On the Torr of life…

Today, I used the excuse of my birthday to cajole my nearly-12 year old onto the Torr Road for a spin.

It was, as always, lovely.

We only had two near-misses, one with a tourist who’s clearly never driven the road before and was white-knuckling it.  The other when we attempted a 6 point turn to snap pics of some lambs that Liam spotted.  They were cute, and worth it.  These are said lambs:

The thing about the Torr road is not just that you can spot the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland on a clear day like today (this is from Torr Head):

And it’s not just about the vistas, like this one back toward Cushendun:

Or this one, toward Fair Head and Rathlin Island:

There are sheep that spill across the road in ways that make you laugh, and at times that look like ‘guard sheep’:

It’s a place that shows you life clings to the edges — the harsh, sometimes unforgiving edges — and it can thrive there.

So as I turn 39, I think of my Granda’s home truth (spoken by my Granny) that “where once his hair was wavy, it was now waving bye-bye”, and recognize myself in it.

And that my greatest achievements in this life, however modest they may be, will be in and through my three lovely boys.

So the Torr Road represents to me the twisty, windy, undulating, steep, sharp, lovely, tight, broad, crowded, lonesome, uncertain road of life. 

A journey best taken with people you love and cherish.

Great new talent

No, not of mine , though I will write on my newly started hobby soon enough. Hat tip to my aunt Angie on introducing me to this artist – Hozier – this song is great, video a little unsettling. “Someone new” is also good.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYSVMgRr6pw&sns=em

Cleaning the basement and I find this…

What message dare I take from this, pray-tell?

In praise of the wood(en) shingle

A thing of beauty can sometimes come from industrial manufacture. That’s neither aesthetic heresy nor reductionist stating-of-the-blindingly-obvious.

There’s an old stave and shingle mill at The Ross Farm Museum in Nova Scotia. Every time I visit I think of what a laborious process it would have been for them to make enough shingles to re-side the local school or church.

And that was in the “olden days”.

Now they have machines telling the the machines how to forge the perfect shingle.

But it’s hard to quarrel with the outcome when all’s said and done (provided I am not the one doing the shingling, it must be acknowledged).

A wood shingled building isn’t just a symbol of this region, or an era or type of construction.

It’s a renewable work of art.

Walking by two of these the other day, I was struck by the simple grace and satisfying completeness of a (newly or latterly) wood-sided building.

Take the church in the attached photo, for example. It goes from well-worn archetype of a certain era, to vanguard of the renewal of the neighbourhood with a few wood shingles.

Or the school-turned-community centre. It goes from symbol of the idyllic past, to contemporary community-building magnet when hammer meets nail.

Both now carry themselves the way a child does with a sheriff’s badge affixed to their chest — with quiet confidence and absolute pride of place.

All without saying a word.

“Trying to find where trouble ends, I’ve found out it’s in your friends”: 22-20’s – Friends – YouTube

22-20’s – Friends – YouTube.

So, a good friend just reminded me of one of the things I really love about life – and love to share with others – which is good music. Soulful stuff. Happy stuff. Poppy. Orchestral. Rockin. Ballad-esque. You name it (well, excepting certain really annoying songs, and artists: you know who you are). So I will share this one, as my first of many shares to come — from, and for, her. She’s good people.

Somebody that I used to know

Yesterday I was that, today I am this.  What, exactly, is ‘this’?  And why can’t I be ‘that’ anymore?

If I even wanted to be that.  Come to think of it, what was that, anyway?

Tags, identifiers, labels. We are what we are until we are no longer that any more.  And then what?

We sink (back) into just being us?  Our true selves.  Our default selves.

Which begs the question – what were we all that time in between?

And why did it take so long for the path to meander its way back here?  Back home.

How long were we gone?  Where did we go along the way?  What did we see, learn, feel, think…become?

A tightness in the face

My regular yoga teacher has this refrain (he’s my regular-ish teacher, I’ve only recently become something of a regular yoga-doer).

It goes something like this:

“Let go of the tightness in your shoulders, your neck, and your face.  Let it all out of your face.  Let go of whatever you’re holding inside that is ending up in your face, and crunching it up like that.  Tightening it.  Clenching it.  Whatever.”

Which brought me in mind, today during yoga, of a friend who asked me how my “face” was.  How I was doing with the smiling, instead of the scowling.  The being open, instead of the retreating/reserved.  The inviting, instead of the forbidding.

I will, at some point, dissect this piece-by-piece – that is, the face, and what it is saying to the world.  I think there’s a lot there for me to think about, to work on.

And to let go of.

Putting yourself out there

There’s a perverse, and seemingly converse, thing in this world about hunting for a new career.  There’s the art of timing.  There’s the odd footrace to obscurity and uncompetitiveness if you’re unprepared to be (uber)bullish on yourself, your abilities and your ‘you-ness’ (and the making of your you-ness into the perfect fit for that prospective employer’s their-ness).  Humility plays almost no part in this process, except if you count the judicious application of judgement to which adjectives are just a little too over-the-top or not.  But it’s a stretch to call that anything other than restrained or nuanced salesmanship. And being weighted-down by even an ounce of self-awareness, or holding the capacity for self-reflectiveness, can mean overcoming the voice in your head that argues the weaknesses in the very case you set out to make for or about yourself.   It’s like the unbidden public defender pops up to argue the holes in your case.  Then the lawyer for the defendant objects, and the judge either sustains or dismisses.

Fundamentally it’s about being convinced, and then confidently expressing, that you are “enough”.  And to be able to convince others of that, you have to believe it yourself.  And keep believing it in the face of the evidence, or the signs, symptoms and whatever else blows in like tumbleweed across the ego to challenge this belief. And you have to be “enough”, without being convinced (or convincing others intentionally or otherwise) that you are “too much”.

OliverTheWorld: Off the Beaten Path in Ireland: The Road to Torr Head and Carrick-a-Rede: Northern Ireland

OliverTheWorld: Off the Beaten Path in Ireland: The Road to Torr Head and Carrick-a-Rede: Northern Ireland.One family’s view of this blog’s namesake; one of my favourite places in Northern Ireland.