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If I were to write a loveletter to the hebrides, I would be liberal with the ink until the page was swimming with words like fish in a spring tide. I would wipe my tears along the paper's edge until it was bordered with salt, and I would write about hopeful waters. About the soft sand that seems, from a distance, white - but is in fact a medley of reds & pinks & greens, the finely crushed shells turning my toes into a rainbow. I would write about what it is like to live on the edge, between land & sea, where my small white cottage is a stone's throw from the curling waves and where I learn to feel safe beside the vastness.  I would write about the red lionsmane jellyfish - the crimson blob in the water that fills me with equal parts awe and fear. When I first arrived on the island, the locals warned me about the the excruciating pain caused by the lionsmane, and shortly after I watched someone be airlifted to hospital after being stung near the beach outside of my cottage. Their near-transluscent tentacles can trail longer than 30 meters, so I’ve never been able to feel completely at ease in the water. But I’m not sure that matters, because I don’t go to the sea to feel safe. I go there to feel alive.  After the introduction, and a jellyfish-themed tangent, I would write about the khaki kelp swaying in the current. Once, we had a storm so severe that it simply wasn’t safe to make the 40 minute cycle across the peninsula and over the hills to the nearest shop. When food was running low, the kelp kept me fed. For two whole days it was kelp risotto, kelp soup, kelp noodles. And I would tell them - my beautiful, windswept, hebrides - about how much I long to be a kelp, dancing, flowing, surrending to the tide. All my life, I have fought. I have fought to be seen, to be heard, to be loved, and yet what I really wish to do is surrender. I would explain how living here on the water's edge has taught me that I can, in fact, do both. To fight and surrender, simultaneously. Kelp can only afford to sway with the tide because their root-like hold fasts secure them to the rocks, but I am young and unmoored and searching for an anchor. Here, there is neither good nor evil: only sky and sea.  And then there are the rockpools: small puddles cupped by the barnacle-crusted rock, glowing green with gutweed (one of my favourite snacks), speckled with blood red anenomes, and occasionally holding a small fish captive. A great medley of life viewed through a small window. People always talk about height and distance lending great views: we climb to the summit of mountains for a ‘good view’, where we can look down on the world below like a god. But this is my favourite kind of view: nose grazing the water, my eyes so close that they can barely focus, my whole life a glimmer, my whole world a rockpool. I would tell the hebrides that I see, and love, the parts of them that most people forget to see. I suppose deep down, I long for someone to say that to me.
Eventually, my loveletter would transform into a plea for forgiveness. And I would tell the hebrides that I am sorry - so deeply sorry. I am sorry that these tranquil sands are littered with plastic; I am sorry that the turquoise water swirls with spilled oil; I am sorry that the peaceful sea bed is raked by beasts of steel; I am sorry that the flowerless dunes are incessantly nibbled by sheep; all while I stand idly by. I would apologise over and over again until my ink ran out, and the words halted on my page like fish caught in a net.
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On not being a writer, and my living room windowI am not a writer, I tell myself, watching the mist swallow the moor through my window. I like the idea of being a writer. Of growing words like fruit from my lips, sour, sweet, spicy. Of moistening and chewing and spitting them out onto a page, and turning the pulp into poetry. I watch others do this and yearn for such a skill. A collection of stale, rotten words shift uneasily in my stomach, tossing back and forth like a skiff in a storm. I cannot get them out. Author biographies have become the centre-piece of my bedtime reading, but all I find are things that I do not have. Things I might never have. PhDs. Decades of experience. Expertise in a niche but compelling field. I wonder if this, is why I am not a writer. Perhaps, instead of I am not a writer, the truth is that I cannot be a writer. I spend days sitting at a cluttered table with a blank page, my pen forever poised like a kingfisher frozen mid-dive. Scanning the topics of existing books, I search for inspiration. The life of a mountain. A treatise on rainforests. The case for rewilding. I, however, am no expert: I cannot tell a wren from a sparrow, I cannot speak on matters of the land with any authority, and I cannot be a writer. All I can do, is stare out of the window and dream. So today, I'm writing about the window. When I read the word-songs of others I am torn apart. Torn between awe and anger, desire and despair, joy and jealousy. I search for their secret like musk ox hunting for lichen beneath the snow. All at once I am a shaggy hulk, hardened and horned. The snow deceives me, for there is no lichen beneath, no food to sustain me through the winter. Only ice. Unseasonably warm air melted the snow early this year, before re-freezing into a stubborn layer of ice that I cannot break. It is an increasingly common dilemma, one that I have not evolved to negotiate. I am helpless. I am starving. Back in Yorkshire, I am more fortunate. I have a fresh loaf of bread on my table and a jar of home-made marmalade ready to glaze it. Everything is so sweet. So bitter. It is a greyscale day, a blend of scars and scree and stratus. From where I sit, there seems to be little difference between the solid and the void. My garden is a field of ash. A colourless, muted, collage of life and death. Somewhere beneath the ash, a green shoot starts to grow. From behind the shield of my window I focus on the scar. It is a darker shade of grey to the rest - somehow more solid, more secure. A scar is a limestone cliff, though it stems from the Old Norse sker, meaning an outlying rock in the sea. Certainly, the scars of the Dales are isolated, enclosed on all sides by an ocean of green. The limestone scar has no etymological relation to the other meaning of scar in Present Day English, as in a mark left on the body from the incomplete healing on a wound. Yet I cannot stop seeing myself in these crags, these gashes on the land where the hillside has been stripped bare. I too, have been cracked, broken and battered. I too, am still here. Like the marks on my body, these are rain-stained rocks, tear-soaked rocks, grazed rocks, doorways to a world long gone. They have been sharpened and softened by the storms of time. I have climbed up them, slept next to them, crawled inside of them like a baby returning to the womb. I have screamed at them, cursed them, worshipped them. It is possible that my window is, in fact, a mirror. A herd of belties (belted galloway cattle) weave, dispersed, amongst the medley of sharp scars, loose scree, fallen bracken and coarse grass. Their hooves turn, trample and aerate the soil. As they move across the fell, stomping and scraping and defecating, the cows are spreading the seeds of spring. The scene is blurred by condensation on my single-glazed window. Thousands of droplets catch the light and invert it, tipping the world upside down. I want to drink them. When I press my lips to the glass I can taste the lot, an earthy, chalky, melange of dead sea creatures and newborn trees. I still feel entrenched, as I have done for years. No wind can move me. But I start to grow upwards and downwards - slowly at first - in a tentative process of lengthening, stretching, and reaching into unknown spaces. Words rise up in my oesophagus. They are awkward, bulky things. I cough one up. And then another, and then another. 'Do you know', I ask the skies, so hoary and aged in their wisdom, 'why I am stuck?' The North wind chuckles lightly in my ear. 'Stuck?' The skies cry, and I feel mocked. 'You are not stuck!' They speak slowly, as if to a young child who has not yet learnt that words do not grow on trees. 'You are rooted.'  |
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