Hot Buttered Toast – Starting + Parting
When standing still becomes getting stuck... and how to save yourself from sinking
Enough is enough.
I deserve better than this.
How many more days or weeks or months will I waste, un-living my precious life?
I have been in all of the above places. Have stood, in the centre of my home, everyone cross and crabby, everything messy and the same old things in need of mending, myriad loose ends untied, unfixable, wanting more than anything at all, to WALK (run) AWAY.
I never could or would. I miss the kids, deeply, after just one night. Look forward to their return, every single day, after school. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t also enjoy being alone. I never feel lonely in my own company, but when something beautiful happens, my instinct is to look to my side… wanting to share it with the people I share my life with. Happiness multiplies when it is shared.
So, this week’s letter is a sharing of good things + purposeful choices.
They are things I have invited into my life when I have wanted to walk away from it. When nothing I do has made anyone any happier, so I’ve stepped back, taken a deep breath, and reminded myself that maybe the missing link in this human chain, is me.
An inside job.
I started this Substack last summer, after a long weekend away at a women’s festival. An early hours epiphany that kept me awake through the night… the words ‘nourish the mother’ arriving from nowhere; landing, growing, singing through my body, while I watched the shadows of the trees above, cast across the canvas of our tent.
Nourish the Mother.
How to be found, when those around you are lost (often).
How to be joyful, when those you share your life with live many of their days beneath the waves.
How to be whole, when life feels fragmented, challenging, fractious.
How to be be hopeful, when surrounded by fear, anguish, anger, suffering.
I circle back to these questions, repeatedly. Attempting to reconcile myself and my truth, to the truth of those I have promised my life to.
Attempting, too, to make sense of how I, one person, might ever feel at peace with peace in my own life, when millions of people the world over are not granted the same blessing.
There is always that flip of my heart, like a coin… to go where the good stuff is; to allow myself to savour, cherish, relish; to feel so deeply thankful and blessed, even as I know, on the other side, that removing myself from the painfulness of reality and the suffering in the world around me, does not alleviate my own…
But as I get older, the urgency within me – to follow what feeds and lifts and heals me – grows. Impending mortality, perhaps. I am now quite possibly middle-aged (if I am lucky).… half a life, already behind me.
And the part of me which has, these past few years, lived more at half- than full-mast, knows that holding myself in this cloister… losing touch with joy and ease and soul-nourishment… serves no one. No one at all.
Something that has changed this month…
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