Song

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Island Blog – But the Brave

I’m listening to a song that a famous someone is completely turning into a complete personal indulgence, but I am sat sitting as they say and so I, not you, am going through the excrutiate. I do wonder why those who once were so brilliant, return obviously compromised. It’s a Judy Collins number and she, for certain, was the only one to sing her songs. Moving on. Where was I?

Today felt like a bit of a sladge, my word. It’s sludge with an A and that’s a bit of an uplift in itself, A being the firstborn, the Alpha. I rose, ate, sorted, cleared a thing or two, brought in wood, watched the moon the cantankerous madam slip behind the hills. I washed up, prepped for my trip into town (it isn’t a town btw) which takes many manoeuvres and swingtwiddles to get through because it’s single track and that whole single track is always compromised by the Parkings. The Parkings on this island almost define us, or they do in the summer months, mostly because there are none. This is due to the crap knowledge of Parking. I have known some who take over too much for their parking thing and then head off for the day. Often. I could have got two minis in there. Two locals.

Back to the point. A sladge, yes I said that already. I tramped in the rain, I did, and the waterproof coat failed me. I could feel the sky invading my skin. I waited for my mini to be fixed, dripping and cold. I had gone to no shops and why was that? My damp tramp sladge. I admit. The shops are alight and bright and welcoming. Oh. so it’s me and my self pity, my angst and sladge? what happened to the frolics in me, the wild and inspire, the fun, the mischief? Good question. It seems that we have learning, And we have turnaround. Oh we can’t do anything much now, to save the world, the ones we love but we can do something for ourselves and more for the young who want to know, who are listening, and there’s another think. Whom of us have been honest with our own children? When have we sat to talk with an emerging adult and hung our heads, opened our hands, admitted we have no idea, being completely vulnerable? Not many but the Brave.

That’s me. And you.

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Island Blog – Fog Horn, Wren Song and Ellie

Something woke me at 5. It was just light. I could see this ‘just light’ sneaking around my blackout curtains, the wrong light, the too early light. Just before I swore I heard the sound again, a low growly sound, long and breathy. A foghorn, a warning to mariners, although I doubt any of them needed such a warning. The landscape was erased and at sea that is very upsetticating indeed. I remembered, as I wheeched back the blackouts and as my eyes landed on absolutely nothing at all beyond the fallen over daisy-like blooms in my immediate garden, those times when fog had descended on a lone yacht on its way from somewhere to somewhere else. Very scary. The sea is still bulky and yawling beneath the boat, the rocks are still there, hopefully not ‘very’ there, the sky, if we could have seen it, is still there, but the way ahead is a complete blank. Even radar and the other whatnots that tell you where you are have drunk too much, or so it seems as their dials shimmy about between all quarts of the compass. Due north has gone on holiday. I just went below and cooked something at such times in order to halt my thinks. Thinks out there in the middle of an ocean you were watching like a hawk yesterday, one you could track, every wink and every malevolent plan at its inception noticed and addressed, and which now has laughed itself into invisibility, will create a negative spiral in the mind of the most experienced of mariners.

I haven’t heard the foghorn up here for a long time, although I did hear it often down south where the sea was crabbit and contained and it must be tough being a sea when you want to be an ocean, so I get it, the crabbit thing. But here the Atlantic has free flow for thousands of sea miles or kilometres and holds in her grasp depths nobody has every plummeted. Nonetheless, she fogged us up this morning, creating a strange white-light, the clouds following her lead and lazily hanging about all day like bored students. There was no windy mother/father/tutor to tell them to move on.

Back to 5 am and the waking thing. I came downstairs. I always know when sleep has left me and there’s no hanging on for more, made coffee, sat watching the fog. As the morning began to yawn and lift, I heard wren song, so bright, so clear, so pure that it halted me. It sounded so close and so confusing. The blackbird is the first bird, isn’t it? Why is a wren awake this early? The song was so near. I knew all my windows were open for the heat, but still……

She sang again. I turned, slowly. She was perched on a chair behind me. I went rigid. She paused, bobbed, looked right into my eyes. I smiled. Ok, I almost whispered. (Can you deafen a wren?) I rose as if I was in slomo, moved to close the 3 doors into the house and turned back to open the two garden doors, stood back, watched the battering flapping against windows, waited. With a frrrup of wings, she found her way out. She must have been inside all night, so quiet as I drank (there’s no such word btw) my coffee at 0500. All day in my work, in the crazy of visitors, lunches, clearing, providing, protecting each other, I remembered the wren and the fog whilst I thought of one young brave beautiful wren heading into what seems like fog, for now.

It will clear brave wee wren. You have wings, remember? And no fog will ever stop you.

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Island Blog – Trailblazing

Anything that risks showing up whilst other things hold back for more clement weather have my deepest respect. They are showing courage and bravery, risk takers, future makers, trailblazers. ‘Anyone’ who does the same thinks me samely. I thrill to witness the braves. At times, I may have been such a brave, perhaps. As I ‘ink’ my thoughts, I long to cut the ribbon of correctness, and I do, but with caution, because the world is a heavy old judge and everyone listens to him, or her, or so it seems/seemed. I think of song lyrics, of poets, of writers who, in their time, were dismissed and banished, and, yet now we elevate them into an almost saintly status. What they took was a risk. What they said confronted the acceptable, particularly in the UK where class division appeared solid and impermeable and for generations over generations. I smile when I hear the echo of my past generation, sniggering at people from America, as it was called in my day, a country which had no class system and thought it laughable. Actually, most of us here did too, but we never had the brave to challenge the nonsense of it, and, perhaps, for it’s time, it had a place.

Today I met three bumble bees, always the first, these glorious and singular bumblers. They dip into the early blooms, thrumming with hopeful nectar, longing for pollination, and they will get it from these trailblazers. Barrel-bodied, humming like a C-130 Hercules, without a belly full of bombs, they swing crazy , bumping into me, into the window, but when they land on a primrose, a perfect gentle landing. I marvel.

I consider bumbling. With focus, without focus? It thinks me. The bees know nothing but focus. They rise from a dawn of frost and minus, and the minute Father Sun lifts his lazy butt out of bed, they fly. I think about focus. I am bumbling these after radiotherapy days, and may well do so for some weeks, but do I have focus? It’s an ugly word in my personal opinion, for such an important thing, and that thinks me more, because it seems that the speak of a word and the look of a word often don’t match at all.

I am bumbling. The radiotherapy is tireding and the zap map area, stings. I know that this will pass. I do what I need to do, want to do in the light of this new thing in my life. I rest, a lot. Sometimes i am in and out of bed for bits and pieces of the day so much that the concept of a day makes little sense, if any at all. I hoover, a bit, sort things, a bit, clean things, a bit and there’s another thing……what does ‘a bit’ tell me? Much.

It tells me that a bit is often more than enough. That rising through the frost of something is more than enough. That being one of those herculean bumble bees is exactly what I am. I buzz at that.

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Island Blog – Revenance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us rise. We are revenants.

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Island Blog – There is no Silence

I walk after the rain and into the silence. But it isn’t silent at all, not once I move further in, because, although the pitter and the patter has stopped, there is an aftermath and that is where I am, me and my wee dog on an empty track, which also isn’t empty. How strange it is to discover a new depth of understanding, new ears for listening, new eyes for seeing, but only when a curious person moves deeper into an experience. At first sight, on first hearing, something is an absolute. It has stopped raining. There is quiet out there. The track is empty of people, there is just me here. Then the absolute begins to dissolve, to reshape, to sharpen my wits and my awareness, becoming something unending, evolving and wide open to change. Within this dissolving absolute, I move on, wide-eyed, open eared, listening, looking, feeling, using all my senses. I am not powerful here, not the only ‘It’ in the situation, just a small part of something magical.

A drip falls on my head, a fat drip, one that has gathered other drips into its belly whilst hanging from a leaf, one I didn’t notice at all, what with that massive canopy above me. It is heavy, a kerplunk of a thing. It lands like timpani on the sound box of my skull, a beat, just one. I feel it break, travel down my neck, a tiny river, down and down until the small of my back tingles and I shudder. It is warm now, courtesy of my faithful skin cover, and it disappears into the cotton of my knickers and is no more. But I felt it, I noticed it and we, for just a moment or two, were together on this wander. The rain has left rivulets along the track, tiny lifted ridges awaiting a squash from heavy boots. Beetles wander, indigo blue and quite unable to remain upright, it seems. I right a few. Puddles reflect the lowering sky, the complication of clouds, stratus, cumulous, thisicus and. thatitcus, the nauties not visible and I long to see the nauties. High, they fly, way way up there, but this sky, this fluff of cloud mates are busy taking the stage for now. The sun peeks through in a spreadlight, slices of glare, pushing through the skinny fluff, determined to shine, much like me.

The floor of the fairy woods are dry, the ground bouncy beneath my feet. Mosses, wild green, almost luminous, abound in the dark which isn’t dark once you walk into it, and I do. I pause and look around. How many people over hundreds of years have paused here, right here, with a story to tell, a heart full of joy or pain, a thousand questions unasked, unanswered? How many decision made and what was the aftermath, how wide the ripples? What trysts were sealed, what lives begun or ended on this beautiful Tapselteerie land? I will never know, nor does it matter. T’is enough to wonder.

Lont-tailed tits work the trees way above me. A heron flaps lazily overhead and a sea-eagle yips from far across the loch, yelling abuse at an irritation of gulls. Wild grasses tip into seed, no less beautiful in their dying. A single hind across the sealoch mounts a rock in order to browse the leaves of a tree whilst her faun curls snugly inside a bed of bracken. The wind is soft on my skin, the cloud-sun warming to my bones, the birdsong elevated after the rain. There is no silence in nature, only a shapeshift, for one who is alert and aware. And, in the melee of a human life with its troubles and wotwots, nature keeps a conversation going, one soft voiced, uplifting and always ready for whatever comes.

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Island Blog – There’s something about ‘dead.’

When someone dies you might think, well, that’s that, he or she is gone. I’ll be fine. I am sensible, practical la la la. However, I am discovering that this is not the truth at all. Yes, the person is dead and gone and I am not fine at all, or wasn’t fine at all for a long while. However, something comes alive from that death and it grows and thrives in so many unexpected ways. Beyond the initial shock come a swingle of emotions and they can last for as long as they last. Anger, despair, denial, acceptance, to name but a few and each one of these can burst into life within a single day leaving us exhausted, confused, beaten up. It isn’t possible for anyone outside of bereavement to fully understand, let alone feel these emotions. All they can do is to stay quiet, give no advice at all and to simply walk beside us as we explode into the sky or melt into a cold and dirty puddle on the ground.

But this ‘alive’ thing. What do I mean? I think the best way to describe myself is through imagery. Imagine, if you will, a desolate landscape, one that didn’t appear politely and over time but more as the result of a nuclear explosion. One moment I looked out on trees, flowers, seasons, skychange. I sat by running water, heard its song, watched birds fly overhead, geese migrating, sun rise and sunset. I was complacent in this, expecting my world to look this way every time I chose to look out of my window. I knew, even from behind closed curtains, the promise of a morning. Rain, wind, soft warm air, still waters or the spit and roar of wildflow over rocks. Then in just a single moment, all is desolation, all is grey and empty. I see no green, no landscape, no lift of hill nor fall of valley. The ground is flat and without character, without balance.

Over time I come to accept this new view from my windows. Each day is the same as the one before and here flickers the first flame of ‘alive’. I can see the little spark, watch that spark grow into warming fire. I reach my hands to it. There isn’t much warmth to be honest, but it is the first lift of orange I have seen in this grey nothing and I am keen to fan it into something more. Although the outside shows me same old, inside something is keen to live and I recognise it as the human spirit. I feel a lift in my heart even though all that I ever knew is gone now, and forever. But I am still here and the me in me has no intention of turning grey and flat, it seems. I rise and dress in colours. I decide to cook something delicious. I turn up the tunes and jig a bit around the kitchen. Each time I begin something I can feel the inner flames lift as a new breeze tickles them higher. Each time I begin something I am adding kindling to the fire. I am tending myself. I am saying that, even though the outside of me may stay grey and flat for some time to come, I am the fire of my future and the more I tend the alive in me, the more I realise that this need for living warmth came directly from a death. When the dead one wasn’t dead, I was as complacent as one expecting to see the same world outside my windows as I did yesterday, and all my complacent yesterdays. I took it all for granted without a question in my mouth. Now I have a zillion questions all flying out into the empty rooms like trapped birds. I open the window to set them free. One by one, they fly and as they do, as I busy myself with being alive, I glance out. There is colour, I see it, Look, over there! And there, and there. The grey is beginning to live again. As am I. Although the landscape will never look as it once did, I know now that this blank canvas is aching for me to get out there with my paint and my colours. I have no idea where to begin but that doesn’t matter anymore. If ‘dead’ is going to have any significant impact on me then let it be this inner, cleansing, warming fire of Very Much Alive.

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Island Blog- Rule of Thumb

The dawn turned the far hills blood red. Although Father Sun rises behind my home, he makes his presence known in casts of colour, short-lived but marvellous to see. The sky, flat and brushed with Payne’s grey, Rose Madder and Ultramarine looks like it is unsure about what to do next. Threatened storms may roar around us as they often do, we who stick out into the Atlantic like a determined finger, independent of any weather forecast. It thinks me.

In a few days I will have been married for 48 years. We both will. A lot of what happened over those years were not as I had dreamt, nor planned. My ideal of a marriage is not so unusual. White knight, independence, the freedom to make my own choices, take my own actions, sing my own song and all under the loving and approving smile of a benign king. I would share the throne, choose my own frocks, laugh loudly when I wanted, speak out my truth and be heard. I’m not saying this never happened because it did, but where I thought this would be a rule of thumb, I found, at times, that I was under said thumb and unable to rise to my full stature.

Did it damage me, this thumb thing? It did not. Instead I have learned that on many of those remembered and unremembered times, I had a lesson to learn. I would have been, and can still be, too quick to respond, to act, to speak out. My vivid and often unrealistic imagination could have launched me into trouble without that thumb. I thank the thumb owner, that’s what I do, now that I can look back and join up the dots. I married a man 10 years my senior for a very good reason, even though I didn’t do so consciously. Somehow, my sub conscious knew what was best for me, what or who would keep me safe from danger, from myself.

I would never, even in my wildest dreams, have lived the live I have lived, the one I shared with my king. I would never have known the exciting highs nor experienced the awful lows without him and his thumb. In balance, and this is where the dot joining comes in, my life, our life together has been extraordinary from the beginning and all the way up to the now. When I recall our adventures, the spontaneity of them, the sudden Let’s Go thing, the way we led our children into independent thought, creative action, kindness towards all living people and things; the way we laughed and partied, invited and welcomed, shared and made ourselves known in the work we collectively undertook. The way we steadfastly marched on through bad times, poor times, times when our inventive strengths pulled us through. And the way we made a difference, made memories that so many others share and still remember with fondness and a chuckle.

It was never plain sailing, not for either of us. I doubt that marriage ever is, for anyone. But, to survive and thrive through such a vast ocean of years is to have made many sail corrections. Thousands. Millions. And we have, and we still are making those corrections, working with the winds of time, rising over and over again, no matter how big the waves, how fickle the chop, how far away the next peaceful harbour.

I feel honoured and proud. We did it. We got through. And we are still here, still breathing, still sailing towards a new horizon. Together.

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Island Blog – The Overstory

I walked yesterday among the trees in the Fairy wood. I barely glanced up into her leafless arms nor stopped to touch the bark of the tallest Fir, nor paused to consider the tangle of roots thrust into visibility by endless erosive rains; roots as thick as my arm, conifer fingers, gnarled and scarred over hundreds of years by hundreds of human boots, marching boots, tramping across the overstory with little enough thought. I didn’t look, nor see, nor stop to garner soft peace from the whispers of these gentle and protecting giants. I just took my place in the march. I didn’t pause to consider over what I did this marching thing. I just wanted to get back out of the nipping wind and into the warm.

All evening, staring out at the dark, I considered. The understory thinks me. What brilliant planning, synergy and sharing goes on down there, in a deeper darkness that Night could ever bring? In a clutter wood, where new springlings struggle towards that wee patch of sky, of sun to hear the stories carried on the backs of the winds that dash across this rocky island from all points on the compass, how can life go on? Is there a finite of trees within the human boundaries of this wood? And how do they know not to crowd themselves out of sunlight, water, food – to leap across the track to where that fallen beech has created, in its final death cry, a whole rack of gentle space just asking for a friend. And not only space, for in its dying, in its soft slow submissive return to the earth, this giant is preparing magical layers of nourishment for that seedling to grow strong and straight-backed.

Roots will be under my feet even on this track wide enough for a whacking great lorry. Roots don’t bother with our boundaries and it isn’t just that. I think they conjoin, I know they do, merging and melding together for the greater good, the good of the wood, of the family. Unlike us, separation is not their main thing, not a thing at all. Unlike us, they do not judge by species, sex, type, shape or achievement. They care not what colour your leaves might be, nor if those leaves are bigger than their own. Like us, they need each other. Like us they sing better in a choir, a unison of voices rising into the sky sending harmony, melody and rhythm out to warm a listening heart. They know it. We are only learning.

Life is lived in the overstory. Although the underneath matters a great deal, it is easily hidden from the world. I can do this as well as anyone. I can slap on my smile and pretend just like you do. And there is no wrong in that, unless, unless, either of us forget our tap root and that of others with whom we share our life. The good news about tap roots is that, like the trees, they grow in silence, whether we pay them attention or not. As they grow in the silent darkness of our hearts and souls they find other roots. This meeting is not confrontational, nor constrained by fear but a vulnerable reaching, meeting, greeting; a gentle slow winding together of fingers, a melding perhaps, or a share of time before moving on. We can learn from that time of open curiosity, the lack of fear, the acceptance of another life doing its very best to grow and to grow right.

Today, when I walk beneath those same trees I will be witted-up and open. I never tire of the woods and have walked through and around them for almost five decades but sometimes, like yesterday, my overstory is so shouty that I forget where I am and thus I miss the nourishment on offer beneath those ancient wise giants. I miss the startling gasp of star moss on a rotting trunk, the shelf fungi holding on even as its host crumbles away, the rain-betrayed spider webs cast between a spindle of branches, long since empty of life. I miss the patchwork of sky, the squelch of peat under my boots, that sudden realisation of the understory, always working, always growing, in gentle silence. Today I will see it all, hear the voices of the wood and they will bring me calm and a real smile, no pretend.

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Island Blog – Wildsong

We have a January Hooligan blowing around us today. The gusts are enough to throw a girl against things, or people and I am overly aware of the ancient Scots pines behind this old stone cottage, waving, as they are, like parents at a kids sports day, only with the whole trunk falling menace thing, unlike parents. Who knows how deep the roots go? I can see them lifting above the grass, the thin layer of grass covering the rocks, big strong looking roots the width of my arm. All very fine, you might think, solid and fixed and probably so for many decades, but these winds are real hooligans, gusting enough to blow a whole ferry off course and to stir up massive waves in the bit between us and the solid hen of a mainland. Nature is our mistress out here on this brave soldier of a rock and we are more couried in, by a long chalk, than those islands in the Outer Hebrides, the ones where only gannets fly and then with difficulty. Ideas and stories up there in the blast of Nature’s ferocity must struggle to keep in line. Not surprising, is it, that old tales morph and change and become as potent as a drug in the telling and the re-telling. This happened once to someone. Then it happened in perpetuity to a generation and please add the lifeboat and the bagpipes and that wispy maiden ghost who still haunts the basalt and gannet flying shoreline. Add a fishtail and bring in a song and before you know it, Sirens are doing their work. It is as it has always been. Wind, water, wide skies, fickle moonshifts, lonely people and no electricity will stir up a right drama before you know it and nobody can pin it down. As soon as it is written, it changes, it shape shifts, becomes another creature altogether in another set of natural unnaturals.

I watch a silken ribbon of gulls fly through the narrows, away from the rise of what will be a full moon soon enough. Last night, she, the moon was all wonky chops, soft around the edges, not gibbous, wrong time for that, but firming up as she always does for the big show. The clouds are running from the hounds of hell and nowhere in the sky is there peace. The damp patches make swirly patterns of amber across my ceilings and the windows luff and suck their way through the nights. I remember, once, at Tapselteerie, when an old huge window luffed and sucked and blew into the garden in the midst of a dark winter night, leaving us fluttering along with our bedding and ornaments and grabbing the curtains into the wild where they cracked against the frame, heavy with skywater until I cut them free with a kitchen knife. I have no idea where they ended up.

Tonight may send a power cut. These dottery poles stuck into the rock do not grow roots. There are hillsides here that defy any pole affixment. And, yet, affixed they are, like soldiers across a wildscape, confident enough most of the year, barring January, to stand tall, giving buzzards a better view and the chance to realign a confluence of feathers. They are marks for fishermen, for sailors, not that any sailor in his right mind would be out in this. It thinks me.

The gale, just now, shrieking and moaning around the house is in E Minor. Of course, that will change, and I clock every change in key throughout the night. Last night, I barely slept. The key changes awaken me, as does the shift in the wind as she flexes her muscles, happy to be free and loud and in control. A bit like me on the dance floor, which is what she is as she takes over, demands the super trooper light on her alone and makes the most of that limelight. We whispering mortals, all in bed holding our books and pulling the duvet right up tight, are nothing compared to her and she knows it. The gulls knew it, as I watched them ribbon with her, making her beautiful, defining her as she whiplashed by, exuberant and utterly wild. They were not stupid enough to fly against her, not like we do, out on our walk with the dog, pushing into her motherly breast, her fire, her E minor. You cannot, will never, win against a strong mother, and, yet, we try because the paths we can walk are not nature’s paths. They no longer follow ley lines but go where it is convenient for us to manage a covering of ground. When we lived at Tapselteerie, we honoured Ley lines. These are the lines that wild animals walk and have walked for generations. In honouring these ‘walkways’ we didn’t upset the natural balance. New owners came in with fences and I recall gasping out loud as I saw a ley line fenced off. I couldn’t believe my eyes, wanted to scream, to cry out, to say something, but those people would have laughed me out. So, I said nothing. But, one day……..

As I walked the small dog around the fences (to keep out the deer, which nobody can ever do here btw) it was the darkling time. That cusp of still when day gives in to night, but not quite yet. The sky was full of gulls and divers and blackbirds out way too late. I heard a tawny owl cranking up her vocal cords, could see her eyes black bright somewhere inside the woods, sense her hunger. I could feel mice hunker down, sense the exciting tension around me. The little dog wasn’t looking, but I was. A fine young stag startled right beside me, on a bluff. He stopped. I stopped. We looked at each other. Behind him, as my eyes acclimatised, stood four hinds, equally disturbed. Nothing moved, not even the dog, for what felt like a month. Then, suddenly, the fine young stag took off, across the path I challenged and, in doing so, took down the deer fence that blocked the old ley line. His hinds followed and to my amazement the small yappy dog said not one word. She just watched. it was a historic moment, that time when Nature, all wild and fiery eyed said No. And No it was, and is still.

E minor is fine for me, if that is what Nature wants to sing just now. To be honest, I would love to be as flexible in my key shifts as she. All I can do, as a wee wummin is to let my fingers flow over the keyboard, to listen to music long written down by those who had the gift of Natural Connection and who captured what they could when they could, and to love every lift into the wild.

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Island Blog – Hope for Change

There’s a hum I hum when things infuriate or frustrate me, when I meet a bump in the road. It, the hum, begins in upper case and probably in B minor, my favourite key and the one that fits best between clenched teeth. These bumps in the road are not just there for me, but for all of us at times. Of course, there can be no actual bumps inside this house because, if there were, himself would be tipped, all ungainly, from his wheelchair and then I would be tasked with the job of lifting him up. Neither of us want that. Once he is down there, gazing at the cobwebs, the seat of the wheelchair is as far away as base camp, Everest, or it looks like that to me. So, no bumps allowed.

However, actual bumps are not what I’m talking about. I mean bumps, as in ‘stops’ in the running of a life; things that go wrong without asking if it’s ok to go wrong. They could be little things or huge things, but, either way, they alter facts. Life herself makes a subtle shift in a new direction and it is easy to get left behind as she turns away. Standing by the roadside is not taking anyone anywhere, so we are expected to accept this shift and to turn with Life. We can do this in B minor, with clenched teeth, or we can take on the major key and loosen our jaw. I am actually sick to death of loosening mine. I have done it a zillion times and will, inevitably, be required to do another zillion times before the fat lady sings the whole flipping song. But, being sick to death of this required repair work on my attitude is not all that helpful. I get indigestion, for starters, and then cross and then crabby and before I know it, the bump has become a Monroe, one I will really struggle to climb.

Rebecca Solnit (another favourite) said that ‘Change comes, not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love and commitment.’ And I believe her, however fed up I may get with all these acts of courage, love and commitment, required daily. I may be an official unpaid carer but so is everyone else. If we don’t care, we might as well walk into the sea with stones in our pockets, for life has no meaning at all. The danger in our country now, perhaps across the world, is apathy, not caring, giving up, shrugging at the gift of Life and making no effort to engage with our fellow humans. With Christmas coming, many are thinking of others in a wonderful caring way, but that mustn’t stop come January. If, like me, the opportunity to improve my attitude comes at you daily, hourly, minute by minute, then we are the lucky ones, for we have no choice in the matter. We cannot be outfoxed by a bump in the road. I have learned and still am learning that I can make or break a situation with my attitude. I can make someone smile, or make someone cry. I can lift and encourage or cut down and break. That power is immense and we all have it. The choice is down to us. We may not be able to predict a new bump in the road but if we have decided not to make this broken world any worse than it already is, we can find our way around the bumps with laughter in our eyes and loving care in our hearts.

That way lies hope, change and the first few lines of a new song, one we can all sing together.