stags

I walk out, barefoot, onto the morning grass, feel the cool bite of it, the ice chill thrill up my legs. It’s early morning and the birds already line the staves, making what sounds like the beginning of a piece of music. I’m coming, I tell them, armed as I am with seed, with hemispheres of nourishing fat. I watch the sun lift from his eastern bed, the clouds turning fringe-pink, the blue mountain defined as if by a black marker. I see late bats scoot through the dawn, a pair of early ravens cawk overhead, a five of Brent geese loop around to land with a scoosh of bright white spume into the sea-loch. An ordinary morning, for me at least.

As the sun lifts higher and the cumulus resolves into cotton wool, I see the beech trees yellow into gold. The sky is stratus with high wind, but down here we are calm. It isn’t often like this. Mornings like these just beg to engage with us, beg us not to waste a single moment at the controlling end of a hoover because the birds are waiting for an audience, the puddles slack and dull and just longing for a jumping foot to cause exciting chaos. Do we ever think of that? Do we understand our own importance in the jungle of nature, that a path wants to be walked along, a sky craves our attention, a bird wants to be heard and not just by another bird?

I hear the stags roar across the hillsides, not visible to me but their voices are, that fight for dominance, for life itself. I hear the rally cars out there, the roar of them, the lights, the speed as they take the island roads by storm. I hear voices in the village shop, the words flying up from somewhere in between fresh veg and chilled goods, the lilt of a conversation, the murmur of loneliness from a single shopper reading his list out loud. Are you lonely? Are you alone? Two very different questions. I wish a rally driver the very best of luck tonight and he smiles as wide as a whole country. Thank you! he says. What number is your car? I ask, having heard it roar past my door, all throaty as an old whisky drinking rock singer, a few times over the past few days. It’s bright blue and covered in stickers and he, the driver, is young and full of spiritful life. I know nothing of him but I do know his smile and his response and that what I suddenly said meant something to him. We all need to be heard.

Before each rain shower, and there are always those, I watch the fall streaks, the virga , and I marvel. As they dance across the sea-loch like ethereal ghost dancers, I wonder how many people missed seeing them; on the way to work, dealing with recalcitrant children, caught up in the gazillion immediates of an ordinary life. It thinks me. If any didactic had ‘encouraged’ me to take time out, as a young mum, to really see, no, to REALLY see, the wonders of the great Out There, I would have whacked them in the chops. I would have screamed ‘ Can’t you see how impossible my life is right now!’ And that scream never deserved a question mark.

So, there is something about being older, about having the time and the head space to connect with something greater than myself. Another thing about being older is this, and I quote from Oscar Wilde, even though he says it with more drama than I might :-

‘The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old, but that one is young.’

And I say Amen to that.

I can smell the frost as I awaken, even through the dark. It slips through the open window and tingles my nose. It is calm out there, no wind, no sounds of an earthly indigestion. I burrow into my warm duvet and listen, but not for long as I am always curious to open up a new morning, to invite it in and to marvel as my eyes widen at the beauty of it. Stags, baleful autumn moaners, challenge each other from somewhere deep inside the woods on the other side of the sea-loch, one that is quiet and settled. Mistwater sprites dance across its surface, lifting into the air before disappearing altogether and the grass yonder is almost white, sparkling crystals, unearthly.

Ice clouds pink in response to the sunrise whilst Ben Mhor rises into the sky, one that promises a clear sunshine day. Later, when the frost has succumbed to the burn of it, I will open the doors and remove a layer or two, to feel the warmth against my bare skin. These are glorious autumn days and I will love them for each of their minutes, knowing they will not last, as nothing ever does.

As each season gives way to the next, I feel a discomfort at first. It seems we go from skin out to skin in or the other way around. A thick cardigan becomes an old friend even if I haven’t given it a second glance for months. I feel the shiver of autumn or the rise of warmth in spring and feel irritated. Suddenly, it seems to me, more clothes or less are required and here was I pulling out the familiar, one that no longer cooperates with the weather. Well damnit! Now I have to think about what to wear, to clad my bones in something pretty (always) but appropriate. I am always resistant to ‘appropriate’ at first. And, then, over the following days, I find a new normal and wonder at my initial resistance to change.

Yesterday I lifted the very dead flowers from his grave. The sun shone bright and there was a friend at my side. I had thought I would feel something but I felt nothing at all. I am not a sentimental woman and he is dead and he is gone and there is nothing of him below the grass but old bones. The sheep scattered as we unlatched the gate and descended the hill, cautious of their slimy green leavings, moving our boots mindfully. It is a good way to move boots wherever it is we may go. It thinks me of life itself and the best way to live it. Traversing the distance between the gate and the grave we chatted of old ones, other ones who lie here, the characters, their quirks and scallywag games, their teasing, their strength of character and we laughed over shared memories.

Change will always come however hard we may try to fend it off. Returning home I make coffee and watch the view. I never tire of it for it is in a perpetual state of change as am I, as are we all. The key is to let go and follow it in mindful boots.