On blessings…

But here, in the depths of winter, I feel a sense this year of how much hope that has grown within me. How the pain of every tiny loss was a seed planted deep in cold earth. Nothing but faith brings forth new life. Faith that life – and joy, if you’ll let it rise – is the inevitable inverse wage of such a suffering…

The peace of wild things

I am up to my neck in this dark silky water. There is no one else here, just me the birds and the black sky pressing itself back into the lake, light rain at first then gathering so that the storm passes from my chest into the air itself.

What it feels like for a girl.

“I am pulverised. I am smashed to ashes. And yet somehow I get up. Breathe. Buy food. Go to work. Raise my children. Pull my head up by the roots of my hair and force myself to march forwards only. There is no way out or off, just through.”

We, girls.

“So we are all women now. But we are still those girls, who knew everything and nothing. These bodies have grown into us, and we them. We have opened ourselves to life, to pain, to love. To men. And for the most part, as we sit in the Castle pub on our regular table, we agree we have survived it. Not every hand has been evenly dealt, but then the game isn’t over yet is it?”

On being.

It’s a good pain. Necessary. The pain tells us the weight of what we had. Tells us it mattered. Shows us we are alive, alive to the world in dimensions that make no sense.