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...