wild

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Island Blog – The Elbows of the New Moon

Back from work, I’m watching the tide ruffle, lift, push against the rocks, elbows out. There’s a moon in this, somewhere, I know it, and there is. A new one, yet another, and isn’t that a wonderful thing? I mean, well, the moon catapults many of us who recognise her influence, sending us into haphazardness – and many more who justify their bad temper and bizarre choices to something else, like work, or her, or him, or school, or envy, a hightened sense of failure, or of a choice made in faith, hope and love, as being a grave mistake. Hmmmm.

Because of the discomfort, a big tide brings in, it reminds me. Living all those years on Tapselteerie, we would, or I would, walk my way to a ‘spending beach.’ Such a beach, almost a wee cove, a cup of catch, like a hand grab at whatever might come in, a something of value which might be held and captured. Then, it would be plastic, the weariness of toil and spoils, ropes and hopes thrown overboard, en route to somewhere after fishing, playing, not-caring about the ocean and those within her depths, who, btw, don’t want any of that sh*t. It hasn’t changed, but worsened. We gathered, cleared, unleashed, yes we did, seal pups from rope strangulation, setting them back to the ocean, scarred, disorientated, already time-separated from their parent, their safety. However, the beauty of a tidal flow is like a photo to anyone who has no idea of what really goes on. I won’t lecture. But, having seen what we are stupidly doing, does, I confess, alter me. Plastic blows and goes up with any passing wind.

Back to the new moon. She’ll have some ridonculous name, for sure, as if she could be tamed like a terrier. I see what she can do, the lift and luff of her influence over a tidal flow, big, lush, swelling, feisty, sexual. Her voice quiet. And yet she moves, grows, with no care for a sheep stuck on a rock, no care for uninformed canoeists who set off in all the gear but without respect for her. She is wild as the wind, stronger, more powerful. In fact, I think she controls the wind, brings it on, shuts it the eff up when required.

For now, in this balmy soft, sunshine evening, on this beautiful, grumpy, shifty, awkwardly weather controlled outscape, this most westerly point, this wild and wonderful place where folk gather to celebrate anything and everything, I am just going to sit quiet and watch the elbows of the new moon widen and spread.

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Island Blog – Birthday, Trees, Luck Dragon.

Today is Friday 13th December. I know you know that. For some, both the date and the day bring collywobbles. Such a lost word, and a good one. Moving on. It is memoric for me, for our family, because it is a birthday. This boy was born in a frickin snowstorm and in an old folks home on an island because that is what there was. He spent his first few days in Matron’s bottom drawer. He survived all of that and is now a spectacular man, husband, father, although I leave his family to qualify any of that.

As for us, the we in Africa, in the sunshine, far distant from the birthday man, from the minus degree thing that’s going on in the homeland, we moved easy. An early walk, barefoot and skimpy clad to the Indian Ocean, to watch the Luck Dragon/ big dog bound and bond with a load of other dogs and owners as the whapshuck of light-lit waves, the height of walls, pounded onto a slop sand beach. Boom, and boom as the cusp curved and smashed against shell and stone, rounding into gentle . Such is a massive ocean, whispered in, or blocked by the resolute rocks of centuries, and the ocean will respond, raunchy and irritable, banging against resistance, with an attitude I wish I had learned.

We did our own work for a while, a morning while. Let’s walk again. This time among trees. I get that, the need for trees, and not the scrub trees of the bush, bent into an apology, but the huge wide-spread oaks and fever trees and pines and others with fat trunks and an eye on the sky. It’s Friday and we just can go, permission given. And we do. We load up the Luck Dragon and we head for the trees. It’s a drive, traffic is a Friday thug, but we get there and we walk through the space and the silence and the water and the trees and we forget the traffic and the tension and the demands of life and we grow silent. We watch the Luck Dragon welcome every other dog, enchant everyone who sees his smile and his permanently wagging tail.

And we drive home, the echoes of our time under the trees, beside the water, within the peace, still holding us in stasis.

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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 – Risk, Wild, Adventure, Lipstick

My roses are ridonculus. This year, despite being cut down to their knees last Autumn, they have risen like blooming lamposts. They know, they have to, that wind and WIND cometh, and daily, along with slews of rain, a veritable slam-dunk with potential collapse. But, they don’t do that collapso thing, not like the beech limb, that sweet strong gone-thing that prevents my traverse in the most polite of ways in that it fell whilst I was not beneath its massive tonnage. I see the black, the ingress of rain for perhaps decades, the finite a silent given, but not to me, not to all of us who wandered beneath the bow and the beauty of this superb and wonderful spread. We, human we, didn’t think at all. We just lifted an overhang, leaf heavy, and for so many walks and talks and unthinks.

Today, returning from work, I saw something, a definite some-thing at the side of the track, and moving. A buzzard low and just above this moving thing, taunting, dunting, a significant part of the moment. I slowed my mini (she doesn’t like to slow, so there was a tussle) and looked. An otter, an OTTER, right there beside me, slid into the ditch, then paused and looked right at me. It’s face, its eyes, my face, my eyes, we collided. Then, it grabbed the hen it had pinched from……where for goodness sake? There is nothing and no-one here, not for miles. That eye connection champagnes my insides and, for a bit, whilst Mini grumbled, I could not press play. I was in the wild and I didn’t want to leave. The. otter did, lifting over ferns and rocks until all I saw was the nothing I had expected pre this sudden eye-catch, this adventure. It thought me.

Adventure, risk and the wild is not for some, but for us all. We just have to see everything and to seek something beyond and above the usual, the what we’ll have for dinner, the whose turn it is to take the kids to their groups, the grind of expectation and disappointment. I remember being there, but please don’t think that just because my kids are born and gorn that everything becomes marvellous, because that is a myth. I began being ridonculus at 21, deciding to see the wild, to risk adventure, to find connection with my people, who were not always my family. It is a choice. I ask myself, and daily, Who Am I in this Here and Now? The answer comes. You Know Who You Are. And the voice is right.

One day I drove to the harbour, knowing one of my boys had parked there. I also knew I wouldn’t see him, but that didn’t matter. I found his big ass buckie and pulled out my pink lipstick. I drew a huge heart on the driver window and wrote I LOVE YOU, right across the windscreen. No-one saw me. Chuffed, I walked back to my car, passing, oh dear, passing, his buckie, I knew it, his stuff, his order, his things and thought, oh holy shit! I just defaced an unknown’s glassware. Then, the wild in me, the adventure, laughed me and I did it all again. As I hiked my wee car up the hill and away, I did wonder what the other guy felt as he came back to such a message.

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Island Blog – An Eye on Things

The wind is wild today. She began with a huff and a puff, and a bit of spew, then, and I noticed this, she gathered her skirts into a whirl and then some, slewing everyone sideways, canting roses, ripping off their blooms. She felled a tree, well, not the whole tree, but a big limb, already compromised as I saw from the black ingress of water at the point of release. This limb fell right across the cut-off path through the woods. I bogged my way around the whole collapso wanting to see it all from another side. The fallen branches still shivered, still lived, still green and hopeful and I bent down to say something to the dying. The rich green was beautiful against the carpet of lift into the woods, still brown from lack of sunlight, fizzing with old needles, old nuts, old stories. I lifted myself, moved on, looked back, thought much. We leave life lost behind us, until we don’t. It thinks me.

Returning from a various on the mainland, over on the ferry, will there be a ferry, all thatshit, I am now home again, and so thankful for that. The plan was to go to a secret ceilidh for my beautiful daughter-in-law (such a clinical label) but and but and but, I had a sudden thing about my eyeball, left one, not good. So, after the most marvellous night of celebration and dancing and children and balloons and fun, I headed off for the eye thing. Thanks to my wonderful sisters, the tests were done and, oh my gosh, there is nothing to do! Who ever hears that! Nonetheless, being on the mainland where people, my favourite, become a crowd, a number to navigate, to avoid, to watch from a safe distance, confounded me. I would never choose to live in such a busy place. Being told where to walk, which lane to drive, no matter the wotwot of a life would piss me off, big time. I’m all about free movement without explaining, or ever needing to, my reason for rushing anywhere. Here, we respect that, if some vehicle is up your butt, they need to pass you. We know to pull in.

Now home, I think about what home means. I know that I want to stay here as long as possible, but I also know that people think too late. I never want to leave here. But I would, and I did consider that big time when the possibility of my left eye dodging me might mean no driving. I live in a wild place. I adore this place, my home. But it came to me that I am my home, no matter where. In fact, if I have my eye on things, I can see beauty, opportunity, dimension, fun, mischief, perspective, no matter where I am. When I was in the city, my elbows out, moving through the fear of missing a train, etcetera, I found a piano in the station. I had time. I sat down and played as travellers moved by in droves. For a few minutes I calmed myself. The piano was tuned and sounded good. And then I moved on, lugging my broken suitcase down the steps. In Glasgow I had time to buy a coffee. Another piano beckoned, but someone else was there. So, instead I walked outside and watched a man begging, jovial, polite, welcoming folk. I noticed no eyes on. Then a young woman’s suitcase, big, burst. He was up in a moment, helping her. She welcomed his help. I watched and watched, eyes on. Before I headed for my train to the home that is me, I went to give him something and to shake his hand. The young woman was still there. You know, she said, in her Australian accent, I have met a lot of shits on my travels, and then, right here, when my case bursts open, in Glasgow, I meet a real human.

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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.