will the waiting, and the treatment and the anxiety and the fear and the pain. I may be a bit wonky chops when all is said and done, but I will still be in charge, of myself anyway, and that task is not for the faint-hearted, I can tell you.

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Island Blog – Walking On

I was supposed to have my shingles jag today, but the nurse said I was too run down. I know it. So tired all the time. Part recovery from being nearly dead and the long climb back up from the mud and sludge of that Old Gripper, part fear of what may lie ahead. This is a time I could wish, as I did way back in school, for a less brilliant and inventive imagination. ‘Judith (cringe) has too much imagination’. Quote from a school report. And it wasn’t just once. It seemed to me that an imagination was something to be deeply ashamed of, something, perhaps, that might require surgery or therapy long term, at the very least. It got me into no end of scrapes, and, I might add, out of them too. An imagination is, by its very nature, flexi-intelligent, dynamic, able to work both ways on most things and in most situations, and two faced. There is the light side, the fun side and there is the dark side, the backside, the backslide. However, I am in control, mostly, of this imagination of mine, even though right now it is showing way too much sass. I suspect this is because it is also an opportunist and in the face of my looking smaller, aka, run down, it is rising above it’s pay grade. Well Hoo and Ha to that! We need to work together, I tell it, not against each other. When you show me dark, let the fear of wotwot court a dalliance with said dark, I go off you. We have worked together for decades, you and I, much as in a long term and bumpy marriage, agreed, but we did find a synergy of sorts and it benefitted us both. I got to keep the mischief and the inventive thinking and you got to keep me. Actually, I think you owe me. Without me, you would be foof in the wind.

Although I didn’t have the jag, I had the nurse, the one who flagged up a few weeks ago that I was looking like the nearly dead. She told the doctor and I had the chance to thank her, the nurse. She, Cara, has bright eyes, a beautiful and unlined face and looks about 16. She isn’t. Then I got to see the doctor to thank her for her quick and intelligent decision to send me off to hospital. She, Dr Jackie, is a lovely woman. I thanked her and we hugged. The new doctors on the island, this end of it, are a warm and welcoming couple and we are so very lucky to have them now. Actually the whole staff are so friendly, efficient and intelligent, I wonder how we islanders came to be that lucky. I am only thankful.

I came home with the damn imagination. I need distractions. Radio Four Extra is a wonderful discovery. I am knitting something. For now it is a long line of knit-ness. It entertains my fingers which is enough in small doses. I walk the wee dog but oh my, how wearily i walk, how weak I feel! I can do little and often. It’s the same with gardening jobs. A wee bit of weeding, a little pruning of the currant bush which isn’t/ wasn’t a bush but more a blanking out of the sky. It looks a bit weedy now, but I encouraged it to stop whining and to get back its mojo for next Spring, as I intend to do. I gave it a backward glance, having hefted huge long branches into the neighbours garden (she won’t notice). Stop focussing on what’s gone, I said. Look at the opportunity. I swear she quipped ‘Right back at you, lady’. Maybe I imagined that.

I feed the birds. We have swarms of sparrows here, unlike many other places, Englandshire in particular, and I have masterminded my feeders beyond the dive of our prolific sparrowhawk population. There’s a fence in the way, three wheelies and a mini. It seems to work. I watch the tidal dance, listen to the gulls screeching at the sea-eagles and hear their yipping response. It floats across the sea-loch as something unseen yet believed. I know the sea-eagles are there. I cannot see them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t there. A lesson in that, for the learning.

I fanny about with what to take when I leave this beloved home on Monday and head into the unknown. A couple of frocks, a jumper, cardy, (tweezers this time), nighties, leggings, a jacket, my purse, phone, laptop, chargers, underpinnings. How long will I be away? Will the consultation lead straight into surgery, or will there be weeks of waiting? Will I come home or stay away with my very limited clothing options? What surgery do I face? Lumpectomy (day job) or a single or double mastectomy? I don’t know yet but my imagination is already having a field day, whatever that means. Because I am high risk, many in my family having had breast cancer and with my great grandmother coming from Orkney, I may opt for those breasts to go. They fed five children and not many can say that. I thank them. Sometimes I look at them, old now, paps really, and marvel at the work they have done, the lives they have sustained. I can let them go, if that is what I and the consultant decide. To think I may leave with breasts and return with none is quite a thought. Some might say, Don’t talk that one up! I ask Why Not? I am a realist, a woman of age, a strong and vital life force and honest and open to a fault. (why is is called a fault? Does it refer to a fault line or is it a somebody’s ‘fault’? It thinks me)

I will keep writing. I will keep blogging although my arms might feel a bit dodge for a while after surgery. But we are not at that point yet. This is just the beginning. Rather exciting when you look at it that way, don’t you think? A world I have never walked in before, a newbie, wide eyed, scared, yes, but walking on. Always walking on.

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Island Blog – Space

Today the photography volunteers have been given the name of their project.  Minimalism.  I watch them wander around the reserve, deep in thought, eyes looking down, eyes looking up, looking out, thinking in.  What does minimalism mean to me?  Is it this leaf in a dustbowl, or that emerald green gecko shinning up a fat brown tree?  What do I hear while I seek my subject?  What do I feel, how do I feel?  Someone hunkers down to take a picture of an attention bell, one of those ping things that sit at reception when reception has popped out for a pee.  She places it carefully on the wide stone floor and crouches down to get it right.  I see the bell, tiny in such a lot of negative space.  From above it certainly is minimalism.  A child’s boat in a great stone ocean.  From down there, where she is, the bell becomes huge and the stone ocean goes on for ever, or, at least, until it meets the wall.

At art school we were required to work on negative space.  I hadn’t a scooby what that was, thinking it was something dodgy, the opposite of positive space, if, indeed that’s not an oxymoron. I found it extremely difficult at first, looking at what wasn’t there, the space in between the things that were.  We had to look, see, draw the spaces, not the jugs or benches or trees or parked cars.  All I could see was physical presence until, eversoslowly, just as my eyeballs threatened early closing, I got it, saw it and it was huge.

My understanding of opposites can often be This or That.  I forget there are many miles in between the two, many colours, hues, options.  Inhabiting that space is something I need to re-train my mind to work with.  A physical life requires certain choices between This and That and decisions are based on what I see, what is available, what is acceptable in any given moment.   We like routine, most of us, known quantities of things fixable and in good working order, things we use in our daily lives.  There is, after all, a time and place for everything, is there not? I want a positive space to live in, one that protects me, mostly, from myself, one that nurtures, one I can see clearly and understand.

At home, I would call those times of deep internal unrest, negative space.  Instead of really looking into that space, seeing it for what it is and allowing it just to be, I feel that I need to colour it in with my own pack of crayons.  I need to get busy, sweep the floor, cook something, change a bed, anything that gives me good grasp of the positive, the physical. What I can touch reassures me.  At least, over these things, I have control. That awful empty space back there, the one I just ran away from, the one full of unhappy thoughts and doubts and fears, well I sincerely hope that, by the time I descend the stairs, it has flown out the window.  Go pray on someone else you horrid negative space.  I’m fine now, with my pinny on and not long till lunch and the aftermath of dishes and cups to wash and dry.  When I focus on the tasks ahead of me, I can feel the calm.  There is always something to be done, after all, something that demands straightening, or mending, or wiping down, and once collected in an orderly fashion inside my mind, I am happy again. I am safe.  this life is just fine.

However, this is a life out of balance.  It must be, because the negative space is still there and it still bugs me. I don’t ask for it but it has something of import to show me.  Drawing the space in between two jugs, I began to notice the distance.  It wasn’t empty at all.  Behind the jugs I could see someone’s hand as they drew their own negative space, a corner of a cupboard, a snatch of white-scuffed blackboard, and even further back, the branch of a tree through the murky window.  It made me realize that I could look for ever into negative space and find positives, but distant positives, not too close, not mine to fix or mend or rearrange.  They were simply there.  I could fill in the gaps, complete the cupboard, the hand or the tree in my mind, but, somehow, I didn’t need to.

In order to control my mind, my thoughts, thoughts that fuel my choices of action and thoughts that will always have consequences, I need discipline, but discipline and I have never enjoyed each other’s company. I didn’t ever complete the drawing (no discipline!) because I was so pulled into the space.  I may have been given  poor marks, but what I learned about negative space back then has become a life-long fascination.  The trick is to be able to inhabit it, just as it is.  Those times of discomfort and self-doubt will still come to me.  I can fill them with stuff and noise and self pity; I can beat myself up, tear myself to shreds with my hyena teeth, or I can simply let them wash over me and move on.  I doubt that I will ever learn my way around them, never ‘complete’ my drawing, but if I just sit and let them come to me, surround me, without fear……. if I can find the courage to do that, I believe I will, at last, be able to say this is Me.

No apology.

 

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Island Blog 137 The Light Just Right

Music notes

 

 

I am excitedly working just now on new songs for recording, well,not recording yet, but more for designing and developing.  All day long I am humming little phrases, changing keys, changing words changing rythms.  Once I meet up with the Talented Two in a week or so, we will take my scribbles and mood-inspired poems and fashion music around them.  They, not I, will layer melodies and harmonies, suggest quirky add-ons that create depth and texture, colour and light.  And dark.  All I am required to do is to spend this preparation time doing what I do know how to do – put words together in a way that tells a story, that give a hint of pain or laughter, to show and not to tell it out too much, for we all like to fill in the spaces allowed us with our own feelings.  This is why some songs last forever and, to be honest, a lot of them make very little sense once we try to explain them.  A Whiter Shade of Pale was scribbled down in the back of a van in between gigs, so I am told, and, when asked what it meant, the writers just shrugged.  It’s not like schoolwork this song-writing thing, not at all.  I don’t have to show my workings, nor do I have to justify them, but what I do have to do is sing them with emotional connection as if what I am telling you is really how I feel.  I don’t write songs about Percy the Pig, or Nellie the Elephant, although that song is great to sing to grandchildren if I include all the actions.  I write about feelings.

It thinks me about doing what I do best, and not wishing I was best at something else.  At school I longed to be an athlete but I was so very far from getting beyond ‘ath’ that it would have made a whole heap of sense to do my best, loathe all of it and spend my free time writing.  The problem with writing is that the only time I found the limelight is in English Lit classes and that was providing I kept to the letter of the law concerning Good Composition.  Nowadays, it is fine to write slang, a lot of which has found its way into the Oxford Dictionnary, which is fine if it works for the piece.  It is not ok to swear, but, then, what is swearing now?  I can read words that would have had my school mistress dialling the emergency services had she ever seen such an assemblage of letters in print, let alone heard them read out in class.  The book would have magically disappeared from the Reading Shelf and parents would have been informed.

In songwriting, words can be hinted at, the front or the back of them lost in a rising instrumental.  It’s infuriating for those of us who want to cover a song and we must needs leap to Google for the lyrics, but I am encouraged by the Talented Two that it sometimes really works best that way and that my Elocution Prize might consider staying in my past.  Enunciating every word as if the whole world depended for its survival on my clear conscise rendering of a particular phrase, is, it seems, vanity of vanities.  Who gives a rip?

As I wrote my book, I let go of the Eng Lit teacher, pushed her off my shoulder and reminded her she was most probably dead and should shut up.  Although I love good prose and therefore find bad prose irritating enough to put me off the whole story, I find that I look more for a gentle sway, an easy rise of words that don’t trip me up with their brilliance, but, instead, show me an unfolding about which I am fascinated to know more.  I want to be led outside of myself and into another world and, yet, I still want that pull on my heartstrings, that connection to my own experiences, my own feelings.  When I read the tale of someone who is living through something I hope I will never live through, something that involves the loss of a child, perhaps, I will think about my own children, my love for them, my fears for them, and, in my heart, I will re-affirm my vow to them, the one I made as each one was born, a vow to protect and defend them to the death.  If I read of a world catastrophe, as a back drop to a tale of people, I will re-jig my priorities in that light.  In short, I will make changes because, through the words of another, I am changed.

I hope I can do the same with my songs.  For now, I am playing word games, reducing sentences down, questioning the need for all the adverbs and adjectives to be there at all, for what I can do, through my voice, as long as it is emtionally connected, is to pull back to indicated thoughtfulness, pain, fear, gentleness, or bring the air more forcefully across my vocal chords to show power, anger or determination.  I can leave out the paraphernalia and keep just the crystals……ones that should make it sparkle, if I get the light

just

right.

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Island Blog 130 Wild Flower

 

 

 

2014-04-18 11.28.20I know I write often about relationships, but, let’s be honest here, they are fundamental to every step we humans make.  In order to move forward in any area of our lives, we need to form them and feed them and acknowledge, within them, the parts we don’t resonate with.  We must allow each other to be who we essentially are.

Unless I meet my doppelganger, (which could throw up no end of trouble if you think about it) I am always going to have to deal with the things in you that are not in me.

As are you.

I may be loud and laugh like a donkey.  I may have an irritating habit or six.  I may bring, and undoubtedly will, into this relationship, my baggage from my own past, my own hangups about being told what to do, for example, fixed, pigeon-holed.  Or, it may be you who has spent a lifetime wanting your voice to be heard and then listened to and who is fed up with pigeons, and their holes.

When we embark on a new relationship, there is a kind of euphoria at first, if, that is, we click in a way that appears bathed in a glorious and magical light.  Then, after a little time, this wonderful light begins to pale, it has to for the true person to show their face.  We might not like this bit.  Why is that?  Because now we see beyond the mask, and we all wear them.  There are ways we wish to be seen and ways we do not wish to be seen, but it is not possible to keep that mask on for long.  Human nature is too strong for us, we are at its mercy.

What we are all seeking, is to be accepted as we are.  There are probably thousands of books on this very subject.  It’s called Agape love, as distinct from the type of love known as Eros, which is the one that comes bathed in light.  It cannot last, Eros, although it’s dashed useful as a starting gun, unless it matures into Agape.  The Greeks had many words to describe love, as do other languages.  It’s only we English speakers who have the one word and it can fankle us up something rotten as we wander through our lives.  For example, over time, love can grow weary of loving.  This is something you might say to me.  Love flickers like a candle in the winds of time, and can sometimes snuff right out.  But not Agape love, I will reply, because this love doesnt seek domination nor control.  It doesn’t ever want to make another feel small or scared or unsafe.  This love protects and encourages, even if there is no obvious point upon which we both agree, especially then.

A mother’s love for a child can be this ‘warts and all’ type, although such total acceptance is often lacking between herself and the child’s father.  And yet, didn’t they set out together to make a shared lifetime?  Of course they did.  So what is missing?  If we can allow a child to grow into an unique being, how come we work so hard to de-unique a partner?  I’m not saying we all do this, but I have found a common thread or two in the relationships I have watched and studied.

I am wondering if the starting point is outside or inside us.  If it is outside, then it must follow that we are always at the mercy of the world and its complex entanglements, a world that expects us to do or be something and someone, in order to fit, to take our place in the pecking order.  If it is inside us, then why can’t we change things?  Perhaps it’s because we don’t really want to.  Maybe we feel we have done all we can and why should we be the one to change?  If you tell me I am too over-bearing or judgemental, too quick to put you down, and you only see, before you, a person in serious need of repair, then you are obviously not going to budge.  And if I rather like whatever it is about me you don’t like, or I don’t even recognise these, so called, faults in myself, then nor am I.

If I could go back again to the early days of my adult life, not that I would want to, for a minute, I might have wished for more training on relationships and less on geography and latin. Emerging as a student with qualifications might indeed lead me into a certain area of work, presuming I could find any that is, but it doesn’t help me one bit in the art of relationship building, nor its ongoing maintenace.  If I am one of those fortunate children who was loved with an Agape love, then I am even less well-equipped, in theory, for haven’t I been allowed to be myself in any and all situations?  How on earth I am going to be able to ‘fit in’ to the shape you want me to fit into?

When I am working with school children, little ones, I can see who is confident in a goodly home love, and who isn’t, by the way the child behaves, shares, steps back, or doesn’t.  I came from a large and competitive bundle of children, and I notice how we all want to be heard, our voices rising to cap the general white noise inside a crowded house, to lift above it.  When I leave that nest, I take that need with me.  At first, you might have found it rather cute, but over time, trust me, it could well become a pain in the aspidistra, and build on itself until it becomes a ‘bad’ point, something that needs fixing, although we may not ever agree on that one.

What I have learned for certain, over many long years of relationships, is that my strength is also my weakness, and my weakness is my strength.   My excessive behaviour, is just creative energy lacking in direction, like a weed, which you may want to pull up and cast away, but which, in truth is just a wild flower in the wrong place.

 

 

 

 

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Island Blog 120 On Leadership

2013-02-14 14.43.19

It’s a funny old chestnut, Leadership.  It sounds so grand and important.  In fact, as a youngster I wanted it for myself.  Those, it appeared to me, who were given such a badge of honour, positively glowed with the warmest of light.  They were lifted above us earthly girls, fixed to the ground with our lack of leadership skills, our heavy lace-up brogues and our triple-layered (for safety) regulation greys, and they never came back down again.  I met them in corners with members of staff, or prefects, or team leaders, discussing something important in hushed tones, corners I rounded in an un-leaderly, and often late dash to the next fixture in my school diary.  They would both stand in a conspiratorial silence, one that positively burgeoned with importance, as I hurtled by, knowing two things for sure – that I would meet some disgrace for running in passageways, and that my bottom jumped around way too much inside those earthly greys.

When they said to me that they were sorry I was leaving the school because, did I realise that they were going to ask me to be Music Prefect next school year……I knew what they were up to, asking me AFTER I had announced with barely concealed joy, that I had now collected my 7 O Levels and was abandoning my brogues for ever.  If I had said……Oh, ok then, I will stay, they would all have fainted clean away and I would have finally become a leader, one they may well have regretted inviting into a corner.

A few minutes later, as a newly engaged farmer’s wife-to-be, I pondered leadership once more.  This farmer with whom I was about to spend the rest of my life, needed some serious leadership.  For a start, he didn’t want to be led at all and most certainly not by me.  Well, ok, I can be patient.  After all, look at how he does what his mummy says, albeit now and then, but ‘now and then’ looked promising to an over-zealous young woman (child, really) with a fat sapphire on her forever finger and plans already laid out in the loft of her mind.  He argued with every plan I brought forward for discussion.  He made all the ‘big’ decisions with automonic confidence. He dropped his clothes on the floor, the ones he deemed ready for washing, which was usually two weeks later than my deeming.   He wore white crimpolene flares.  There was a lot of work to be done.

Leadership isn’t nagging.  Ok, ok, so what is leadership then and why can’t I lead him?

Answer……he doesn’t want it and, listen girlie, he is as determined as you on this matter.

Once this sank in, was resisted vehemently, caused endless rows and overly slammed doors, removal of priveleges and absolutely no cake for tea never mind the honey, I remember falling into a black depression.  My mother, who also tried to lead my dad, who also had no intention of being led, had the advantage.  Dad was away all week so that she could lead all five of us, the neighbours, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker to her heart’s delight.  Then, when Dad came home at weekends, she could probably just about manage to shelve her leaderly urges for two days until she popped him once more on a plane to Dubai or Italy or Africa or wherever his veterinary consultant skills were currently in demand.  But my husband was always at home rejecting leadership, so I had to think sideways.

43 years later I have a crick in my neck and still no husband running along behind.  I ask myself, is that what I want?  And the answer (quick learner, me) is absolutely not.  What I want is actually just to lead myself, not to lead, and not to be led, although that bit is very much according to my current mood swing.  There are times, many times, when I do want him to lead me, and love the feeling of safety and protection his leadership brings.  When it goes wrong are those times I feel controlled, which is, of course, the same for him.  My tutting over dropped clothes, or whatever, serves only to make him feel controlled, and therefore to resist.

Aha…….now we are getting somewhere!

So, if I can’t control him and don’t want him to control me, and he feels the same, why does this need to lead still raise it’s discordant cry?  Because dear sweet daft woman, it is yourself you need to lead.

Well how can I lead me?  I am me and me is me and that’s three of us already.

Yes, and you can lead all of them, all the mees, as much as you like, to your hearts desire, knock yourself out!

Thinking, reflecting on this bonkers truth, opens many doors to me, to all mees present.  If, in an argument, I only consider my own voice and the content of my retorts, my behaviour, I am in control.  I am leading. I don’t need to lead the other (the one who is so obviously wrong) in this situation.  I only have to lead myself.

Yes, but, will you listen to what he is saying!  It’s complete tripe and EVERYONE would ALWAYS agree that he NEVER gets it.

Hmmm……so many absolutes.  But life and love isn’t about who is wrong or right, always or never.  It isn’t about what happened in the past and the past is only a minute behind me.  It is about leadership of myself, and if I can get that right, after a few, or many clumsy crashings through the thorn and thicket of life, then I just may find, to my eye-wide surprise that someone is following on behind.

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Island Blog 74 – Spontaneous Adventures

The Boat House

 

I rarely plan adventures.  They just happen to me, swooping round corners and whopping me in the eyeballs.

Here I am !  Look at me!

And there it is, the adventure, full frontal and blocking my path.

I could, of course I could, step around it.  I could cite a whole gamut of plausible and dull reasons why I can’t take this adventure by the hand and let it lead me astray; like it’s nearly lunchtime for instance, or I must catch this ‘dry’ for a load of wet sheets, or it’s only Wednesday and nobody adventures on a Wednesday.

But, I say, and but again, the best times I have had in my bonkers life have been spontaneous adventures, when logic is wheeched over the fence leaving ample room for imagination and emotion to fill the inner void.  Then, and only then, does the adrenaline fizz like bubbles in my veins and my head feel light as goose down. I never get that fizz hanging out the sheets.

 

Yesterday we were planning to turn left.  The day had arrived in its customary shapeless grey but as we walked the little girls through the woods that climbed into the sky, we noticed a patch or two of blue.  Avoiding as best we could, the manic desire to search for more, we found a bridge with fast-running peaty mountain water and looked down to play Pooh Sticks.  We went under the bridge and sloshed over the slippy rocks, and climbed up the banks till our knees were brown as caramel and we were dizzy with giggles.  When we looked up again the day had shucked off the shapeless grey and the sky smiled blue and gold and warm.

 

So, instead of turning left for home, a sensible lunch preparation and an even more sensible change of trews and wellies, wet on the inside, (overly enthusiastic Pooh Stickery), we turned right and headed up and over the hill on the skinny track that first laid itself down, hundreds of years ago, beneath the feet of animals.  We turned up the tunes and sang our way up and down again, stopping only to remove a jumper or to admire the view or to encourage a mother and lamb to step onto the verge.  We passed by the little school shed with its beach hut stripes (The Square Rainbow) and turned down the track to where the little ferry would take us over to lunch. We pulled back the slide to reveal the red square, and the little boat cast off it’s moorings and began to move towards us.

 

Lunch, as I have said before, is a really delicious experience at the Boat House.  The welcome is warm and gentle, the food superbly prepared and presented.  We sat outside, watching the seabirds, and eating fresh prawns and I don’t mean those piddling shrimps most people understand to be prawns.  I mean island prawns, big and meaty and you only need four to be quite filled up.  The bread was straight from the baking oven with a lovely crust, the salad crisp and fresh and the dressing delicious.  But, it is not just the food that makes this place, run by Becky and Emma, so very good.  It’s the light in their eyes, the passion and enthusiasm for their business, their island welcome, their no-fuss-about-anything attitude.  They think outside the box.  They don’t say NO.  In fact, there is not a single NO visible on the island – such a joy to see in a world where NO is the most overly used word in all public places.

 

On the way home over the hill, past the Square Rainbow, we stopped to buy fresh strawberries from a roadside stall with an honesty box.  It was the last bag and as we put our money in the little till, and I saw the amount of cash already there, I thought…. how wonderful it is to adventure, to take risks, whether it be leaving an honesty box by the roadside, or opening a restaurant on a tiny little island or simply by turning right instead of left.