Is it worth these precious breaths?
This fight,
this blame,
this game?
Is it really so important?
People die
(people who are loved)
and still we take for granted
life.
And we fight,
and we blame
in this game.
It’s just a game,
just a bloody game.
Just
a bloody
game.
Death, I suppose, does that to us. It’s one of those accidental growth inducing things that none of us actually want, but do end up getting from time to time. Lessons in perspective. Lessons in gratitude, these are just some of the positives that can come from death knocking on our doors. But today, death has broken me. And my empath metre is still reeling.
I’ve just read an article written by a Mum recounting her five-year-old sons final days. Cancer. To say I struggled to hold myself together wouldn’t be accurate. To say I fell to pieces is absolutely correct. What a devastating, devastating thing: to lose a child, and yet people do experience this sort of loss in life, and far too often for my liking.
I felt I owed it to that precious little man to reiterate the message his beautiful, heartbroken (positively grace-filled) Mum put out into the world, on behalf of her little boy. To live and love, is surely the greatest gift. To live now, to be grateful for this. What’s here. What’s out the window and how beautiful it is. To see that it’s pointless fussing over the little things, when there are even more little things to honour and cherish in this mixed bag of a life we live.
This Mum. She was given a beautiful gift, in the end, when her son’s final words were: ‘I am happy Mum.’ I am happy, Mum. It makes you think how dumb we are worrying about the extra weight we might put on over the holiday period, doesn’t it? It makes you think that, in the end, all we’re really here for is to realise nothing matters but the people we love, and love itself.
Anyhow, I should stop this because it’s going to take me down, again, but I think I’ve said it all, anyway. Most of you already know the way I view life. It is short and beautiful, and we have one chance.
One sweet, sweet, chance.
This is it.
This is it.
This is it.
They didn’t understand her,
but they allowed her
just to be.
And that,
she knew,
was a wonderful, wonderful
wonder.
There is depth and beauty in loneliness.
It is quiet.
Peaceful.
And though I’ve never known it,
loneliness is the wave that has known me
a lifetime, long.
Its quiet waits for nothing,
it just hangs in the air,
aching,
holding me closer
and closer
until I am quiet, too.
I will try to let it be.
To never ask it to leave,
but instead,
let it fill me
until I have no room left inside.
I will let it be, now,
loneliness.
I will no longer be attached
to wishing it gone.
Somewhere in the clouds
is where you will find me.
Am I broken,
or am I just me?
Floating,
somewhere beyond the day.
Floating,
not quite flying away.
As humanity goes,
I am far from normal,
and yet I’d not trade a cloud
for a rock, and a chance to be
normal.
What is normal?
What is this broken world
asking me to be?
There is a soft
quiet
truth
in every lie.
If I hold your hand still,
if I paint your world bright,
if I sing you my songs
will you love,
will you love me?
If I answer your needs
with a need of my own,
If I paint your world bright,
If I sing you my songs
will you love,
will you love me
love?
Oh, but those who feel like the wind!
How lovely they are.
How very lovely.
There is no sound.
There is only the air.
There is only the peace that was stolen
from the garden
of every man.
There is no sound.
There is only quiet, now.
Life is busy and overwhelming at the moment. I’m better for the tools I’ve found to bring me back to softness (walking, gratefulness, meditation) but it’s a mammoth slog I’ve been through.
And a mammoth slog that lay ahead.
My husband and I are merging two houses into one. House work must be done. Small children must be both survived and parented beautifully, given the monstrously high standards I set for myself.
And I need to write, or create (more than I have been) or I might die. No one is dramatic here. No one at all.
I’ve never been through a period of life that has been so truly exhausting, from all angles, for so long. A million different balls hover in the air around me and I do not know which one to reach for in order to catch it and bring it down.
Not only that, but my spirit is quite literally breaking free from my body, shouting (well, more buzzing and glowing, really) to be let out, to be set free. From something. From everything. The energy that moves through my body so often brings such beauty to my life, but I can also hear it asking to be apart of something more. I wish I had the time, clarity, and grit to give it what it is asking of me.
I’m grateful.
I’m tired.
And it’s tough. And it’s oddly beautiful.
