Categories
Life

And Then The World Changed

It’s funny, isn’t it. How we zone in on the things that happen in life that signal an ending of something and the beginning of something else.

They roll on in, these momentous happenings, and soon they pass: although we do wish we could cling to the beauty of them. We do wish we could hold on to their quiet precious hands just that little bit longer than they allow us to. So we can breathe them in. So we can close our eyes and know something bigger than ordinary is actually happening to us.

That’s a lot of waffling just to get to the point isn’t it, my lovely bloggy friends. And yet I’m certain you all know me well enough to understand that waffling is my way of holding on to the precious moments of my life a little longer than the average human might.

So.

Without further ado…

It’s a girl.

A beautiful, darling, button nose girl: isn’t that just the loveliest thing?

She’s been flip-side of my belly for a week and a day. It’s been a foggy time. A time where my hormones have screamed abnormal things and my rational side has begged to make it all feel a little more normal than that. But I am perfectly okay, and that is just about all I am asking of this post birth phase.

I am being so, so, so well cared for by a husband I love even brighter the second time around. I am kept busy giggling at my other children who tumble around, daily, and so often remind me of tiger cubs at play (especially when the tiger mum nudges them away and gently snaps at their tumbling bodies, in order to pull them into line.)

Life is both foggy and good, for now.

And to me, that is perfect.

Perfect.

Just the way it was meant to be.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Categories
Poetry

Glimmer

Beautiful are the moments

where I remember

you are you,

and I am me.

Perfectly.

Beautiful are the mornings

the sun shines on cobwebby thoughts

and there I see the glimmer of truth.

How beautiful you are.

How beautiful I am.

How beautiful.

To know that different

is not another word for wrong.

Photo by Blue Bird on Pexels.com
Categories
Life

A Mysterious Animating Force

The sweet divinity that lingers at the edge of life.

Writers and artists know it well. Actors and musicians feel it within their bodies. And none of us have any clue as to what it is. Not even those who believe, beyond a doubt, that they do know the source of this most beautiful, magical wind.

To understand this force would surely be like bottling and dissecting infinity. How could you bottle a never ending force like that? More to the point, how could you ever truly understand what it was or where it had come from? I just don’t think it would be humanly possible.

I read a book a little while ago, by Sue Monk Kidd, named ‘The Book of Longings’. I’ve been re reading it, and last night I couldn’t help but smile as I came across a familiar idea. The invisible divinity. She mentions it in the book, and right away I knew I had to share it with you all. Surely as readers and writers, both, you have felt this invisible magic. How beautiful it is to know we are not alone in our recognition of it.

The act itself of writing evoked powers, often divine, but often unstable that entered the letters and sent a mysterious animating force rippling through the ink.

Sue Monk Kidd. The Book Of Longings

At University, I studied writing. One of the units I studied was called, ‘Writing: Finding your Voice’ but the thing was…it never seemed as simple as that, to me. That we each have a ‘voice’ we can use to write with in a unique and beautiful way, or that one could simply ‘find’ this voice. Like finding a tennis ball beneath a shrubby, weedy bush in the desert.

All I can say about this mysterious voice is that I feel its magic arise when I relax my entire body and stop thinking. I’ve heard the phrase thrown about that, to evoke the force, we need to ‘get out of our own way’. To me, this is both entirely accurate and also impossible to comprehend.

Just whose way are we getting out of exactly?

And what, exactly, is the mysterious animating force behind it all?

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Categories
Life

A Beautiful Epiphany

From the depths of the ache came a beautiful epiphany.

A knowing that the day could be different, and would be different, if only I’d offer myself a brighter choice; something beautiful to fill my cup to just enough.

I stood in front of the bed, exhausted from lack of sleep.

How can you love yourself in this moment? said the whisper.

The answer: make the bed. Admire its softness.

Again, I stood in front of the bed, exhausted from lack of sleep.

How can you love yourself in this moment? said the whisper, once more.

A glass of warm lemon water. A candle on the ledge of the shower.

It was a normal weekday morning. A weekday morning that could have taken my whole day down had I not listened to the quiet voice of my heart.

I sat on the couch, still exhausted from lack of sleep.

Knowing I had lived beautifully.

Knowing that had been the difference.

Photo by annie untalan on Pexels.com
Categories
Life

Kaleidoscope Life

The rules of love and life.

So much grey, everywhere, all over the place.

Cultural differences. Familial differences. How could you ever say a person is wrong in their beliefs, traditions or values? And what do you do if one person in a relationship is satisfied with the chosen boundaries, and another is left feeling unfulfilled, unsupported, traumatised, even.

What do you do?

One mother may birth a child with the expectation that her job is simply to raise a child to adulthood and set her free when she comes of age. The child has been given life. She will be guided. She will be taught to fend for herself. But a mother is a mother, says the mother. Her boundaries are strict, yet fair, and she has no intention to provide for her child beyond basic care, until she dies. She has provided well, therefore, she has loved.

Another mother may birth a child with the expectation that her job has only just begun, and will never end. She is love, and she will give and give and give, in every way, to this child until her final breaths. She will provide the role of parent. She will provide the role of best friend and confidant. Her boundaries are far and wide: anywhere love lives, she and her daughter will wander, together, always. She has provided, therefore, she has loved.

What is a mother?

It is an individual question.

It is an individual answer.

And it is only one of the question answer combinations of life with no black or white answer to relieve us of conflict and struggle.

The rules of life and love.

There are none.

But there are many.

How easy it is to fight for our right to be right.

How difficult it is to find true peace amidst the chaos of life.

Photo by rovenimages.com on Pexels.com
Categories
Poetry

I Will HoldYou

I will hold your ache in loving arms.

I will be the faith you have lost in the world.

I will shine a light on your breaking heart,

that you may hand stitch the truth

into the fabric of your soul

and know it is safe

to feel.

I will love you.

All the broken you wish not to see,

I will hold you.

I will hold you, love.

Categories
Poetry

Waves

I have lived on this earth with them,

but not apart of them.

It is a story I have not written.

I,

( whoever ‘I’ is )

would not write a story such as this.

I am them and they are me,

and yet there is a silence so loud in the air

that feeds on my soul,

and asks me to learn to be happy

despite of it all.

I love,

and I see they would love

if they would stop

for a moment

and breathe.

There is a beautiful fire in the belly of them.

A pure, raging storm

meant for the rising of their beautiful day.

But they use it to fight.

To stay lost in childhood gone by

and I resist it.

I resist the binds their stories have gathered,

knowing I am not a story of shame, fear, or hate.

I try to hold them, I try to wait.

And yet, perhaps I might try

to fall into the ocean of it all

and understand,

without resistance,

that I am just one of many waves

surging differently to the rest.

Photo by Pawel Kalisinski on Pexels.com
Categories
Life

Cereal And Life

The oddities of humanity. The neuroses that so often become us that really have nothing to do with who we are, at all, or what’s best for our health, wellbeing and growth.

Take breakfast, for example.

My body doesn’t know that breakfast is a man-made occasion, and yet, still, I choose to feed it specific foods such as toast, cereal, orange juice or coffee at the very time it expects to find them in my life. The morning.

My body, I’m fairly certain, just needs food. To be nourished. It doesn’t care if what I eat in the morning is not, what I might consider, ‘breakfast food’. Only the odd little whisper of my brain cares about that. Should I listen? Or should I challenge what it has to say?

It’s not just cultural expectations around breakfast that rouse me. For too many years, I allowed the cultural narrative of suppressing emotional vulnerability to rule my choices, and, as a consequence, I lost the ability to live with my heart. Goodness gracious me. My precious life moments. Potential soul singing moments, destroyed because I succumbed to a life story that, ultimately, had nothing to do with the truth of who I am.

I have no regrets. Every wrong turn has brought me to this place of strength, wholeness and home, and I am grateful for the rocky roads I’ve travelled thus far. How could I be anything but grateful for the ways it has all helped to shape and expand my perspective?

Life. How it has me in awe.

Over and over, again.

Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Pexels.com
Categories
Life

Thank You

I was in tears this morning, bouncing on my fit ball in front of the TV at my new favourite time of day (4AM).

I was watching the world news.

Small children were being handed over a fence to soldiers at the airport in Kabul, thankfully with no idea there is a better life for them out there somewhere.

And then there was me.

So small in the world, thinking of my own beautiful children tucked neatly, safely, away in their cosy beds.

I felt helpless.

I wanted to take all those beautiful people in Afghanistan under my wing and hold them there for a while.

I couldn’t.

I have no control over the mental state of the terrorists of the world, or the mental state of their fathers before them. Fathers who were taught by their fathers that love looked like fear. Fathers who passed this very fear onto their sons, and so on.

I have no control over the pain of these poor darling humans in Afghanistan, just trying to live.

But I have this blog.

I have my words and I have my heart.

And maybe I can’t make a difference for those poor people, but if you are reading this, and feeling in need of some love…I can make a difference to you.

So here I say this:

Thank you for being alive.

For being unique and wonderful you.

For being human enough to have bad days.

And for the strength I know you’ll find tomorrow.

I hope today is beautiful for you and I hope you remember the sun isn’t far away if it’s not.

Because even when the darkness of the world takes over, there is always something beautiful to find among the rubble.

This is my reminder to myself.

And this is my love letter to you.

So much love and strength to you all, my beautiful bloggy friends.

Thank you for being such a big part of my sun for so many of my days.

And so, life goes on.

xx Brooke

Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com
Categories
Life

To Be

I’ve come to realise that creativity is just the art and flow of being yourself. There’s really not a lot more to it than that.

At its core, creativity seems to be made of the absolute depth of who we are. And the depth of who we are is always waiting, somewhere beneath the surface, to be shared in its most resonant form. (I believe this is true for every human being. Not just those who are considered creative types.)

For me, the purest form my creativity takes is music. My voice, in particular, seems an extension of the calming, soothing essence that naturally seems to spill from the deep, internal parts of me…and so my music always does seem to reappear in my life, no matter how far I stray from it.

For a lot of years I judged myself (my voice, my performance capabilities) based on what others were doing with their own musical talents. Somewhere in my teen years I grabbed a hold of the idea that, although my talent was constantly being validated, I didn’t have a voice that could compare to a real singer. According to young human me, real singers had a range that reached far beyond the heights that my limited range could. Real singers were perfect, never to stray a note in pitch at all.

How sweet it is to have found the most beautiful new gift of evolved perspective when it comes to my music: that being…my music is my essence. Unique and beautiful, and only mine, never to be compared to any other. My voice and my music are here to achieve their own purpose. And this purpose has nothing to do with an out of this world range or perfectly crafted technique.

There may be singers who use a wider range of skills to express their musical essence in order to thrill…but to thrill is not what I am here for. I am here to express the depths of my heart. I am here to heal with my voice and perhaps to bring peace, calm and emotion to those who connect with my music, writing and creativity. How beautiful, to finally come to know this of myself.

And so I continue to release my musical essence as it is.

No more excuses.

No more foolish voice within trying to compare my musical self with others.

They are all beautiful fruits to be savoured and cherished in the fruit bowl of musical life. I am a different fruit, who finally understands that apples and oranges never will compare.

Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com