There’s a beautiful line from a Sarah Barellies song called, ‘She used to be mine’.
It goes like this:
Sometimes life just slips in through the back door, and carves out a person, and makes you believe it’s all true.
It makes me think of how funny we all are. How we travel along believing we’re very much in control until suddenly we realise…we never were in control. Not ever. At all.
Perhaps we maintain the beautiful illusion of control, quite well, but ultimately when life steps in and presents its aching quiet…all we can do is look at it peacefully and understand: this is.
Life, ever fragile.
Always beautiful.
In fact, it’s the darkness that shows us what light is.
It is our fragility that shows us our strength.
It is our failures that show us the right way forward.
And it is anger, fear, hate that shows us how deeply beautiful surrender is.
How deeply beautiful love is.
Life frightens me, sometimes, but peace is the shining puddle I look for beneath every rainy day.
I feel it, now.
I feel it, now.
Sending sooooo much love, however life may be swaying you, lovely bloggy friends.
Some days I fall. I’m not a good mum. I’m not a good human. I’m not a good me, on those days I fall.
It’s not a consolation to know that I do not fall alone. That humanity itself is in constant fluctuation, that some days we rise and some days we fall. I’ve fallen. Me. The writer of these words, the feeler of these aches. On those days I wish for more, I also wish for peace. The two do not go hand in hand.
But it’s not as easy as finding peace and being happy with that. Without this beautiful depth—without this wild and wistful wind that moves me—there would be no passion to whoosh me along the creative river of life, the river I know and love so well.
Is it about lowering the expectations I have of myself? Or is it about lowering my expectations of life? What, I wonder, would help me to feel at peace in a world that so often clips my wings.
I was given wings to fly.
I long to use them.
Is this me, using them? Right in this moment, is this the way I was meant to fly? To write about love and loss and sorrow and sacrifice? About life at its best and life at its worst and how, at some level, it’s all the same thing, anyway?