October 15th 2021
I have spent much of my many years fighting. That's not the way I started, though. I am told I was the most laid-back of babies, always smiling, never disgruntled. Somewhere along the road, and I think fairly early on, I started trying to go through walls instead of around them. Just last week, pain in my chest and a racing heart took me off to the hospital, where everything settled down quite quickly, and I was given the all-clear. In retrospect, I am wondering if these were symptoms of anxiety.
With English PM Boris Johnson trying to run Scotland into the ground and after four years of Trump corruption in USA, most of us have learned to walk a fine line between resignation and despair. If you're like me, it has turned you into a nail-biting news junkie. In my case, a Twitter addict. After all, the best line of defense has always been offense. Finding myself up at 4 am, checking the latest round of Breaking News, should have sounded some kind of alarm.
Then came Covid, another platform over a dinky swimming pool for the clowns that run the world to dive into. I had Sars2 early on, even before it had been named in the popular press. Over days of 104 degree temperatures and what felt like a sickness unto death, I was forced to fight.
Another thing I stay up in arms over is my country. Like a persistent bagpipe drone, Scotland's struggle to free itself from "servile chains," to regain its own self, is mine by dint of birth. Scotland wants out of the United Kingdom, because this union serves only the overlords in their mink and pageantry.
Because of these things, life often feels more like a battle field, with me in the middle in a state of profound amnesia about how I once looked out on a calm sea from these sea green eyes.
Two nights ago, under cover of dark, a bear came into my garden to raid my apple trees. It broke branches and shat all over the grass and even in my raised strawberry beds. One bear can produce one hell of a lot of scat. By daylight, I walked around, stepping over the piles, weary as I am these days, with no inclination to cut down the broken limbs or scoop up the piles.
Later, however, I noticed the magpies picking out half-digested apples from all that bear poo. And in that moment of epiphany, I saw something I have been apparently slow to take on board: it is easier to see the glass half empty. It is hard to navigate around the wall, when complaining about the wall requires nothing but standing your ground.
I have always had great eyesight, but perhaps my inner focus has been too honed in on the next standard to raise, the next fight. Perhaps I should unlearn my adult self and become more like the bear that smells ripe fruit, climbs over a fence, eats apples, shits and leaves. The bear that is not disgruntled by the fact that it soon needs to find a place under the snow to exist in limber close to death until the earth cycles round and begins again to feed it.
Perhaps it's time to let go of Tyger Tyger Burning Bright, and look instead for the bear-necessities. It would make for fewer walls, more open space, more oxygen, even a little clarity. And no doubt a steadier heart rate and better sleep as well.
