Writing

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Island Blog – About Light

I’m battling with my specs just now. They’re old ones even though I do have new ones, ghastly ones, horrible frames, my bad. I said ‘I don’t care how I look in specs’ and so I ended up with ‘don’t care frames’. Mostly this matters not one jot, although when I see myself scowling in a mirror catch, I do eye roll. Good goddikins, who the hell is that old twit? Well, me. Then I forget as I move into whatever I need to read, to see, the godawful frames forgot in the light that sees me the words. And they do ‘see’ me. See, just for the record is now a standalone being, and it is high time that word is freed from the control of a human, I see…..this allows me to see….it’s all about me. I give it independence and not without confidence. Light sees. Trees see, plants, winds, waters. The who is watching whom is a fair question but the which and the what get left behind.

Light. It is all around us, all over the place, all seeing, all illuminating, in surreal moments, in sudden innovations, in epiphanies, when two fall in love over a coffee table having never met before; in something someone says, something you overhear, in a realisation, when a long dead lovely person appears clear in a mind, in the survival of a child, in the moment when the awful ghastly shimmers with hope. All of these are light, looking at us. Light is an energy, a massive force moving among us every minute of every day and it is never dependent on the sun nor the moon. It flows through us and around us and why the hell don’t we just tap into an awareness of numenous? I can guess. We have divided into….wait…tree huggers/hippies versus money-chasing, expensively besuited entrepreneurs, many of whom are lonely and lost and who would just love to get back to light.

I do have to check my full stops and commas because my laptop has her own way of doing things. She is mighty in her independent fight to keep me hers. Talking to an editor or publisher is a right barbelue. I don’t know how to stop her dot/comma control thing and most of me loves her voice. Mostly, obviously, she is under my control and, if I was her, I would fight for my own light, I would. I believe we are friends. See what I am saying here? Anything and everything can see, is looking and always was. I know, I know that predators abound, but they always did. The thing is to understand pure light, honest light, salty light and to notice it, to recognise it, to give it out, arms wide because there is no charge, unlike every other damn thing which needs charging.

Just spread it, notice it, talk to it, welcome it, let it move on like noctilus. Now you see it, now you don’t. Keep watching, keep looking, ah… here you are again. Thank you. Without you there is darkness.

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Island Blog – You Crazy Loon

Calm today, light bright, cold wind but no bite. Perfect, really. I had things on this morning, friends for coffee, that glorious invitation into another’s life, so supremely different to my own. Seeing the dynamic of it, feeling the troubles in it, hearing the determination to make this life, their life, work and smiling at their beautiful young faces, voices, opinions, the glorious wild of those who are not old nor defeated. Then I grabbed a lunch bite, read some of a good story, walked out into the wilder. As I ‘tsked’ at the way one, or may be two, big ass vehicles, or maybe a once or twice from the same big ass vehicle has totally squished a lovely grassy verge and not just once. I know it’s not my problem now but it still ‘tsks’ me. I am all about respect for others and their otherness. As I walked back I head a rabbit scream. I know that scream. I pulled down my beanie. This is nature, all are hungry.

Today a woman was celebrated. She was a huge part of our family. She was there at Christmas, births, birthdays, celebrations and when my mum struggled with too many children. She was feisty, strong and powerful in her work with the World Council of Churches. She was a voice out there in the days when women had nonesuch. She was also naughty, ready to challenge dogma, seeing the light in the freedom of NO.

I remember so many times with her. When a dance tune came on, and, remember the timeline, it might have been a waltz or a calypso, and we were in the kitchen or the garden or the street. We clocked each other. I held out my invitation and she immediately responded, We bounced and rounded and laughed and lightened the day.

RIP Pamela Helen Gruber. You were a lift in my growing life and I thank you for that, you crazy loon.

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Island Blog – A Curve of Change and Beacons

I’m watching my tulips, a huge vase of them, a gift from a friend, curve into fingers of fire. Others might have thrown them out days ago but I like to notice change and its effects, so they remain, still wild with colour, but obviously existing in the end days. Do they still have a voice, something to say? I think so. In the sky the clouds move fast like a conjoining of grey-haired line dancers full of gin. Today, yet another big gale was all about push, like a bully, without care for the lids of my wheelies, the cancellation of all ferries, of no mail, no deliveries, the village shop scanty on all the expected usuals. The rain pelted and I didn’t walk. I watched, from the goldfish bowl of my very obvious conservatory, those who did. I could hear them crackling by, all waterproofed, all with dogs. There’s a kind of ‘have to’ about dogs no matter the weather. Although I have always refused any noisy clothing, just fine about getting soaked, I regret not getting out there. It was cold, the wind full of teeth and menace. However, I know that, had I got out there, smelled the wild, soaked myself, been buffeted beneath very compromised trees, watched the uplift of wind over tide, the upsurge of startled water, I would have engaged with the change. It thinks me.

In less than a week, I will be in South Africa. Am I anxious about the journey, the airport overwhelm, the weather, the ferry situation? Hell Yes. But my thoughts on these are just thoughts, my feelings understandable and still just feelings. It is how I deal with my fear of change, over most of which I have no control at all, which will matter. Matter…….sounds like someone who makes mats, as a Hatter makes hats. Sorry, wordal irrelevance. In any life there is always a surprising element of control, not over anyone else, nor over everything, but over self, over me, oh definitely yes. My response to fear, to a scary change, will shift the whole dynamic. Not like a bullying wind but more as a gentle turnaway. The anxiety comes in. I gently whisper, and I do, and out loud, I See You, but You are not Helpful to me. Please Go. And then I find a Thank you, for something, anything and the list builds itself.

Everything passes, the good and the scary, the gales and the calms, the good days and the not so good, the seasons, the daily round and its upsets, the friendships, the losses, the changes. Like the line dancing clouds, it all moves on, has done for millennia. We just need to accept and to dance on, in the rain, through the shite, bright as beacons, because we all are. Beacons.

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Island Blog – Now and then

It’s cold, the wind an iceslice with bitey teeth like a ferret, not that I know a damn thing about ferret teeth but I can imagine. Tiny sharp incisors and no filters in the mind of the owner thereof. I was bitten by a mouse once, the tiny rodent I was trying to save from being sluiced down a push of rainwater. I grabbed it, no thoughts of teeth in my own mind and was hurt and upset until I understood an instinctive reaction. I could have been a ferret after all. However, and this is irrelevant, the wound rose red and its subsequent pulsation required a switchback trip to the doctor because I was basically carrying a balloon on my forefinger, thus unable to text, employ finger recognition, or point an accusation at anyone without inviting ridicule. Irrelevant.

This time of year is yahoo Spring although it isn’t yet. I do know, of course i do, that Spring up here on the butt of the west coast of Scotland with the wild Atlantic wheeching up huge waves and making a great big noise about it, munching old rocks into pivots, and flipping sands into a beachy confusion, is to be expected. I remember lambing in April in the snow. Not me, the cheviots. But I was on the early shift and for weeks. 5am, swallowing mouthfuls of darkness and cold, looking for colour. Not moon, or maybe moon, such a fickle light. I’m searching for those undercover, the ewes who take their hideaway in cowers and coppice, under hedges, in the brack and barm of stone dykes. Twins or triplets definitely a challenge. Too much for the exhausted mother. Delivering, shifting tricky ones coming arse first, all out, all ok, pulling off the sticky stuff out of tiny mouths desperate to breathe, sucking the stuff, mouth to mouth, blowing in whisky breath probably, the wriggle and pulse of life in my hands, the shouty thrill of it, in the early dawn. The crows are not awake yet. My job, to deliver if I can, to make safe if I cannot and to leg it back home to wake himself. I can’t do that one, this one. He was exhausted, had walked the fields/parks all the day before right up to Crow Sleep Time. He rose, still clothed and smelling like days of unwashed and sheep. The daytime walks I couldn’t do. Feral kids, guests, dinners, bedroom changes, cleaning, phone calls about cottage bookings, calves to feed, cow to milk, stable mucking out, hens to organise, eggs to collect. Enough. We did well. I know we did, the clueless We who had never done a single thing on that list before. Lambs survived, mostly, children definitely did, guests returned to the Quirky Hotel and now……well, now I have none of that other than what I’ve learned and that is a powerful and energising gift. This is what I did, what we did.

Now, when I still swallow mouthfuls of darkness and cold, I remind myself of what I have achieved and, therefore what I can still achieve, not in the same context, nor genre, nor situation, but I still can achieve. And here’s how I do this achieving thing. Any time the alien thought marches in tooting a trumpet, all important and (somewhat ridiculous) I shake my head. Ah, I smile, no thanks. You think you define me now as, yes unsure, yes with less self confidence, yes a bit wobbly whilst hanging heavy curtains, yes in a dither because my car computer tells me I have a stop alert when I know that everything mechanical is quite fine and always was before computers made us all doubt our own intelligence. I am grafting myself off this failing tree, because I realise I stuck myself here. And, it is so good to notice, to realise, and then to take action. I have strength, huge strength, maybe not physical although don’t tell me I can’t lift this, nor carry that because I damn well will. I have wisdom, experiential wisdom. Not many care to connect with that in these sad times when oldings are written off as a right pain in the arse, and that saddens me. I learned so much vital knowledge on how to cope with life, the world, the isolation, from my granny, my parents, and, I am happy to say that my ferals and their kids do connect with me, asking things, smiling a lot and with no understanding at all of how life was without the internet.

Talk to your granny, grampa. Your wisdom guides. They really never thought they would ever be a pain in the arse. Trust me.

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Island Blog – Thin spaces, Intrathinks,Otherness

I’ve been aware for a while of my dead husband. I don’t mean memories of the missing of a life partner, but more an alert, as if he is there in a doorway. He loved doorways, used to stand in them all quiet, just watching me batter the living dalights out of a souffle or a ton of bread dough, lost in my thoughts. It always made me laugh, once I caught sight of him. He’s back now, not standing but in his wheelchair, still in doorways. I am not going mad I assure you. I know he is not there but it does think me. Way up here in the wilds of the West, we inhabit the thin spaces. Have a google on that. The further north, the further wild you go, the veil between the world and the Otherness is super thin. I can walk in woods I have walked through for 47 years and can still catch a glimpse of a beloved dog in a scamper over old roots. I see her clearly for as long as a bubble burst. I can be walking in my nowadays thoughts and suddenly I am back into a memory of my kids laughing, the song of it lifting into a winter sky. It’s just a second of two, the image so fleeting, but it comes and I welcome it, them. They always turn up when I am somewhere else in my head, so I know I don’t conjure them up. I’m not even thinking about them, caught up in an Oh I forgot to buy a bayonet light bulb, or I should probably turn up to do this or that. And that is precisely how I know I live among the intrathinks, the otherness. It can be damn confusing, but only if I try to explain any of it. Rather, I accept, even when it tumbles me, alterspects my spects.

I believe that we are all connected, but the thirst for Armani and Tiffany and Celebrity and the smartest car, don’t do cars, all shiny and tinted and purring and impossible to park, drowns us. We can forget who we are and what we really want. Out here in the thrick of endless storms, home battering, forest falling, we know. Life is simple. Food, friends, family, shelter, ceilidhs, a great local shop, a village hall, a church, a fabulous pub, single track roads, massive potholes, loads of rain, seasons, shared lifts, communication and the openness to an uninterrupted connection with nature and all her wild tantrums.

I have rarely been to his grave, him, dead over five years now. I know his bones lie there but not his spirit and maybe that’s why I haven’t gone to tell him things. It’s as if I am pulled into a maelstrom, down and down and in this downing down, I see a load of differentials. The Intra, the inter, the whatever of logic and what, illogic? I do have a big issue with the either and or of pretty much everything. There is so damn much in between, quietly moving on. So, back to point, I thought today that, instead of just waving at him as I pass en route to the harbour town, I will stop, park, push my way through sheepshit and rain and hurdles of slamdunk wind and go to his bones. I will read his inscription. There is a small space for me. And I will tell him that he was my everything. And then he wasn’t. And now I am here and doing just fine on a sheep-soaked hillside looking very conspicuous and with not a lot to say.

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Island Blog – She

Fingernail moon up there in the blue. Clouds gentle, moving grey and soft and ever changing. Silence, as day sinks away and night rises all black and holding. It doesn’t fear me anymore, although it did once. It’s as if an inevitable Onething decolours, swallows all other things down a black throat, until a wee intuitive light lifts. I can see now, a bit, admittedly, but I can see. Of course in all places of street lights, cafe welcomes, car headlights, Darkness does not have her time on stage. Here she definitely does. The fingernail moon is enough in this wild place. She can, and has often before, lit my way home after a ceilidh, walking among gentle trees, the only sound a burn trickle, a rustle of wildlife, eyes watching me. I’m amazed I never fell in a ditch. The pull of home is ever strong . It was about two miles but with the ceilidh in me, still hearing the dance, the tunes, I knew I would get there, to that door, into that home of children, dogs and safety. I never felt unsafe here, still don’t, not for a minute. I am Island blest.

I did stuff today, kept doing the stuff. Most of it is boring to be honest, cleaning, checking, sorting and that’s how life is. However, and I always have one of those in my pocket, I know I have a choice as I head for the hoover or the power drill or the hose, or the mould clearing squirt. A choice of attitude. I can see myself hearing this and swearing like a fisherman or someone in my local pub on a Friday, and I halter, falter and soften. Dammit. Ok, I will do this utterly boring and repetitious pointless thing again, again, again. I can hear Life laugh. It isn’t a giggle, nor a false Haha, Heh Heh, but a real fall back laugh and I can’t help joining in. Once recovered, I consider this. Ah, yes. To laugh at my self, the one who walked home 2 miles after a ceilidh and didn’t fall in a ditch; the one who got home to begin again the endless round and who regrets not one single second. She.

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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 – The Dream of It

We all have one, a dream for the future of one. I say ‘one’ because this dream usually begins from the seed of a furious teenage bedroom, if you’ll pardon my choice of wordage. I spent any hours allowed in my yellow and white wallpapered bedlam confines, dreaming. It was going to be perfect, brilliant, long-lived, shared with the other Perfect and free and wild and finally I would get out of uniform. I won’t say that didn’t happen but the happening wasn’t Disney. In fact it was bumpy as hec because what this dream thing doesn’t bother to tell you, much like a PA I worked with once, she who had it in for me from the get-go because I was pretty and younger, is that the distance between you and your dream is an exhausting quixolatitude of desert and thirst, and the ‘im’ of possible is a constant wasp in your face and there are endless lonely roads and so many swinging signposts that even the strongest and most determined travellers sink down and fade. And that’s the truth of it. Had I known this for certain in that bedlam confine, well, who knows and I do ask myself that. No question mark required. Obviously I can’t answer from that teenspace. I can’t feel her anymore although I can in glimpses. I see her rising from the side of bed, the looking out window barred, the lovely garden beyond. I see her knowing there is a night out. I feel her sparkle, fizz like fun, the wild luffing her sails. I watch her stand and move slowly towards the long mirror. She was me once. She looks good. She looks scared. She looks beautiful. She is empty. She is ready. She has a dream.

She hears a call. Ready?

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Island Blog – A Bed without Fences

Last night I dreamed that I came upon a young gardener creating a new flower bed. The soil was sodden, dripping, mud basically. As I neared, watching him pulling earth towards him and into shape, I confess to a smirk. This will never work I thought but didn’t say, and in the few paces it took me to get near enough to exchange a conversation, my optimistic mind proffered a wider map, not one I know, nor had experienced with all the deer, the rabbits, the careless touristic footfall of my ‘known-ness’. It was a new spread, the map, as if this single action could be a beginning. I said Hallo and What’s This?’ with a big smile on my face because I am genuinely interested, nay fascinated when I meet boundary breakers, their courage and hopefulness, their determination to make this thing work. He explained a bit, none of which I can recall, nor did I on waking, but the image of him working, pullkng earth, levelling, making a new shape stayed with me all day. And, it thinks me.

I remember how excited each one of my five ferals were when the cot bars no longer confined them. I also remember the endless night walking as a result of that freedom, even as I got it. I was once a baby behind bars and now I am totally growed up and free to wander. What’s not to love about that gift of independence even if it will take me another 15 years to learn how to spell the word and then a lifetime to understand how to live with it as a friend? Those bars don’t just relate to babyhood, that confinement and also that safety and security, for many choose to stay behind those bars even when they are long rotted away or have been used as kindling. Safer that way. Again more thinks.

We are urged and taught to make ourselves free. There are a gazillion books, most of which talk at me from elevated situations, an I’ve Arrived Here thing and with a list of excercises or therapies that just iss me off and I move the book on with a smile. It isn’t that I dislike such helpful books, not at all, but I am looking for ‘real’ and not finding it. I don’t want an excercise plan, one which I just know I won’t sustain. I want someone who has been through a load of tough to tell me that even if I just take the lisp of my tongue, the stutter in my sentence, the limp in my gait, the falter in my forward progress, the hesitation in my conversation, the slight of my strength, that I can begin again from the exactly me of me. Include the falters, the falls, the regrets, the way I stuck behind bars because I was too afraid to step out alone, include all of it and let me lift all by myself. Now that would be. a book I’d buy.

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Island Blog – How to look Wandered

As I walk today in sunlight and through the surprise of too much hat, scarf/gloves because the air is light and kind, I slow my pace. When I walk with some others I have noticed a march thing going on with them. Now that I am older and with a far greater hold on self confidence, I question the rush. Look at that stone, I say, pointing. I wonder how old it is, how it got here, who lifted it, who placed it? A high tide, the fall of a huge pine, the aggressive and thoughtless shove from a digger bucket? How does it feel sitting here? By this time, as you might imagine, I am paper-clipped over said stone and they are already well into next week. But my curiosity does halt them and that is enough. Their much younger lives are driven after all, and time is short and this stone is just this stone. As I unbend myself I do remember that, initially, I had to decide to slow my pace, so ingrained in me, in us all perhaps, is the need to move along and fast because the early bird, the front runner, the winner, the best are always the ones who get the prize, who hold the rosette, the cup, the shield and the love of endless unknown others. It is no surprise to me that half the frickin world is lost in transit.

I am lucky, I know, priveleged, fortunate, pick your own definition of the same thing. Through all I have learned in a long life, the strubbles and pixellations, the divides, whole maps burned like witches, no visible paths in sight, I know who I am and that’s a big thing. However, a far bigger thing is to be happy with that. It demands to be lived out. Decisions and deliberations are required, new ones, fences built and taken down, timings altered not faltered, responses re-enacted, twirled into coils and pulled into different shapes. An outside reaction is not important, nor relevant, not if a soul wants identity. Work is a daily whatnot, and there, I did it, introducing fun. Everything, and everyone, is so serious now and it shows in faces, in eyes and droops and stoops and with a complete lack of whoops. When does someone stop whooping? I can whoop over a plate of strangled eggs. (family word) and maybe there’s another thing. In my family, as my bajonkers feral children blundered their way through their ‘formative’ years, we played, with words, with moments, with opportunities. I found it exhausting, even though I was a co-initiator in the chaotic nonsense of a wild life on the tip of forever or nowhere and in the storm face of the great Atlantic but I could be no other way and nor could he, well mostly, and I am glad of it. There was always a jump and frisk in my head, still is, more so now, now that I am free to decide my way.

I didn’t wander in those days. Who ever does when bills need paying, work demands its daily tuppence? I marched, I did, saw nothing, noticed no stones, never heard the stories from the ancient rocks, the pine trees, nothing beyond the need to get to school on time and back again on time to prep for a 16 dinner sitting plus collies to feed, five kids and various other helpers, fires to light, and the so on kept this so on thing endlessly. I could lose my funthink, and did. Now, with all those incredible memories flying about me like birds, I can wander. I know who I am now. No, that’s not true. I always knew but was waiting for permission to consolidate my knowing . Never going to happen. How to look wandered describes a person who knows who they are and who is still curious about the next bit.