Words From The West

The settlement at Lagg is a little faded in the winter light. No visitors at the Inn, only a couple of large dogs parading outside. The post office is closed down. Although there are primroses in the window, a sign on the lampost says the post box has moved down the road. A small boat lies upturned in a yard beside the river.

In the wood, the wind flies through the trees, spooking me with its whispers. The golden remains of autumn lie on the path, even though we’re nearing spring. Gorse bushes are walloped by the wind and the rain, bright petals strewn like confetti in the path.

At the break in the path, an old green bench sits waiting.

It marks a break in the landscape. The sky opens up. The woods stops its whispering. Here the gorse bushes stand strong. The sea shimmers silver ahead.

The path runs on to the cairn at Torrylinn.

I stop to soak up the history. It’s only later I notice the colour of the stones, the perfect ending to my yellow-seeking walk.

Stained deep with yellow lichen.

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This particular record of the walk was inspired by focusing on a colour – this time yellow – noticing what you see, and then writing what happened. What you find is always a surprise!

The wind dominates.

My landlord is waiting for the bus, a hopeful trip to the Ferry terminal, to see if the boat is running. In the Co-op, neighbours discuss the speed of the wind. There’s a discussion about speed and directions, and what it means for the running of the boat.

The boat is the pulse of the island. Regulating its pace, its speed, its economy. It’s a constant, humbling, reminder that there are things outwith our control.

By the shore at Kildonan the wind howls, blowing salt water onto my face. The waves crash on the distant headland. It’s hard to stay out, to stay upright, but it’s hard to stay inside too.

The wind has wild dervish energy. It makes me shout, and laugh.

The wind has dominion.

It was a grey old day today. Grey skies. Grey, foreboding seas. Grey mist. Grey waterlogged land.

You might be forgiven for thinking it was totally grey.

But there is colour everywhere, if you know where to look.

Walking along the front at Lamlash I notice a line of small birds. A flock of oystercatchers. My favourite bird (how did you know?)

I bend down to try and capture the group. The movement makes them fly up and away.

The sky is a flash of black and white, brilliant flashes of white, illuminating.

As far from grey as can be.

There are at least twelve of them in the small back room at the Ormidale, getting ready to play.  I came with different city notions in mind.  More audience, fewer musicians.  I like it better this way round.  There’s no room to wander off in your mind, to get bored, to feel your eyes getting heavy, to write lists or poems or novels or blog posts, only this group of people, this small back room at the Ormidale.

They take it in turns to lead, and I love the way the music works like this.  Shifting and turning from rampaging fiddles to a mournful harmonica, from drinking songs to harp music, from foot stomping to country lyrics that would make you want to cry (and I do).

It’s odd, intimate somehow to feel your eyes filling up when you’re 10 feet in front of the singer, when you know he can see his words in your heart, and you’re glad that he knows: can see the connection he makes, the power of the song that he’s singing.  Funny too when he sings a slow sad song that makes you want to shut your eyes and drift off dreaming… and he’s watching you, smiling, teasing both you and himself.

I love listening to the music this band of players makes.  It’s not perfect, and that’s why I like listening to it.  It’s human, it’s real, it sings to me of learning and playing and learning to play together.  Of experiment and rememberance and the desire to pass on, to transmit, to take the songs and the music, the ideas and emotion and pass them on, before they are gone.

They make me think of writers.  One hesitant, one bold, one strumming quietly, one apologising before every song and every time he finishes, undoing the confident boldness of his sweet sounding soul songs.  One tuning, retuning, trying to find the just right note, the just right word, the just right key… and losing the moment in the search for the rightness.

They make me think of a group of learners, sharing and guiding, teaching and supporting, laughing and crying.  Learning how to make music together.

And I like the fact there are  more of them than there are of us.  That they invite us in to hear them play.  Let me smile, and remember.  Give me the chance to wake up old feelings, to sing and to hum songs, to shed some soft tears. 

All on a Sunday night, in a small back room at the Ormidale.

I have forgotten how dark it is here.  The total absence of light, the thickness of the dark. 

Driving from Lamlash to Brodick at night, all alone on the road, full beam illuminating my way.  I’m both scared and excited, thrilled by the dark, by the wildness of the wood, by its darkness that survives beyond any notion of progress.

Returning, the stars are out.  I crick my neck looking up at them and wondering.

When I reach the hill coming out of Brodick a near full moon swings into view, illuminating the sea.  It’s big, fat, yellow.  Fat yellow moonshine, lighting up the water.

Guaranteed to make you smile, then cry.

There’s the promise of at least a few hours sunshine so I head out to Whiting Bay and walk to King’s Cross. It’s a multi-tasking walk, as I’m trying out a writing challenge too. Look for a colour as you walk, then write the colour.

I can’t decide what to look for but a burst of purple heather at the top of the church lane makes the decision for me. And so I watch for purple as I walk.

You wouldn’t be surprised at the flowers and plants I found on my way: crocuses, tiny hedgreow blooms, dark purple leaves on the ground, even the woody stalks of the brambles have gone purple, as if the juice of the last berries has been sucked into them, waiting to paint the next batch of berries when the autumn comes back around.

And I guess you wouldn’t be surprised at the pebbles and rocks on the shore, the inner shine of an oyster shell, the near brown shades of the sea-weed, all adding to my collection.

It was the rubbish that perplexed me the most – dairy milk chocolate, a blackcurrant Locket, a calypso bar from the summer, even the print on thrown away papers was running purple in the rain. A circle of plastic washed up on the shore. An old office chair in someone’s garden – mainly white with a bright purple cushion. As if it had been put there, waiting for me.

On the way back from Kings Cross my eye was caught by a fragment of material in the muddy ground. A fragment of something bigger, a scarf maybe, or the lining of a glove, embedded deep into the earth, only an inch of colour showing: deep, dark purple.

Later in the day I walk out again. I’m looking for different things now.

As if.

Purple leaves, stones and flowers are thrown into view. Look at me, they say. We’re here too.

I walk down to the shore at Fallen Rocks and it’s all I can do not to laugh.

The rocks and stones are a thousand shades of purple, as if a god has taken the colour and splintered it into a thousand million variations all lying here at the beach to the north of Sannox.

It starts to rain and I can’t help myself, I gather up handfuls of pebbles, tiny stones and larger rocks, filling my pockets with the fruits of my day, bringing home bundles of purple.

The door opens onto a farmyard. Hens roam by the door, waiting for food. The yard is muddy, marked by the turning circle of my car. In front of the barn is the big house, the old white house with black painted frames, one of those Arran houses that sits in my imagination, waiting for me.

There are purple crocuses, palely coming into bloom, in the centre of the yard.

The lane leads down to to the road. It’s bumpy, pocked, muddy. Water pours in from a leaking culvert. John is proud of the state of his lane.

I meet him walking back. Collecting his post from a hand-made post box, a bucket with a half fitting lid.

There are daffodils by the side of the lane. Some are just starting to bud. Some are in full bloom. It’s impossible to walk past the daffodils without the hope of a poem bursting inside you. Even if you don’t want it to.

The lane leads down past an old house, half in ruin, the for sale sign crossed out with a sold. It sits almost at the corner of the lane, where the track meets the road. I call it the main road, but it’s just the road that runs round Arran really. It’s busy when the boat comes in, a stream of traffic filing their way to their home, their end point on the island.

I turn left at the end of the lane, over the bridge. The river is running full. The wind is blowing in the trees, wintry brown in the woods, it’s misty today, but there’s still colour in the wood.

I cross the road to Sliddery and walk into town.

The road goes past a wood, the grounds I think of a big house you can just see in the distance. The trees swing in the wind and it looks like a place you’d want to play in as a child. As I walk past the trees something catches my eye: pink blossom on the branches of a bare tree. I look up through the grey branches to a totally grey sky and the blossom smiles.

On the way back a man stops me to point through the trees. “A heron” he says. I can’t see it, though he keeps on pointing. He’s disappointed in my response. “Well I think it’s amazing, it’s amazing to me”. This is enough to give my eyes focus and I see the bird, not one, but four birds sitting quietly in the scrub beyond the trees. Just sitting, or waiting, or thinking or having a heron parley.

I walk past Murray Place. I’ve done this walk many times, repeating this cycle over and over, coming to Arran, coming to Lamlash, looking, wanting, unable to move past the paralysis of the dream. And that knowledge carries with me as I walk, dampening my spirits as I look at the hill behind the houses – it’s not much of a hill but it’s shape is just perfect, it always make me smile – and the Holy Isle, sitting, waiting, as it always does. It’s good to know that Holy Isle will always be there.

I cross over and walk by the shore. There’s a wading bird there, a curlew perhaps, it has an impossibly long beak. The bird looks silly, comical, to my untrained city eye, and yet at the same time it is so perfect, so perfectly designed, so right for its purpose, that my eyes fill with tears at the unutterable wonder of the whole thing.

The wonder of evolution, of adaptation, and the wonder of the knowledge that all of this, somehow, was thrown into being by some essential, elemental, universal force.

It’s misty on the way out, wild and wet when I turn back for home. The weather doesn’t trouble me. I like it. I like the feel of the wind on my cheeks and the highland rain on my face. It reminds me of the person I was when I was small. Because I remember that feeling of walking on the moor with my grandmother with the wind in my hair and the cold rain on my cheeks, walking to cut the peats.

Oh it’s not rain as such it’s rain in the wind, it’s mist that makes you wet, it leaves you wet and cold but laughing too. The wind batters when I turn and I think about wind in the city, the way we scurry to get indoors, the dirt that blows around, the bins that uproot. I don’t walk in the town when it’s windy.

I’ll walk here. Walk out and talk with god, watch the waves, listen to the cry of the oystercatcher.

Know that I’m home.

Sunday morning.  There are daffodils in the window, and the heat of the day has brought them into bloom.  Perfect colour, framed in a window of light.  Behind them, bare branches of the trees, dark greyish brown, against the backdrop of a cool grey sky.  Silver light of the sun illuminating my window.

If I looked up, I’d see clear blue sky in the high window in the roof of the barn.  The promise of a beautiful day.  Of illumination and light.

This barn sits in the middle of the wood.  When I look out I am in the wood, surrounded by its grey branches, its brackish colours, its sound and movement.  Woken by the sound of birdsong.  Behind me the old walls of the yard, surrounding me with the stone bricks of history, reassuring me of my connection with the land, with the past, with the people who have gone on before.

The light flows into this barn and flirts with its beams, its staircase, its iron balustrade.  Shows off its features, moving around and showing me new corners.  The way light does.  Illuminates.

The light is softly Sunday.  Not the hefty demand of a day, but a quiet invitation to be peaceful, to move softly, to wander and explore, to feel the light, to let the rain fall, to allow your self to breathe into the promise of the light.

It cheers me, like the sound of the radio, giving me solace, connecting me, reminding me that I am not alone but part of, enveloped by, the shadows of darkness and light that play through the branches of this wood.

In a way I don’t yet understand, I know this is my genetic inheritance.

Well I don’t know, entirely, if it’s something I’ve heard, learned, shared, or that’s been instilled. It could be something that’s just in my blood, or the remembrance of a time I lived here before.

All I know is that my heart needs the hills and the sea. That the sound of the wind, the rain on the glass, ’s like a song for a homecoming queen.

Wind’s picking up again, battering rain against the cottage window.  The wildness of a storm, running through the night.  Flying through the trees, running across the sea.  Knock, knock, knock upon my window.

It sounds familiar. 

I recognise the voice.

I hear you.