wild

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Island Blog – The Atticus and the Reflexion

I’ve been allowing a whole load of thinks over the past days. They swirl in like twimbly waves against the atticus that stands strong, stoney strong, against any natural flow, like a frickin blockade, salty confusion and a whole load of ineffective slapping at a finite. I got sick of this. To slam at a solid truth is to waste energy and intelligence. Although most of us, if we are honest, keep swirling twimbly waves at a solid something we don’t like one fricketty bit, by the way, until we eventually blow out of breath and energy. And we see the pointlessness of such a flagellation. As I have done, thank the holy crunch. I decide to employ reflexion, a different word to the one with a ‘c’ and a ‘t’ and with a shift in meaning, if not a complete one of those shift things.

I can see behind me, beyond me, I can see from whence I have come and this damn atticus is right in my path, if waves can ‘path’. And I have been slamming at it with full ocean saltforce, without intelligent thought. I suspect this is normal, whatever that means. It isn’t just me who confounds, surely? And then I find reflexion. It’s a flexi word, dynamic, inviting and entirely appropriate. It is ‘the phenomenon (I’m already in with that word) of a propagating (again) wave of light or sound, being thrown back from a surface’. Don’t you just love that! Opportunity, choice, intelligence, all so dynamic. However, I do know what it feels like to be on a boat in wild weather and facing an atticus, and it took a brilliant skipper to draw us all safely away from a slam dunk that would have so pissed me off down in Davy’s locker, as dinner was all prepped and the fires lit and the candles just squatting there all ready to fire up the evening. The undertow in an ocean is never to be ignored, not for one minute. Just saying, and maybe my just saying is saying something. Overboard, and you could end up in Venezuela for Christmas.

I know atticus is always a sudden. I also know how reflexion can tumble me over and onwards to fret another shoreline, to tingle more little toes, to whisper over other sands. But, without an atticus, there’d be no limits, no new startings, no haltings that help us to consider our choice of direction. We are in control of our own boat. I just got that. Once again.

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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 -Jabbly Crossing and that Flower

A boat cruise, picture it if you can. It was sudden, as in I hadn’t forward planned it weeks, months before, so I had needs to adjust my seating and the hold on my phone when that offer landed in my ear (the good one). I alerted, as you might imagine, suddenly on the spot. Decision. Choice. Adventure. Oh, I get that one, the last. I love adventure, but I have found, in recent years, that my woohoo is somewhat deflated like an balloon at my feet, and requiring CPR or a foot pump at the very least. And yet, and this yet thing still can firework me, I found a sparkle, a dynamic in my heart that is still pumping. Go for it. And so, I said yes.

And then panicked, thought the whole thing down, told myself I couldn’t, whilst the ‘could’ in me swanked about like a town crier telling everyone I was off on a mini cruise, spontaneous and wotwot and let’s just go. Everyone being just me, of course.

So I went, I arrived and there I was on a mini cruise and immediately engaging with the other guests who had come from everywhere else and were just as bug eyed as was I, and then we boarded and the welcome was warm and wonderful and on we went in this warm and wonderful state over jabbly seas to the calm of the Cairns of Coll, scrunched our bare feet over shell sand and bird flight and not a human for bloody miles and the sky wide and inviting. And the time we had together, the strangers and I, we met, just a bump, but a meet nonetheless, and, because we have all experienced the wild , the truly wild, the uninhabited wild, we met there and we know it, and there is a beautiful flower we all saw, just then, just for a moment, out there.

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Island Blog – Nature and Form

I felt overwhelmed yesterday. Stuff came in, calls and wotwot, like a collision. I am not good at that, this, it. I confound at dawn, no, earlier, because the beloved old frickin dog wakes me at o400 when I am finally asleep, btw. She means no ill. I know this, deal with the rag of this, and she still rises me with a smile as she squeaks and dances around my sleeping form.

Form. We all love this. It has a geometric shape, can solve an equation, can create a whole frickin building. I love form too. But today had no form, nothing form about it. My overwhelm took over. it was a spread across a peat bog. All those acres of apparent nothing. Generally speaking, I love the nothing, the gasp of cold air, walking out there into the sparkle of ice.

It thinks me. I take me and the dancing squeaker out for a walk, feel the cold hit my face like an energising gift, stopped to hear the thrust of an incoming tide and looked up at the skinny branches cutting the sky. I watched my little dog bounce through the ice-crisped leaves, saw he pick up a stick, long as a fence post and a definite threat to my legs when she scoots into the lead. I chuckled and felt the expulsion of air blast out all the overwhelm. Among the beauty of nature, things simplify. Fallen bracken stalks create a twinkling mound beside the track, all covered in ice and flashing in the sunlight as I move onwards. Ghost trees stand like sentries either side of me, and through the evergreen pines, the sky is a cerulean blue. Tiny clouds, miles above me, look like they’re painted on with a wide and wet brush. Ahead, snow clouds puff up behind the hills, a sort of ariel bonfire, ice white, sun-tipped. Will it snow, I wonder?

I meet nobody at all. Cutting through the woods, I look to the beyond. It seems to go on forever, and however hard I stare at it, this beyond, I will never get to the end of it. I realise that I have been staring at the ground too much, scurrying like a frightened mouse through my small concerns, and allowing them to create my state of mind. I watch a sea eagle slide through the sky, wings wide, slow and easy, and decide I need to get myself up there, to let my small concerns remain on a page or in. my diary, small they are, very small, and I am at liberty to alter or change any or all of them. I am unsure driving in icy conditions so, once I am home again and have rebooted the fire, I call to organise new appointments for a hair cut, an MOT, a shingles jag appointment. I settle to some sewing, eat lunch, switch off the phone and go upstairs for an hour to rest. Perhaps I will sleep a little. The walk into the wilds has given me form perspective, as it always does. Always.

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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. – Present, Alone and Safe

Oh how I love my home, the warm, cozy, safe happiness of these four stone walls surrounding me and my wee dog. Since himself upped and died, I have not felt safe here, concerned about loneliness and boredom and the fact that those who needed me, every single minute of every day, every month, every year, no longer do. It has taken all this time to be comfortable with that. At first, it felt like abandonment, I was abandoned, and I was, abandoned. I remember thinking, as each child left home, that gut twisting ouch, like a punch, that one of my beloveds had chosen to leave me. It sounds mawdling, arrogant, even, but what loving mother feels it any other way? I dont know if himself felt it too, but I do know that he still had me and that was enough for him, but he wasn’t enough for me, and that’s my raw truth. When they left, I longed to go with them, even as I knew I never could, nor would. A young life must learn through living it out, and a mother in tow was never going to be me. I knew one of those, my mother-in-law, and much as I respected and needed her, I didn’t admire her hold on himself, not once he had a wife and family. However, reflecting, this was a two way need. I get that.

It rained today. No big deal. T’is the norm in this glorious place, the wettest in the whole of the country, and that is saying something. To be the Best Wet……. goodness, demands a medal, or, maybe several medals distributed among all of we islanders, not that you would ever see them beneath the layering of wools and waterproofs. The rain can be slanty or stick straight. The clouds must be exhausted, or perhaps not. Perhaps this place is the only one offering regular employment, and clouds are fantastic creatures, lifting, shifting, colouring, turning Colgate white, spreading out their arms to each other, conjoining, merging, changing, always changing. Clouds can teach us a thing or two, at the mercy of Nigel or whatever daft and ordinary name the weather folk have decided to give a force of nature that begs no name at all. It is just a gale, I want to tell them, just a wild creature of magnificence and power, and you want to what……turn it into a small thing, a something you can label and tidy away once it has moved on? It ridiculouses me.

I finished a jigsaw, started another one. No, that’s a big fat lie. I laid out the 1000 pieces, covering most of my big oak dining table, tiny pieces, god so bloody tiny and dark, darker than the bright picture on the box. I left them overnight, studied them this morning, these pellets of impossibility, and snorted. There is no way I will, would, want to, enjoy putting you together. In fact, you are a big fat chore and I don’t want one of those. I gathered all the pieces up and returned them to the box without a moment of guilt. I shall take this one to the library. And it thinks me.

As I move beyond the loneliness and the boredom, and the pointlessness of me, I find a strength, a new confidence. Had I been the old, bored, lonely and pointless me of just a few months ago, I might well have battled with that horrible jigsaw, out of a sense of duty and because it might, just might, have filled in an hour or two. But not now. Now I can feel the amazon (not the company, but the woman) awakening. I can, and will, choose what I will do and what I will not do. 50 years of not having much choice about anything much is becoming my past. I will put myself together in a new way, even if the pieces confound me at first, and it will be I who choose the picture. And my head is full of colour and light and clouds and skies and fairies and walks in the woods. I can feel the Atlantic swell in my heart, and she calls me, the minx that she is, and I find myself yearning for that wildness, the not knowing and not understanding, the turbulence, the storms, the sudden calms, the snow geese flight overhead, the swans coming in, the autumn bluster. It all chuckles me. I am woman. I am strong and, I am rising up to laugh at the days to come for I am made of cloud, woods, ocean, light and dark, and I am here, present, alone and safe.

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Island Blog – Roots

The first time I set foot on this island and I knew I was home, not because of his story but because of my story, yet to reveal itself to me. How very far we can wander in this life, our roots keeping faithful track. We will not let you go, they say from deep deep down in the ancestral core. I had no reason to know any of this, not at first footfall. It was simply that something seemed to rise from the rocks and the muir through my feet, into my legs and on up into my heart, my soul, as if the roots had been waiting for me a very long time, longer by far than my own time. Although it took a while for me to find my place, although life was sometimes just too hard, nothing changed my knowing. I was home. I am home, among my own people, their stories, their lives, even as I knew nothing at all about any of it. The cold, the wet, the slap and fret, the endless winter, mould growth, frozen pipes, chilblains on chilblains, hot tears, wild fears, none of these made me doubt, made me hanker for somewhere else. Guests are coming, must be Spring despite the snow still falling. But I cannot. Fall.

No hardship born, imagined or played out could change my mind. I am home. Breathe it in, suck it up, breathe, wait inside the wildness, the raw bloody wildness, fickle weather, my damaged plans, my lunatic fantasies of escape that turned to dust as quickly as they formed, all melted away by a merry lick of fire, a babble of feral children, a few of them I don’t recognise as my own. In this place my heart beats along to the rhythm of the stones, the shush of the sea, the scream of the storms, the sight of swans overhead, a whisper of wings in the sky. I dance to it, sing along to its melody, an integral part of something old, something new, something ancient. I catch the stories of lives long done, the bones buried deep in the island’s heart, never to be forgotten, held safe. Where grows the heather old feet have walked. There is old laughter in the sky and old tears rushing the burns into spate. On it goes and on and I am proud to find my forbears lived and walked the islands, knew what I know now, made the wraparound Atlantic their protector, provider and sometimes their cradle unto death.

Even as I never knew way back then, I know something now. I didn’t find this place, this home. It found me.

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Island Blog – To be a Mother and Saying Farewell

An eclectic role for sure, if such is possible and if say it is then it is. Although I’m about to lose a lot in the translation of such a word, let me play. When a woman becomes a mother she is about as lost as a goldfish in the ocean, barely able to breathe, exhausted and completely lost. She finds no others of her species, everyone else being salt-friendly and busy. However, with this new little one, she knows that it is she who must be eclectically “IT’ for……for….where did he go? Oh, there he is over there, chuffing away to a sea snail who is not all that interested, and if he was it would take him at least three days to turn around for a look. She hasn’t got three days to spare. She is on demand every moment of every day plus seconds of panic, of despair, of constant checking. She is wild now, thinking wide, way beyond her understanding of normal thinks, and nobody, not even dad, gets anywhere near even if he or they might have an awfully good suggestion. She is all Bugger Off and tail swipes. She is deadly. She is Mother.

When she considered this Mother thingy, she might be forgiven for thinking Disney. However, Disney was obviously never a mother. The sweet glory of an instant co-ordination between mother and child is, I am sorry to tell you, a load of tripe. This baby is everywhere but where he should be. This baby shrieks loud enough to call in the Whales and upset the Navy in their sonar missions. What is this? Naval Officer Jenkins might ask, his eyebrows lost in his fringe, quizzical and holding out the ear plug thing for his upline to hear. The whales, happily traversing 35 continents via the swirl and twist of oceans, stop and founder. Let me tell you, a founder among traversing whales can cause a tsunami 10,000 miles away, upsetting fisher boats and slopping Lady Merriweather’s gin all over the Captain of a luxury cruise ship, thus informing him that she is a secret drunk and that his trousers are in an embarrassing state. The butterfly effect, sort of.

This day my firstborn, taller than me by about half a mile, left again for his next shift as ship’s Captain and no matter his age and height, I am that goldfish mama again. When he is here, everything is wild again, everything is fun, anything is possible. His attitude to life is upbeat and can-do. I wonder who taught him that. Does he remember upsetting the Navy, the fishing boats and the whales with his baby screams, or me with his curiosity? I doubt it. But I remember. And now, when he is gone I go back there, back into that ocean, back to where it all began. Tomorrow another son departs and I swirl inside the loss of them even as I know I gain more just because I am their mother; because I am the only one they will ever have; because I have the memories of this shared time and those memories are enough, have to be enough.

It isn’t that I want to be ‘IT’ anymore. I don’t, but don’ting doesn’t stop the feelings, doesn’t weaken the bond. I never knew it would be like this. I doubt any mother does. But here it is and for us all. Confounded still, up and down with the whole gamut of role changing at every level all day and well into the darkling nights, still learning, still thinking eclectically, I am at the heart, a mother and one who will never not be. Not never. And, for all the sadness at saying farewell, it is enough. It has to be.

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Island Blog – Reflections, Imperfections,The Wild

Such a strange time of year. The build up to Christmas is so frenetic, so full tilt and then cometh the lull, the pause before Hogmanay. I remember it well, that time at Tapselteerie when crumpets were toasted on devil forks at the open fire, when rules were ruled out and when parents left routines out of all equations. I remember walks into the days with skips and crazy games. I remember the cold and not caring about it at all. I didn’t force my feral kids into jackets nor woolly hats. We just laughed and ran for the Atlantic, her call wild and face-biting. Inside my downy coverings, I pushed my lovely silver flask, a gift from himself and the best I ever received. Whisky and green ginger wine, for the cold, you understand, and to gift a parental kindly pause from the children as they whooped and swooped like birds on steroids over hummocks and across bogs, rocks and slippery kelp to find the end of things; where the land stops, where we stopped, and where forever begins.

Looking out there today, this in-between day, I have an outfall of memories. They spill from my mind and scatter across a land I know as I know myself. They tinkle and sing, they lift into the air and cause me to follow them into the cold bright air. I see them when I look out to the little isles, so clear, so close and yet, as I know, a long boat journey away. I can hear the childish laughter from way back then, from when these, my children were tiny, bouncing over these rocks. I can hear the call of seabirds, see the inlets we landed on, find my slippy way across the basalt and granite and up, up to the sunlight. Now, their own children are tiny and I look into eyes and watch the gymnastics of a face hoping to find myself, himself, the ancients. No longer do I need to be The One in such times. No longer am I expected to present, prepare, plan. It is both a loss and a release.

This in-between morning, I took a saw to a couple of big bushes which, in my opinion, needed culling years back. I cut and wheeched and was pricked and somewhat compromised at times but determined. This may well be the wrong time to prune whatever they were but if they survive and grow again, then good. If they don’t, then good. I am done with the rulebook at this ruled out time of year. I look up to the hillback, the new and open view and I wish them well. You can do this, I tell them, as I have told myself for decades and I did; do this. When ‘this’ changed, as this always does, I know I learned new dance steps, new ways of seeing, new perceptions. That thinking has served me well. When I see an imperfection, according to my perception, I jig my head. Hmm, I say to myself. I want (not need) to look at this with new eyes. Oh, still my own eyes, of course, but slanty or pullback, lifting wider, higher. What this thinking did for me, it still does. From girl to fiancé, from wife to mother, from domestic non-stopper, to feral child releaser, from carer to widow, I am proud of me. I know I strained at the harness, broke it, ran wild, came back (with the wildness) and am still, even now able to stand strong for my beloved ferals and their own little crazies who believe life is every single moment, lived at top volume.

May the wild live on. There are too many people out there who have buried their wild. Wild isn’t a danger, but you might be. To it.

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Island Blog – Watching, Waiting, Wondering

The morning begins well in that I wake up and it’s morning, well almost, still dark but the clock tells me of others who rise at this hour, dark or no dark. I slip into my dressing gown, thank my bed, pat the dog and glide down the stairs. I remember actually doing that once, for a dare of course, on a tin tray and an oak stair case that dog-legged into the room. Not a good plan. I started off well, gathered warp speed and just knew I was about to be sliced like an egg when I hit the sharp corner, all balustrades and newel posts and rigid as if it had rooted into the earth’s core. The wails arose in me, alerting all inmates who were quietly sipping Earl Grey from china cups and pretending they didn’t want another scone. My mama was livid even if she feigned compassion. I could see it in the slit of her mouth, the narrowing of her eyes as she scooped me up and marched me away, my knees bleeding, my face scratched and my mouth yelling out a storm. This morning’s glide was more gentle, my hands holding both bannisters and my cautious eyes wide open for the fall that always threatens old folk, the one that leaps out for a rugby tackle from somewhere in my blind spot.

I descend in regal safety and round the corner for coffee and a peer into the darkness. No moon, but she is coming, the Beaver Moon, tomorrow I believe, although why the moon has to keep to a schedule un-moons me somewhat. I had thought her above such calendar control. I perceive her as reckless, upskittling, wild, and that’s because her full bellied lightshow creates that reaction in most women I know and some men too. I tap tap wait for the light to rise. I iron something, sweep another thing, flip through Facebook, write some notes about what I will do with my day, this day, today, most of which will be scratched out by breakfast once I realise that the ladder to any of them has faulty rungs, most of them missing.

I WhatsApp chat with my best friend and she laughs me and we share all our familial concerns and delights. We have done this for years now and her face takes me right back to her, the way she waggles her head when telling me of something that pains or puzzles her, the way she looks straight at me when she asks how I am. I know why. When I say ‘Fine’ she smirks and challenges, but I will always say ‘Fine’ because mostly, I am just that. However, as the day rolls on, not like chocolate, more like a stubble field and with me barefoot, I am ratty with the dog. It shocks me for I am only occasionally ratty and I don’t like it in me at all. I watch the wind, hear the roar of the whips and twisting punches of it, see it scrape rain across my window and bend the trees like torture, laughing at its bully power. Reluctantly I decide to walk, no matter the rain, the bully punching wind, the darkling grey, the wet underfoot.

To begin with, I stomp. I know I am stomping and the track looks up at me, eyebrows raised. I pause and smile and slow my boots. Then, as I rise into the woods, the rise of the track lifting me from my earthly grump, I begin to see, to notice, to watch. The bare limbs stick out like old fingers, old friends, the ancients who still stay to protect and to remind. Leaves still holding on, copper, gold and blood, tremble in the wind, showing me this face, then that. I hear the tic-a-tic-a-tic of their dance and I stop to watch. Beneath my skinny soled boots, a bronze carpet tongues out before me, inviting. The wind lifts again and the pines sing as the wind combs the needles, the ones that don’t ever give up, the ones I will see all winter long. A stand of ditchwater has been claimed by water moss and I chuckle at the emerald courage of this survivor. Well done you, I say, as I pause to wonder and I swear it shimmies. Tree ferns waggle like random hair tufts all the way up an alder tree, flapping at me as I meander beneath the high stretch of ancient trunk. Geese navigate the sky wind adjusting their positions and I wonder again at their understanding of all this power and of my complete lack.

I will never understand the power of watching, waiting and wondering, will even thwack it away with an irritable flap, but once I step out into it, bring myself to walk, to stand as a part of it, engaged with it, no distractions from it, I return with hope. Where the hell I found that hope, I can not answer, but it doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that in my reclusive sadness there is a beckoning, one irritating enough to get me inside my boots and out there.