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Island Blog – But the Brave

I’m listening to a song that a famous someone is completely turning into a complete personal indulgence, but I am sat sitting as they say and so I, not you, am going through the excrutiate. I do wonder why those who once were so brilliant, return obviously compromised. It’s a Judy Collins number and she, for certain, was the only one to sing her songs. Moving on. Where was I?

Today felt like a bit of a sladge, my word. It’s sludge with an A and that’s a bit of an uplift in itself, A being the firstborn, the Alpha. I rose, ate, sorted, cleared a thing or two, brought in wood, watched the moon the cantankerous madam slip behind the hills. I washed up, prepped for my trip into town (it isn’t a town btw) which takes many manoeuvres and swingtwiddles to get through because it’s single track and that whole single track is always compromised by the Parkings. The Parkings on this island almost define us, or they do in the summer months, mostly because there are none. This is due to the crap knowledge of Parking. I have known some who take over too much for their parking thing and then head off for the day. Often. I could have got two minis in there. Two locals.

Back to the point. A sladge, yes I said that already. I tramped in the rain, I did, and the waterproof coat failed me. I could feel the sky invading my skin. I waited for my mini to be fixed, dripping and cold. I had gone to no shops and why was that? My damp tramp sladge. I admit. The shops are alight and bright and welcoming. Oh. so it’s me and my self pity, my angst and sladge? what happened to the frolics in me, the wild and inspire, the fun, the mischief? Good question. It seems that we have learning, And we have turnaround. Oh we can’t do anything much now, to save the world, the ones we love but we can do something for ourselves and more for the young who want to know, who are listening, and there’s another think. Whom of us have been honest with our own children? When have we sat to talk with an emerging adult and hung our heads, opened our hands, admitted we have no idea, being completely vulnerable? Not many but the Brave.

That’s me. And you.

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Island Blog – Village Life

There is something about a small community that isn’t a bit small at all. Although the wee street is short, the homes hunkers, mostly, against the winter gales, people open doors, emerge onto the skinny tarmac with dogs, kids, bikes, empty shopping bags over shoulders, and all of them wave. If it works, I slow on my way to work, wind down a window, share a laugh, find something out, check on the wellbeing of those whom I value, whom I love, whom I would sorely miss. Mostly, it’s cheeky chat, fly comments, something like a nourishing extra breakfast or lunch, a lift to my soul. There’s almost no parking because all the parking is already done, and the line goes all the way up to where the road divides, a cusp, a problem sometimes because I have to be in first gear to overscape the cusp thing and in the ice times, even first gear, even in my snorty wee mini, is no enough. Needless to say, there is a lot of reversing, pulling back, moving forward a bit, sneaking into skinny gaps and just to get to the end of this wee street. It’s not a street, no. It’s a track, or, perhaps on days when ‘the boys’ have moved in with pot-hole fillings and tarmac hot enough to take the belly off even the highrise big-ass four wheel drives, should they risk a too early move, a road.

The thing here is community, a kindness and a helping, a reversing, a lot of that, a waving, a smiling. I came, we came as incomers 46 odd years ago, and there are many more now. I meet them because they involve, they want to. They come to help, to volunteer, to bring their skills to any situation. I watch them. I see their smiles, their body language, their openness to a complete life change. Coming from cities, from stressful jobs, from awkward familial situations, from judgement and marginalisation, towards the dream that life can be a Can Be. And it can. And I would wish for so many folk that the belief in just that would give them the courage to shift, to lift, to gift a better life to themselves.

When we had to leave the island, a load of whiles ago, and rented a flat in Glasgow Southside, I felt ripped from community. I seek community, love people, talk to anyone and everyone, and all the time. I know I need people, but I am not needy. Oh no. Very independent. Our flat was 3 floors up. It was a fine flat. But I had to find friendship. I knocked on doors, noted when this new lass came back from work, she was unsure about new flooring, her new job, what did I think? I met folk on the cold concrete stairs, said hallo. I met warmth. It thought me. Everyone is lonely. Floor below lived a very old brother and sister, really wonderful Glasgow folk, the best. She baked. He swore and laughed a lot. When she had baked scones, she whacked a broom handle on her ceiling. Come, collect. Even though I could not wait to escape the city, to get back to my island home, I remember those two who gave me village life in a very lonely place.

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Island Blog – Diving the Deeps

Today I worked at changeovers in the sunshine with a fablious team. I had to learn my way around the check list for each property, four tea towels here, two there, one for glass and one for otherness. The store cupboards, floor to ceiling, hold super king duvet kit, king, double and single. I did, momentarily wonder where the hell are the queens in all this! Well, I know where they are. They’re plotting in the dark spaces, along with the cobwebs, not that I found one of those. That is how it is, even now when we might all do well to acknowledge the fact that queens and women who never got the crown will not be kept in the dark for long.

I buzzed here and there, cleaning windows, scrubbing loos, working impossible duvets into the resistance of their covers, as if they had tasted freedom for just a few hours and were dead pissed off at the thought of, again, obliging into a well-ironed confine for yet another week. What might be the word for someone who gives life to things? I have no answer. Anyway, I am digressing, madly. I was somewhere else for about four hours with wonderful women in the team, with no mobile reception and the sky blue, the wind very Sahara, blowing leaflets and sticky information sheets off their blue tack restraints, and visitors who stopped by for coffee and stayed for ages. We watched, from the laundry, a line of classic cars thrum by, their bellies way to low for our island potholes, and then, later, big bikers on big bikes, turning in, all leathered up and grinny, for big ass sandwiches and the chance to swelter in the very focussed sunshine. the doors to the cafe stayed open, until a Sahara blast thwacked them shut. Folk came with dogs wearing shorts, the humans, not the dogs, and for a short while conversation lifted from the sort of sheltered outside bit and up into the sky, stories and laughter flying like birds. A conjumble of fablious. We don’t have many such days here and we know how to celebrate the fun of the moment, to grab it, but not to expect a hold, for it can so quickly be snatched away.

I knew I wanted physical work. I can still jinx and bend, not only with my body, but also with my thinking. I have dived deep throughout my life, seeking what I could never have, and finding that which I never sought, a sudden surprise, a something that stopped my flow and caught my breath, like a new understanding. And that, I now know, only comes over time lived, experiential time. We sort , (I say ‘We’ only because I have talked with others on this), our expectations and our disappointments into an acceptable line like a track we know we must walk. We know there are potholes and, jeez, there are some spectacular ones here. My mini could disappear completely in one, although, and here I go again, she has no intention of losing anything, never mind herself. We talk. I warn her, or she, if I am suddenly zooming, warns me. It works, this communication I have with things. Someone once said to me, they actually did, that I cannot talk to plants and I did give an eye roll at that. It isn’t such a stretch to ‘things’. Not for me. If I need something to work with me and I with that thing, my garden gate, for example, which refused to shut properly until we had a chat, then I need to initiate conversation. Had I been born in Westmoreland in an earlier era, I have no doubt I would have been burned at the stake.

Depth in life is asking to be dived. I know the surface is safe but it is also boring. I cannot see opportunity beyond what is under my control. I want to risk, to dive, to possibly struggle, but isn’t this living, isn’t this fun? I have no interest in control, although I am definitely me and the definitely me is still wild.

Who would choose less?

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Island Blog – Indigo and Goose Shit

I’ve been blue for a few days, I admit, and blue is my favourite colour, but not my favourite way to feel. Although I don’t show it outerly, this feeling, I still feel it. It’s like a trudge in my heart, filtering down to my legs and up to my thinking. And I did trudge, all of me did this trudging thing. Each task felt like a frickin bore and a half, more. I kept going, automaton switch on, but felt almost absent from proceedings, even if I did proceed. Sleep was bumpy and ebullient with odd images and chilly moments. But, now I have moved on to green. I also love green, the growth colour, the one that heralds change and the promise of astonishing colour. I went to church today in astonishing colours, my boots and one of my layered frocks, the colour of goose shit after a korma, and my underfrock green with white flowers and yellow interiors, the teeshirt below a washed out blue, a concession and a wink to the blue of late. My socks were wildly striped, my coat blue/grey with red hearts. Nothing matched but I read the lesson quite the thing, acting it all out in my voice. A definite improvement.

It thinks me. Sometimes, actually many times, when I remember the gazillions of counsellor guides who have gifted wisdom, revelations and inspiration over most of my adult life, there has oftentimes been the invitation to colour a feeling, or a state of being. As I am me, with my instantly curious mind, I wanted to know ‘which shade of this colour would you like me to name?’ There was a silence after that until, I’m guessing, strength was gathered along with an eye roll, pre responding. If asked, I might explain the difference between shade and hue, between the wisdom of naming a colour as a single thing instead of the many, many hues and shades of that particular colour, depending, naturally, on what other colour/solution/medium was added, and in what proportion. Have I lost you?

I walked today in the wild place. It is right outside my gate, a few steps, slew right, and I am on the right track. Always the right track. The air was a gasp of what might have been a snow warning, had the clouds told me so, but no. Damp held in fists as I breathed in the smell of Autumn’s stand against the Winter King. He’s a bugger, so he is, arrogant and confident and blowing early shards of ice at people when they’ve only just got the hang of those awful wooly stockings, only just thought about packing away all their summer kit. The trees wave at me, spindly now, ghost trees, sap sinking into roots. The snipe are in, the hedgehogs snuffling about for a place to hibernate, the stags are silent, dead, or triumphant, but wary. Grass is held in stasis and will soon be dead, but the moss and the fungi still stand tall, an arrogance in their standup. Thats an island word.

So, if asked the question today, What colour are you? I would grin, avoid doing the shade, hue thing, and answer, still blue, but with green. Blue but with a touch of rose madder = indigo. Green with a touch of cadmium yellow = goose shit.

Sounds like confusion. That’ll do.

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Island Blog – Through the Pond Weed

I am gradually growing used to city life, even as I absolutely do not wish to live in one. So many people, cars, bikes, streets, houses and windows. So much white noise, black noise too, sudden sounds of too many folk living cheek by jowl. A car bump, horns, ambulance alarms, a shouted caution or rebuke. Even the darkness falls with a clunk, although mornings slip quietly through curtains and under doors. I love mornings and today I took off for a walk around Blackford Pond, feeling the harsh resistance of pavements give way to a softer track, muddy around the stones. Benches flank the curve of the pond where I see ducks, moorhens and a family of swans with four healthy looking goslings, velvet grey, necks long, heads proud as they move with grace through the pond weed. Plaques name those long gone, etched in brass. ‘In memory of Jim and Mary, Robert and Matilda, who loved this place’. I remember this pond years ago, the banks less densely covered with spindly trees and ebullient water weeds, the body of water more visible. I exchange Good Mornings with dog walkers and joggers as we pass. each other by. The sky is white with sprachles of grey but no blue. Gulls cut through the white, a single hawk, pigeons. I miss abundant wildlife and must keep my eyes up to see any at all.

I am playing the waiting game, but it doesn’t feel like a game. Some day soon I will receive a letter with a date on it for an MRI scan and the process will nudge forward a few steps. For now, all I can do is to build strength, rest, play and keep my imagination under firm control. If I was at home doing this waiting thing, just me with my thoughts, I doubt I would manage such control. It is good to be here, with family distractions and in a completely different environment, despite the lack of wildlife, of space, and this constant movement of mass humanity. In quiet moments I watch people walk by under the window. Mothers or fathers with wee ones, old grannies, like me, with shopping bags, stout footwear and ice white hair. What is going on in your lives, I wonder, you tiny old woman, you, jogger with a dog, you young families with laughter or angst on your unlined faces? Are you well, happy, frustrated, sad, disappointed or thankful to be upright, well fed, free to walk, supported and loved? I wish you some of your dreams, because nobody gets to live all of them. Life has her own plans, after all. And it isn’t what happens to any of us that matters, but how we deal with it. Thus we make a deal. We say, okay, I didn’t want this, ask for this, even imagine this would happen to me, but it did anyway. How will I accept, with the spirit of fight, whilst concomitantly showing to myself and to the world, that I am bigger than my circumstances, way way bigger?

In my attitude of gratitude, that’s how, my acknowledgement of all that I have, all that love and support and friendship. Priceless gifts and completely free. I hold them close and, in doing so, the waiting loses density and gravitas and I am light as the swans on the surface, effortlessly moving with grace through the pond weed.

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Island Blog – The Wild

I walk this day through copper gold and spandangles of sunshine. The track, wet, muddy from all the rain, dapples into light, peckled with mosaic, the light glinting off the water spots, the puddles, and lighting up the prints of yesterday walkers. I watch the down, erstwhile forgetting the up until it calls me to me in blue and gold. Me and the Poppy dog keep the beat, or I do, for she scoots and slows, sniffs at pretty much everything, oftentimes right before my feet and it thinks me of tripping. Old folk do think of tripping. I never considered making such a foolish error before, but now I do. How odd that tripping, a simple fall that comes with an answering bounce back into the upright, now holds menace. I could be here for hours, days, should I allow this tripping thing. Then I wheesht myself, saying, out loud, Nonsense, and loudly enough to startle a quiet other walker with his terrier who rounds the bend in a way that wonders me. Is he a ghost, so quiet is he? No, I have seen him before with the same little terrier, politely held on an unstrained leash. Hallo, I say, unable to quell the launch and startle of the Poppy dog, the gap between me and her ears being too great to prevent a situation. I say Hallo in my quietest tone, in A major, I think, and muted, so as to calm things.

He is unfazed. We talk. He suggests unleashing his dog and I nod in agreement. Dogs are always better off without the strangle-throat of a leash. Always. At best, they will sort themselves out in moments. At worst, the one who knows they are about to be dishevelled, right here on this peaceful track, can get away. Humans always cock things up, these sorts of things, their fear, their ignorance of the animal kingdom. It rolls my eyes and often. Just let them spar, just let go, just let. But not everyone gets that ‘let’ thing. I suspect my life as a farmer’s wife has loosened my desire to control something way more powerful than I. The animal instinct is definitely a ‘let go’ thing for me. And, I have a lot of opinions around the rules of controlling wild animals, even dogs or cats, but I keep it all to myself. Anthropomorphism is a big deal in the human world, and practised to our detriment, but try explaining that to someone who thinks their pet is their pet.

We humans forget our wild too. It is a big mistake and one we can rethink. During lockdown a lot of folk bought puppies and kittens for their own pleasure, to entertain and to fill a lockdown hole. I am really hoping that most realised they had taken on a wild creature, no matter how domesticated they may have been over many decades. The wild is strong, it never goes. It can be battered into compliance by fear but the worm will turn (whatever that means).

I can see a happy and respected dog or cat immediately. Any cowering, any slink back when a hand is raised, speaks me volumes. A canine or feline who is loved and understood will walk straight-backed, will wag a tail, will merry a look, be curious and open, like the terrier and his man I met today in the dapples and around a quiet corner. A good man, a happy dog, a merry, and a bit shouty, encounter. I thank him. He knows the wild.

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Island Blog – Cusp

I like being on the cusp of change, even as I sometimes am a fearty. This day I walked beneath a billow of grey clouds and thought, well, at least the sky isn’t flat. I’m not great at flat, unless it refers to my midriff, in which case I am delighted. The sun is closed and already lowering in our skies which brings a change of light. Another cusp. As Summer concedes to Autumn, I wonder if they discuss when and how and if there is any resistance or if all the seasons are good students and just know their places. You go, no, You go, No you, or something, or is it silent, peaceful and are the four of them friends? I have met Autumn in the mornings, a thrill of chill, a shiver, a rush to light the wood burner, only to end up with burned skin in the afternoon. In the laze of Spring, for she is lazy up here, I can dress in thunder resistant woollens, mighty leggings and at least four frocks plus jumper and be trounced and bounced into stripping off by lunchtime, only to fall back into shivers by wine O’clock. The seasons are capricious.

It can frazzle me. And then it thinks me. Perhaps the seasons are like us, ditzy and unpredictable. Perhaps they too are unsure of their roles, of who they are are in the now-now of now. Old people in my young days and in my middle age could bore my tonsils loose going on about how long the summers were, how on time the snow fell for Christmas, how floods never flooded and how we never knew what a hosepipe ban was. I can hear myself now, telling a young granddaughter about the ‘simple’ days but I notice and pause and erase and laugh for this is memorical nonsense and so very flat sky.

I walk the same track, the Tapselteerie track and it never bores me for it is always changing as the seasons change. Today beneath the yellow, umber, Payne’s grey and white of the bumpy clouds, the scabious lights up. Peacock butterflies show me wild strong colours and sea-dandelions are so yellow I want to spread their buttery gold on my toast. I peer into the woods and see the green slowly change from lemony lime to deep wine bottle. Summer in there is moving out. The grasses are dying and so they should for we will need them next year. Nonetheless it is a gasp, the watching of it, of their turning. Where sunlight lifted and tousled, danced and elevated these emerald fronds, he is abandoning them now for he cannot reach from his louring face in the western sky. And it is right and it is time and it is preparing us if we just care to notice. Bracken stems copper and begin to fall, to fail. Different birds fly over, birds that will leave us soon for the north, for the south. Go safe, I call out. Come back to us.

Mushrooms and toadstools stand like sentries along the track, big-chested, bullish, almost scary, some tempting and beautiful. I touch nothing. A choir of temptresses, all perfect and come-eat-me have erupted overnight on a tree stump. Hallo, I say. Not interested, I say, and not because I don’t eat mushrooms but because I have no knowledge of the safe and of the deadly. I do look back. They are beautiful. I walk to the old pier and sit a while. The wind is snappy, cooler but the tide is gentle, ebbing but softly. Two herons screech at each other like women at a WI cake sale and I smile, rest on a basalt rock and look out while someone across the sea-loch pushes out a dingy and heads for his fishing boat. I stay as they spin by and wave, heading out to catch dinner perhaps. The coolth lifts me from my rock and I wander back home. I check the fire, bring in logs, close a window. I slide down the cusp and go in search of my boots.

Hallo Autumn. Welcome. In you come.

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Island Blog – Till Tomorrow

The seals are calling today. I hear them as I round the point but I can’t see them. Their eerie crooning comes on the breeze, one, two, maybe three of them. I stand to listen, allowing the song without words to enter my body, my mind, my soul. It shivers me but in a wonderful way. I cannot live without the sea and all her friends. She lives inside me, her tidal ebb and flow, the pull of the moon, today a pink fingernail hanging like parenthesis. The seals sing on, the lift and fall of their melody something unreal, ghostly. I am not surprised that such music terrified sailors back in the days when they feared falling off the edge of the world and felt the dread of scurvy. Safely rooted here on the Tapselteerie track and inside the knowledge we have today about seals and their singing, not to mention the confidence that neither I nor anyone else will ever fall off the edge of the world, I smile and linger. Taking the song home with me I wonder what they are saying. It will be for a purpose, that’s for sure. There is no sentimentality in the animal kingdom. Every sound, every move is about survival.

I meet nobody on the track. It is just me, the turning trees, the dying bracken and sunlight dapples. Birds flit and flutter, busy on the berries now red as blood and just asking to be eaten, the seeds spread only by travelling through the digestive system of the birds that respond. Scabious host peacock butterflies, blue, red, purple and of such delicate beauty. Harebells, heather and many bullish seps, big enough to shelter a small rabbit from a rainshower, flank the track. Leaf fall carpets the woodland cut-through, red, gold, brown, butter yellow and copper and I see nature’s artwork laid out below my feet. A cooler breeze today I think. Autumn is moving in, but softly this year.

The last visit to the sea takes us down a steep slope and across crunchy seaweed. It sounds like I am walking on crisp packets. Last week this weed was stodgy soft, greened up again in the high tides of a full moon. Be patient, I tell it. High tides will come again soon when that fingernail gets above herself and puffs out like a balloon, causing many of us sleepless nights and itchy teeth. It will wait. It knows how to wait, has done this waiting thing for thousands of years, after all. I heft my old self onto a tall flat rock. After himself died I did no hefting at all. I just stood like a dwarf before a giant and longed. Now my hefting ability is growing balls and I am thankful. I am no good at dwarfing. Although I am shrinking, it is normal but I know that it is just my body, not my mind.

I sit in the sun and watch the water. A Merlin erupts from the bow-backed shore hazels behind me in a startle. He lifts and floats across the narrows to scoop up into a distant tree, startling a heron who lifts with a screech. Ordinarily, the wee doglet would ignore a heron but as it lifts, it screeches and that screech bounces back from the far rocks creating an echo. She is startled, the doglet, and barks back. In turn, her bark barks back at her, once, twice. She barks again, certain there is another dog around even if she cannot see it. I clap my hands to stop her and the far rocks clap back. Good Lord this is turning into a situation. I am aware that the folk in the holiday cottage are at home today and I don’t want this echoing percussion to upset their peaceful afternoon. I heft myself down and whisper a farewell to the sea, the Merlin, the heron and the echo rocks. Was I to speak it out loud, the whole echo thing would kick off again.

Till tomorrow, I breathe. Till tomorrow.

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Island Blog – Fractal Dance and Twee Storms

I leave my little home and swing right onto the Tapselteerie track. There are no cars parked in the wheen of a passing place so that means no walkers unless they arrived on foot. Good. I love solitary walking. As the sea breeze lifts and luffs around me I get a faceful of wispy down, seeds from the rose bay willow herb, white, soft, fractal. I don’t take a deep breath as the cloud floats around me and away into the sky. Thistles are also setting flight their hopes for the future, and this down is hardier, more able to land with a modicum of precision. The cloud down can blow on for days, weeks, at the mercy of a capricious breeze, ever changing its direction over this land of rocks and tides and capricious breezes. I have found cloud seed everywhere, inside the house, in the bird food bins, stuck to the washing on the line, in my knicker drawer. I’m not hopeful for them. I catch some seed and study one. Aeronautical perfection with tiny limbs, one weighted and with a tiny barb for holding on. The seeds spin like tops through the air, catch on clothing which then travels home with the wearer only to be shaken off in a new garden. Nature is genius.

The Tapselteerie track is dappled mosaic. Sunlight creates a masterpiece beneath my feet, a work of art. As I walk over such beauty my eyes lift up through the canopy of hazels to a mosaic of cerulean blue, bright green and icewhite, then back down to golden hexagons, polygons and all the other gons laid out before me like a star studded carpet. I hear long-tailed tits somewhere in the density of woodland, warblers and the prrrt of a robin’s warning. Two herons flap and screech at each other on the shore, vying for territorial rights. They lumber and flap, crashing into bowed-back hazels as if nobody ever taught them how to fly with elegance and precision, as if they still have dinosaur blood coursing through their veins and the wing thing is, well, awkward. The tides are both very high and very low just now because of the full moon, the Sturgeon Moon. The full moons were named by the ancients, called to reflect the season. How sensible. Not like the naming of hurricanes or storms which always scoffs me. A twee name for a disturbing natural eruption of astonishing energy tells me much about how our current culture really isn’t taking life seriously at all.

The tappsled seaweed is flung across the rocks in a sort of gay abandon. Gold and copper, black and emerald against the black of the basalt and I wish once again I had brought my phone for a photo. No matter, myself says. You can just take it in through your eyes, feel it sink into your body, your mind and your heart and by the way who on earth goes for a walk in the wild with a phone? Good point, I concede. My sensible self, my let go and shut-the-hell-up self is often right. She is all about just enjoying the moment or, if the moment is a shit storm, then not enjoying it at all and just waiting until it moves on to the next moment. It’s a good ethos.

The oyster farmers are working across the narrows now the tide is low enough to walk across from one side to the other at such tidal times. Their puffing tractors work the shore, the men in full body wellie boots as they tend to the cages. I wonder what they need to do and how hard the work might be, probably is. In sunshine weather it must be easy, in sharpening bite-cold, not such fun. The oysters are the best I have ever tasted and we can enjoy them anytime we choose. The shucking shed is big and green and sometimes I can hear voices floating across the search as the men and women work. I can hear laughter, jokes shared and it reminds me of working on our farm way back in Norfolk, way back in the 1970’s when I first learned that being part of a ‘waulking’ team was the warmest and happiest I ever could be.

Deer can swim over the narrows and we did warn the new owners of Tapselteerie once we heard they were deer fencing the estate. Don’t bother, we said, the deer swim and nobody can deer fence an entire rock-solid shoreline. They didn’t heed us. I remember wondering back then if my heeding skills might be due an MOT. Now the fences sag and flop anyway and the deer go wherever they please. Once I watched a stag leap said fence, startled by me. My heart was in my mouth as I watched him head for the impossible. I envisioned broken limbs, damage, wounds and general disaster. What actually happened was that he cleared the fence but his back legs caught, bringing down the whole thing as if it was matchwood and string. Once the clanging and puffing and snorting and leaping and heart-in-mouthing thing was over, he stopped, looked back at his awaiting hinds, all shivering and silent on the ridge above him, above me. I drew respectfully back quietly, my eyes down. Make no eye contact, I remember that lesson in Africa and it makes sense to me. No eye contact, no challenge, no threat. With nervous steps, the 3 hinds descended the ridge, stopped once to look at the not-looking me and the not-looking dog clamped under my arm, and then elegantly flowed over the matchstick fence, up, up and away into the trees.

These sunshine days are a gift. The winter is long enough, loud enough, scary enough with twee named storms causing danger of death which is very real for some. We have lived with storms and disturbing natural eruptions for thousands of years. The problem is dissociation. Instead of connecting with what is way bigger than us, way more powerful, we are hiding. And, thus being fools. I know I am fortunate, living high enough on these old rocks to avoid flooding and all the horrors that brings to bear and I am glad that my husband was overly alert to nature’s power along with her gifts. He taught me to be vigilant, to be aware, to make sudden decisions based on what was plucking at his gut and not what we heard on the news which, sadly, is often too cautious in its decision not to cause panic. If we as alert and intelligent human beings felt confident enough to decide for ourselves, what spirit would come to life! What powerful and intuitive choices would be made, what influence that might have, and how many lives could be saved! These are not questions.

All this on my dappled seed blown walk today. Let us, people, learn things, like CPR, like what happens in a tidal flow, a flood, a storm. From what direction? How much build up is there, considering the friction, drag and density of that tidal flow. Tidal spiders, taken into account. The earthly tides flow widdershins but not always. I am not saying that everyone needs to know what the tides are doing but I am saying learn something. You might live in Glasgow or Stevenage. No matter. You will be affected by the tidal flow and the altercation that is going on between the heavens and the earth. And it is real. We must teach our children. We absolutely must.

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Island Blog – Alpha Beta and The Geese

I walk today, peaceful like. The wee track is even wee-er now after the rains have turned the bracken tips face down and dripping. Branches bow low creating a sort of trunnel for me to dip and duck through, the leftover drips cool down my neck. Sunshine catches diamonds like pearl painted finger nails glinting rainbows at me. I don’t mind getting wet. Although heavy (and, apparently dangerous) rainfall was prophesied, like many prophesies, it never came to bear and I risk setting off sans jacket, just free, a light cardy and walking trainer thingies that look like flippers but work just fine. After all, nobody is looking.

I just know that after this ‘dangerous’ rainfall and the subsequent hot hot of Father Sun, anything green is going to go crazy bonkers. The bracken, already over my head and, I am sure, burgeoning with bloodthirsty ticks, will soon turret the track. Bracken looks harmless enough but don’t read this book by its cover. It may look pretty with its green finger fronds and the way light can show through the forest it creates but underneath the ground it is a pernicious killer and will take over anything with hopeful shoots, stifling it until it breathes no more. Bracken is for Mordor not this lovely island, nor anywhere else for that matter. Just saying.

Me and the Popster walk to the shore, to the old pier where Alpha Beta slept. Perhaps she is in my mind once I heard that she featured on TV last evening with Gordon Buchanan. She, wonderful she, who safely transported so many people out into the ocean to find whales met with a very sad end. She took us to Minke whales, and on a really special occasion, Killer whale. Her body was strong, her engines pure and true. She had props all over the place for turning on a sixpence and for exiting danger quickquick. She carried hopeful souls on her back and never seemed to mind and she was as faithful as a collie. I stand beside the pier where, many years ago, she waited patiently for everyone to step aboard. It is a skeleton now, draped in dried kelp, blackened and hanging like witch hair. The breeze moves it a little and I can hear the crackle. The rocks are coppered with living kelp, a lie if you cared to walk across. You would sink. Or I would. Kelp looks so solid in such a mass. We move through a canopy of gorse and I remember how the old Sea Dog would cut and slash this now 8 ft high mass into submission. Cutting it down is good, he would puff, slashing and snapping the limbs. It will all grow stronger next year. It thinks me. It must be four years since he could walk never mind swing the slash-cut weapon without spinning into the brink. I stay with that remembering, holding the memories when both Alpha Beta and the Seadog were upright and strong, and I say to the skeleton pier, one the SD built, Thank you. You may look wind blown, wonky chops, and whitened by salt but I remember you strong and proud. I still see that in you. Thank you for your grace, your strength, your loyalty.

We sit on a flat rock having navigated the gorse forest. Pods are popping. I can hear them. They sound like a cap gun. It smiles me how life goes on going on with fierce determination. The sun is warm on my arms and back, my face. The Narrows sparkle, diamonds on the water which I think is just beginning to flow in again from who knows where. I ponder on the tidal flow, not just here but the one that circumnavigates the world. There are new stories coming in, I can smell them, those whispers of hope of pain of joy, all flooding in right here and right now. An otter pops up like a cork. He is fishing, I can see that. The fish in his grasp has no chance. He bites off its waggling head but the waggling goes on. He leans back, peaceful like, and floats while he eats the rest. Then he is off again, sleek, dark, fleeting, a gymnast. I watch him cross the Narrows in seconds where a few Greylags have landed for a splash. He threads through the group and they yell and flap at him. Returning to their bathing, once he is gone, I watch them lift water over their wings, bury their heads in the brine, lift their tails and then they begin to play. I know play and this is play. One hurtles at another, and another scoots off. Chase me, chase me…..

I can hear them still laughing as me and the popster wander home.