wonder

Soon I will be leaving the island for my long journey south to Jenny’s funeral. I enjoy journeys, especially by train and especially the first part when we travel through the wild bracken and the bonny purple heather. Bracken is the name for our land’s plague, although it redeems itself considerably once amber-dead, enough, even, to feature in sentimental songs about leaving and losing love.

The second part of the journey will be in the air, zipping through clouds with barely enough time to knock back an orange juice and certainly not enough time to prise open the hygienic packaging and free the currant scone.

Or, indeed, to re-locate myself.

Half an hour ago I was in Scotland, and now I am in England. Countries shouldn’t be crossed so quickly, as if they were hardly there at all. There is no time to absorb the change, the process, to consider a new culture, a new way to hold my fork.

This sudden way of travel may be convenient, but I wonder if it’s all it says it is. In any part of our growing and learning, our minds and bodies need time to sort ourselves out, to slowly absorb a new way, to consider what we do or don’t like about it, and to decide how and who we shall be in context. To travel too fast through a state of change, finds us leaving our self behind. We may understand at a logical level what it is we undertake, but unless we have allowed time (and that length of time is not something we can set in stone) for our senses, emotions, body and heart to join us, we will ultimately fall in the poo. No change works if only based on logic. Not a single one, and not at any age or level of brilliance or intelligence. It is, quite simply, un-rushable, a journey into change.

So how do we do this change thing, considering the fact that everything is speeding up in every area of life and we are failures if we can’t keep up? And there are so many of us who can’t keep up and when we find ourselves at the bottom of the pit, with nowhere to go, worn out and broken, we fall ill. But I don’t think there is a collective solution to this, I think it will take each one of us, on our own, to decide to look away from the world and its empty promises of success and beauty, and look for something higher. We know it’s there when things happen we can’t explain, like a coincidence. We might need to employ our imaginations a bit more, develop eyes that really see the natural extraordinariness of our world and a thankful heart, all day long, for what we do have, instead of wanting what we don’t.

My little grand-daughter has just returned from a family camping holiday. Each day they visited somewhere new with a picnic and the sunshine overhead. One day they went to a safari park, another to the river, another through the hills to a lochan for a swim and so on.

I asked her what animals she had seen, and which was her favourite, expecting her eyes to light up and her mouth to fill with names like Elephant! Lion! Giraffe!

Tadpoles, she said and the whole room lit up with her smile.

In the night I listen to the wind rising up like an angry woman. By 3 am she has bullied the curtains into a right state. The snapping of upset floral chintz wakes me with a start.

Gunshot, I tell myself as I burst up from another of my apocalyptic dreams. I had just been wandering across a dead grey wasteland, somewhere beyond Thunderdome, and looking for my children. I can’t go back to sleep to find them once I’ve left the dream.

The curtains lift out into the room exposing the window glass, but no light falls in, for this night is just plain black. The only light, if I can name it such, sneaks up the stairs from its source- that disco ball of a mouse.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that shutting down my laptop would shut the rodent down too? But nothing will persuade it into sleep and on it glows, red and blue, all night long, but irritating me a little less tonight, as it lights my way down the stairs and all the way to the kettle.

During the day we had visited a little school over the hill. The sun was warm and yellow (well, maybe not warm) and the sky ice blue with scuds of snowy clouds as we climbed our way up, over and down the hill. The little isles were still where we remembered them to be, but faded a little inside a veil of mist. Ewes with their bright white lambs, peppered the roadside and, behind a wonky fence, slow cows peered at us through long russet fringes.

Neither the island husband nor I had remembered to make packed lunch.

We spent an hour in the light bright classroom on little plastic chairs, discussing her plans to decorate a school shed with beach gatherings; bits of fishing net, bits of rope, colourful plastic, shells and so on. The children do many beach cleans during the summer and after a big tide, pickings are treasure for those who care to think so. Ideas flew like swallows around that little classroom and we could just see how wonderful it would be, once we got beyond talking about it, of course.

The children came back from some outside adventure just as we were leaving, all breathless and excited, their cheeks rosy and their mouths full of chatter. We watched them settle in their places around the wide tables. The teacher introduced us, and explained the hut project, the abstract design ideas, the use of shape and texture and lots of colour. I wondered if those little heads could imagine what we had imagined.

I burped ten times. said one little girl a propos of nothing.

Green burps, she continued, then furrowed her brow.

No, not green………what’s that big colour Mrs Eden?

The big colour? We were all wondering.

Big as your dad? asked a little tousle-headed boy.

No, silly, she replied. Nothing’s big as that.

As we drove back along the little winding road, sucking toffees to quiet our growling stomachs, we considered big colours a bit smaller than a dad, and we felt the awe of it.