It Casts a Grim Shadow

I haven’t written anything for a while because I’ve been feeling a bit stressed and despondent; although I can be brutally honest here up to a point, I still feel I have to be careful what I say given that what I say is out in the public domain.  I was also hoping to bring news about bunkhouse funding; perhaps next month.

Today has been one of those days that stops you in your tracks and makes you re-evaluate what’s important and what’s not really worth stressing over.  One of the contractors working on the new temporary hostel accommodation collapsed unconscious and fell into a hole he’d been digging; as the second person on the scene I felt totally helpless – no clue what to do.  He looked in a bad way but his colleague and the Castle chef had him in the recovery position, so I went for help.  From there, everybody knew exactly what to do – the right people appeared on the scene, the air rescue helicopter was summoned and then ... an agonising wait.  The minutes stretched out excruciatingly into half an hour and still no tuk tuk tuk of approaching rotor blades.  The man on the ground came round and we all stood around trying not to crowd him, but unwilling to leave until we knew what was happening.  The helicopter came, paramedics took over in their maddeningly calm, unhurried way, everybody moved inside out of the cold; more waiting.  The helicopter left with our friend inside, we drank sweet tea and talked over and over about what happened.  Everybody did everything right; the systems in place for just this sort of thing swung into action, yet as the helicopter shrank steadily away from us, I think we all felt a bit helpless.

We don’t know if he’s going to be ok.  Nothing is quite the same.  The things that seemed so important when I woke up this morning don’t seem as pressing any more.  These contractors have been coming to the island off and on for a long time, they’ve become our friends.  It’s a terrible thing to see one of them so close to death, to be so closely reminded that it will come to all of us at some point – even to me.  Everybody did everything right, hopefully a life was saved today.  We are all shaken by it.  There’s nothing like a life or death situation for giving back perspective, but I’m glad it doesn’t happen very often.

People Need Wild Places

I’m in a much better head space now than I was this time last year, though it’s difficult to pin down exactly why.  A different mix of people on the island, more social events, better weather, feeling as though I’ve actually achieved something; maybe a combination of these.   As the Independence Debate steps up a gear with the setting of The Question, I’m hopeful that a new popular democratic movement will emerge.  I’m all in favour of devolved power – right down to community level, but with the caveat that with increased power comes increased responsibility and maybe not everyone is quite ready for that yet.  I’m watching these guys closely – So Say Scotland is a project working to bring people closer to the decision making process.  It happened in Iceland after The Crash, why not here? 

On a more mundane note, we’re still trying to figure out how to pay for the repairs to the roads (every day the potholes get a little bit bigger, cycling from the pier to the village takes longer & becomes more jarring).  We are the state of the nation in miniature.  Yet when I walk past our weathered-in camping cabins, I have a little smile to myself, remembering that they weren’t here this time last year and it was me that made them happen (with a little help from my friends); this is what community ownership is about.  Planning permission has been granted for our new bunkhouse and I’ve submitted our funding application to Big Lottery - I feel suddenly lighter, brighter, less worried.  I’ve had time to put together some adverts for our Marketing Rum campaign which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed – watch out for us in the Visit Scotland guide and the Highlands & Islands Travellers Guide.  I love sharing the best bits of our beautiful island with others.

 This is from Barbara Kingsolver, in her book ‘Small Wonder’ – “People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own."

This is what makes Rum so special.

I have a new housemate – my fourth in 18 months – an ecologist doing a phd on our thriving rat population.  He’s become known as the Rat Man, obviously.  He’s here for two years and we’re getting along just fine, so hopefully that’s one thing that won’t change for a few months, even if everything else does.  It’s interesting seeing the island through his eyes – he has the same hope and enthusiasm I had when I first arrived: so many possibilities! 

Change continues to be as relentless as the ebb and flow of the tides; our Castle Manager and his wife & child have left for a new job in York, and another of my friends is planning to depart in the spring.  I think we need a moratorium on people leaving; it’s too hard saying goodbye every few months to someone I’ve come to know & like.  The future of the Castle itself is up for debate through the spring, with a discussion of positive options involving various stakeholders, including the Rum community.  Like it or not, it’s central to the island’s identity – a giant folly, a rich man’s extravagance, but in a sense as much ours now as the hills, the rivers and the wildlife.  How would we feel, actually, if it was bought by a private investor who had the money to restore it but shut us out of the building, the woods and the grounds?  We don’t necessarily want it, but do we want someone else to have it?

These are the Dark Days

November and December are dark months, as we drag ourselves through identical damp, gloomy days towards the winter solstice.  It will still be weeks before the first signs of spring return, before the days are noticeably longer and it becomes possible to do more interesting things than the endless boring cycle of work, eat, sleep...

It’s been good to have some time off over the festivities and be outdoors in daylight.  I started the new year by climbing to the top of Hallival, one of our iconic peaks.  I’ve been up that hill a few times with various friends but never alone; I love high places and wide open spaces, and the weather was not bad (for Rum in January).  I ascended into thick fog and hail, but the hail passed and I felt optimistic that the fog would clear by the time I got to the top.  It did!  I can’t help extrapolating from the specific to the general, and it gave me a strong sense of hope for this year.  We might feel as though we’re moving through fog and the way is unclear, but at a certain point we find ourselves at the summit with the whole island spread out before us and a view of snow-topped mountains on the mainland.

Work-wise most of my time has been spent finely crafting my application to Big Lottery’s Growing Community Assets fund for our bunkhouse project.  Finding the right words to express just how vitally important the bunkhouse is going to be for our wee economy, but also for our confidence as a community, has been challenging.  That this project would finally produce tangible evidence of progress, that all the tears and gnashing of teeth were worth it.  Finding the detailed information the Capital Grants Checklist calls for has been even more challenging – I can add knowledge of the technicalities of capital building projects to my growing list of talents.  Now I’m just waiting for planning permission to be granted while I check and re-check my figures.  What if we don’t get the grant?  What if we get it, but I’ve missed out something vital and the grant turns out to be not enough?  How are we going to manage our cashflow when we’re making payments to contractors of tens of thousands of pounds and our reserves just don’t stretch that far?  Why do I feel like I’m the only one worrying about this stuff? 

I have 12 months left on my contract here.  I don’t know if it will be extended, or if I’ll want to stay on if it is.  Sometimes living here is so hard that I’d gladly pack up my stuff and board the ferry without looking back.  Other times, like when I’m standing on top of a hill in a sprinkling of snow, looking down on our tiny village, I can’t imagine ever living anywhere else.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.

Wendell Berry

 

No Time to Blog

This has been sitting on my laptop since the start of November when the weather had turned properly cold, leaving feathery ice patterns on my skylight window and a dusting of snow on the hilltops.  Now we’re more than three-quarters of the way through the month & I’m only just getting around to uploading it.  Where has the time gone?  Frittered away in numerous trips to the mainland...   

The path through the bluebell woods has disappeared under a bright coloured carpet of leaves; difficult to navigate by torchlight these days, lucky my feet know the way by now.  Last year I blinked and missed autumn - this year I've been trying to capture it with varying degrees of success.  The leaves don't stay long on the trees in these winds.

We had an excellent community engagement event at the end of September, part of the year of support I won us from the Scottish Community Development Centre’s ACE programme (Achieving Community Empowerment).  Almost everyone turned out for it, as well as our local councillor, MSP, and key people from Highlands & Islands Enterprise and Scottish Natural Heritage.  We had round-table discussions on four topics: housing, infrastructure, developments, and getting people involved, each one facilitated and focussing on how to achieve positive ways forward rather than getting bogged down in past gripes.  I was feeling a bit anxious about facilitating my table – I’ve never been in a room with everyone on the island before and I wasn’t sure what would happen.  What if people started shouting at each other?  The cheery chaps from SCDC advised me that everything would be fine and if things did start getting boggy, I could move them on by asking “what can we do to make this better?”  My fears were unfounded, everyone displayed thorough understanding of the issues, and there was a reassuring consensus of opinion.  Being a worrier, I’m still concerned about the ones who didn’t come – if they won’t get on board with an event with a free meal at the end of it, will they back whatever we do next, based on the outcome of this event?

 “What can we do to make this better” has especially resonated with me this month, as I’ve been attending a 5 day course on conflict resolution and mediation targeted at those working with communities.  The course was spread over 4 Fridays and a Monday, so it’s been pretty tiring commuting backwards and forwards to Glasgow, but I’m thoroughly enjoying the course and it’s not so bad compared to the Inverness – Aberdeen commute I did for the two years of my MSc.  Like the man said, everything’s relative.  The course has been useful in helping to identify my own response to conflict (Avoid! Avoid!), and to reflect on whether this is the most constructive way to deal with it (not always).  It’s also got me thinking about how we resolve conflict on Rum, since it seems like a fairly peaceful place compared to one of our near neighbours.  I suspect it has something to do with the relative equality on the island – as individuals nobody really holds any more power than anyone else, everyone has a similar degree of security.  Living on an island we’re very dependent on each other for survival; people will always help each other out, even if they wouldn’t particularly choose to socialise with them.  It’s also an island where women are the main decision makers and business owners; I’m not drawing any conclusions from this, just putting it out there!

Part of mediation involves allowing things to be as they are; allowing both sides the space to find their own solution, rather than trying to impose what you think is best for everyone, and this ties in neatly with a mindfulness programme I’m working my way through.  Can I just accept that things are as they are on the island, and stop making myself crazy trying to “fix” everything?  Can I allow events to unfold in their own time?  I suspect not, if that timescale is measured in decades rather than months and it’s the community bunkhouse we’re talking about, but in other areas, yes – perhaps I can.  Maybe this way I can find a little of the peace and harmony I’m seeking.  Our Rum Mum who departed last autumn for warmer climes was fond of reminding me that things will happen in their own time.

Someone made the radical suggestion to me recently that our island “characters” are as essential to the health and variety of the community as anyone else, and this has got me thinking as well.  People contribute in their own way, and maybe it’s not necessarily by being a director of the Trust, or setting up a community company.  As confidence grows, will more contributions be made in more obvious ways by more people?  This is a community which has historically had everything done for it by someone else.  We’re like a teenager who’s left home for the first time and it’s slowly dawning on us that clothes don’t get cleaned by magic, and the shelves don’t fill themselves.

Skye from Kilmory