One day like this

Every hour is our whole life, or something like that. How do these hours anoint my soul?

Sam is in the kitchen already preparing fresh coffee in his cafetière. An act performed in the softness of dawn and total habitual abandon. He’s probably listening to the cricket, or more likely a YouTube video about last night’s AEW tag team tournament. 

I am woken with the same soft light upstairs, by my baby boy shouting ‘mummy’ across the corridor as he too wakes. I say my simple line of morning prayer and go to greet him with a big cuddle and, let’s be real, a heaving and stinking nappy.  

I change him, we go downstairs to greet daddy in the kitchen and the breakfast ritual begins for the two of them - they must have their own things, as must I. 

This year and all I move towards

to slow down. the whole way down. whatever metaphorically comes before first gear. this does not mean to coast, but to glide with my full will behind the absence of force.

to live in the Lord's ease and peace. nestled right in where no body or spirit can drag me back out ever again. ever.

to be generous with my time, attention & resources. to give and to give and to give and not to horde, so that I will feel not empty but replenished at each turn. 

Expression of Interest in Frenzied Tones

I will kiss myself in the name of the Lord, I will
ask open-handed and allow the voice at the door
in the unknown hour of night into my throne so that I
may receive.

My son, my love and I will hold hands in the gale,
we will form a ring and shout and laugh
and run round each other, with each other, to each other. 

This is our year of plenty, of wilderness and home,
of light thought.

We come from one another, we will not fold
unless to Truth. We show our glinting mystery
to the vastness and, still, are more
than it can take. 

This is so much that I have held, so much I have held away,
it would be sin, now, to place it anywhere but here on the pedestal. 

I’m here too, screaming, crying, smiling, kneeling,
confessing the red ruthlessness of my whole being and oh my God, 

I love this and don’t understand it.
I love me so much, I love you, Sam and baby boy, yes!
I love this world (but I am confused),
the whole world, the one in his hands, so much. 

I am not done.

Why I should draw, but can’t. Not right now anyway: An Amateur's Manifesto

I fear the blank face of the page or canvas. That’s the tip of the truth. I dread the moment just before creation is expected. There is an overwhelm of possibility that stuns me almost every time: where on this space do I start? which colour or word comes first and then next? what is my subject? or is it an object? do I focus on line form texture or function? do I design or simply emote? is that even a real word? how do I best go about figuring out this piece of work, it’s totality and afterlife, before it’s even begun..?

This state of constant self-questioning can appear purposeful. In reality it is a well worn distraction technique. It's also not something that can be shaken off very easily when you have myriad other distractions waiting for you to slip quickly into and drive away… what I ask now is how do I overcome this artistic inertia? 

My village came

 Mama has power, but has she enough strength? I have found an old definition of motherhood and it is simply, complicatedly, ‘Everything’. 

 My village arrived in drips during the weeks after the birth of our son. To tell you the truth, I do not really remember anything other than the relief & gratitude I felt whenever my door would swing wide to the smiles and coos of some warm person I loved so much, often bearing food or open arms. 

 There were photos, of course there were, with our new bundle where he should be: at the centre of all of them. And I was there too - not the headless, bodiless arms that were only there to hold him up so others could see. But me, my whole self, my whole bloated and sagging and lifegiving body. We were there and my people held me as I held my baby and I swear it was God on Earth all over again. 

 There is power here, oh yes, power in abundance. And deep within my village there is more strength than could be told. 

Sweet peas

Right where my scar is,

on the inside of it,

that’s where I used to feel your little fingers

moving as sweet peas do:

The Devoutness of Father John Misty

 The first chords of Only Son of a Lady’s Man struck me with stars and spangles right in my spiritually war-torn teenage heart. O did that music grip me like a mystical fever, burning up every question and potential answer in me, sticking to my skin like the sweat from weeks of heated worship or illness.

 a poem by Erica Jong:

Beast, Book, Body

I was sick of being a woman,

sick of the pain,

the irrelevant detail of sex,

my own concavity

uselessly hungering

and emptier whenever it was filled,

and filled finally

by its own emptiness,

seeking the garden of solitude

instead of men.

 

The white bed

in the green garden—

I looked forward

to sleeping alone

the way some long

for a lover.

 

Even when you arrived,

I tried to beat you

away with my sadness,

my cynical seductions,

and my trick of

turning a slave

into a master.

 

And all because

you made

my fingertips ache

and my eyes cross

in passion

that did not know its own name.

 

Bear, beast, lover

of the book of my body,

you turned my pages

and discovered

what was there

to be written

on the other side.

 

And now

I am blank

for you,

a tabula rasa

ready to be printed

with letters

in an undiscovered language

by the great press

of our love.

The Nursery

 F ck, I’m almost livid at myself for being this  silly heap of a mess. . I am staring at our doorway, cracked open & showing a sliver of dim hallway,  and i wait for my baby to need me. The  sentinel - a monitor which very tenuously links the two of us by no sense other than sound - silently betrays the fact that, right now, he does not. .      Need me.  

‘Don’t ask me what any of this means’ - 2022

 I scrolled through hazy pictures, grainy with the heat of adventure and youth, and felt that same dull prod of jealousy that often appears when observing the lives of my peers through the small lens of that app. 

 My idea of the word Adventure has been under most strenuous interrogation this past year. I thought as a late-twenty-something year old that the definition lay in the very obvious physical sense of exploration – the one constantly tugging at me, pulling my mind from country to country, allowing me to roam freely, to taste new cultures, to converse with strangers, to know the earth and its fullness and all that wonderful, thrilling, romantic stuff. ‘Adventure’ had at some point been sold to me as a specific type of youth, entwined with an even more specific kind of freedom, and I happily bought it all up.