I’m sorry that I’ve wasted so long trying to make you happy when all this time it’s never even worked. How is it I could have assumed such a strategy that stole so many years? I’m sorry that I have placed rules and obligations, and how things ought to be, as a precedent over joy. I’m sorry that it has taken me so long to register that these are only scams to plunder life.

And all this time, all those commitments to doing what is right have made me feel so joyless I’ve rarely seen the point. And I’m sorry that despair has driven out my life.

[Read more…]

The funny thing is that after all this questing, and reaching out for more, I am right where I started, only parsed down to less. The reaching for more has led to less. Less in the most positive sense. Like the soon to be bride who steps on the scales and exclaims in delight, “it just fell off”. Because like her I was never trying to lose weight, in fact I had never known that was the goal. Maybe I’d read it somewhere but what does it ever really mean to read about something until you have lived it in the flesh.

And the funny thing is, is that flesh is at the root of it all. All this reaching out for more, crying out to God, and all along it was embedded in the curve of my belly and the touch of my vulva. For so long, I sought out – out of this world, this body, this life. I wanted home and home was a far off land where angelic voices chorused and heightened states of bliss fuelled me in transcendent euphoria. I have always known what it is like to feel God, I am far less versed in what it is to feel me.

[Read more…]

 The sad thing is how many people I see around me that simply don’t know the magic and delight the conversations in this group are eluding to. Stuck in the compelling ruts of jobs that must be done, relationships that must be kept, cell phones that must be answered, they miss the very pleasures that bring it all to life.

The sad thing is I’m guilty of the same, and, unlike them, I should know better. Even now, with all my knowing, yet still I rush and harry my way through the day. “Hurry up” I hear myself routinely saying through gritted teeth to my daughters. “We’re going to be late”, a note or two higher as my anxiety levels start to rise.

[Read more…]

My daughter comes to hug me in the kitchen, as I wait for the kettle to boil. She has become so tall my chin can no longer comfortably tuck itself upon her head. I am so practised in bending my neck down to smell her hair I am struggling to adjust to find the rightness in meeting her embrace from this level place. Where did all those years go, I ask myself, and feel the tug in my heart that has been recently haunting me.

I walk past a woman with a new-born in her baby sling, the baby’s right cheek squashed against her mother’s breast, eyes shut in blissful oblivion. The woman looks tired, intent on the aisles in Whole Foods, and I imagine her lower back aching from that unfamiliar weight in the front of her, even whilst she absently kisses the top of her precious sleeping bundle whilst she picks out avocados. I want to stop that stranger amongst the vegetables and, looking her intensely in the eye, urge her to relish every present moment, even when exhausted by those nights after nights of disturbed sleep. I want to tell her to savour it all, to not complain about a moment of it, because before she will know it her daughter will be as tall as her and will no longer seek to snuggle a warm check against her side.

[Read more…]