Young

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Island Blog – Amen to that

I walk out, barefoot, onto the morning grass, feel the cool bite of it, the ice chill thrill up my legs. It’s early morning and the birds already line the staves, making what sounds like the beginning of a piece of music. I’m coming, I tell them, armed as I am with seed, with hemispheres of nourishing fat. I watch the sun lift from his eastern bed, the clouds turning fringe-pink, the blue mountain defined as if by a black marker. I see late bats scoot through the dawn, a pair of early ravens cawk overhead, a five of Brent geese loop around to land with a scoosh of bright white spume into the sea-loch. An ordinary morning, for me at least.

As the sun lifts higher and the cumulus resolves into cotton wool, I see the beech trees yellow into gold. The sky is stratus with high wind, but down here we are calm. It isn’t often like this. Mornings like these just beg to engage with us, beg us not to waste a single moment at the controlling end of a hoover because the birds are waiting for an audience, the puddles slack and dull and just longing for a jumping foot to cause exciting chaos. Do we ever think of that? Do we understand our own importance in the jungle of nature, that a path wants to be walked along, a sky craves our attention, a bird wants to be heard and not just by another bird?

I hear the stags roar across the hillsides, not visible to me but their voices are, that fight for dominance, for life itself. I hear the rally cars out there, the roar of them, the lights, the speed as they take the island roads by storm. I hear voices in the village shop, the words flying up from somewhere in between fresh veg and chilled goods, the lilt of a conversation, the murmur of loneliness from a single shopper reading his list out loud. Are you lonely? Are you alone? Two very different questions. I wish a rally driver the very best of luck tonight and he smiles as wide as a whole country. Thank you! he says. What number is your car? I ask, having heard it roar past my door, all throaty as an old whisky drinking rock singer, a few times over the past few days. It’s bright blue and covered in stickers and he, the driver, is young and full of spiritful life. I know nothing of him but I do know his smile and his response and that what I suddenly said meant something to him. We all need to be heard.

Before each rain shower, and there are always those, I watch the fall streaks, the virga , and I marvel. As they dance across the sea-loch like ethereal ghost dancers, I wonder how many people missed seeing them; on the way to work, dealing with recalcitrant children, caught up in the gazillion immediates of an ordinary life. It thinks me. If any didactic had ‘encouraged’ me to take time out, as a young mum, to really see, no, to REALLY see, the wonders of the great Out There, I would have whacked them in the chops. I would have screamed ‘ Can’t you see how impossible my life is right now!’ And that scream never deserved a question mark.

So, there is something about being older, about having the time and the head space to connect with something greater than myself. Another thing about being older is this, and I quote from Oscar Wilde, even though he says it with more drama than I might :-

‘The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old, but that one is young.’

And I say Amen to that.

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Island Blog – I Can Do This

Having my young and strong bodied children with me for a few days shows me my age, not that I have any problem with ageing for it is a very natural part of the living process. Nonetheless, my observations shunt forward somewhat around such ebullient fluidity of movement, of thought. I smile, I did smile a lot, as they leapt off steps, landing two feet square, knees flexing whereas I consider each step, paying close attention to my feets and pausing prior to each cautious descent. In fact it chuckles me. It seems like just yesterday I watched my own mum, my in-laws doing this pausing cautious thingy whilst I was still a gazelle, albeit minus two legs. In a doorway with a step down into and up again from the garden, on the stairs, at the top of a set of steps or when wheiching a body in and out of a car seat, I could flow then as they could not. Now I am experiencing it all for myself.

I find the same around packaging, lids and cork-pulling. But, unlike some, I am determined and my favourite of all phrases is my mantra. ‘I Can Do This.’ It might mean I need to ascend a hillock on all fours. It might mean the descent is on my bottom. It might mean I have to cut the packaging with sharp scissors instead of using what are left of of my teeth. It does mean, in the realms of cork-pulling, that I must needs squat on the floor, hold the bottle between my feets and brace myself against the kitchen unit in order to avoid a backwards somersault when the cork comes out but I will succeed because I Can Do This. I say it out loud, just to ensure the full attention of my whole brain, expecting it to communicate new strength to all required limbs. And it does.

When speaking an affirming and encouragingly defiant phrase out loud, I can feel my body responding immediately. Ok, she says, wake UP you sleepyheads! The Boss requires an elevation of pep right now. It always works. When himself vacated his position as the strong one I did flapdoodle a bit, I confess, but there is something about finding oneself on the spot that brings the opportunity to rise strong in circumstances as yet uninvestigated fully. I didn’t then need to find the strength, either of mind or body, to achieve the result I wanted. Now I do and with that ‘I do’ comes the option to falter, fall back, to bemoan my lack as if that lack is terminal. It isn’t. I have succeeded in more situations wherein I was lacking, or believed I was, since being alone than I would ever have believed possible back in the lack. The thing is this:- I don’t want to miss out on anything. Allowing myself to miss out would be my way of dying long before my death and to hell with that shower of nonsense! Ok, others may run far ahead of me, skipping down 3 flights with alacrity, popping corks with one hand or skipping over hillocks, but I will allow myself my place behind them all and I will find my way. I will run the gauntlet of my ouches and my anxieties and will think of life and not on the demise of it because demise is for someone else who gives in too early. I don’t even like the word.

I Can Do This, I tell myself when I have to barrow a load of wood into the shed. I Can Do This, when I manage to press the wrong button on the right machine and it goes into either chatty overdrive or a huff; when I find it hard to twist a lid or descend a hill or climb a fence or any other little challenge that comes my way. I will even manage to free a toothbrush from its ridiculously tenacious package, because I Can Do This.

What are your favourite words of self-encouragement? If you don’t have a line, pinch mine. I have it written in fat felt tip on a card where I can see it all the time. and each time I feel a falter coming on, I read it, speak it out, lift my chin, straighten my spine and smile. Suddenly I am invincible and it feels so very good. Life is for living no matter a person’s age. And remember this……

Circumstances do not control man (or woman)

Man (or woman) controls circumstances.

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Island Blog – The Last to Leave the Dance Floor

Around my home the fragrance of Spring is an olfactory delight. Every room sings me daffodils. My garden sways with them and bunches arrive for my birthday. As I arrange them in vases, I consider their spacing with a view to the final picture, correcting myself from time to time. I never was a ‘shove-em-in’ sort of woman. I like presentation and flow, design and a sort of roundness that tells me I am probably OCD around the flower arranging thing. I might be thus around other things but that doesn’t fuss me now, even as it does think me about a book and its cover. Let me explain.

As I walk in the still cold wind, but not so cold as to beg a jacketty coverance, what I think I see is randomness, in the woods, along the banks, beside the shore, where various shrubs, trees and plants are exploding through the ground in a shout for life. Maybe ‘exploding’ is a bit ott. It is, to be honest, a more cautious peek out and no surprise there for the slice and dice artic wind is not gone yet back to wherever he takes his raggedy old destructive self as we welcome Mother Spring. His bite is one of anger and rage, of sudden ice, of ha ha and you thought you were safe to show your colours. Mean. But he can come in this month, oh hell yes, he can come and we must stand vigil, sniffing the weather and just knowing, as we once did before diesel fumes and light pollution turned us into eejits.

But I am wrong to think that anything in nature is random. It is anything but. I get that we randomise merrily away inside the confines of our garden, forcing intelligent plants to grow in all the wrong places, sentencing them to gigantic effortness that will never produce good blooms, but out there in the wild places, new life will explode into beauty and a future in which we have had no hand at all. I like that. So as I wander beneath some ancient larches that are pushing out buds I recognise their intelligence. Here is sheltered, both from strong wind and from ice wind. There, not so. Therefore the buds are still holding, holding, because a blast would ping them off into the nothing.

I notice my thoughts, about 200 thousand a minute. I watch fat trunks pass by, ancient and strong, moss covered, they who have stood for a hundred years. They may be bent and leaning somewhat, but I bet they are not fussed about how they look. They don’t bother with a mirror to tell them how wonkychops they are now. They don’t care for such nonsense. Their sole purpose is to stay alive through whatever ice slice dice weather comes their way. They are grounded but not trapped. And that thinks me. As we grow older, things will go wonkychops. They will. And, in knowing this, we have a choice. We can fuss and fret and btw get mildly histericous about turning 50, a year I uninhabited almost 20 years ago, or we can decide to dance whatever. My thoughts are all about my kids now and their kids. This is my world and what a world. It doesn’t matter how I look. They don’t care. It’s all about me showing up. Like the push for life in Spring.

And on we go, until we stop and, just fyi, I will be the last one to leave the dance floor.

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Island Blog – A New Path

I have begun. Pulling jeans out of the jeans drawer, way too small, way too skinny-legged for me now and, yet, held on to like a Precious, just in case I awaken one morning to find my skin tighter across my bones and my belly flat. How bonkers is that! I even hold on to dresses that have been the wrong fit for years and they hang as from a gallows tree all pretty and flouncy and empty of breath.

But it is hard to let go of them. Within those folds lie memories of what was, of who I was, once when the carefree in me sang in a higher key; when the crone didn’t huddle in a wrinkled corner, beckoning. But they are cuckoos now, these frocks and swingle skirts and they aren’t the only ones holding those memories. Jeans, boots, tops and froufrou; halter necks, strapless, slim-lined, tight-waisted – for family weddings, parties, dances, ceilidhs, stage events at book festivals, I will remember you when you are gone, all by myself.

I take a big bag upstairs and begin. There are button boots with cuban heels still in their boxes, worn once, maybe twice; there is a sparkly sequinned sheath bought years ago in a Glasgow shop, electric blue and minus a few sequins now and a sheath. A sheath. I will never ever wear a sheath again. Inside that wardrobe hangs my past. In the depths of the dark they call for their release, like long-term prisoners from a cell and it is I who am their jailor. I have no idea if anyone will find them, eyes ablaze with excitement, pull them off the rack and take them home, but what I do know is that I need to let them go, for them to breathe new air, to adorn, possibly, a younger body, one inhabiting the carefree, careless of the lack of sequins.

It thinks me. Not just of clothes but of life as a whole. Letting go is being open. It is also being vulnerable. If my wardrobe stands empty, what then? What if I am invited to something swish, some event that requires a dress, or a pair of button boots and all I have to hand are wider frocks and flat plimsolls? Will I still go? Having little or mostly no access to shops I cannot replace any of them short term. Besides, I loathe shopping with a vengeance. I can go into a dress shop and be overwhelmed within 3 paces, so overwhelmed that all I see is a blur of colour and rack upon rack of 25 dresses all in the same style but in different sizes. I run for Costa.

Letting go of old things, old ways of being, old beliefs that birthed when I was young and carefree, and are now quite obsolete, is not easy. But….This is what I believe. This is what I think. This is how I do this. If I let go of any of these, what do I replace them with? Well, replies my inner guru, Nothing. You just wait patiently for something else to come in, something new and right for Now. But, I am not patient, I snap at her. I want things to be there when I need them, people too, help and support and more carpet cleaner. She only smiles. I can feel the warmth of it and I know our conversation is done.

When life feels like a wobbly back tooth I can panic. I can think I am all alone in the world, the Only Weirdo at 67, the one whose insecurities are alive and kicking and whose self-doubt is as fat and magnificent as the Taj Mahal only without the bejewelment. But (and there is always one of those) when I sit and talk with other women of my age, even if their lives are markedly different to my own, I hear the weirdo in them too. They confess their own insecurities and those insecurities rhyme with mine, they harmonise, they match. It seems we all feel these things and I am mindful of the arrogance that thought me I was the Only One. What changes me are these encounters, these shared laughs about missing sequins and memories hiding in the folds. They also have held on as if youth might return one day with her confidence and her wahoo and her carefree danceability.

We agree, this Other Weirdo and I that she is not gone; nor is she beaten into submission; nor is she dead on the gallows, empty of breath. She has quietened down, yes, she has felt foolish and turned in, but she has something within her that has replaced her trust in the world. Trust in herself. Yes, it’s like a toddler learning to walk, this trust, but it has potential, even now, even when life has bashed and scarred with all that is thrown the way of every one of us.

In the light of this knowledge I am inspired to greater heights. If I think, just once, that keeping ‘this’ will bring back my vim and vigour, it has to go because I am not trusting in myself if I hold on to the old. Not just clothes but old beliefs, old ways of doing things, old lies. I will no longer pick through the rubble of what once stood four-wall-tall. I will gather the bits I can carry and make a path.

A path into whatever comes next.

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Island Blog 59 – Dolphins

Island Blog 59Never let it be said that journeying is for the young. I never journeyed so much in my life as I am these days and all because I wrote down my life and Two Roads Published it. It is not just the trip tomorrow down to Glasgow for an interview with Jane Garvey in the BBC Studios – Woman’s Hour ‘Celebrating Extraordinary Women’ (oo-er) May 27th 10 am; it’s not just the trip the following week for an interview with Sally Magnusson, a sort of Desert Island Discs for Radio Scotland on June 2nd, called Sunday Morning; it’s the journey my mind is taking, and my body, both of which, to be honest, have obviously been resting for quite some time.

The trouble with growing older is that we ‘allow’ ourselves to step out of the slipstream. And everyone around us allows it too. When something or someone requires us to step back in, we begin, at first, to spin, understandably, having not had so much exercise for years. We resist and fall back onto the verge, wheezing and flapping our hands in the air, laugh, if we have the breath and say something like…….oh I’ll just wait here for you and admire the view…….!

Not an option for me.

So how does a woman, like me, part way between young and old (not saying which part) find her way back into the slipstream, the rush and tumble of life, a life where people and things become faint memories overnight?

Colour. Attitude. Confidence. Letting go.

I remember learning once this wisdom. ‘Fake it till you make it.’ and I instantly liked that way of turning life on its head. I realised that just because I might feel frightened, or unsure or too young or too old and wheezy, I could, if I so chose, act a part. Now, you will know, if you have read my book, Island Wife, that acting a part was something I did often as each challenge rose up before me, like a Rachel Whiteread sculpture, blocking all exits. It requires not my own strength, not my own experience, even, but simply a willingness to let go, and to find quiet moments in which to sharpen my sword/teeth/wits as preparation for whatever comes next.

I couldn’t cook until hungry guests arrived expecting dinner. I had no maternal instincts until I gave birth. I knew not the rules of engagement, nor of wifedom until they took over my life and woke me each morning with a to-do list. I had no idea when I wrote down my life that so many others would want to tell me how my story sang out to their own, thus creating a new harmony, one that cannot be contained or filed away, for it has taken wings and will make a new journey, all of its own into new skies and over uncharted lands.

Maybe, just by refusing to wheeze and flap and admire the view, I have become the pioneer I always secretly hoped I might be.

And dolphins often play in a slipstream.