we

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Island Blog – Fiddling Sticks

My favourite music, the fiddle. The word alone lifts my feet into dance. Fiddle, rhymes with diddle, piddle, widdle, skiddle, and I could add a few more. All of them traverse me into lift, laughter my aide de buoyant. That might be French, might not. I’m not for caring much right now about semantical language shifts, nor their accuracy. Actually, fiddling is rarely an accurate science. I know because I had stood standing (a rare thing for me) at a ceilidh, just to watch the wild crazy sawing of that bow across four strings, the bow and bend as the fiddle and the player become one with the dance. I hear more beats to the bar, more sudden shifts into minor, into major, I hear it and it wilds me too. Even if others don’t get the musical seasonal shift, I can sense their excitement as it happens. Needless to say, there is often chaos in the field, a lot of crashing into each other, laughter lifting like spice and sugar into the over-breathed air above our heads, and we forgive, as our toes sting like hell. We just dance, we just move, we just collide and apologise and move on. We have to or we might end up as part of the single track road.

Sticks. After all the winds we have buffeted against this summer season, we find sticks every which where, spun off from big limbs, like they are no longer useful. And, on the picking up of them, I get it. It’s a bit like clearing out a wardrobe (such an ancient name) and shucking away those dodgy frocks and blouses (another ancient word) for the moving along. That’s a season in a word. Move it along. It seems to me that nature is much better at this than we are, we daft humans who hang on to what was fine in the past, and is no longer. Nature just spits out. Maybe there’s a lesson there. However, and notwithstanding, (sorry, indulgence there) it is not easy, because we have this propensity to hold on to our past. I was young, looked good in this, once, thing. It wonders me, even as I know the feeling. And not just in bodily coverings, but in mindal (my word) acceptance. If we could, can, spit out the dead sticks in our lives, just like that, how might we free ourselves? From past pain, from regrets, from the feeling of pointlessness (way too many esses in that), how might we be able to enjoy the seasonal changes in our own lives? And our lives are seasonal, not as an accurate science, no way, but as a random crazy unknown thingy. Which it is.

In our turbulent times, as we try to navigate the yet unknown, who the frick are we? We have seen Sea take Land which seemed solid. We have been there when the light died and the black came in and held. We have danced with the reckless and longed to stay in that moment. We have loved, we have lost, we have done bloody well by the way. So what now? Who is caring, who is in charge, and what is it about that which tells us we need a leader anyways, beyond our own ability to flick and flex with a new dynamic dance? I say we need only ourselves, and that might need inner work, but that is where our power lies, not over anyone else, no way, no, no no, but over our own selves.

It’s a fiddlesticks sort of desert, seasons shifting like waves in a menace, sudden, unexpected, wild and infuriating, much as life is now. Meet you there.

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Island Blog – To Head for the Stars

As I move forward, always forward, even if it feels like I’m moving back, I know that we all are. When someone says ‘I am going back to work, back home, back to school, back to the ordinary’ I will gently question. How can you be going back when you have experienced so much since last you were in those places? I believe you are going forward to them all, or to whichever one applies. Think on it. You possibly made a new friend, learned a new thing, experienced a change, noticed something you hadn’t noticed before. We are always moving forward, always, even, and I repeat myself here, if it feels like we are moving ‘back’.

We may, agreed, be returning to familiar circumstances, be it a job we hate, a relationship that no longer works, or a a school that doesn’t respect us in the way we need. There are many such scenarios. But we have, even if only in our minds, left those places in our understanding. So what do we need right now? Will we continue on the old and comfortably uncomfortable treadmill, or will we find the courage to say No. Enough. In other words to speak out our own truth. And that is a tough ask, I know it, but if we don’t, then nothing, nothing, nothing changes and everyone thinks we are ok about the totally not ok of our lives. We always know when we are unhappy or unfulfilled. The feeling has grown for weeks, months, years, but we seem unable to rise up and shout, unwilling to cause a stir, to rock the boat, to make a ghastly mess. And Life trudges on without us, when what she really wants is to spread her wings, to hunker down for us to climb aboard and thence to lift us both into a sky of hope, adventure and stars.

The reasons for staying stuck lie, mostly, in the old voices, the old judges, the ones we have held on to for years, even when those voices are stilled in death. We take them on like clothing, wear them, quote them, live by their rulings, even though those rulings confined and defined us, squashing us into shapes we could never, ever, sustain, because we are not they, or is it them? We are absolute and unique and there is no copy, not even in a twin. When we are caught up in appearances, we will always be a shadow of what we can be, always, because we are an I. A single I, and this I is not part of a We, not in design, not in mind, nor body, nor experience. I am unique, and if my uniqueness bothers you then it may, respectfully, be your problem, and not mine.

The past and our present are separated by a divide. It is, initially, once we choose to work on discovering our own self,a narrow one, like a slight tectonic shift. The crack is not threatening, as yet, but because of this weakness revealed in the earth’s structure, we know it will widen. And, in the story of our past and our present, this is a good thing. Initially, we can easily leap from present to past, for reassurance, perhaps, validation, if we’re lucky, but it will widen, leaving us one day orphaned and feeling very alone. We are I now, aren’t we? I know that can be scary if the scared ‘I’ has been a significant part of We for longtime, but take courage, and really take notice of your gut, your inner voice of wisdom, because there lies the truth. What any of us were required to be as children, teens, partners or in the workplace does not define the I in any of us. I stands tall and alone. It begins a sentence. It takes back the power from We. And, as you probably all know, someone inside the We is just the one who is determined to retain the status quo and therefore to control.

I have no idea where all that came from, or maybe I do. I watch too many talented beautiful people remain inside the We for safety, protection and appearances, including myself. But I know, now, as I head for 71 as a determined I, that Life is still waiting for that chance to hunker down, to lift you on her back and thence to head for the stars.

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Island Blog – We are an I

The dusk falls like a cloak, rumpled, full of holes, quick if you turn away, look back and gasp. It is down now, this cloak, this wizard velvet, mouse-lit velvet rumple, allowing starlights to arrest my thinking, stop me, turn me as they poke through, thrust their death light into my looking. The sun, fighting still against his slip from stage right, thrusts a backlight so that those way-over-there trees, skeletal now and with limbs reach-stretched for maximum effect, stand silhouette against the indigo of a winter sky. I watch and watch as the new moon fingernails across the almost darkness, stars brighten and faraway, and this night, if I go out barefoot and goonied, I will see lace patterns in the wild space above me, above you too, although yous with streetlamps will miss a lot. I remember missing a lot whilst living in Glasgow and it was there I knew how the song came to be, Blackbird Singing in the dead of Night, because we had one of those, right outside our flat, singing and singing and exhausting himself and I felt a big shame for the wild ones who knew something once, for sure, and then became confounded by a change that might take generations to become okay with a species.

Transition is a fine thing for us, even when it sticks spikes into an ass every time you sit down in a place that used to offer ‘sit-down’ as a thing expected, normal and oftentimes visited. From one state to another. That’s how it defines itself. From cocoon to butterfly, from larva to god-knows-what that will eat your cucumbers and primulas and wonder you why you ever bothered planting the damn things. But who has a map for the bridges? The ones, like me, like you, we and many ‘I’s who must and will exist between loss and friendship, between existential pain and the light of new hope, between the doubt and fear of young age and a possible future, and the old agers who would love a rainbow beyond bent fingers, weakened wrists, and faulty legs. Both transition generations seeing what? A bridge?

There is no answer to that question and there may never be. So, we find our own answers, fumbling, faltering, seeking, searching and, in all my reading, my miles and miles of reading, our generational congregation is no different now. Centuries of searching for the absolute brings no reprieve from the ongoing thingy of human-ness. We can watch the sky and think our thinks. We can submit to sulks and huffs and the refusal to communicate within a relationship at home. We can reject or connect with ‘difficult’ children. We can walk the dog or let it die of the lack. We can dress in jewels despite the rain. We can lift old mothers-in-law into an evening of smiles, ask them of their memories, lift them back home into the empty bed of their lonely lives or we can hold to the fact that we don’t like her, nor ourself in her presence. We can enjoy a puddle with little children or claim tiredness and the need to be home to watch Countdown. We can decide to live out our whatever life, no matter what the inside demon tells us. We did not fail. We lived our best. Yes, we failed, made mistakes, have regrets, let no-one hide from that big truth. However, we can tell ourselves, even if nobody will ever tell us, that we did what we deemed right for the family, we were/are a character created, a personality shaped and formed, wonky and faltering. Or we can hide away from a anything honest and watch some celebrity nonsense on TV.

But we are an I.

We are.

An

I

And with an I lies all the power.

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Island Blog – The I and the We of it

I listen to how people talk, their use or misuse of grammar (thanks Dad) and how confusulating the whole thing is these years. I suspect the rebellion against the structure that began in my childhood, now a very distant memory, those days when syntax, sentence construction and punctuation moved like a rainbow over the settled earth of academia, causing a grandiose upset. It was needed, even if I am oftentimes huffing like Hogwarts train over the rickety bridges now connecting the old acceptable to the new ‘anything gose, or is it goes’? Mostly I love it, even though I find my old fingers snatching for words that nobody ever uses anymore. The rhythm and beat of new language is, if we choose to engage with such a ‘new’, both exciting and inevitable. At least, I tell myself in my huffing days, at least I knew the beauty of fine language, well placed commas and how to spell Chiaroscurist.

However it has always been the pronouns that bothered me. In my young recalcitrant days of frustrated rebellion, listening to the Beatles singing about the Sun and Here it Comes, I was reliably informed that to say, ‘I’, was arrogant, challenging, selfish. ‘We’ is how it’s done. It was perfectly fine to say They, We, Them, (although here I confuse pronouns) Us (ditto) and You. Don’t even go there with that one. It is often considered aggressive. There was, and still is, a warm hot milk thing about hiding behind backstage pronouns. Employing them allows our deodorant to remain effective. Moving on.

I hear couples use the We. A lot. We go here, we go there. I get that. But when I hear that We like this and don’t like that, my ears get indigestion. I can hear the gurgle of rebellion and the acid of warning. As long as the strong ‘I’ is lost in the ‘We’ a trumpet should sound in the soul, loud and acid, because one day the ‘I’ will struggle for breath.

Keep your ‘I’. No matter parental teaching, no matter the warm, honeyed, seduction of the ‘We’. I know it well, loved it, was warmed and honeyed by it and I am not saying it did me wrong. (sorry Dad) But, had I known, had I been taught, that the ‘I’ is powerful, beautiful, important, back in my youth, I believe the rebellion might have been better informed, better educated in a kindly and more gentle way. I hope our children learn how to see the one as a valuable person, no agenda no gender judge, just who they are. My prayer. Don’t wake thinking ‘we’. Think ‘I’ and then study and learn and listen.