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Island Blog – A Jigsaw Tangle Jester

I get home to a home bathed in light and sunshine. It was damn hot in the servery today and many degrees higher in the kitchen, what with all the ovens and toast machines and grills pumping hot breath into the skinny place. When folk come to the counter, I notice that all they want is recognition. No, not all they want, obviously, because they are here to order two kiddies meals, one toastie with beet, feta and walnut, one just cheese and maybe seaweed chutney, two soups, one with a cheese scone, yes, warmed please, another with something else. I find the ordering a wonderful stray into a new jigsaw piece, mainly because I have not paid due attention to what is on offer that day, this day. One customer confounded me. He wasn’t initially friendly, just ordered but, I noticed as we attempted to work together, him on the far side and me, glasses steamed up and suddenly just out of the Washeroo because everyone else had just gone somewhere, that he wasn’t that certain of himself. I believe that, on the far side there is one part of the puzzle of this whole running a cafe thing, one that can be drawn into place. Together with smiles and explanations, he ordered. I noticed that, after sometime, he and his wife remained seated, talking amicably. I set the jigsaw piece in place.

When I set off for work in the morning, I have no set picture, because I know a lot about business, over decades, and there is only tangle. There is also the Jester, the one which dances in just to confound. You think, we thinked, that, because of the weather, the time of year, the day itself, we would expect this. Well, ‘this’ never turned up. Never. Running a business may be a dream, as it was for us, but it is tough and unpredictable, diminishing and very personal and it takes many years to establish. I think, I remember, the fallouts, the doubts, and the Jester temptation to stop the whole thing. I remember the cold winter giving up. I remember the massousive effort it took to rise up and run again, skinny, empty of conviction, flayed with self-unbelief, over and over until the business recognised us and the Jester was just a snigger in the effluence. I remember.

It should be quieter now, so they say, but I am watching the weather and the fact that this island is rated as the best weekend retreat in Scotland. I can see evidence of this. Not a single parking space in the main town, not even in the flux car park by the harbour, and it is nearly September, so the whole ‘kids going back to school’ is no longer true. The weather is shifting, the planet shifting and time has moved verily on in terms of the predicts of the old jigsaw. However, there is opportunity in this if acceptance and understanding and facilitation are ready, like the three musketeers, ready to face up to what now is and thus to adjust stirrups, or maybe change horses. Whichever way anyone looks it, if they do at all, the jigsaw is no longer predictable. The tangle has come in, and the jester too. Even as old as I am am, I can see it and I don’t want to be blind to any of it, even if it takes me some time to research and to understand.

To be honest, I am sad for some of my peers. Like me, they are olding, but some of them are glue-fixed to how it was and, thus startled,, at the least, when a dynamic we have all trusted, or learned to trust from parents, is jestered away, like mist. The jigsaw is what we trusted and it worked for decades. No longer. I like the ‘longer’ word. It proffers hope and continuance and i will take it. Does it, I wonder, remove the word predict from our language as so many other words have fallen away due to lack of use? I don’t know, and the ‘don’t know’ of these times enlivens me. Learning, as I have for some years, to live alone, to work my own jester problems out, even in the dark months, strongs me. I won’t say it is my choice because it isn’t, but the what is of ‘is’ is where I am and I love life with a passion. Tangle? Jester? I still love the jigsaw, the pleasant picture, the endless blue of a seascape wherein the nightmare of a clock of deep sea creatures confounds me with the seaswirl of itself

There is always tangle. Always a jester.

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Island Blog – The Cafe, Keeping on, Q and Clouds

Someone said the Q word this morning. It isn’t allowed, and we all flinched as it spilled through lips and took off like a jester cloud, filling the whole place. It was gentle for a while, coffees, hot chocolates/what type/marshmallows/cream, bespoke teas, cakes, scones with jam and cream, blueberry bakewell, still warm, chocolate cake so full of chocolate as to dynamic the most miserable of souls into hopefulness. Peanut butter brownies, gluten free flapjacks, and so much more. WE are so much more, the team who work here and that’s a good thing because of the Q word earlier.

Around midday they came, and kept coming. The Washeroo was swamped with plates and cups, water glasses and pots and pans and all things kitchen. I don’t even know what half of this equipment is for but it does produce excellent lunches so I don’t really need to do more than to make sure all of it is thoroughly scrubbed. We welcomed dogs, children, families, couples and we never stopped at all, clearing, chatting, welcoming, delivering great food. I ducked out at times, just to escape the high piles of plates and cups and cutlery and pots and the endless parts of a new mixer. I changed the water many times in the deep sinks, so scurrilous did it become. I remember pulling back at one point and looking at the greasy brown swirl of it and thinking this. I don’t want anyone to think that I would ever countenance such water in my sink, not staying there like it was an ok staying there thing. I pulled the plug often.

The thing about running a very popular cafe is that the populous will come. They come because they hear it is a lovely welcoming space and that the food is healthy and fresh and prepared daily. Of course they do. And reputation will grow because people will recommend and new visitors will come because of that. I know that the owners of this cafe have got it so right. I also know that a business takes years to learn its wingspan. I remember growing a few and the early years were also cloudal. I remember doubt and judgment and loss of confidence. However, I am glad we kept going because now all around the world the work we did is used in protocols around sea-mammal research. There were clouds aplenty in the long years of that keeping on thing.

Home now and the sky is a big nudge of clouds. Not a flat sky, not lying down, not at all, but there are stratonimbus and a dwindle of cumulous and a load of feathering interruptions going on in the conversation. I hear it loudal. It moves all the time, shifts, blends, pulls back as if in outrage. Below, I have a baked potato and salad for supper.

The Q word? ‘I think it might be Quiet today”

Enough said on that.

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Island Blog – Part of ‘We’.

Just made my green stuff. All the goodness. Carrot, Celery, Apple, Ginger, Broccoli, Spinach plus Turmeric. I usually make it in the early morning, but forgot. I never guarantee that I will like the taste but, as I recall from the medicine proffered decades ago, I will drink it because, apparently, it is good for me and ‘good for me’ with my sore bones and my guilty mind in mind, I decide to decide to believe in a sort of wipe-out, a cleansing, a restart. Not that I can, obviously. I remember once, driving down an even narrower lane than most on the island, late at night and legging over a fence in my long frock to hide from the police behind a nettle hedge after a riotous meal out. I have the tear in said frock to this day, although I did repair it with good needling and a heart. I think about this as I fridge my green stuff and chuckle. I could not leg over any fence now, although I probably would give it my best if nobody was watching. I am not one to readily accept the limitations within which I now live, those which might just attempt to contain me. I am not about to accept that, been too contained and for too many years. Enough on that. However, I am not interested in prowess. It’s enough for me to know that I could do what I once did, if suitably challenged.

Thing about this olding thing is that it is critically important to keep connected with other lives, with those in a younger generation who discuss things that leave me mystified. Just to connect, that’s the power of itself, and I know this first hand. Too much time alone, gazing at the beautiful view from my home, watching nature unfold, deliver and pullback is not enough. Humans are required, and not just a wave from a passer by. In my beloved cafe job, where I am looked after in ways that tell me I am respected as myself, the, at least, 33 yeasr beyond them, the granny. Here there is purpose. That’s what we can lose if alone and olding. And purpose is a thread, like a continuance in a tapestry, or a connective line in a painting, or in the way a business includes and settles. You are all important here, your difference matters, the things you bring, just you, matters. You are an integral part of ‘We’. It’s a belonging.

In an alone life with a mouthful of stories, with the scars and breaks of legging over fences, of the heart stopping awfuls of rushing to a bedside to sit all night as a child fought to breathe, of the disappointments, the leavings, the lack of communication, of the all-too-natural guilt of motherhood, I welcome the connections I have now. I can’t change the motherpast, nor make it better, but I recognise my place in the now of now. And I can smile.

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Island Blog – Bumble, Soup and Times Ahead

I wake in my old thoughts a few times in the night for no good reason beyond the immense shackalackle of fat rain crashing down and making a noise I might have reported to the Noise Police had I not realised what it was and therefore controlled my inner fishwife. The thoughts were weird, random, old stuff. I did the ‘wheesht’ thing with my hands, both of them. Thoughts are uncontrollable. It thinks me of those teachers who go into schools and who, though strong on their subject, just cannot hold the room and are thus vulnerable to the jokesters. I am trying, over decades, to teach my thoughts, and they are pupils even now. I can brandish my wand until I become the catherine wheel, but they won’t, don’t listen to me, no matter how many sparks I spiral out into the night, any night. I must befriend them. Much like teachers, I guess.

As I drove the skinny road to work this morning, I felt so excited. I mean something here. I am someone. I am the Washeroo. Others can do it all, with eloquence and majesty but I love that place. It used to be about hiding and I could. nobody could see me there. I love the change that the Calgary Cafe has wrought in me. It was an invitation and, I am sure, a risk, but here I am again and who knew how many dancing staff could shimmy around each other with dozens of lunch orders and with tunes on, and with changes and skedaddles on table shifts and others suddenly joining and the joy in it all.

My break. I grabbed a courgette, pea and mint soup in a big cup and took myself off to Pixty. As I opened the door, I tipped the hot soup, not much but enough to singe fingers. I did laugh and opened my windows to the warm sun. A bumble flew in, beautiful, sharp arse, conifer stripe. Hey, I said, quietly. I got the trapped thing in its buzz. I held my fingers up and it landed there. Then, window open gone.

New Times ahead.

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Island Blog – Middlemoon Smile and a Skinny Life

I love the middlemoon, the calm of waters and the gentling of skies, the chiaroscuro, the huge pines on the shore standing tall and unskittered. Birds can fly wing forward, scooping the air into helpful bundles of energy instead of backflipping onto bird feeders, thus sending them way beyond pendulum security. In short there’s a lot of wheeching going on when the full and new moon takes control. Life is just like this, I tell Jock the Blackbird as he flips and holds onto the seed tray, skidding somewhat and sending a shower of seed into the ether. There’ll be a few unsterilised seeds. grabbing the chance to root and grow and I’ll not be knowing what the hec this green thing is, come late Spring, and I will suddenly know and smile at this tiny opportunist. Again, this is life. The storms come, the dark holds like being inside a dustbin bag but someone, one someone is patient. A random thing happens, a blackbird skid, something, and that someone grabs at skinny life, no promise of success nor growth. So what is that energy, coming from nowhere, from somewhere?

My belief is that it isn’t planned. There is an extraordinary strength in all living things, not just fight or flight, and not calculated as some do, watching the stock market, pursuing business ideas, believing that to be financially wealthy will bring comfort and security. Live long enough and know that there is neither in the accumulation of money. It helps, yes, but never will it fill the human void. The random catch of opportunity, being open and aware and ready for the upset of moons will always bring growth, the ask to be spontaneous, to listen to hunches and random thoughts, to not explain them away,but to just go and to risk the wrong direction and then to try another one. Laughter and fun, work and focus, family and friends, food and sharing, listening and hearing, supporting and making hard choices. These are life skills and sustainable. I say ‘skills’ because they need honing and they need a ‘becoming’. They make us feel whole and a part of somethings and someones.

The birds fed in calm today, no skidding. There was rain, of course, but the land was at ease, the trees unskittled. There is no visible moon so the cloudal shift is light-blown and soft as wool, grey and light grey and white and off white and barely moving. That’s a rare for them. I can hear them snoring. This middling is short term. It won’t last and nor it should because that is life. If it was always easy on us we would never appreciate anything. We need the beginnings, middles and ends in order to grow into ourselves. It isn’t always pleasant but when I remember the rocks and the climbs and the falls and the fails and the sharps and the joys and the sunlight and the soft and the way I learned to grab opportunity, I smile.

I unloaded and stacked a ton of firewood today, aware as I always am of fumbly fingers, the way I can no longer grab as I once did and accepting, once I get through the fury of such a decline. After all, I want to do this for myself, not giving in to the dark thoughts. I listen to an uplifting audio story. as I climb onto the window seat to re-hang a heavy curtain. I check something on my car computer which tells me my engine is in trouble and here I meet a temptation. I could ignore it but I won’t ignore it because my wonderful Pixty Forkov is my freedom, my independence. Still, for seconds, the ‘Oh Whatever’ in me is loud in my ears because the complications of life are more tiring now. But NO, NO, I will not listen. I contact the garage and I get this response. ‘Hi Judy, we can fit you in on Wednesday next (tricky as I have commitments, but wait…) and someone can pick up your car early, delivering it back in the late afternoon. That ok? Hell Yes. My life is not skinny, even if I am. My life is my community, support, friendship and warmth.

I had my beginning, or so I thought but these beginnings keep beginning. I am not sequestered, not excluded, not abandoned, not that I ever really thought I was, but so many do. Thing is to keep moving on, or keep buggering on, in love and giving and being seen and dressing up and showing up and arriving alltimes in fun and playfulness. Maybe that;s how the moon feels at times.

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Island Blog – Lexicographer

We don’t ask to be born. How many times is that used as an accusation in the face of judgement? A lot, but it is true, and we didn’t, at least not necessarily into where we landed. We all want to be seen as who we are, and at every single stage of the who-we-are-ness which, I have to tell you is frickin tough for parents who are equally puzzled, and daily, at the transmogrification of what had at first, seemed like a wonderfully planned out life.

I came first, on the back of a howler. I’m sure, judging from photos in the album of me with hair tweaks and frilly frocks with matching bar shoes, all pristine and ironed to death, that I was the one, the perfect girl, top of the chart, a celebrity. That didn’t last. And why was that? Well, from what I remember, I was, well, different. I did conform, I did, and it was very wise to do so in order to avoid the slap, but what is it in a someone else, one who inhabits a ‘good girl’ even as she damn well knows she is on a slide to nowhere? I got brilliant. Please excuse the slanguage. I was best at performing, elocution (does anyone nowadays knows what that means?) English Language, Wordage, Dictionary expertise, the Study of Words, their history and their importance, once. And this was a gift? No, it was a loneliness. It felt like I was in some in-between space. I could see my ‘friends’ out there all happy with endless conversations about nails and clothes and fashions and horse riding and bejewelled parties around uplit infinity pools and I just wanted to sink into a bed of bluebells with a book and a like-minded friend. We would talk words, new ones, old ones, work out their meanings, laugh at our mistakes, be together on this lonely journey.

I knew one once. His name was Tom, and a bit older than me. We both worked at Lotus, watched the first run of the Elise around the track, which was right outside our big wide glass-filled office. He gave me lifts to and from work in his VW Beetle. It was the new age of seatbelts and we laughed a lot at working the whole thing out. We did spend time in the bluebells. We did talk words and their origins and it was a fire lit in me. I moved on, as did he. But I remember that glorious connection with words, with Lexography, with research, with the play on words, the way they change over time.

I’m glad I had that time. I can still see him in a stumble of trees, bluebells at his feet, laughing at some word I’d conjured from nowhere, the sundown at his back.

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Island Blog – Celtic Sea and Me

We were born, before the wind, some of us. We are irrefutably connected to the mystic, although there’s nothing mystic about it, not for some of us. We’ve always known it. Trouble is, with all this concrete covering over earth, all that burying, that disguising, turns our land into, well, Pleasantville. Watch the movie. It has much to say about the falsehood of our lives. We, out here in the blast of the thrawn Atlantic, still bumping over tracks, still able to walk barefoot without (sort of) any fear of broken glass shards, used needles, cutting things, are still connected. It wonders me, as I think back to my time living in a flat in Glasgow after so many years in the wild, that pavementing damage to a human connection to what once was (and still is) so vital for a goodly life. Over years, over time, the strive for money success, the building over bones, over history has taken us up many miles by now. We are lifting ourselves beyond oxygen.

At work today in the cafe kitchen, working with the team, filling the quick-steam dishwasher over and over and over again (and more), we fried, all of us, but we knew we would, and we kept each other cool just by asking “you okay” a lot. It’s a very uplifting question. My thoughts as I sank my old fingers into the deepsinksink scrubbing pots and pans and kitchen whizzy things went to the oceans, the seas of the world. I don’t question my thoughts anymore, nor did I much as a young woman. I know I am connected and it is a warm bond, like a cord, like a chord. I saw and see what those caught on pavements may well, and do, dismiss, although not so much these days.

My thoughts today as I batted away a persistent wasp sailed on the Celtic Sea. I love that name, feels me at home, my sea, although it isn’t. However I came home and studied a bit. This Sea, which immediately tells me it is confined somehow, like the `North Sea’ and thus, a possible grump. However, this sea, a big tradeline traverse, has the blood of the massive Atlantic in her veins and that smiles me. She will be feisty for sure. I check more. Celtic Sea, Basin Countries (the ones she bangs up against) Ireland, Wales, Breton France, Cornwall. She follows a tricky coastline and, knowing skippers (sons) who have launched into the Bay of Biscay in slight trepidation, she has a temper. She is also the minder of part of the Continental Shelf, where land falls away into scary depths. She curls around landfall, so she needs company.

I love her already. She sounds like me.

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Island Blog – Fiddle Work

I was thinking about fiddling today. I was. We do fiddle about, do we not, with fingers, with ideas, with olding, with blockades, with the constant push against the barriers we meet on a daily basis. Should there be a question mark here? Honestly, the whole ‘how you do grammar’ thing was once my absolut. Don’t mess with me on that word. It doesn’t need an ‘e’. There are kids this day bothering about results on where the eff they place their ees, never mind their hyphens and dashes and please don’t bring up exclamation marks, which, btw, were just fine a few years ago, and which have now become a yawn. Turmoil at worst. Fiddling at best.

Let’s fiddle. Fiddling requires finger movement, dynamic finger movement, in the fingers, that is. Limited, yes, unless you have learned how to. In the mind, different. There’s a wildscape in that head which (not ‘that’,….never ‘that’.. #grammarqueen) can spiral the brightest mind. You might go low one day and all the old stuff rushes in as if a tide has suddenly turned on you. It stutters, physical momentum, there are stumbles, hesitations, pauses, a want for hiding. Other days, and for no particular reason, the fiddle mind plays a wonderfully dynamic tune, and your heart is light, your clothes feel right, your make-up worked, the path ahead clears like a walk into bright opportunities and surprising serendipities. What you expect, you will attract. I know this. It is a fact and proven. So what is the thing about days when your fingers tangle-damage your scarf, when, in irritation at said tangle-damage, you wheech off a precious gold chain, breaking it; when you forget your keys, can’t decide what to wear for an important something or someone or when your ego is way below knicker level, in fact it’s ankle deep and asleep? There’ll be days like these. Mama said.

I had one today. I know these days of old. They’re trying to be the seventh wave, and maybe they are. They do piss me off, nonetheless, because I never gave them permission to diffuse me into a spread I feel incapable of. I wanted focus, a strong light ahead, a clear path, and now you straggle me into a general illuminator. I don’t care who else can see. I just want light for myself. Ah! there it is, the conundrum. So I don’t appear to be the master of my own days. Instead there is a force I cannot see which confabulates my story, my plan, me.

When I arrived at work, I felt as if my outside, all uniformed up, didn’t belong to me. At the door, I pulled up, said some stern words to myself, got to it. But it didn’t shift. I listened to the laughter from my delicious co-workers, chatted, heard their news, cleared tables, engaged with customers, laughed with them, loved their dogs, filled water jugs, cleaned endless kitchen equipment (inventively), but I still felt I was limpish . I thought ‘tired.’ I thought ‘old.’ I watch my fingers type this out and I laugh. Tired, yes. Old yes.

Ach, wheesht! Fiddle on. Always fiddle on.

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Island Blog – Go Mahousive

Ok, a new word, yes, but my family are right there on inventiveness. We always were. I do remember the odd altercational exchange with t.t.t.tteachers who stood resolute against any such inventive nonsense, stuck as they stood, like plastic, and holding out the Oxford Dictionary, which, even then was definitely well beyond its shelf life. So we, in that crazy Tapselteerie kitchen did invent. We did. Stories, chances, lifts and lufts, beyonds and togethers, all made a right frickin mess among pots and pans and plans and dance dynamics, not enough bread, squashed strawberries, an important delivery that didn’t arrive. And I am proud of that, The fact that in the face of endless structural collapses, we made our guests believe that everything was mahousive. And it was. To be honest, should I notice an unavoidable slimjink, I would move into the guest mist, performing, always performing, my eyes alight, bright with a tomorrow promise and an absolutely firm delivery of an amazeball pudding, with cream and liqueur and more wood on the fire.

It worked. It does now, I watch the do it now thing in the Best Cafe Ever. What might be a lack turns into an opportunity. In order to make everyone welcome, we, on the business side of the counter, behind the cakes, the swivel and twist, the real mahousive, the inner workings of a brilliant cafe are bright like the sun. Welcome, we say. How can I help? And there are so many incomings, I watch them. from behind my Washeroo. Hallo you, I think. Each customer is served alert and kindly, orders change, others in the group, the family, shift and change choosing this, no, that, no maybe two, no, one.

And on it goes. I did spend a while today standing and thinking. There are only two words in the Oxford Dictionary beginning with mah. One is mahogany, brown and well, brown. The second is mahout. Elephant friend, those who, back in the day, cared for those poor creatures who were forced to carry queens and other eejits with delusions of grandeur through streets, into wars, way way out of their natural and familial environments.

So I officially add Mahousive. It means bigger than anything. I’ve done this adding thing before, by the way. I wrote a piece for BBC Wildlife, a gazillion years ago, about a whale, so called stranded in a sea-loch, Isle of Lewis. It was a nonsense. The whale was fine. It was February, so damn cold even that word wasn’t enough. I, and Janine timed the breathing of the whale as it took on the loch and the captive fish, I watched the surface lift in response to the hailstones. The loch ‘poppled’ . It did. However that word did not exist, I challenged that. I find it now in the dictionary.

Go Mahousive.

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Island Blog – Ordered Chaos, Fire and Fun

I shove another full tray of pots, cups, teapots, plates, cutlery into the maw of the crazy fast wishdosher, lift up the done one to dry the constituents whilst they’re still hot. Glasses, cutlery, everything does better with a quick dry. I turn to see the wotwot of the dynamic in the kitchen. Is there space for me to bring clean thingies in, or not? It is definitely a dance out there. I get to the butter pots shelf. I can see there’s a shove-in. I hesitate. I can’t see the back of this shelf. In theory, all the butter, jam, chutney pots, etc are cautioned into regularity. In theory. Actually, to be honest, in a busy fast-moving cafe, there is always a shove-in going on. We work with balance, all of the time, every minute. Someone out there in the thick of orders needs more mugs, cups, espresso minis, than are available in their parking places. I have them, I have them, they are super boiling hot from this crazy fast washing unit, but I have tea towels and I’ll be right there. Same with cake plates, glasses for anything Frappe, soft drinks, just island water. Orders come like bullets. Me, i enjoy the slow, not sure I should, but I do. That’s me hiding in the Washeroo, noisy with pots and busyness. And then comes that lull, the fizz and scoot of the coffee machine making latte, mocha, small, large, americano with hot milk, with oat milk, with nothing, and I do peek out. I do. I am armpit high with suds and soup pans and soap suds, but the immediate is incoming, and right there, just the other side of our flimsy protective walls. I wipe off suds, find my way through steamed up glasses and my unsurety around the paying equipment and smile a welcome. Not just me. I’m just talking about the Sudster in this dynamic. We all smile a welcome. Hi folks, how can I help?

It thinks me, about life.

Today wasn’t a day in the best beach cafe ever. I slowed my feet. I watched the birds on my feeders, felt the heat the humidity in the air, saw the cloud cover, the hunker down of grey and white, the pressure, humid, a standing still. I noticed the effect in the someones I met in the shop, the touristic faces denying access to anyone, a lot of looking anywhere but at another, the sweat beading. It was, ‘a bugger’, as we say up here, not being mincy with wordage. Hot, loomy, a holding, as if in the arms of a big woman you really didn’t want to be held by. And so rare. It’s cleared now, I can feel it, hear it in the music of the dove wings as they ping like regentlessists, up and away and over and back again around the bird seed.

We live, all of us, within our attempts to order chaos. We do. Chaos comes in like a wind from nowhere. A teenager turns fury. A mother or father departs. A sibling comes out. A storm barrels in. We lose credit, funding. A dream dies. Taking it way down into the ordinary….. A bus party comes in for cake, no, quiche, no, cold drinks, no, actually, 4 lattes, two with oatmilk, and, oh, look at that raspberry bakeweIl or that strawberry sponge…..or soup, shall we have soup? Eventually, resolution, an order to Initial Chaos and the chance to learn to work with it. Eventually, to have the wisdom to prepare for the next blast. An eloquence of freedom. It’s every day, after all. For all of us.

I know it is easy, my analogy in the butter pot shelf of the cafe, but it still speaks. We can’t make everything perfect, nobody can. All units, all shelves, all plans, all dreams will fall into chaos. But, and this I have found, in the multiple chaos of my life, that it is possible to find new storage for the ‘butter pots’. The bigger stuff, the beyond of any sky, the way forward in a fireball dynamic? No answer. We just have to live it and to bring hope and fire and. fun to the dance.

Just believe it. And, keep going. Chaos gets tired too, in the face of someone who recognises an incoming unfriendly.