touch

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Island Blog – Sense ability

We forget, don’t we, to notice what our natural senses tell us, unless someone. shoves a fragrant bloom under our noses? So busy is life these days, so disconnected from the beauty of the wild. Where once fields scattered in glorious disarray, there are housing estates. And it’s all very well to shout about the loss of ‘green’ but where would all our people live? In caravans, wicker shelters? It’s definitely not an easy conversation piece, nor a simple decision for the big cheeses in our world, our cities, our villages. I remember a time living in Glasgow, in a flat. So not my thing, but there we landed, short term. There was a ‘washing green’ for all 6 flats. A stumbly plastic spidery thing stood in the small patch of grass, a few pegs attached. One sunny morning, after washing a load of boy stuff and with nowhere in the wee flat to effectively dry anything bigger than a couple of boxers, I lugged the basket down to the back door. I had already bought pegs and hoped the thing that looked like a big umbrella with plastic connectivity and the ability (apparently) to move with the breeze, not that there was one, would never be one, not in this square of overgrown grass, fenced in like a punishment, would dry the load.

I pegged and swivelled the thing. It squeaked and creaked and tipped and I just knew that nobody, from any of the flats which, all of which proffered a scummy window view of me out there being a loon, used it. I stood back to check my affixings. All seemed pegged up. A window opened. A woman poked her head out. I looked up. Hallo, I smiled. Just pegging out my washing. Aye, she said, and chuckled. You won’t do it twice, she said. Everyone takes their dog out there and never clears up. She was right on that. I remember that moment, as I moved back into the confines of a flat, having known the fly-freedom of a west coast home, all space and nature, most of the latter moving in with confidence, and felt an overwhelming sense of loss. I won’t live this way anymore, I said to myself, even though it seemed there was no way out.

Life is different now, and it thinks me. I would have diminished there, starved, lost myself. I am a wild woman, a creative, a solo. Returning to the island gifted me, eventually, a reconnection with all that was familiar. Instead of traffic noise, I came back to the birds, remembered their songs. Instead of grey pavements, I returned to peat-foot, to a ground that bounces with me as I walk. Instead of incessant chatter, I returned to conversation. Instead of a thrum of people, an assault, I met individuals.

Today, just today, my five senses lived, really lived. I watched a young otter dash to hide under my car, a fleet, yes, but I saw it. I watched sea eagles cut the sky in a spirograph. I heard the loons way down there on a lifting tide. On a walk I saw wild honeysuckle, blousy and determined, create a bouquet of delight from the roots of a huge fallen pine. I stopped to touch the delicate but feisty blooms and breathed in the fragrance. Home again and I sat to taste a home-made hummus, salad, a wild garlic Tapselteerie pesto, toasted seeds. I heard the loons again. They’re down there somewhere.

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Island Blog – Someone or No-One?

This is something I performed once. It begs a performance. There is rhythm, rap, and begs a reading out loud.

Wherever you grow, bloom strong and petal wide, don’t hide but spread your colour, blue is it, or red, or butter yellow, white? Be right with it, your colour, it is yours alone. Hold your own, make it known, alone, not lonely. Only you know your ground. It may be rocky, maybe rich and soft, a mountainside, a beach path, garden, grey street, river bank. Give thanks for wherever you find yourself. Hold out your petals, reach and reach up to the light, breathe right. Your breath is life, in joy or strife, breathe on. In shade or sun, you are the one.

Make a difference. Have fun and look around you. Who grows beside, or over there? Another soul with hopeful roots just pushing through in fear, perhaps, delicate heart, easily broken by careless feet or the lash of punishing rain-words, to die in silence. Cry out in anger, but stand your ground. For those who stand will remember the ones who fall. All of them.

And share your light, your bright, your coloured heart, still beating like a drum on the battlefield, and there, don’t yield, but glow with life and, tender-fingered, lift a drooping head. Warm a faltering body. Say ‘I am here, and I will not leave you’. Share your mystery, your very soul. Hide nothing, let nothing cold you, hold you fixed in ice or fear, as if the end is near.

Notice every season, but not too much. Touch another, lift, don’t drift, for Time moves on, fleeing like a thief in the assault of misbelief, no crime committed in the touch. Some of us long for touch, not much to ask, small task, withdrawn through fear and that worldly slime, the snake of self-doubt, out with you, damn spot, you are not the true voice, my choice, I touch.

Hold each blooming moment, roots in the earth, head in the sky. Let pain go by, toss it to the wind, the changeling wind with stories on her back. And, remember this. Never miss the chance to lead another to the dance. Show your light. Be curious, like Alice, and leave your smile among the trees for the bees to honey up and sweeten. Reflect the sun, the rain, the moon. And do it soon, because you know that a winter of the soul will come, and, for some, it is already here. No matter your ground, make it better for your being there, nourishing, flourishing, sharing, caring, thankfully placed just where you need to be to learn something. Let laughter fill your throat and let it fly out like birds or butterflies to smile a flagging soul up and out of sadness, and to spin their own bitter into glitter. A million rainbows lie within you. Let them show, because you know, no matter the chatter, that you have the power to choose.

Am I someone, or no-one?

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Island Blog – And, I am thankful

I hear the flapsnatch of white bed linen on the washing line and the sough of this welcome warm wind through the green fingers of the ancient scots pines. They flank my island home, soldiers, a battalion of protectors. I tilt my eyes up to the blue, the glorious blue, as the meep of Goldcrests I cannot see, feed in the woods. I laugh as one sheet escapes my hands to coat a small willow tree, turning her into a bride, or a choir girl and my laughter skitters away, up and away into the swirl of words and songs, stories and longings. I see the sunlight touch cloud edges, wilding them into spun gold, just for a moment, and I was there to catch that moment.

I see the Rose Bay Willowherb sway like a chorus of dancers, almost to a beat. I see sunshine glow through maple leaves, lift the silvered backs of leaves turbulenced in the breeze, as if they are showing their knickers. Rose bushes swagger, the sea-loch bobs softly, catching diamonds. Honey bees fly past, travelling many hundreds of miles there and back from a source of nectar, watch one on the lowly ragwort, the so-called weed, the only plant the beautiful Cinnebar moth will lay her eggs upon, the one plant so cruelly discarded and burned by those who don’t know what they are doing. I watch families walk by, talking, laughing, looking in wonder at the landscape of which I am a strong part. We chat sometimes, I ask them How is your Holiday, and they smile and look around as if they have arrived in a place made of dreams of songs, of stories and longings, with gentle natural peace as an all surround sound. I hear the odd car, but it is only someone else who lives here going about their day.

I have seen few bees this strange summer, but I have seen them. I have gone to visit the space the hives used to sit in holding thousands of stingers who never want to sting, busy with the production of honey, the only food on the planet that will never go bad, no matter how many years, even generations, it is left untouched; the food which, if applied to a wound, will generate faster healing than any medication, which will ease any illness from a sore throat to depression, just a big spoonful a day. In the empty space, up in the soughing pine woods, there is a sadness, yes, a sense of what it meant for the beekeeper to let them go, to move them on, what it meant to him. But those wonderful creatures live on, I know that, with new bee lovers who love them, care for them, listen to them. And that smiles me. I still wish i had seen more bees this summer. Without honey bees we are in big trouble, as you may already know.

The clouds are curving now, conjoining into a rather fetching grey. Over there, loaded, planning a sneeze, methinks, or maybe not. This motherly wind is warm as soup and she just might ping them away. Either way, I am watching it, smelling each change, loving that I am alive and wild and part of this extraordinary gift.

And I am thankful, for all of it.

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Island Blog – See That

That’s what we say in Scotland. Well, in some parts of this wonderful country. We say ‘See that’ and it doesn’t necessarily mean we see what remarkables us. We might smell it, or hear it, or feel it or notice it, but the verb is all about vision, as we know it. And even that ‘as we know it’ thingy can confound others who stick to the senses as separate and well defined over long years whilst the ‘See Thats’ trickle like water over the human boundaries of the sensory divide.

I remember meeting it in a bus shelter in Glasgow. I heard one woman to say to another ‘ See Him?’ I looked around but she did not and nor did her companion. Both knew he was nowhere near and I quickly learned it. She went on to list his weekend crimes, omissions, commissions, et la and la. I was captivated. The rain lifted all but the pavement from beneath our ill-clad feet, theirs in heels, mine in flats, and my eyes fell to those feet, the way they moved in perfect tune to the active movement of their bodies, arms, fingers faces, eyes, spines. It was as if I was watching trees in the wind, the bending, the swing this way and that, and the connection between these two. They caught branches, tipped back their heads, laughed, hugged, and I could see that. See that.

Since then I have felt at home with a ‘See That’ knowing as I do now that there may be no actual seeing. See that can, and often does become the prologue to a story that only one in the mix has actually experienced. It can come out other ways. See Him? See Her? See This? See That? See Who? See What? And there the story begins and it can lift and rise, pull up colour, crash into grey or black, but it begins every time with vision. Vision experienced, vision proffered, vision received, a communique, a connection, vital.

See that smell? See that sound? See that touch? All visionary in its presentation. I love it because it thinks me. Our eyes are so very precious, our looking, our seeing, our vision and the way we can see means everything. I don’t know what it is to be blind nor losing sight but I do know that a deal of my adventures, understandings, my sorting out of self angst and fear has grown through my inner eye. We all have that sight.

When we eventually caught that bus, the friends still chattering, me silent and alone, I watched them. They were two women leaving their home lives for a day at work, no doubt demanding and exhausting. My stop was before theirs and as I wobbled down the bus (driver didn’t slow) I paused and turned to them. It was a risk. English, or so they thought (so very wrong) and proper spoken. but they had the grace to look up. You taught me something today. Thank you.

They probably still think of me as that weird ya-di-ya woman. See her………..?!!!!!

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Island Blog – Touch only Rain

Rain, at 0400 is a sigh, a shake of my head, a slump in my gut, yet I know the flowers need it so and it makes a pretty mist picture-coat on my window pane. The sky is heavy with it, with rain, fat pregnant greys all lined up like women at an anti natal clinic, emitting rain. The morning seems just fine with it. There’s no sense of disapproval, no cross words flitting across the in between where humans like me are earthly bound and at the whim of weathers. The birds don’t mind enough not to fly, to swoop down for soggish seed and to rise up again quickquick into shelter, although it is not from the rain they hide. I sit on the other side of the window, watching rain. My phone app tells me in an inappropriately luminous yellow that there is an 100% chance of rain the live long day and I slump again. What is all this slumping? Well, I don’t know. Perhaps I am bemoaning the loss of those recent balmy summer days, the ones we recently enjoyed on our rain-sodden island. Our summer could already be over. We all know that. We are well known for being sodden, have been rain sodden for about 600 years give or take and we are also well known for going completely bonkers on sunny days, completing gargantuan tasks in record time like re-roofing a hotel, landscaping a 20 acre garden or building Gran a bungalow by tea-time, foundations and all. Or perhaps this slump is that I am thinking of another’s tears.

The wood pile is rained wet but the wood pile has no care of such a minor incursion. This wood grew from sapling right here on the island after all and has rain in its DNA. It burns regardless, wet or dry, no smoking. No bees though. Bees don’t like to fly in rain. I imagine them all peeping out through that tiny hole watching the clouds and needing a sugar rush. Buzz buzz, not yet ladies. How’s Her Majesty? She’s fine the old bat and who wouldn’t be with all that royal jelly plus, if you don’t mind, 1000 nurse bees at her every whim whenever she fancies whimming?

Gulls cut the sky looking white as newborn snowflakes against the greys, lazy, leisurely, nae rush at all, whilst other colours sharpen and shout new defiant music into the sleepy air. Rain turns ferns apple green. Moss and lichen lift into shades of Ochre, Sienna, Olive and prick tears to my eyes, Granite rocks divide into maps of the world, the cracks darkling with wet. There, the Mason Dixon Line, here, the continent of Africa minus Angola and over there, Iceland, more or less. Rhododendron leaves are polished to a sheen. My face drips as I walk and the little dog grows ever mud coloured. Puddles big enough to bathe in squat along the track, rain plash hiding tree reflections beneath its surface. Come another day reflections, for this day has no time for such gob-smacking indulgence. Mirror another day, bring out the cameras, click, post, marvel, compete, Like. We raindrops are legion and extremely busy watering the flowers and pissing people off. In short, we are having fun rumpling puddles and filling the wellies of anyone who stands still too long. We are chewing up the mud for the spreading, clarting the roads with it and sinking the baleful cows up to their knees as they wait to grab mouthfuls of hay before it becomes insulation for wall cavities.

Diamonds shiver at the tips of weeping larch, hundreds of them, thousands, perfect pear drops of heavenly water held in stasis, catching the light, on hold until it is their turn to fall into the mud. Still, it is surely a wondrous thing to be a light catching water diamond even once in a lifetime. Rain popples the sea-loch, lifting, luffing, tickling the surface until it giggles. A single heron stands as if on water, still and patient. Beneath a spread of hardwoods, beech, chestnut, elm, birch and ash, their branches lowed with rain weight, the ground glows liquid green, a molten gold carpet of Creeping Buttercup and Lady Elizabeth poppies. Even the wheelie bins gleam bright.

I remember rain, as slump and lift, as promise and disappointment, as joy and sadness. Rain, tears; Rain diamonds; Rain liquid life; Rain skid death; wash clean, wash away, wash out; I remember the joy of rain and the unjoy of it. Walking in the rain helps to shift a slump even if I cannot stop thinking of the family who will reach arms out to a beloved pet this day and touch only rain.

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Island Blog – This Journey

I will agree that these lockdowns have given us time to reflect. It has also given us fear and a stuttering of easy movement. Any journey holds both. Even going to the local shop on a little island. Imaginary demons lurk on every door handle and in every breathy encounter. Even from behind a mask we are cautious of guffaws so we try not to be funny, even if being funny is our absolute thing. For those of us who love to cheer others no matter what, our vocal chords are compromised if not fettered, our lungs on hold. We turn our faces away from other faces we know so well, pushing out a gentle Good Morning with as little puff as we can, for we must not forget the responsibility we carry. Touching anything is risky. Touching each other, forbidden, even if touching is our absolute thing. It is stultifying at times and we must not give in to imaginary fears. We must keep journeying for we cannot hold back the days any more than we can hold back the virus. Both are invisible.

Other invisible things also keep coming, rolling beneath our feet like thunder. These things can confound. Not now, we say, Not Now! But they do come anyway, bringing birds into bellies, all a-flutter and a-twist. Some of us must go to another place, a hospital, perhaps, for a check up or an essential operation. We must ride the road, traverse the water, open doors, breathe in air that may or may not be healthy and fresh. I think of these folk, compromised, fearful. I hope they have good family support. I wish them the very best outcome and enough courage to push away the fear. These journeys, in ordinary times, were bad enough. Now it must feel like a walk into Dante’s Inferno. I know of some who are back home now and healing well, who have journeyed through the Inferno and are cool again and safe. This is how it can be and this is what to focus on, never mind the flutter and twist of belly birds. It is natural to be afraid at such times. We feel thus as we face the unknown.

My way is to look at the other side of things, the flip side, the arrival and not the departure. When a journey is inevitable, no matter how badly we might wish it away, there is a choice. Look at the fear and feed it, or don’t. Instead look at the smile on your face when it is all behind you, when this journey that looms is already a fading memory. Look at what you can learn as the journey flows beneath you. Notice and reflect and store these observations away for a future think. Precious are these observations, the shared chuckles, the muffle of masked conversation. Look out and up at Nature as she flies by the car window. See how the clouds part and conjoin, how the sun takes a quick peek at you, enough to dazzle. See how quiet are the roads, how the rain spits up from the car ahead, how crimson are the tail lights. Listen to the music coming from the speaker. In other words create a distraction, create many of them. What you allow into your mind is what your mind will develop. It is such a powerful lesson to learn. No matter the journey, no matter the timing, we have a chance to learn something we never imagined was there at all.

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Island Blog – Pas pour Moi

I wake with the sun, can feel the warmth and the promise of a new day ahead. Impatient, I leave first, walking from the apartment down the little hill towards the village. Bonjour Monsieur-dame, I greet an older couple coming towards me with bags of shopping. I can smell the baguette and see it too, peeping out as baguettes always do, refusing to fit in. She, Madame, appraises me, her eyes covering my body like a touch. She is, I know, looking for an inappropriate bare of skin. She won’t find it, for I know this old fashioned place and am respectful of its rules of thumb, its unwritten laws. She, naturally, is dressed for a winter’s day in Alaska, all in black and so buttoned up as to appear more like a seal than a woman. Her face, pinched into a critical catch tells me that her smiling Monsieur will be disappointed at my coverings and also that her life has not been an easy one.

The streets that wind through the village are cobbled, worn by thousands of feet over hundreds of years, smoother around the entrance to the cafes and bars where feet have scuffled and stopped, turned around or opened the door for refreshment and friendship. Picasso painted here, as did Matisse and Dali and it is to the painters I am bound. Through the archway and down to the rocky harbour I find them, placed like buskers and probably with their own pitches considered sacrosanct. Bonjour I say and more than once as I walk by with only a glance at their work. I know the rules. No artist wants to be gawped at and most certainly do not invite comment. as they apply oils to canvas, eyes on their subject. I look out to where the sun rises pinkly perfect over a calm and submissive sea. Around the curve of the natural harbour an old stone edifice stands sentry. Much of its face is gone but once it would have stood proud as Punch. This is the way in, it would have said to the fishermen and sailors seeking sanctuary.

On the edge of a spit of rock stands a woman in white. Her long dress floats a little in the warm morning breeze but nothing else of her moves. Her hand below a bonnet of white satin is shading her eyes as she looks out to sea. Searching for her husband, says a gruff smokers voice behind me. I am startled back to myself. How did he know I was English? Ah, Madame, he says, English always look English, no matter where they go. I am momentarily disappointed but concede he is probably right. She will not move all day, he continues. She is an art student and this is how she earns money for her studies. I smile and move closer to her. She doesn’t even blink. The heat, I think, the heat! Already, at 7.30 am it is 20 degrees and she has enough clothes on to kit up the whole cast of Hamlet.

I move towards my favourite cafe and sit outside beneath the shade of a tree, one I cannot identify. Cafe Madame? Our, mercie Monsieur. In moments he returns with a small coffee, black, thick and hot. Beside it he places a tiny shot glass of something and winks at me. For the heat, Madame, he says and swings away.

Later we swim. There is a storm gathering and the waves are restless and confused. Himself, snorkelled up, is ferreting about among the rocks whilst I sun myself on the stony beach. When he returns to me I can see something is wrong. He has lost his teeth, pulling them clean out along with the snorkel tube. Lost, he lisps at me. I roll my eyes and feel a small panic rise but the storm is closer now and the waves too high and mighty for a search. I resign myself to a toothless husband who doesn’t care one bit. For three days as the storm rages he orders omelette or scrambled eggs for dinner and thinks the whole thing hilarious. I smoulder across the table. It is, after all, one thing to lose all your teeth to the ocean and quite another to think it amusing, having no intention whatsoever of either organising a new set once we get home or to have any regard for the way I feel watching him lose food through floppy lips and talking like a drunk.

After the storm has moved away and the waves, their skirts still upskittled a bit, have calmed, I move into the water. Point at the place you lost them, I call back. He looks at me as he might a crazy woman and guides me. There! he says and turns back to his book. I duck beneath the water and there they are, sitting atop a rock, complete, waiting. Triumphant I lift them to the sky and call out to him. The whole beach looks up as if I had just found gold, which, in my opinion, I have.

We are the talk of our favourite restaurant. C’est impossible! They say and I am a Cheshire Cat. Pas pour moi, Monsieur, I reply. Pas pour moi.

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Island Blog – Little Fires

I believe that grandparents have a gift. One that is gifted to them. They also have a gift to give, through translation, nothing lost, unless they choose to ignore the opportunity it brings them, and by extension, the generation below and the one below that.

On the first gift, I can say it comes as a surprise. This gift is one of a second childhood. Not physically, of course, but in a renewed lease of life. From banging on about arthritis to clambering over a fence with a cackle of glee; from medication programming to random acts of play; from soup at midday on the button to fish finger sandwiches just because we’re hungry – with ketchup, naturally. The awakening of the sleeping child is painless. Sparkles return to rheumy eyes and stolen carrots from the veg counter at Tesco’s are an absolute must. An old woman who has plodded, fallen- arched, and for many years, up one aisle, politely rounding to the next, might suddenly find herself speeding up for a swing-wheelie at the top. The giggles of the little ones egg her on and she just can’t help herself. Her mind is full of naughty ideas that came from nowhere. After all, these half-pint charges of hers have been sternly groomed for a perfect public face and mummy never does any of these things.

As mummy, we don’t either. Many of us are so caught up in right and absolutely wrong that we contain, without intending it, the free spirit of our children until their bodies can barely bend at all. And here comes the second gift, the one given. With granny we can fly and fly high. My granny was like that and we all adored her. The mischief in her eyes set little fires in our own and although she was in all ways the perfect lady, she showed us a side of her true self that my mother rarely saw as a child. I feel sad about that and wonder how much, and how often, I contained my own children in boxes at least two sizes too small for their exuberant personalities. But how else to protect, teach and develop a child into the adult we want them to be, hope they will become? This, in itself sounds like a box, but only to my granny ears. So is it just that we can ‘hand them back’ or is it that second chance to what, make amends? My own children, now parents, are not always delighted at granny’s antics. Initially I faced a few stern reprimands on my behaviour, feeling like the child in trouble and most uncomfortable. Can I say God or should I pretend he doesn’t exist? Can I answer questions on where babies come from, asked by a ten year old, or should I say “Ask Mummy’ thus making it very mysterious and serious? I get my nickers in a right knot at such times, and dither like an old woman who never thought an original thought, or was never allowed to.

9 grandchildren in, I now am more relaxed about the nicker knot thing. I pause a lot after a question is asked. I might distract, as I would a puppy chewing on a cat, suggest some toast or a bounce on the trampoline. I might answer the baby question, but vaguely, with something safe, like ‘Mummy’s tummy’ and leave it at that . As to God, I might say, some believe he exists, some don’t, and round with a question for them. What do mummy and daddy say? Always a safe bet, that one.

I don’t remember my mum having any bother with dithering. She just answered as she saw fit, no matter what parental bans we had put in place. And blow it. Thats what she said. She had no intention of bending to our whims and I cannot imagine ever being brave enough to challenge her. In my day and with my mother, challenge was verboten. However my generation have been confounded with all the new information about parenting. Strait jackets were out, for starters, and choices offered to small people on the best dinner plates. My own children, and I have heard them all employ this, would ask their 3 year old what she would like for supper. I managed to keep my snort silent, although it gave me indigestion and required my scrabble into handbag depths for a Rennies. Now, I am used to it. I remember, once, tapping a child on the leg when her tantrum threatened the entire neighbourhood, and being strongly warned never to touch a child again in anger. It wasn’t anger, I began to say, but said no more after making eye contact with the parent in case. The Childline number is readily available, after all, and there are posters in every school in most of the rooms, and at a child’s eye level.

However, the joys of playing hooky with grandchildren are the best. Naughtiness and mischief fan the embers of my internal fire any time I am with them. And I am reminded, often, of the gift I have received and the gift I can give – that reconnection with my own childhood and the chance to be the child free, the child outside the box, setting all the other children free from their own boxes and, together, heading off into a fantasy world of mischief and fun and laughter.

I am going to have to live for decades more, it seems.