survive

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Island Blog – Survive, Flourish and Life

I watch a robin cling to a fat feeder, wings dinging. It can last just long enough to get a mouthful, pinging back onto the fence and looking around as if to say ‘ so?’ I smile. I think it smiles back as its wee black eye clocks me doing this watching thing, but I’m unsure about the ability of a beak to smile. I see sparrows do the same, their feet adapting to feeders, their learning pivotal to survival. And, it thinks me. We do it too, we humans, adapt when survival seems beyond our understanding. We become inventive. And, thus, we survive and flourish. At first, the robin floundered and wobbled and fluttered as if gravity had won, but not now. Now it holds, steadies, self-corrects and stays, as I said, long enough for a mouthful. I think of my own life and all the adapting I have undergone, and it makes a perfect sense, for I have encountered many, many of those who, or is it whom, I just knew were not going to make it. And that saddened me and still does.

From a young age, well, about 20 years old/young, I knew I wanted to be a survivor, more, a flourisher. I had no substance to support my knowing, no experiential wisdom, but I just knew. That, may I say, is a tough thing to hold inside, because everyone wants facts around any such pronouncement. I did not pronounce. I had no facts to support my ‘theory’. It just grew like a newing and a knowing in me until I found someone who, older than I by a decade, had tried out a few of his theories and was equipped with some gravitas. T’is a shame, in my opinion, that we don’t listen to the young and their beliefs, and still now we don’t, because our culture decides them into schools and subjects and noise and ‘success’, confizing a sunburst into a tiny, and ‘acceptable’ light. Just saying.

I walked today beneath gale-strafed bows, the trees quiet but I know what’s going on inside their heads. Kathleen will return tomorrow, the gale thus named, resurrecting the waves, upsetting the fisherman, turmoiling the ocean into lifts and spits and deeps and discordance and none of us need it, not even the great Atlantic. I notice nubs of new growth littering the track, and it used to bother me. I thought, Oh No, the new growth is gone! Not so. The trees know what goes on here. The first fruits of growth push out anyway, the birds, hungry, long winter (and still not gone) pick off the growth to find the juicy life beneath. Their long hunger is lifted and I can hear them sing from those branches, inviting in a mate, life all over again.

And that is what I knew, without a damn clue, way back when I was 20, that life does that over again thing. We get through shit. We keep going. New life is beckoning. Trauma, bereavement, enforced change, even a move into a world we have never encountered. We can adapt. We can. And, we can not only survive but flourish, because we are strong and intelligent and an important part in what happens next.

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Island Blog – November days, Petals and Butterfly wings

Today, November paid a visit, bringing with her a socking great gale and heavy rain. As I forget, mostly, the name of the month we currently inhabit, the last 3 being much the same as the one before, I did wonder, for just a moment, if everyone else knows it’s November and here I stand bare-legged in my cotton frocks feeling puzzled. No, no, don’t be a twit. You know it’s not November. But what month is it? The calendar on the wall will ground me. It’s still May, our island month of steady sunshine, warm nights, petals remaining affixed to their parent stems. Well, inside it is, but out there where maple leaves are scooting into the sky and birds are being blown off fence posts, I feel justified in my ditherment. The sweet pea seedlings I lovingly sank into the goodly ground just yesterday afternoon, the sun burning my neck, the ticks crawling towards me like I was a surprise picnic, must be very upset. I watch the seedlings flee this way and that, their roots holding, just. I had put off releasing them into the elements for way too long, thinking cheeky frost, and was understandably seduced by a few days of soft sunshine and calm. Actually it is not just the sweet peas who feel cheated. I’m feeling it too.

It has blasted on the whole day and is still blasting. This gale is enough to send boats a-scatter, lift waves into grabbing hands, turn underpinnings, left on a line in the sunshine cocoon of yesterday, into cotton-mix butterflies to land who knows where. Nobody will ever admit to owning them anyway, not once they’ve made public the size and width of the owners bottom. You could hardly Facebook’ Has anyone received delivery of a pair of baggy greys that once were white about ten years ago, or a bra with reinforced cups for the sag factor? No, indeed. I should have gone to M&S a while back.

This crazy November mayday has something to teach me. I look out through the rain-bashed windows and whisper to my newly planted seedlings, as I did to my children, so long ago, You can survive this. You can grow, you can fly and precisely because of this November gale in the May of your life. Many won’t, but you will. You might flip backwards off a fence post you thought gave you a solid base (could be a friend, a work colleague, a boss, even a route home) but you have wings. The thing about that blackbird I saw who spread his wings at just the wrong gust and who flipped like a tiddlywink into the fist of the wind, is that he knew he could fly out of it, find the temperate safety of low-below and who could gather his feathers again. We can all do that. We just need to remember we have wings too, not visible, but there anyway. The drudge listening of the factual news is all about how we will ‘cope’ after this lockdown time is done. I shake my head at all of it. Cope? Are we victims of this time? I say No. I say we are marvellous and colourful inventive humans who will find wings we never knew we had on our backs. I say we may be scared, because ‘out there’ now is not the ‘out there’ we hitched our wagons to and that is fine. It’s ok. We are so ‘flipping’ resourceful, it is almost embarrassing.

Let us consider this. In the swatch of material, that little square we cannot escape for now, the flow of colour can make new swirls; the limitations of the square will never confine us. We will out. We always did.

And we always will.

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Island Blog – Lock Down Light

Well you can’t do that. Lock down light. Light will seep under a doorway as you sit in the dark, catch you in a flash of lightning, astonish you as you meet it in someone’s eyes. Light will out. And we love it. The thrill of light can turn a dark moment/person/situation/problem into a new possibility and, even if we can’t explain ourselves at that time, or after that encounter, our sub conscious minds will surely find a way. The only way to lock down light is by putting it into a dark and sealed box. Then it is no longer light, but darkness, and so it seems to me that we are the ones who decide on the existence of light.

We use the word ‘light’ in so many ways. Things are illuminated by something, or someone, else. We throw light on something…..in the light of this new understanding, this reflection, this memory…. We choose to stand in the light; we find light in a dark time; we share our light with another who keeps crashing into things; we accept light as a gift when we ourselves are fumbling about looking for a metaphorical candle. Light is us and we are light.

In this lockdown time, light is being shone on all aspects of our individual lives, those of others, and on the whole world. Although the problems #the dark of our lives were always there, we could ignore them, to a degree. We could move over them, overcome ourselves as we acknowledged they were here to stay. In short, we fabric-ed them into our normality, accepting them with varying levels of grace and grit. But not now. Now, it’s if someone with a Big Pen is highlighting those things and we are being forced to look at them, all yellow and luminous in a sea of black text.

This is a good thing. This chance to change is on offer, free of charge. Only in a crisis do we humans stop to pay attention. All those years of accepting this, or doing that the way I did is up for questioning, and we cannot avoid it. Nor must we. There are small businesses going down, people losing homes, work, lives, family. This is a light throw on our whole existence and however uncomfortable it is, however painful, it will show us a new way and will keep us safe in the end. Those who, right now, think the world is ending will discover it has no intention of abdicating the throne. New opportunities will arise for all those goodly folk who feel they are permanently broken. As long as they remember the light, and, when they forget, someone will bring it to them.

I am not one of those unfortunate people and my heart aches for them all. It must be terrifying. But, having lived as long as I have, I know the feeling well and it passes. It passes because we humans are strong, resilient, resourceful creatures with marvellous brains. We are Light. We can think. We can reason. We can flip our whole life if we decide to. Many have. Many have changed everything and, in doing so, become light for the rest of us.

The light of the lockdown will not be contained inside a box and turned into darkness. It is showing, instead, how much we want to give, how enterprising we are, how strongly linked we are to the muscle of survival, and not just with plans to survive, but to thrive once more, shining out new light into a new order.