I’m in a cupboard, peeking into the light.
If you looked, you’d see my eye,
and I’d see you.
All of you.
Even your well worn Volleys.
Especially those.
White.
(Not so white at all.)
I’d smile, but you’d not know it.
All you’d see is my eye, remember this.
Here, in this cupboard, it is warm.
It is warm,
and I see you.
I always did see you.
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?
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.
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.
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
Wherever I look,
someone is fighting.
It hurts the softness of me,
this world.
It takes and takes the peace
and I am so afraid to be torn apart
by another day of humanity.
The carnival of dark and dense
dis-ease.
Wherever I look
someone is fighting.
When will enough be enough?
The perfection of life is beyond the boundaries of good and bad, sad or happy.
2015. My fourth miscarriage. The loss of pregnancy at ten weeks.
The doctor looked into my soul and told me, ‘I know the obstetrician for you. Here are his details. If this was happening to my sister, I would be telling her the very same thing. Go to this man. He will treat you beautifully.’
Love.
Held by a stranger, through pain.
Never be afraid of the fullness of life.
Never be afraid to love beyond it all.
Some days,
I can’t be here for you.
Some days
I need you,
to hold my softness
and let me fall.
It is a beautiful drift of snow
that feathers the earth of me.
A gentle spring breeze
beyond the strength I’ve tried so hard to be.
And I lay me down to feel it all.
I lay me down to feel it all.
If I am not her,
that good and lovely girl in a box,
who am I?
Now that this body is alive
with the energy of all of life,
who am I?
I believe this,
but I believe the opposite of this, too.
I love you desperately,
I hate you just as achingly.
Both can exist within, but how?
But how?
I am bursting fire,
I am calm ocean blue.
I do not understand, and I understand entirely.
For one small me,
these feelings are large.
Too large for me to carry
alone.
How lovely it was
to call the darkness an old friend.
The darkness inside,
the darkness outside.
Did they even know it was both
of which they spoke?
A Neon God was made
so beautifully to shine
light
for all the world to see.
And so the world saw.
And so the world changed
for a moment, just one.
And so the world went on
to lose its voice
over
and over again.
To the darkness.
To the never ending lies
that remain hidden
beneath a grand old rock named
fear.
