The Last Days

December has swept by in a blur.  It always does with two children's birthdays and Christmas all within ten days. The house has been full and busy and happy. There's not been much time for quiet. We stole away the day after Christmas for a walk along the beach. I didn't know how much I needed it until we were there - wide blue sky above, the pale winter sun dancing off the water and the sand beneath my feet stretching on and on...
This year's word for me was free. It's been true. There by the river spilling out into the sea I finally understood it. It's not shirking responsibility, abandon, recklessness, selfishness...I've wrestled out from under the weight of those misconceptions...it's knowing who I am beyond the titles of wife, mother, daughter, sister, teacher, friend. It's knowing what it is that makes me come alive and being brave enough to make a leap of faith towards it. Walking along the shore-line, climbing over and ducking under trees brought down in recent storms, I looked back and saw how far we'd come - the place where we started just a dot on the horizon. I looked ahead to a rocky outcrop, a bend I couldn't see around but I knew the open sea and all possibilities lay that way. I keep walking from this year into the next and the promise of good things to come.

"Do I matter? Did the hands that formed my existence do it intentionally? Was it purposed? Carefully crafted? If so, what was the point? Why are we so different, unique in our ways of loving and giving and living?"
Such questions stir our soul's deepest parts, with a faint flicker of hope that more waits to be discovered. This undercurrent longs to surface and capsize our lives in order to reorder them. It bubbles and gurgles and finally washes over us like an early morning wave against the rocks. and we let it. We surrender to it, because something in it wakes us up.

                                                                           From "Freefall to Fly" by REBEKAH LYONS

We've been away far from here, a place lost in the hills where water tumbling over rocks is the loudest sound and the only light at night spills down from the stars. In a place like that I feel small and questions about who I am and why I'm here overwhelm me. What if there are more days behind me than up ahead? What will be the sum of it all? Will it add up to anything worthwhile?

Walking home one day across the fields, just the two of us, with the leaves flying around he took my hand and told me how lucky we were. It stilled the wildness in me. The word "free" shares roots with the word "friend", someone beloved or held dear. I never feel more free than I do when I feel loved. The fear leaves me then and I feel I could do anything.

There was a picture in the room we were staying in. I didn't notice it until the last day. It was of a bird flying high above a cornfield in the bluest sky.

Day 29: Taking the Leap

"She took the leap and built her wings on the way down."
                                                                    KOBI YAMADA

I remembered what it was that made me come alive, the things I loved to do as a child. I knew more about who I was then than I do now.  I loved to make things - paper, string, beads, buttons, needles and yarn - I wove them into some kind of usefulness. I loved words - I wove them too in the quiet places where I felt most at home. I also knew that I had a heart that was bent towards melancholy rather than merriment, that in a crowd it was the sad faces I was drawn to, the ones not laughing with their eyes. I ached for those who had to make impossible choices, who felt stuck between a rock and a hard place and whichever way they turned the losses were going to outweigh the gains.
Then I chose a career where I was the centre and tiny planets spun around me in a blur of light and noise. It wasn't wrong but it wasn't right either. I stepped away from it earlier this year. It all slowed down and I saw where I wanted most to be. Here at home with time for the ones I love and the weaving I used to do. And there, in a quiet room overlooking a garden where women come in with all the broken pieces of their hearts falling from their hands and I sit with them while they slowly piece them back together again.

Day 28: Measuring the Gulf

"My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels-
Its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour, found;
Measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound!"

                                                                                         EMILY BRONTË

Driving home from the clinic, she asks me if there's something wrong with her.  We've spent the morning with a paediatric occupational health therapist assessing her difficulties with co-ordination.  Simple tasks like writing, cutting with scissors and using a knife and fork are a huge challenge for her.  She's only seven years old but already she's being made to feel she doesn't measure up, that what is expected of her and what she can do are too far apart. I don't want her to feel that she isn't enough just the way she is. She has taught me more about being free than anyone.  She hasn't wasted one moment of her life being somebody she was never made to be. She has dared always from the moment she fell into this world, believing everything was possible even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. She dared her first breath when none was to be had.

"No," I tell her, "There is nothing wrong with you. You are wonderful. You just have to work hard to be able to do some of the things the rest of us find easy and we have to work hard to do the things that you find easy."
"Like what?" she asks.
"Like flying!" I think out loud and she laughs.

Day 27: Days Like Leaves

These days are like leaves. The wind blows through them and they're gone. There's a storm coming in from the sea. We tie down what we want to keep.  I feel that's how it is with me - I've gathered what matters to me now and I'm wanting to let go of what doesn't anymore. It's a freeing kind of thing.  I remember long ago growing up in South East Asia, monsoon nights when the house would shake with great cracks of thunder and we'd lie awake watching the trees all lit up with white lightening and being torn by the wind. I didn't feel fear - I felt more alive than I have ever known, awe and wonder crackling through my veins. The next day, the air would be lighter and running barefoot across the rain-drenched grass I'd believe the world was made new. There was a storm the day before she died. I watched the wind strip what was left of her away and how it bowed us all to the ground. I know now how I can bend and not break, how deep the roots have to go to keep me upright. There can be unleaving but I won't be felled.

Day 24: The Long Shadow

 I thought I would write here everyday this October but as the nights drew in and the leaves began to fall I fell silent.  There's a long shadow that hangs over this month for me.  I thought after many years I'd outrun it.  I've written about it elsewhere, dragged every detail out into the light hoping it would chase the darkness away.  I wanted to be done with it, to feel there was nothing left to say and that I could move forward without looking back.  I thought that meant I would be free.

I've confused being free with finding peace.  Some things rest in the past, others we carry with us all our lives.  For me, I can't leave this thing behind because the joy and the pain are so intricately entwined.  I lost but I gained. I grieve deeply because I loved deeply and I can't separate those two things.  There will always be a shadow because there was light.

"When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy."

                                                                                      KAHLIL GIBRAN

Day 15:The Other Side of Fear

The other side of every fear is freedom.
There are those who fly too close to the sun and those who never leave the ground.
I have always envied the brave of heart- the ones who think only of what can be gained rather than what might be lost.  These days I find myself wanting to throw caution to the wind and let it carry away what it will.  Last night I dreamt I was standing on a high cliff above the sea.  Someone close by me fell and I jumped instinctively after them as though I could some how catch them on the way down.  I woke with a jolt before I found out whether or not I could really fly.

Day 11: The Peace of Wild Things

"When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

WENDELL BERRY

Day 10: The Light Within

"You have moved too carefully through your life.
Always the light within you is hooded by
your own protecting fingers,"

                                  BRIAN PATTEN from "Through all your abstract reasoning"

It's hard to write about being free today.  The weather turned last night. I lay awake in the dark listening to the wild wind and the harsh rain as it spat against the window.  His place next to me was empty and I felt his absence more than I did the cold.  It's fear I feel more than anything.  The days are shortening and the nights are drawing in and I feel it in me too.  My world closing in around a fading patch of blue sky.  I close my eyes and try to see a way through the dark. I forget the light within.

Day 9: Coming Alive

"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

                                                                                                           HOWARD THURMAN

What makes me come alive?  It's hard to answer that because I've denied it for so long.  I've found the answer the hard way - by doing things that have left a hole in my heart and drained away who I am drop by drop.  I lost sight of who I was. I stopped listening and forgot my own song. The world doesn't roar so loud around me now and I'm hearing it again for the first time in years.  I'm slowly picking up the tune and remembering the words to myself.

Day 8: Having Faith

"The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings."

                                                                                   J. M. BARRIE from "The Little White Bird"

Day 7: The Unfurling of Wings

"Our lives are a collection of stories, truths about who we are, what we believe, what we came from, how we struggle and how we are strong. When we can let go of what people think and OWN our story, we gain access to our worthiness, the feeling that we are enough just as we are..."

                                                                                                          DR BRENÉ BROWN

I always knew I had wings.  I hid them because I was afraid of what others might think of them.  Every now and again I'd dare to show them to someone.  They'd stare in disbelief, look to see how I'd stuck them together. One by one they'd pluck out the feathers looking for glue. Eventually even I stopped believing they were real.  Something's changed this last year.  I'm believing again in what has always been mine; the lightness in my bones, the flex of muscle, the fanning of feathers. I'm learning again the miracle of the unfurling of wings.

Day 6:

"...at school you might have been prodded to come "out of your shell"- that noxious expression which fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and that some humans are just the same."

                                                                                                       SUSAN CAIN from "Quiet"

Day 5: Finding home

"I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. we marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias. We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do."

                                                           MAYA ANGELOU from "Letters to My Daughter"

(These thoughts seem jumbled and skewed. There's no real sequence though I hoped there might be. I'm just writing as they come to me. Perhaps I'll be able to make sense of it at the end.)

I have mistaken the inside of the cage as that place of safety.  I've been afraid to leave because of it.  I thought I had to escape my real self  to be free.  I've come to see how wrong I've been.  I don't need to leave the real me behind.  She's where I belong.  She's home and I actually quite like her. I can carry that safe place with me wherever I go.

Day 4: Being Alice

"From the moment I fell down that rabbit hole I've been told where I must go and who I must be. I've been shrunk, stretched, scratched and stuffed into a teapot. I've been accused of being Alice and of not being Alice but this is my dream. I'll decide where it goes from here."

                                                       ALICE KINGSLEY from the film "Alice in Wonderland"

Shrunk, stretched, scratched and stuffed - too big, too small, too much, not quite enough...so drink some of this, eat some of that and maybe, just maybe we'll get it right- that we'll be just right. But we can never measure up, we always fall short and suddenly we're stuck when we should be moving forward. Alice finally chooses for herself and at the end of the film a butterfly alights on her shoulder  as she sets out on a voyage of her own making - a sign that she is at last free.

Day 3: Through the bars

" I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high."

                                                                           CHARLOTTE BRONTË, " Jane Eyre"

I glimpse her sometimes - the real me.  Like when lost in thought you glance up to see someone walking towards you in a shop window and it takes you a moment to realize it's your own reflection.  I see her then, just as she is, without pre-thought, misconception, past judgements - I see her with my own eyes and nobody else's.  She is somebody I would like to be.  

Day 2: Bending back the bars

"I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out form their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth."

                                                                                       DAPHNE DU MAURIER, "Rebecca"

"Shy" "Quiet" "Reserved" - As a child those were the words used to describe me and they were never meant as compliments.  I came to believe there was something wrong with me. I couldn't find a way to fix it to satisfy those around me so i hid. I've been hiding most of my life, even from myself.  Too many lost years...

Day 1: The Cage

"And what do you fear lady," he asked. "A cage," she said. "To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire."

                                                                               J.R.R. TOLKEIN, "The Return of the King"

The cage. Some of the bars are of my own making, some are there because of happenings and circumstance. All I know is that behind them I feel empty and only half alive.  Éowyn felt it too.  She fought it, sharpening her sword in the dark and growing ever more impatient for a time when she would see the days renewed...

31 Days of Being Free

"Freedom given is not complete. It's only when we receive it, enjoy it, give thanks for it, that it becomes fully ours."
                                                                                                                                     
                                                                                                                        HOLLY GERTH

This year named itself for me, a soul-whisper deep in the night waking me to the sound of fireworks and revelry and a cage door wide open. "Free". I have never been more thankful for anything. I cried with relief. But the truth is I've struggled since then with knowing what to do with this gift of freedom, how to own it and...enjoy it. I stepped out of the cage but I'm still here, back up against the bars, wondering what on earth comes next?

 So, for October, the month I was born, I'm going to figure it out one day at a time - how to be Free.

She died

She died on this day two years ago but somehow nobody knows. The world keeps on turning and everything keeps on going. I want to scream it loud sometimes - that she's gone, that she died, that it matters. But it's no-one's loss but mine, ours - those who knew and loved her.

In the early days it was a huge hole I kept falling into at every turn. The first time was less than a week after her death. I decided to make a dessert, needing to weigh out ingredients as though I could somehow weigh out grief and make it into something more palatable and easier to stomach. Only I couldn't find the scales and rummaging in her cupboard I turned to call out to her, to ask her where she kept them... then there I was, at the bottom of a huge hole. There would never be another answer to me calling out her name.

Heart-bruised and soul-sore from falling in and having to scramble out over and over again, I learnt to navigate my way around it. Two years on and the path towards that deep cavern of missing is overgrown and I don't walk that way much any more. It's not a forgetting, more a heightened awareness of how to avoid the pain.

It amazes me, the capacity we have for absorbing grief and loss. What feels unbearable at the time becomes something we learn to carry. The razor-sharp reality of it carves its way through bone and into the marrow of us. That startling clarity that comes through viewing life through the eyes of the dying, dims once again to blur and myopia.

Her death silenced me. I couldn't find the words to make sense of it and I didn't see much point in trying. She died. I miss her. There's nothing else to say.

Spinning straw into gold

I got lost in the woods once.
I was carrying tiny sparks of life. They glowed briefly, fiercely, then went out.
I wasn't prepared for how the dark swallowed me.
When I eventually found my way back, life beyond the edges of the trees blazed too bright. I missed the shadows. I made a place in the woods where I could hide from those who knew me and try to spin the tangled thoughts in my head into something that made sense. I left the door open in case there were others like me. It was a place much like this, but one by one the trees around it were felled. No longer hidden, too exposed, I closed the door and left.

This is my new place hidden deeper in the woods. I've been quiet here. The spinning wheel sits silent. Sometimes I wonder if I remember how to use it. The thoughts are different now, unfamiliar and unlikely, like straw. It's as though  I'm waiting for some Rumpelstiltskin to come along and turn it into gold. That didn't end well for the Miller's daughter and somehow I know this is my task alone.

"You are a writer. You need to write."
Those who know me name me when I won't name myself. They see what happens when I don't write; how tangled I become. Gifted with time and space, I promise to write, to spin the words that make me well.

It's been a long, cold winter. I wrapped a blanket around me with the first snowfall and have barely moved since. The words never leave me. They tumble around in my head, growing louder and more impatient with every day they're kept in. I named this year Free and then pushed her back in the cage. I trust quiet and standing still in the dark...the free-fall of faith is terrifying to me. But I know I've waited and stalled long enough. The sap is rising even in this struggling Spring.

free

"What do you fear lady?" he asked.
"A cage", she said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire."

J.R.R. Tolkein, The Return of the King

I though it was an ill wind that blew in with an icy blast at the end of last year and rearranged all the carefully placed pieces of my life. Here now, under a clear blue January sky, I think it may have been a holy one.

I dared to name last year Hope and after twelve long, hard months that left me soul weary and heart sore, I was ready to concede how foolhardy I had been.

I though I could circumnavigate grief - deftly leap over the pitfalls and side step the potholes.  There is no way past grief except straight through it.  I know that now.

I thought I could keep doing what I was doing, keep spinning all those plates and never let one fall.  The crash, when it came, brought relief more than anything.  I realised I didn't much care for some of those plates anyway.

The one plate that didn't get broken is the one thing that perfectly fits my heart.  There is time and space enough now to continue and pursue the counselling course I began in the Autumn but have struggled to keep up with.

This new year names itself.  Perched atop a broken cage, singing its name in the half-light, it stretches out its wings and flies - free