I watch while you go to the dark place
And I know there is not more I can do
Or say to you
Other than
I am here.
I send to you freedom
Without constraint
And I pray you know
Eventually
The place of peace
And love.
I watch you today
Walk along the shore
Lost
Lost
Lost
I can say no more
Other than
Love.
Reflection of the solar eclipse on the ding of my handpan.
Drumming
in Ynyslas, Ceredigion Wales
20 March 2015
We are all moving forward, sometimes quicker than light.
And we are light.
Bringing one forward we follow each other. Finding our way, known and not known. One to each and each to the other.
Thank you to Christopher, for your craftsmanship.
To April, for the impeccable tuning.
To Brooke, for following the healing road home.
And most of all to Daniel, kind heart and good man you are.
We’ve travelled a lot already but here we go again.
Heading north. Small dog. Small campervan. And me.
Trying to clear my head out.
The stars are falling
One by one
Upon the ground
Around us.
While the little dog dances at our feet.
You whisper,
No one, no one will know
For this is ours
And ours alone.
Look. See.
Trust.
Ok, trust I repeat.
For now and for ever more.
Stars are falling
Down
And within each
We find
A night of abiding peace.
Begin.
Compass points
to the beach above Borth.
Perhaps roads cross there.
Or a journey to be
from west to east
and the road
a grandmother’s bread van once traversed.
But even before
lies the cathedral at Brecon
and three candles lit.
So quiet and waiting in silence,
there upon the left,
as energies alight then come to rest.
Under an image
a word resounds
how to find a heart not divided.
Fly through windows?
Oh yes, they do.
Turn about and bright happenings ring out.
When lighting struck it came quite literally as a bolt from the blue. It was a morning of blue sky and one singular cloud. The fire was lit in the front room and I sat by the window on the phone to a friend. We spoke of Gretel’s book, a woman’s story of being struck by lighting. A Match to the Heart she called it. I like the book, the title appropriate for ………
Then, it happened. There was no thunder. No warning. Just the explosion as a bolt of lightning struck the house. The phone flew. The electrics went. The air ionized instantly.
It has been a year of lighting bolts, although not ones quite so literal or stunning as what struck that morning. Over the course of the year, so many strikes, each one an ignition, each one a match to the heart. For better for worse each one sudden, unexpected. It seems this year, I was the woman whom lightning followed.
From the beginning with saying no more to one known too long. To a surgery that went from difficult to just wrong. To the loss of two cats, long travelling companions of heart and soul. To suddenly finding a light of pure gold where and when least expected. To the night that light arrived yet again at my door not meaning to leave. And then with that light co-creating a language seldom spoken. To the offer of a field I can with eyes closed still traverse. To travels through karma and visions of futures waiting to unfold. To a bridge that can not be burnt, only crossed. To a loved one’s fear, the one who fled without leaving. To flight not forewarned making misfortunes befall but leading however to crumbling walls. To a heart that restarts each time like a bolt from the blue. The clearing of old, the welcoming of new. With each strike another match to the heart.
Tonight I light candles in the window to the front. The window by which lighting arrived. I do not light candles to ward off other strikes, nor to cast upon the night prayers, wishes or dreams. Tonight I light candles and begin to say goodbye to the year of 2013.
How could I Ieave it like that? With the posting of those last words? She’s gone? Yes, she was gone. But the woman who wrote those words, and all words before it, eventually found her way forward despite hardship, despite anger, despite grief. Since then much has transpired and this life continues on in Wales.
We all have different ways and we do the best we can to find our way forward through times of great strife. How? We come together. And then? We heal one another. And in the healing we find our way home. How? Through love. Love is home and love is at home always waiting for us and willing to receive us with acceptance, with open arms, and with the deepest of recognition. Home takes us in without question without judging who how where why or when.
Home. How to find where we belong? How do we recognise home? To find that belonging is a blessing in itself. And once we find it we will know, deep within the very essence of our being, that this is indeed where we belong. It can be that we find our true belonging beyond the family we were born to. Or we may find our true belonging with a person we never imagined in our wildest of dreams even when we were brave enough to allow ourselves the freedom to dream wild dreams.
At first, there may be difficulties to overcome. If so, they can be overcome with courage and determination as we discover that in belonging there is both comfort and great freedom offered. And then, there we are - finding ourselves finally with the family or the person, the one or ones who are ready to embrace us, accept us, to lift us and support us for who we are and for all we are. With them we find our belonging no matter how odd or unconventional that belonging may seem to the world beyond. With them we build the foundations of our future.
With the belonging our true home is created. Home takes us in. Home nurtures us closely and allows us to fly free at the same time. In finding our way home we find our way to that which will always sustain us – love. Always love. Always sustaining. That is what it is about. Love. That is what it always comes to. Love. From beginning to end. Love. Always returning home, is love.
I can’t bear to look at the previous entries here; to reread them would bring too much grief because I don’t know who wrote them. I mean, for sure it was me but not the me who is here and now. The woman who wrote these entries is gone. I don’t know when she will be back.
At last posting I was picking up after an intensive meditation course. There were some moments of both questions and brilliance afterwards. But I had also begun to withdraw from a pharmaceutical medication which I now refer to as “the drug from hell”. I was told that if I did not come off it I could die. I was told that coming off it could also be life threatening. Either way I had to come off it. For the next 8 months I damned the useless German doctor in Regensburg who put me on it after the septicaemia in 2001. I damned myself as well as to be so stupid as to blindly trust a doctor.
For the next 8 months I suffered through a nightmare of withdrawal that I can not explain to you unless you have lived in hell. And now, more than 6 months later, I am still living it. I am not who I once was. I am not sure that I like the woman who has emerged. I have yet to make friends with her and I’m not sure I really want to be friends with her yet. She is difficult and sometimes very angry.
I had to learn new words though, like myoclonus. I had to learn that the brain will try to heal. I learnt that if I didn't line the edges of my bed with pillows, that for a time, at some point during the night I could end up on the floor. Will this change, eventually yes I believe it will.
I have learnt that if you tell people why you are struggling they tend to avoid you. I have learnt that I can find my self sobbing profoundly without advance notice and not know why. I have learnt that my spine is not being ripped out through my skin, it only feels that way. I have learnt that I can swing between here and hell within the space of a minute.
Will this change? Yes, I believe it will, eventually. Meanwhile, I don’t know what will happen to the blog. It seems so alien and foreign right now. I do know that I need to spend time learning how to live from here on out. As for the rest? I don’t know.
Like staring into a mid-December sun I am as feeble as the light it emits. So long gone from here and that was never my intention. Now, whole chunks of my life remain heartbreakingly treacherous so much so that I can not completely recount them for you.
I left the blog at a time of an elderly parent’s slide into life threatening critical illness. At the best of times I can barely navigate my own health - there was then hers and the nurses the intensive care the doctors the surgeons the surgeries the infections the blood clots the scans the procedures the nursing home the bills and there in the maelstrom was me – the only child an ocean away trying to orchestrate some sense into madness while remaining too ill to travel.
After this was all to pass it would have perhaps been wise to declare the remainder of the year a holiday but I have never been that kind to myself. I instead enrolled on a four month long meditation intensive. Sound peaceful? It wasn’t always. When the cocoon begins to unravel you begin to see what is there, or not there. At some point you stand naked in atonement and pray for a redemptive state to be found within - regardless of whether or not you feel you have previously touched the face of God. Everything begins again.
Thus began where I am…… and my questioning of faith both lost and found. This repeating theme will one day find grounding. Of this I know.
I didn’t
know that the study of Presence would lead me into such a place of silence,
away from words. Yet it has while you have wondered where is she and when is
she coming back.
But I’m
right here however silent, watching as the world rages on.