strength

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Island Blog – Middlemoon Smile and a Skinny Life

I love the middlemoon, the calm of waters and the gentling of skies, the chiaroscuro, the huge pines on the shore standing tall and unskittered. Birds can fly wing forward, scooping the air into helpful bundles of energy instead of backflipping onto bird feeders, thus sending them way beyond pendulum security. In short there’s a lot of wheeching going on when the full and new moon takes control. Life is just like this, I tell Jock the Blackbird as he flips and holds onto the seed tray, skidding somewhat and sending a shower of seed into the ether. There’ll be a few unsterilised seeds. grabbing the chance to root and grow and I’ll not be knowing what the hec this green thing is, come late Spring, and I will suddenly know and smile at this tiny opportunist. Again, this is life. The storms come, the dark holds like being inside a dustbin bag but someone, one someone is patient. A random thing happens, a blackbird skid, something, and that someone grabs at skinny life, no promise of success nor growth. So what is that energy, coming from nowhere, from somewhere?

My belief is that it isn’t planned. There is an extraordinary strength in all living things, not just fight or flight, and not calculated as some do, watching the stock market, pursuing business ideas, believing that to be financially wealthy will bring comfort and security. Live long enough and know that there is neither in the accumulation of money. It helps, yes, but never will it fill the human void. The random catch of opportunity, being open and aware and ready for the upset of moons will always bring growth, the ask to be spontaneous, to listen to hunches and random thoughts, to not explain them away,but to just go and to risk the wrong direction and then to try another one. Laughter and fun, work and focus, family and friends, food and sharing, listening and hearing, supporting and making hard choices. These are life skills and sustainable. I say ‘skills’ because they need honing and they need a ‘becoming’. They make us feel whole and a part of somethings and someones.

The birds fed in calm today, no skidding. There was rain, of course, but the land was at ease, the trees unskittled. There is no visible moon so the cloudal shift is light-blown and soft as wool, grey and light grey and white and off white and barely moving. That’s a rare for them. I can hear them snoring. This middling is short term. It won’t last and nor it should because that is life. If it was always easy on us we would never appreciate anything. We need the beginnings, middles and ends in order to grow into ourselves. It isn’t always pleasant but when I remember the rocks and the climbs and the falls and the fails and the sharps and the joys and the sunlight and the soft and the way I learned to grab opportunity, I smile.

I unloaded and stacked a ton of firewood today, aware as I always am of fumbly fingers, the way I can no longer grab as I once did and accepting, once I get through the fury of such a decline. After all, I want to do this for myself, not giving in to the dark thoughts. I listen to an uplifting audio story. as I climb onto the window seat to re-hang a heavy curtain. I check something on my car computer which tells me my engine is in trouble and here I meet a temptation. I could ignore it but I won’t ignore it because my wonderful Pixty Forkov is my freedom, my independence. Still, for seconds, the ‘Oh Whatever’ in me is loud in my ears because the complications of life are more tiring now. But NO, NO, I will not listen. I contact the garage and I get this response. ‘Hi Judy, we can fit you in on Wednesday next (tricky as I have commitments, but wait…) and someone can pick up your car early, delivering it back in the late afternoon. That ok? Hell Yes. My life is not skinny, even if I am. My life is my community, support, friendship and warmth.

I had my beginning, or so I thought but these beginnings keep beginning. I am not sequestered, not excluded, not abandoned, not that I ever really thought I was, but so many do. Thing is to keep moving on, or keep buggering on, in love and giving and being seen and dressing up and showing up and arriving alltimes in fun and playfulness. Maybe that;s how the moon feels at times.

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Island Blog – Hutzpah

Someone said to me once, “It must be exhausting to be so consistently positive.” This may be a misquote, but the sense is there. It spun me around when he said it, so clear, so observant. I could feel my legs jelly up. At first I leaped to defend (what, I wonder?) my state of being, as if my positivity wasn’t completely natural and effortless, as if I was faking it all and that he had clocked that. I wasn’t naked but I felt it as a nakedness way below skin and bone. His words have never left me even after well over 30 years. It thinks me even now. And there are times, many times at this end stage, or Autumn stage or whatever bright and nonsensical term is applied to we who are over 70 and alone, that I recall those words. They were sent over the Tapselteerie kitchen airspace, whilst children drove plastic tractors around and around, collies biting at the wheels, when those of us on a mission to serve a sumptuous meal to waiting guests lifted plates and feet high, ducking, diving for a chance to get through the door intact, laughing together at the lunacy of our collective life.

As children, all five of us, because I was a child once, as were they, we were taught hutzpah, not that that word came up. You don’t make a big Thing of the whatever that is big-thinging you. Well, you might be allowed 30 minutes but then you got up, brushed off,and got back in the game. Or else. It has served us all well. We got over the personal harshness of it. It becomes a way of being, with a caution nonetheless. This was our childhood, not one we might choose to perpetuate as parents, at least not in its initial shape. However when you learn something from birth, it sticks. My ma always showed positivity, not always behind closed doors, but most definitely when she was ‘out there’. And I, not necessarily recollecting that, as I downed the stairs, tripping over tractors and collies, made my choice. I was one woman in private moments and a veritable force of nature in the rest of the day which went on for hours and hours, for years and years.

I don’t think I am unusual. I believe every single everyone gets this. We either do or do not employ hutzpah and it isn’t falsehood, as I once thought, but deep inner strength. It’s a determination not only to survive but to fly. It isn’t a two-dynamic puzzle which confounds but instead an opportunity for a jinx, for fun, for the laughing with and at life, the chance to let go of control of the (may I venture) panic hold on the how I think it should be. Perhaps that’s what I did, coming down those stairs into another new long day. I can still see myself, young then, tired, wondering about the again and the again of the again, a baby in my arms, the toddlers already on tractors or frying bacon or letting the calf in to scourry the floor into a slide fest, and deciding just before the bottom step. And then through their teenage years, the turbulence of relationships, the wondering, the hoping, the grandchildren and all the way right up to the now of now.

A deep breath. Bring it on. I am a match for whatever comes and more than that. There is a dance in my step, a jinx in my eyes, a pixie, the fun rising. So, yes my old friend. It is exhausting but I can live no other way. I positively worked out, with oil on my face and at least 3 spanners, and a deal of self doubt, how to affix a new handle to my woodburner, the right way the screw worked, the springs and things and the twiddles and jeez the patience! T’is done. It took two upside down balasters, (new word) until I remembered how I can do any damn thing that challenges me.

We all can.

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Island Blog – There’s Something About…..

Having no idea who reads my blogs, nor who benefits. Never knowing what each new day will bring, a serendipity or a catastrophe, a gain or a loss, a fall or that moment when I will stand tall as a warrior. It’s as if life lives me, and, in a strange way, I like that, most of the time. I like danger, living on the edge, always ready to do my very best at outwitting. I am naturally spontaneous, a state which can, and often has, found me in a dodgy situation, mudswamp rising up my legs, the dark completing me, eradication. Until, that is, my eyes adjusted. They did, and they do, and once the ‘ayes’ have it, the house is quietened, and then comes sensibility. Love that word. ‘The quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences; sensitivity.’

There I am, was, appreciating and responding to my highest level, and although this life is bloody exhausting most of the time, what with all this learning even when I left school decades ago, I still love life, the way it lives me, the way I live it. Well, not so much the latter to be honest, because I can still flounder in mudswamp and the dark. However the importance of the important is simple. It’s poopy in the mud. I can do dark but not for long. I love light, am light, bring light. And there’s something in that, the need and the strength to defy. Any something is an enough something because we know the opposite of that.

I have no idea where my children are. I have no idea what will become of me, ditto when the next gale will smash down most of our island trees, nor whom will fall sick, nor when this baby will be born, nor when I will see this person rising from the sadness with a smile on her face. I know not whether this shrub or that will survive the winter, nor when I might hear the Arctic swans softly talking from across the sea-loch. I don’t know when a still day with all its quiet glory will come, not after a torrential rainday, the sea all a-popple with white smoke and sprachle. I never know and there’s something about that.

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Island Blog – I Love This

When my life get’s tricky, bad news, no news, the lonely, the what now, the what if of it all, the olding with all its tired and broken bits, the hurtings, the way my fingers gnarl and bend without my permission, I think this thing and get that think to roll through me, to take over from toes up until it lifts my mouth into a real smile, one which reaches my eyes……..

I love my home, black coffee, red wine and a wave from a passing stranger. I love the sound of giggles from a child, the feel of a dog’s wet nose against my fingers. I love sudden encounters, shared smiles, the warm voice of a friend telling me without words that I can do this living on thing. I love the birds at my feeders, the finches, gold, green, ‘common’ not in the way I learned that word from my old ma……’common’ was basically ‘trash’…….the sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, robins, the way they fly in, watching for skyborn attack, dense aflutter, then scattering, grabbing a morsel and gone into the wind. I love that when I need help I can ask for it and not feel needy. I love tweaking my geraniums, the warmth underfoot of my heated sunroom. I love doorways and windows, my faithful car, my work, my gift of writing, my ancestors, seamen and women, out here in the wilding islands, the way they handed down such inner strength to me.

I love noisy pubs, scampi and chips, Atlantic salt on my face, the bite of winter and my ability to light a good fire. I love to welcome. I love cosy. I love sharing. I love gaps in conversation, the wait, the light and the chance in that wait. I love random smiles in unexpected places. I love boots that lace well, soles that grip. I love the West Coasters, the Island folk for their humour, their strength, their ability to turn any talk of trouble into opportunity and then take action. I love my laptop, the way she works with me, the lightness of her body, the way she can go quiet for two days when I fly to Africa and never give me grief. I love my children and theirs even if I only see them now and again. I love my sisters, my brother, my memories, my lifestory.

Then, as I turn back to the tricky, which has visibly diminished, I say (and I do out loud) I say, Hey, I see you.

I also see this.

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Island Blog – We Just Are

Thing is, if I don’t write, I begin to feel uncomfortable, as if my knickers are back to front. It’s been a few days, not the knickers though. Enough on knickers.

My thinks are nonstop, even when thinks should be fast asleep in their beds. Some of us are like that, born as ‘troublesome’ souls, too many thinks. I, and many like me, have been, and. still are, accused of overthinking. Accused? My point, precisely. I’m not going to say the us of we ever asked for all this tiddleypom in our brilliant brains which, inevitably result in a brouhaha the world finds ‘troublesome’ because it breaks the silence of complicity. And can be messy. I, for example, can see a wardrobe anywhere, in a shop, a garage, an anywhere and immediately think Narnia, my mind heading into another world, way beyond the rigid limitations of living in this one. If I see a track lifting up and away in a wild place, and disappearing around a corner, I want to follow. There be opportunities out there, although maybe not dragons, unfortunately, and my thinks lead me on.

However, life is here, and my imaginatory thinks, the possibilities out there, need to be turned into a module (that’s me) acceptable to the where of my life. So I walk among trees. I stand beneath their astonishing height and strength, think how brave they are. And I thank them, talk to them, tell them, every one, how wonderful they are. They found their way within a chaotic dynamic, seeds earthing, sprouting, lifting into a density of an already canopy. Light is a fight for them, for us too. I stand awhile, although my ‘awhile’ is about fifteen seconds and that’s because of the thinks. I have watched people stand for ages, yoga, mediation, all those things I can’t do because I am my thinks. I must be moving, shaping, changing, learning. I am a seeker and knowing that is oftentimes a pain in the ass. I have tried, am still trying to corral my thinks, but they are wild and free and the goodling about them is that I get to see what many do not. In a wild sea, I can see the depth, feel the anger, sense the history; In the woods I can hear the trees groan; in ground that was once free and is now a clickfit home, I can hear the rumble of all that is now trapped. None of it is loud, but I sense it as I walk by, even as I like the friendly people waving from their new home.

Hallo to anyone else out there who knows what I’m talking about. We are. That’s it. We just are.

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Island Blog – Wording

Words are my thing. I am no worder, powerful within the pages of research books, no academic Brilliantine. But words are my thing. They fly about my head like birds, assault me, trip me up, wake me in the night, confound me in the day when I’m scrubbing the loo. I am a word vessel. So, when words bugger off, their absence is like I’m naked, which I am so not. I can walk deep into my Mother Nature, feeling my way, searching in the brush, the fallen, the ancient, the rising, and find no words at all beyond Wow, or Thankyou, or Shit I just soaked my Boots. Not enough, not good at all. And, yet, resting in the ‘how it is right now’, I consider. Perhaps i need a rest. Perhaps the wordness of words need one too. Everyone is always actively searching for a word, the right word, as if words tumble away into the vast void of everything lost, for now. Right words must be exhausted.

In my younger days, I freaked out if I couldn’t find a word, when, inside my head I had this clear and beautifully perfect one somewhere just behind the bins, behind the confusion and questioning of my life, one which refused to grace my lips. I would leave an encounter, furious at my lack. It thinks me, with a wonder. Maybe it was not for me at that moment, infuriating as that felt at the time. We humans seem to think we are in the upper echelons of pretty much everything, thus, in control. Maybe words don’t want to be controlled. I certainly don’t want to be, so, maybe I get it. Perhaps I am being taught a life lesson, because this is not the first time, and I will be wise to notice.

So, I can flounder, for now, abject myself to a considerably higher power, and wait for the words to fly back in, as the Redwings will soon, the Mistle Thrush, the Autumn visitors. There is no loss, as long as I don’t buy into loss. I know who I am, and there is no weakness in bowing down, in letting go of ego. In fact, I believe it is a strength.

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Island Blog – Because she cares

The farrago is clearing, as if, as if, I move through it, like a fog that eventually gets fed up of all that fogging nonsense and puffs itself out. The path ahead becomes clear, or clearer. It takes a moment or two to re-align my eyeballs with this new clarity as the density of unseeing becomes vision. A human falter. But we know how to survive and suddenly. When fog clears, our senses are heightened. We adjust. We must adjust in order to move on intelligently. But, we cannot always rely on self, on the aloneness of the singular, not in all situations. Because I was lost in the turmoil and fear of fog, I spun like a dervish without intention, without a plan. So, I reached out. I called my sister. I have three and each one is wise in different ways. This one is beautifully pragmatic with a can-do attitude, cautious but never compromised by caution. She investigates it, thinks it through, pulls it apart and studies it. I came to her like an unravelling jumper and she, well she, did not knit me back up again. She just saw, immediately how I felt. She is not afraid to speak and I felt so much better after our talk. It was like I came down from some planetary freak out.

It thinks me. I know, have always preached, that we need each other, that reaching out for help as we feel we are drowning, is not a weakness but a strength. However, I did feel foolish at first, me, the older sister, needing a guide through the fog, my personal fog. Then I did what she does. I looked around me at the complex thixitude I had made all by myself and for myself, I thought it through and studied it and I smiled. It takes someone else, a one you trust with all your fears and failings, your admitted weaknesses no matter your age or place in the pecking order, to hold out a hand and to bring support.

The words ‘help’ and ‘support’ took on a different shape for me in the caring years. They came as crutches and support bars affixed to walls. But I need to re-jig my thinking on that and to remember that there are times in every single life when we need to trust another enough to tell them how we feel. Yes, it means unzipping our breasts for a full revealment and I get that it is something we would rather not do. I felt it and for a whole foggy week. But, I have learned and am still learning that, no matter how experienced we are, how apparently wealthy, how strong, how much of a leader we have become, we are human. We meet fog. We meet fear. And, when we do, we must reach out to someone we trust, someone who we once guided but who now might just lift us up just because she cares.

Thank you my sister.

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Island Blog – Woman

I’m thinking about her today. I am one, after all. A woman I mean. As Dennis rages like a husband outside my door, threatening to uplift the new conservatory, I turn in to my thoughts. After a Dennis sort of morning I put on music – my sanity these days. Have you heard Disturbed sing The Sound of Silence, or Elbow’s Fickle Flame or Lily Allen sing Somewhere Only We Know by Keane? I research music a lot and am helped considerably by my youngest, equally in love with music. Lyrics, musicality and beat can lift any soul from a dark place. I recommend it if the dark surrounds you this day, or any other day.

I add something super dull to the shopping list, holding said list in place with a heart shaped stone as if Dennis might get in somehow and snatch it. Actually, he is welcome to it. I get dead bored of shopping lists, of washing clothes on the right setting, of wiping down tables, of mopping spills I never spilled. It seems to me that women are always on the move and it is just as well or most of the world would just sit down and wait for a sandwich. Not only do we end up on the sandwich rota but we are required to pop here and collect that on a regular basis. Then there are screaming children to squeeze into clothes they don’t want to wear ending in a fraught drive to school. There’s a flaming mother-in-law to appease and toilets to clean; there are beds to make, rooms to tidy, gardens to tease back into life; phone calls to answer, batteries to replace, dogs to feed and supper to be planned, bought and prepared. I am sure there are modern women who fold their arms, say something colourful and then go out for Prosecco with the girls but I don’t meet too many of those. From girlhood we are conditioned. I see it with my own little grand-girls, the unconscious teaching by their mums, the learning they absorb through example. I want to throw fireworks at it all, but (and there’s always one of those) I cannot see how the family would survive if women stopped being IT. That indomitable spirit is in each one of us. How else would we survive? Although life does dump on us, despite the fairytale wedding and all those impossible promises, we find an inner strength we never knew we had. It seems we can take pretty much everything on the chin and still keep our sense of fun and fight.

A man once said, a man I admire to the skies, that he had no idea how we women kept so full of life. Observing the very obvious attitude of the world, that of demoting women at every opportunity, plus the lie that they believe in equality, this man made his own mind up. God bless him. We need more of him. He can see our spirit and he loves it. Loves it! it doesn’t frighten him at all, which is, of course, what it does to men in general. Strong women remind them of their mothers and they really don’t want that image in their minds.

This fighting spirit is powerful and dangerous. Powerful when guided right and dangerous when left to turn into low-boil anger. I have learned the difference between the two, often. I know when my angry puts down roots and applies itself to the whole garden, and it needs uprooting. Power is quite different, something precious to be nurtured and loved and admired. It is a part of every woman. Although young girls learn submission and polite behaviour in order to survive the early years, that spirit is still alive inside them and it will out, trust me. And it scares even them, the first time; the time they see injustice, feel it, are hurt or attacked. It will rise like a hot dragon breathing fire, one who needs teaching. Not now Dragon. Yes, now Dragon. That sort of teaching. We learn this as we form into the women we will become and it is a good thing. I have met women whose dragon controlled them and their life was not a happy one.

However it is good to just know the dragon is there, to feel her power and strength and to know she will always be there for you, and for me.

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Island Blog 135 Little Weeds

 

Flowers close up 1

 

 

As the garden grows into complete hilarity, with an ebullient chuckle, I watch the weeds find their places.  They’re clever, these weeds, finding quiet little dark places to begin their journey, rising into view long after the roots have winkled their way around, along and through those finer species, once carefully placed by us.  When we clear space for such a planting, we see, not the weeds to come, or those now removed, but just this fine sunny spot, allocated to a shrub or bush, envisioned in full majestic bloom, with the ground floor as peaty brown as it was at the start.

Well Ho, says Mother Earth, and Hum to that, for she has other plans and she’s not giving them up to any old human.  Let them eat cake, she says, for now.

Over winter the roots keep spreading, like witches fingers, in the silence of the earth, out of view, out of mind.  Some of us employ evil sprays, conveniently forgetting the lasting damage any of them might do in the long term.  We don’t worry too much about long term, unless we are a fledged and experienced gardener, which I am not.  I quite understand those who buy all their bedding plants each year, thus creating what appears to be an established garden.  It’s tempting.  We don’t use sprays, choosing, instead, to allow the witches fingers room and time to stake their hold.  Then, whatever Spring might bring in showers, snow, frosts and sunshine, these roots decide to reach for the sky, pushing up green and strong, and tempting me with pretty yellow blooms the bees love to visit.  Well, that makes it okay then, if the bees choose thus.

It thinks me about weeds, or wild flowers in the wrong places.  But who says  it’s so?  The wild flowers were here long before me and they’ll be here long after me, so which of us has rights in this little hill garden?

I was a weed, once. I think we can all admit to that at some point in our lives; when we just don’t fit in.  Actually, I think I have often been a weed, but not ‘weedy’.  Finely pedigreed folk who do fit in, might want to remove me, for I pinch the light and the live-giving water allocated to them.  But, the strength and tenacity of me might undermine them, as long as I keep moving, keep finding new ways to reach the sun, keep producing pretty blooms for the bees.  This is not a ‘them’ and ‘us’ thing, for we all have our place and time in this life, but, instead, of ‘both’.  I never did like either/or scenarios, opting every time for a laterally sought choice.  We know there is room for all of us, but the trouble is always one of boundaries – where you stop and I begin.  After all, we don’t have the same voices, you and I, nor the same dreams, visions, hopes and plans.  You may be planning for something I have no interest in.  This doesn’t make either of us wrong nor right, just different.  We laughingly say ‘Vive la difference!’ in our best french accent, but most of us have no idea what it means as a life choice.  No matter how careful we are with our inner thoughts, we all make judgements on others.  Words like ‘should’ and ‘ought’ pop into our mouths and out again and we feel regret long after the damage is done, for, in speaking those words about another living soul, we have shown we are better than they and have established it firmly in the ears of the listener.

I kick myself often for such worthless chatter, gossip to call it by it’s proper name.  If I name a weed, I damage three people.  Myself, the weed and the listener, and on what authority I ask myself?

In reply, I look out of the window, at the fancy shrub about to bloom, and, then down towards the so-called weeds.  The shrub will never surprise me inside it’s controlled boundary limits, but the long-tailed fronded grasses, the speckly indigo blooms of the wild forget-me-nots, the creeping buttercups, the purple-belled ground ivy and the Lady Elizabeth  poppies, the colour of sunshine……?

Well they will.

 

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Island Blog 70 – Life is a simple thing

Island Blog 70 - Freedom

fig: http://favim.com

It’s all about breathing in and out for decades, something that happens to us quite naturally.  We can take no credit for this and it’s not complicated, until it stops, of course, or struggles to continue.  All we have to do, as out heart beats and our lungs fill and empty a thousand times a day, is to get on with living.

Ah, you might say.  That’s the rub.  My life is so much harder than just breathing in and out and getting on with things.  My circumstances, you see…..well, life is not simple at all.

Yes, I say, it is.  It may not be easy, but it is simple, and then I draw back in case I get swiped, because why?

Because people love to complicate things, all things and especially their own things.

I know people who have come through cancer and people who have not come through.  I am not one of them.  Therefore my life is a breeze.

I know people who have lost a child.  I have not.  Therefore my life is a breeze.

I know someone disabled, paralised, in prison,bereaved,destitute and hungry.

I am none of them. Therefore….etc

At Jenny’s funeral yesterday, I listened to the tributes.  I counted 250 at least in the church.  I caught the sparkle of a woman who refused to moan, although, believe me, she had plenty of reason to. In fact, she had absolutely no time at all for moaners.

On the way to the church, down winding country lanes, I saw a land rover parked  in a driveway.  Across the top of the windscreen the words in bold black said this:-

ONE LIFE.  LIVE IT.

Jenny did.

Short or long it is the same for us all, as far as we know, although one friend whose family are fisherfolk, plans to return as a crack shot seagull.

Whatever our piddling ailments, our list of miniature disasters, we were born with laughter in our hearts and we all know it.

We might consider laughing more and particularly at ourselves.