think

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Island Blog – The Disordinary

I’m on my ordinary list. Got through a few, a lot, in fact. I emptied the compost bucket, said hallo to an obviously newborn toad, for all the blinking and not moving thing he or she did on the step into the woods. I brought wood in, welcomed a friend for soup and a delicious afternoon of chat about everything to do with life and notlife and everything in betweem which is a hoor of a load of years and fears and tears and joy andchildren andregrets and gains and loss. I went to church, read a prayer, hugged, left. There are a couple of didn’ts. I didn’t do my 100 pulls on the rowing machine, nor did I walk. I feel bad about both. But, there is always the morra. I moved cash to cover incoming bills. I decided what I will wear to my friend’s funeral in a couple of weeks, and I felt good about the lunacy of my outfit.

Last thing is to sort the drain smell in the shower room. It used to be a bathroom, with a bath long enough anbd deep enough for a whale. It was a fabulous bath. However, times change and so on, and because we needed no bath, no chance of disaster. A wet room, a shower, hold handles and a non skid floor. A big change. The piping of this new song is too thin. The shower, still a good one, works fine. The drain requires constant attention. I have no idea what changed. Perhaps the old pipes didn’t fit with council rules.

Anyways. I went upstairs as the dusk dusked to pour some soda down the smelly pipe. Added some boiling water, just a cupful, to leave till morning. I was listening to an audio book, lodged safely on the radiator, atop my flannel. Somehow, and I don’t know how, I moved something and the mobile slid down between the radiator and the wall. I thought, oh shit. Here I am, alone, old, in the dark, and this audio book has at least 30 chapters to go and my phone is well charged. However, I am me. grinned a bit, moved downstairs to find tools, thinking all the way. Slim, grab, push, that sort of think.

I did all of that. We are together again, but it did think me of the disordinaray. It comes.

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Island Blog – A Thingummy Tree, and a Surprise

Another lovely warm morning, too hot, actually, to read my book in the full sun. I look to the Thingummy tree over there, all that dancing shade and the two pigeons coo-ing on a branch. David Bowie, I think, as I take in their colourful feathers, flagrant and sparkly bright, as most creatures are in Africa. They even coo musically, more the beginnings of a melody and not irritating at all. Beneath is grass trying to grow, elephant grass, tough and fat-leaved, but failing somewhat in the growing palaver. Mostly, I notice, there are ant mounds, wee ones, not termites, little tumps of sand with an air hole I am careful not to block with careless step. I consider what to lie on that close to the ground. I’m thinking snakes, beetles, all those other crawly things, none of which I mind as long as they don’t sting or bite me. I haul out a yoga mat, towel, pillow, book, glasses and the ever necessary water bottle, and lay down. All goes well for sometime, the shade most pleasant, the David Bowies hopping around me, the flying things remaining in the air. So far so good. I had just finished The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, a fabulous read, and, becoming completely captured by Marjam Kamali’s The Stationary Shop of Tehran, I failed to notice that something was crawling up my body. It, or she, had managed quite a distance over clothing, and it wasn’t till she arrived on my shoulder, and tickled, that I snapped my head around to look. It’s always wise to look before swatting in Africa.

The sun was almost blocked out and I kid you not. This insect is huge. 2 inches long, an inch deep, scaly and brightly striped, red and black. She was, I swear, as startled to see me as I was her and, I confess, I did swipe her off, apologising as she plumped to the ground beside me. She took a minute to gather herself and then, snail-slow, no hopping, she began to wander into the bushes. She is a female African Great Grasshopper, at least seven times larger than the male and spectacular to look at. Our encounter, albeit harmless, kind of put me off lying there like bait. I read the same page twice, darting looks over my shoulder and jumping at every tickle. Ridickerluss, I know, I know, but once the thinks think me, I am done for.

I had made a promise to myself on the yesterday, I remember, and when all my hearty thoughts rushed in like I knew I had to push them away and just go. I couldn’t take a bag, a house key, anything pinch worthy, particularly not on a Tuesday when dawn rises with a lot of noisy lid closing as many poor folks, knowing it is bin day, riffle through old rubbish to find whatever they can to eat, to sell, to repair, to make into something. Not a day to be leaving a bag on the beach, even if it is always in sight. Starving folk run fast. So, cozzy on, shorts and a sun top and the always bottle of water and off I set, marching down the road towards the Ocean. Skies scud skimpy clouds, the blue endless and white teeth flat welcomes and greetings from black and coloured faces. I met the fire service attemting to stem a burst water main, a massive burst of water arcing way over my head, and we joke about me getting soaked so ‘move quickquick Ma, Ayeee!’ The car guard who watches over parked vehicles wishes me a lovely swim, and on I go, ducking under the road, dodging piles of kelp, through the freshwater flow from the Flei (marshland) and onto the white hot sand. No more thinks are thinking me as I strip off and head for the waves. The water is warmly glorious, the waves lifting and lowering me, the salt delicious on my skin. I swim a length or two, then sit dripping myself dry in no time. I watch other swimmers, dogs in the water, children at play, and I smile.

I surprise myself sometimes, when the thinks don’t think me and I take action.

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Island Blog – Itchy Knickers, Mary, There is Life

I send my mind out into the world, and pull it back quickquick. The thinks, the sheer expanse before my mindal eyes, the troubles I can’t even spell, rise into a swirling fog. Maybe a good thing. I know about the corruption in governments and want to smack all of the leaders. Did your mummy not teach you anything? In the pull back, I focus on the immediate, on where I am, on who I am, on this very minute. Oh, that’s easy. Let me think. Ah, instead of sinking into my current bog, let me find another someone who might love to hear what I I think of them. Avoid superlatives, an early lesson from my English teacher. It hesitates me. Superlatives are basically lazy speke. Amazing. Wonderful. Excellent. The Best. And so many more. They’re like uncontrolled dribble to one who considers how much spit goes into intelligent consideration. A little at a time, that’s how. And those superlatives can apply to a packet of crisps. Just saying. Hallo, I begin, You are just short of amazing. Let me find the word (that is just short of amazing). Doesn’t work.

I think that navigating a world where language and street rules change so fast has never been easy for me. I’m the girl, now woman, in the wrong kit. I remember arriving to a poetry challenge at school, all elecuted up, strong voiced and in itchy knickers (uniform), wondering, as I did, how the hell all those other ‘gels’ managed to look part of the landscape. I saw many smirks and although it irked me, I longed for whatever bonding they had with a) their itchy knickers and b) their ability to be an easy dot in the pattern. I could see the connection. And then, there was me, all tumbelshift and awkward. Or that is how I felt. The fact that I was chosen for the poetry rendition, that I came away with the silver poetry cup, meant zip, at the time.

In this time, the autumn of my life, I kind of get it, mainly because if I don’t get it now, what hope do I have of ever understanding the point of me? A rhetorical question. Looking back to that super lost, itchy-knickered girl, I smile. I have found my people, here, on the island, for sure, and that has settled me, given me place and point, to a degree. Perhaps, as my lovely wise sister-in-law told me, it isn’t wrong to feel out of kilter, as she may have done. Rest in peace Mary.

Sometimes I scrabble for purchase, when I see others step out in confidence and the furies rise in judgement against me. Their eyes are wild and bright, their confidence evident and overwhelming, but I’m a daughter of the moon and the tide, I (whine) tell them. I continue, itchy knickers and all, I feel everything, sense so much, notice every tiny shift in this breaking world. I don’t know how to explain anything, have no shape nor map to guide me, but I feel it, see it, hear it, all of it.

I remember Mary saying to me, once, way back when she was vibrantly alive and wise as Merlin, that I would have been in danger when any girl or woman who sensed moon change, tidal shifts, changes in nature around them, people becoming irritable, a slip slide into anger, a rise in the river, was doomed if she spoke out, or was noticed noticing. I am thankful that, nowadays, writers write about those who can see the beyond, and anyone can btw. We just have too much noise and too little belief in our skills.

On the cusp of a flight to Africa, I watch the skies, the moontide, the chat in the clouds, the copper comment, the wild shapes. I see the raindrops held on branches, like showing off as the sinksun sequins and sparkles. I see the straggle of shrubs, climbers browning, the flood in my garage. I feel the rainwater, the hill rain under my bare feet, the chill of concrete. I feed the woodburner. There is life and I feel every moment.

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Island Blog – My Thinks Think Me

Today I walked, a little, into Tapselteerie, treading on memories. It wasn’t easy, body feeling clumpy and awkward, as if I was just learning this walking thing. I haven’t walked for many days, holding in, holding myself safe behind the stone walls, looking out but not going there. My maple tree is stunning, rain heavy, sun-kissed as this Autumn upsy downsy plays out hour by hour. A smur rolls in from the land, covering the hills, the sheep in the field, blanking out the landscape, but I walk out anyway. Even my boots feel odd on my feet, but I go. A robin sings its autumn song, so different from the spring Come-to-me melody, and I feel a settle in my gut. My garden is a spraggle of stalks that once exploded with wild rose, willow, forsythia, apple blossoms and more. Rest, my friends, I whisper as I climb the hill to my compost bin. I want to do the same. Leggy, bare, shifting in the wind, adapting to the incoming cold, accepting. What better way to live, knowing that they have flowered their very best, and now will sleep in the knowing of it. Humans, or at least I, don’t find that so easy to do.

I hear other life ongoing as I almost stumble over ground I know so very well. Seabirds, oystercatchers, the slidecall of curlews, the voices of many birds feasting on nuts and berries, high up in the trees, and I stop to look up. I can only catch the flit of them, but I know they are there as I am down here, and that is enough. Back home (very short walk), I try to congratulate myself for going out at all but it doesn’t come easy, brilliant as I am at harshly judging myself. I don’t think I am alone in this. I purposefully notice the brave roses, still thrusting out buds, still determined to flower. I watch a wee bumble bee burrowing into a bloom. Bumbles, the first and the last bee, always, even in the iceslice of spring and the crumple of summer, bumbles bumble on. Many are solitary, no friends to warm them, so I get it.

Listening, as I do, a lot, to an audio book today, something caught my attention. It was on the theme of choosing who you want around you, your five. They say you can count on one hand who are the ones you want around you, whom you trust, who would be there for you et lala. This number may not include immediate family, and that always tripped me up, heretofore. But today, in the aftermath of a challenge, I got it, I could feel it and it felt ok, albeit awkward. It also reassurred me. So, I can choose who I want as my close five, those whom I respect, understand, around whom I feel completely free to be myself? I could feel the tumbledown stairs thing as Appearances, Learned Patterns, Family Expectations, all smudged my sudden clarity, like a smur, a blocking, a confusion, a familiar landscape invisiblising. I could just see all those I have felt I had to fit in with, taking on a million different shapes, denying my own voice, and for so very long.

I’ll think on this, although, if I am honest, my thinks think me more than I do them.

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Island Blog – Barefoot and So Very Connected

Shadows are longer now. They surprise me, twisting my eyes towards them, when the sun gets behind this overgrown shrub or the line of my rake, or just me. I am, it seems, the giant. I reach all the way up to the big larch on the rockface, my neck and head lost in the skinning branches. I smile at the thought. Long gone are my days of hiding in trees, of scaling the scarp of an ancient trunk, scratched, bruised and, at times wishing I hadn’t bothered to begin. But the absolute joy of hoiking my butt onto a strong limb, into the hook of a tree mother’s arm, the inevitable wobble and correction and the determination to stay exactly there, completely lost to the eyes of predators, aka, adults or, later, visitors, even my children, is like a fizz in my blood. I like the memory, hold it, recognise it, know that it, once, was mine.

Although the Siskins, Goldfinch, Swallows and House Martins are gone, Robins have returned with a different song. Their Spring ‘Come to Me’ has changed, in timbre, in melody, in regularity. Timely, I guess, but what do they sing for so beautifully? Perhaps they sing for. Autumn, on the cusp of Winter. Perhaps it’s for the superb clarity, the reviresco of light, the copper,gold,fiery sunsets, the way the basalt sharps up, glitters with rain, sparkles with sun, moon, reflecting, as we all do in the autumn of our lives, a new and unexpected brilliance.

There is sudden sun and sudden rain, sudden cold and sudden warmth. The invasion of another seasons is always a fight. Think about it. Summer (so called) has lazed about for months, taking her place, sitting fatly upon her throne, throwing us, this year, a capulet of cloud sneezing and, somehow, she managed to throw into our mix, a. big dose of winter. I suspect, she, fatly lounging upon her throne in the Out Of Work Months, mixed up a laboratory of cold spite, made it work, cackled a lot and then brought her experiment down on our heads. Summer always had a love/hate relationship with the Winter King.

I watch chimney smoke across the sea-loch, early morning, as the stars are still stars and the cold is a thrisk of caught breath. The ground is sharp and fierce to my bare feet, a thrill and a real connection with the earth. It is a mystery to me, this sense of connection. I claim no understanding, and I don’t want to, because I love a mystery. I just know that I am always, ALWAYS uncomfortable in shoes and that my feet are happy bare. I cannot walk barefoot along pitted tracks now, any more than I could heist a larch trunk, nor heft my old butt into a mother curve, but that is ok. I could once, and that is enough.

The mice are coming in. I knew they would. The nights are cold now and they are no fools. Survival is everything. I won’t say I am okay about mouse droppings inside my pots and crockery kitchen cupboards but I honestly feel this is a problem that would arrive me a derisive snort from a woman who has no kitchen left because of the bombing. I sweep them away, wash anything I cook with, hope the wee sweet furry creatures don’t eat through the lagging of my water tank in the loft, and wish them well. I suspect I am fortunate to have met animal invasion on a regular basis in my young wife-life. It helps.

Rowan berries, wild sienna, catch my eyes. One here, heavy with fruit, a wide bloom of branches, over there, one skmming for space t’ween big-ass confers, doing her best. Hazels nut up, cones catch the sunset, way up there atop an ancient fir or spruce, and brambles wink blue-black in their tangle. This is Autumn. The rut will begin soon. I will hear the roar of stags echo across the sea-loch, plaintive, threatening, both. The crisp is coming in, no matter what, and it is beautiful. It is tough. It is upskittling, confusing, sudden, It is as it is. We, who live so very close to nature, are so ready for the tapselteerie of fickle weather changes, and we will adapt, and that is our human skill, if we so choose. I think, sometimes, no, often, of those who live in cities, in controlled (so called) environments, and wonder how they are coping with the strangeness of our new seasons.

I wake in the night sometimes. If the moon is loud, or if I hear swans beeping to each other as they fly over my island home, from the freezing arctic, heading south, I wake. I know why. I cannot miss one single chapter in this extraordinary life journey, even if inconvenient. I rise from bed, fling open the curtains, see the night, see the stars, search for swans, feel connected. So very connected.

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Island Blog – Spin the Globe

I have no concept of Global. I have travelled, in my time, but to imagine the globe, one I spent many happy moments spinning into what we may well be enjoying now, as I took Africa to Somewhere Else, and Somewhere Else to some Polar confines, not knowing a dingbat about any of it, but still marvelling. I do remember feeling somewhat pissed off (not in my vocabulary then) that I couldn’t spin the world perpendicular. In the rigid thinking of my childhood, this was a WRONG THING.. However, I believe that sometime ago, about 55. million years, just saying, the world did tip somewhat, tilting toward the perpendicular. It is such a clumsy word. Ps I failed Geography. Big time.

Nonetheless it still bothers me when I encounter a globe. I love a globe, wish I had one, the spinning thing, the stop thing, the where did you land thing, still lively in my child brain. I don’t remember if my parents had one, don’t think so, but somewhere I met one, and was allowed to spin and to stop and to dream.

What happens in our lives? We do what we do, move where we need to, sort what we need to, but what about our dreams? When I consider mine I just know they would never have found the sensible feet required to walk them out, nor the courage, that innate courage. I didn’t grow that one, the sensible. And, the ‘sensible’ has import. Flying off the ground is for birds.

I still wonder about globes, see them now and then, in another’s home, wonder if anyone has put a finger on it, challenged it, flipped it fast, slowed it down, stopped it. Said THERE!

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Island Blog – Feral Contours

That’s an oxymoron, by the way you academic goonies, but you know I like to play with words and to challenge boundaries. In my contoured life, I was as feral as possible, and deliberately. However, I’m talking about snow just now, not the blanket covering thing that you may know as snow, but the white stuff that drives in on the back of a blustering wind, only to whisper itself into corners and crevices, and then, to melt. I watch the hillsides on the other side of the tidal loch, as the waters barrel in and out, capped today with ruffles of white water, like a line of choir girls in a hurry. Gulls float backwards, the wee birds twink and startle above the feeders and even Madam Sparrowhawk missed today, her skirts flipping about white, feathers in somewhat of a disarray as she sulked atop my berberis. Although I know she needs to eat, I won’t make it easy for her, not with all these miles and miles wide open to her, for she is a she, the fastest bird of prey and horribly accurate. I have watched her close her wings at 80mph to get through a wire fence, then to fill out once again, to flip and level and to grab Jock. Jock is the name of all male blackbirds. I notice that the girls are far quicker to juke away. Much like women.

Back to the snow. It came suddenly and making a hoor of a noise. Actually, it was the wind, the shout and slam of it, suddenly elated with a thousand snowflakes on its back, and laughing at the slamming thing it achieved against all windows and doors. I am sure we were collectively startled, even though a cloudreader would have known what was about to come, the whole flinging aboot of wheelie bins, the tattering of bird feathers, the resigned bend of the big ass pines on the shore below me. I watch the way the snow has stayed. Over the sealoch is the cold place, little sun for months and a frozen promise when, over here, we melt. It isn’t resignation, but just a good choice of position. I can do Dark, but I need light, particularly natural light. I have gone from my home, all wet and leaking and light, to a friend for coffee across the water, and crunched my inappropriate shoes over solid ice. T’is bizarre. 

I look over by, as they say here, and see the snow has painted a new picture. It was just a few hills yesterday, with empty land after felling. Larches still stand, now ghost trees, elevations, dips, wrinkles, brown and more brown plus boulders which sometimes catch a wink from the low sun and rise into a glister of beauty for just a moment. But now there is snowvelt. There is a new land over there, the ridges crisp and with a curious turn this way and that. The forestry lines are ruler straight, pulling up into the bumpy clouds, all shades of grey and quite unsure, it seems, of what to do next or where to go. I see faces in the light touch of the snow painter, here an old man puffing out his last breath, there a child running out to sea, chasing a ball. In one place the snowland is thicker. Why? It wonders me, until I see the stand of evergreens. I think of who might have planted them and why. Stories abound when we are curious and I am always thus. 

We all have to live within contours, some of us more than others, when our sky is grey and our light lightweight. We can think sink or we can rise like a surprise. We can speak out, even as we are hoping our bladder won’t let us down. We can. We are naturally feral. It isn’t any easier for a so called privileged person to find a voice, to speak the truth, to point out the cutaway contours, to definate the self, to see the old man dying, the child chasing a ball out to sea. 

A new year lies ahead. Sounds good at first until the old stuff kicks in. Don’t let it, if it isn’t what you want. Be brave enough to see, to acknowledge and to act. Create new contours, feral, of course.

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Island Blog – Confoundle

A lovely Christmas, the build up ridonculous for all those who welcome and supply, who think of every moment when slack threatens mood into a twist; who provide and keep providing, always on their feet, with an astonishing wealth of pretty much everything. I was there, a guest, and I enjoyed it all. The winds rose, cirrus clouds capping the sky and I knew, I just knew, my home was further away. I remember the antsy feeling that morning, my son reassuring, as he always does, but nothing stopped my confoundle, my uncertainty, my maybe not getting back home. Ach, I knew I would one day, but they, my kids, had their kids arriving to fill beds the next day, and I had to go.  I am so busy making everyone else easy. It thinks me.

Home now, my own bed and space and. candles and tunes. Gales and stair-rod rains. Stair-rods, old thing, the brass rods that held the steps to the risers. I remember them, remember them being polished of a morning, although not by me. Again, the thinks. Old and new, like this time, this waiting for the bells, as it is on the islands. There will be a dance. I might walk down. We want so much, miss so much, grieve so much, plan so much, love so much.

A confoundle

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Island Blog – Alpha Zeta

I quote……’ What’s the greatest thing a woman should learn? That, since day one, she already had everything she needs within herself. It’s the world that convinced her she did not.’ Rupi Kaur

Trouble is, we, born with vaginas listen to worldspeke. We do, and it can confound and punish and confine us. I so wish I was 20 now and not 70, because I would have been a frickin menace. I had, I confess, hoped, that somewhat more of a freedom would have become a norm as my own daughter moved into the world of man control, and it has changed, but not enough. Perhaps, as our planet sucks her gasping breaths, the old structure might just collapse into a new alphabet. 

It oftentimes struggles me that the allowability to shout out truths only seems to come at the time when there is a load of ‘there,there’ in our ears. We can be ridiculous, inappropriate. How come it’s not ok when we are 15? The world says, ‘It was the Time’ as if that makes it alright. They turn away at that point, I have watched them do just that, as whoever ‘they’ are, or ‘is’ move or moves onto the next painting, choice of pudding. I have felt absent all my life, as if the norms within which I lived missed letters or numbers, as if the alphabet and the math would never find solution. I still do, but in the now of my now, because I have become an old frickin menace, with a vagina, I can say what I like. I have seen what I have seen over 70 years, and I am often pissed off with the whole alphabet. A is alpha. Z is Zeta. Are we saying that one is greater than the other? Are we even bothering with all the letters in between as if they have no significance? Think of the in-betweens in your life. Do it now. Those sitting on the pavement in the face of a night right there. Think of the waitress who is slow to serve you because she is on minimum wage, feeding kids and holding tight to her meagre home. Those, as you walk by on the way to a concert, theatre, a film, dinner, where you plan champagne, a proposal, those who unnerve you, swerve you. 

Shouting out is good, but that way of thinking can become a thing. What we need, and I hesitate to use that word (history), is inclusion, (too wordy), love. Might we forget the old alphabet and move, regardless of letters, word shapes and sentence approval? All good things are wild and free. (not my words) ‘The fire inside me can either warm or destroy. The choice is entirely my own.’ Thoreau. So much of life is about words, the way they are stroyed, the random way they stray, the weight of them as they land. Words. All constructed and constricted by the alphabet. 

I have learned this. I can go from A to Z without the rest of the alphabet knowing. Again, not my words. Writers, painters are nothing if they don’t pinch bigger ideas.

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Island Blog – Thinksmith. She

Been thinking about thinking. We all have a gazillion thinks every day, but it’s the sorting of them that fascinates me, draws me in to the frickin web of itself. I can get stuck. Did you know that a spider web is the strongest of all ‘materials”? It can hold a floating astronaut, once duly bigged up, or so I read. So, these thinks, these random trollops (can I still pen that word?) invade a brain, invited or not, and, mostly so NOT. Howeversoever, they come from the moment we wake. The What To Do List is immediately available, the flat surface visible, and, in theory, doable. Doable? Is that a word now?

Back to Thinks. I wake with all of them and I watch them fly about my mind, then, on lifting into the morning light, into a new day. It’s noisy, the think party, yes, but as my body moves from the dream world, where everything is transient, falling, scary, I grab my huge man-jumper, a gift from an old and gone friend for whom I cooked and cleaned. sling it on and take my legs to the floor. Oh, pause on that. There are those, many thoses who can not do this, and never will. I take the stairs down for coffee, knowing there is warmth and power for the kettle. I flick on the fairy lights because it is so not dawn, yet, but the moon is owning the sky and she smiles me. Salut, Lady Moon. May you live long and prosper.

But, and there is always one of those, or, if not, it’s a bloody However. Another think. How else can a writer break from one statement to another, without a but or a however, or a coach or counsellor, or a friend who cares? We don’t talk right these days. We fire statements like rockets. We don’t invite and accept, on the streets of our lives. Now, I know I am an old island woman, so am not in the hub or hug of today’s thinks, but it seems to me that there is almost more fight for survival in the world of greed and success over others, than ever there was. And that thinks me more, even though I have no inside information on how the hellikins this world works now. Just this very day, I heard a young man tell me he no longer seeks money as his goal. Yes, he wants money for his own lifestyle but not for its own sake. He wants wealth in order to share it, to help someone else, to be random, to be wild with it. It thinked me good.

I can play with words, phrases, terminology, wordology, big thinks, random tiddleypom, the thinksmith, always, she.