Emotional Geology

"Don't joke about it, Calum -it wears people out! It wears them down. All my friends walked away."

"What wears folk out is the wanting, Rose - wanting things to be different. Better. I don't want that. I don't want to change you. I don't want you "cured". I love you the way you are. It won't wear me out. I know there's a price to be paid for what I want. Maybe it's a high price, but I'm prepared to pay it. Seems like a bargain to me."

“…And why do we engage in this exhausting activity? Alex?

“It’s a warm-up, sir. It develops our writing muscles.”

“Indeed it does. And it’s a great way of tapping into the subconscious where all your best ideas live. You get down to the bare bones of your thoughts and you can write without all the usual inhibitions. What happens to these timed writings? Ken?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Explain, Kenny, for our visitor’s benefit. Do we mark them?”

“No, sir, because they’re private. We can keep them or we can bin them.”

“But sometimes we use them, Miss,” Mairi pipes up again, her face shining. “We use them for poems and stories. They’re our raw material.”

I decided I'd write a book for grown-ups--a thinking-woman's romance that dealt with real issues, had believable characters, a yummy hero, but no easy answers. I made my heroine--as a matter of principle--47. This was suicide in terms of finding a publisher, but I didn't care--I was writing to amuse myself.

I talk to the island. I don't speak, but my thoughts are directed towards it. Sometimes it replies. Never in words of course.

I miss trees. You don't notice at first that there are hardly any trees here, just that the landscape is very flat, as if God had taken away all the hills and mountains and dumped them on neighboring Skye. But eventually you realise it's trees that you miss.

Trees talk back.

In the hospital grounds there was a special place where I used to stand, where I went to feel safe. It was my magic circle, my fairy ring. There were three slender pine trees in a triangular formation, only a few feet apart. I used to stand within that space, sheltered, flanked by my trees, like a small child peering out at the world from behind grown-up legs.

Once, when the air was very still and a brilliant blue sky mocked my misery, I stood between my trees, head bowed, not even able to weep. I placed my palms round two of the tree trunks, grasping the rough bark. I begged for strength, support, a sign. Anything.

My trees moved in answer. Quite distinctly, I felt them move. As my palms gripped them they shifted, as the muscles in a man's thigh might shift before he actually moved. The movement was so slight it was almost imperceptible, as if their trunks were flexed from within.

I knew then that the doctors were right, I was indeed mad. I threw up my head and cried out. Above me a light breeze played in the treetops, a breeze I had been unaware of on the ground. It tugged at the branches with a sudden gust and I felt the trunks flex again, bending to the will of the wind.

I wasn't mad.

At least, not then.