Today started out just fab. The skies were grey, rain threatened, and I said to The Kid, “Why do you have to complain about everything ALL THE TIME?”

Even as I said it, I felt regret. (And believe me, it was the nicest of the statements that were flitting around my head in the moment.) But? Honestly? Why does he have to complain about everything all the time?

He doesn’t do that. And when I apologised to him, I told him that. But he does do it quite often, and I should know because it takes a complainer to know a complainer. It also takes an anxiety-ridden person with obsessive-compulsive tendencies and control issues to recognise one, and as far as that goes it’s like each of us is looking in a mirror when we’re around each other. His recent success with independence at school is counterbalanced at home with OCD behaviours and stabs at controlling everything in his environment, and I resemble that. It all reminds me of my life from childhood until…two seconds ago, usually, so this mirror does indeed have two faces.

My own issues, which have allowed him to come by his honestly, should make me more empathetic. And they do, in theory…and when I’m in solitude. And sometimes when I’m with him, in calm moments, talking at bedtime or cuddling on the couch. But at other times, we combine to combust. And then there’s Little Brother, beside us and watching, and now I have shame and guilt to add to the mix.

Parenting is so fun.

There are times when I look around at our life and think that things are almost too good, and then I have to laugh because I will never run out of things to discuss with my therapist, and soon TK will find the same with his. It’s all lather, rinse, and repeat around here, and no matter how many times we go through our rhythms, I still think that someday my insides will match my well-ordered and wiped countertops. A place for everything and everything in its place. Done.

Then TK screams about how LB is doing a poo and he just knows the toilet paper will be arranged messily afterward, and I realise that these moments aren’t aberrations that will disappear, but they are part of the rhythm. And there is no song without a rhythm.

I find myself revisiting our beginnings here lately, those moments after we first landed when everything was new and life felt like an extended vacation. There was uncertainty, but also potential. But that time carried its own grief that gets lost in the sands of memory as life becomes routine and new becomes familiar. We tell people how long we’ve been here and find that it exceeds their own stay. We’re becoming veterans, knowing and being known. There is such beauty in this, and also moments for grief.

What should have been a kindy year full of experiences that echoed TK’s has been a narrowed-down, pandemic-affected, altered year for LB, with fewer of those first-time school experiences. Yesterday, I said goodbye to my hairdresser, who’s moving back home to Europe. She was one of the first people I met here and I see her more often than I see any of my extended family. We’ve talked about anxiety, depression, Netflix. LB and I still miss his beloved preschool teacher, whom we lost eighteen months ago.

There are stretches of sunny days punctuated by rain that makes me forget how blue the skies are. And then there are swims in water so clear it makes me realise I never knew how cloudy it could get in the winter. There is sniping and forgiving. There are unforgettable dinner parties with friends, and regrettable hangovers the next morning.

There are sharps and flats and majors and minors and all the keys, and I never really knew how much they all tell a story until I listened to this. How we need every kind of note to make a song, and convey its meaning. How only when we embrace it all does it become music.

I was tagged recently on Facebook in a photo of my first grade class. The first thing I noticed, natch, was myself: a nervous, rule-following, hands-folded six-year-old in a peach dress with a placating, not entirely genuine smile. Then I zoomed out to take in the full picture, and I noticed a couplet of offences: we had two teachers that year, one morning and one afternoon, and the name of the Black afternoon teacher wasn’t listed on the information card held by the students in the front row. Second, there was a…ahem…curious arrangement of students, with all of the Black students relegated to the back row except for two, who were placed on the ends of the other two rows.

Weird, right? I think so. So did a friend, when I texted her the pic and asked if she noticed anything. She spotted it right away.

Thirty-seven years later and these injustices, large and small, are finally catching the attention of people beyond just those upon whom they were targeted. I received a message recently from a high school friend who was letting me know about some accusations that have recently been voiced about blatant acts of racism that occurred there throughout the years, both during our tenure and after, and I thought about how blind I’d been to all of it; how, at the time, I would have found a way to even justify it. I believed that we all came from a level playing field because that’s what I was taught.

It’s a lie.

I was lucky, fortunate, (#)blessed to grow up in a financially secure, two-parent home. The gravest injustice I endured was of the I-only-have-three-Swatches-to-stack-on-my-arm variety. Meanwhile, people around me–children–were treated differently; were, two decades after the Civil Rights Act, told to stand in a different row. This was their day-to-day life. How could I possibly understand that, or see it as a level playing field?

After Little Brother’s soccer game on Saturday, once we were all in the car, I checked my phone and gasped at the news of Chadwick Boseman. The boys asked what had happened and I told them–Black Panther died. And the first thing The Kid said? “Was it COVID or the police that killed him?”

I’m not sharing this as a sad little anecdote to garner white expressions of temporary ruefulness; I find it fucking heartbreaking. I actually have to tell my children that some people don’t like other people simply because of the colour of their skin and then watch my boys’ faces screw up in confusion because they don’t remember the last time they heard something so asinine, so mind-numbingly, God-defyingly stupid. I dread the day I have to admit my own complicity.

I find myself in conversations with friends who grew up similarly to me as far as timing and geography, and we are all coming to terms with the contradictions that ran rampant in our homes and churches. We’re angry. Those of us who aren’t currently in therapy know we need it. We’ve inherited a complicated, messy set of “principles” that is collapsing in on itself.

But we’re doing something about it.

How? In every way, I hope. In the recognition that what is wrong needs to be made right. In admitting that we are often wrong, and apologising to our kids in ways we didn’t hear ourselves. In making space for their questions and feelings. In allowing room for our own grief, which can be unlocked so readily these days–by news footage, by the death of a celebrity who seemed decent and kind and there are too few of those people left so of course it hurts. We are being reborn through their realisations that the world can be more beautiful than it was, than it is now. That we can be on the side that loves it toward that beauty.

For our anniversary (I know, gross) The Husband gave me a pendant of an Australian emerald. It’s a gem–a colour–that I’ve never actually seen before. And yesterday, on a walk on the first day of spring here, I turned to look at the ocean and I swear, the sea and sky were both blues that were brand-new hues to my eyes. Imagine that: forty-three and still surprised by the beautiful new that is possible.

It was last Friday morning, and I’d just dropped the boys off at school. I was on FaceTime with The Sis as I pulled up to the house–funny, because I had just spoken to her over the phone about four years ago right before The Husband upended my plans then, too. This time, I descended the steps toward our front door, listening to TS and glancing around at the red flower petals scattered across our lawn. “Is that someone’s trash?” I thought, because this is usually what I see first: detritus, not gift.

I looked ahead through the front door and saw a sign–10 Years was the headline on a framed newspaper-style print–and I began to stammer. We had said we weren’t getting presents for each other, that the house was the present. Sure, I had found a shitty little cross-stitch world map to document our travels that I had almost finished yesterday before breaking the needle, but I began to suspect that I was about to be outdone. I told TS I’d have to call her back, and I stepped nervously inside.

For the next hour, I was repeatedly bowled over by The Husband’s thoughtfulness, which I will not go into full obnoxious detail to cover here except to say that it involved a pretend trip to the site of our honeymoon, a slide show of memories, and a day planned in advance with the help of friends that culminated in an overnight getaway.

It was slightly better than the cross-stitch map.

I don’t remember the last time I felt so loved. I mean, Mother’s Day–when I received candles from the boys, along with mugs that said “Best Boss Ever” and “Tired as a Mother”–was a close second. But this…this was premeditated. It reflected my being known. It was a walk from the beginnings of our togetherness to right now, and I glowed. It was almost as bad as the time he practically forced me to move to this country I now love, a place that has become home.

How dare he.

This pattern of love intervening in my life–it’s so disruptive. My plans are shifted, if not entirely tossed, and I head toward new ones–thought out just for me, for what I never would have been brave or imaginative enough to plan for myself. There was the way I remained single in the South for so long that it was getting awkward, and how my lack of fitting in there forced me to flee for New York, where, among other gifts, I met TH.

There was motherhood, which knocked me around so much I didn’t know who I was anymore (besides postpartum-ly depressed), until I emerged an advocate, a storyteller, a warrior, a writer with more to say than I’d ever had to say before, a person with a deeper well of love and pain than I’d ever thought possible.

There was that extended singleness that led to this particular marriage, which–well, we’ve covered that, I think. Knowing and being known, and loved anyway.

There was, as also previously mentioned, our exile across the world, to this place where my children thrive and so do I, our days filled with salt water and ocean views and dear friends and lots of FaceTime.

How could love do this to me? Disregard my plans so flippantly, interrupt my schedule, relocate me…to save me?

All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.
– Seneca

I just finished a binge of Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum, and the series was everything it was recommended to be: heartfelt, honest, and sweet. There was the added bonus that it was filmed in Australia, where we’ve lived for three and a half years, which means I recognized names and scenery as a local (always fun!). Other than that? Let’s just say it’s complicated.

I don’t remember the last time I engaged so intensely with a series on both an emotional and physical level. In a word, my viewing of the quartet of episodes was fraught: every muscle in my body felt clenched, my face contorted, my heart spasming. This was due in part to my own connection with the spectrum, and the fears the series raised about my son’s future.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird.

One of the most annoying and wonderful parts of my day is the journey with the boys from our car to their school. I sling their backpacks from the front passenger seat onto their backs, and we walk the few dozen metres together but also separate: the brothers usually beside each other, one occasionally lagging back to hold my hand or tell me something, but always, at some point, with me behind them, nearly stepping on them about a hundred times.

Why must I trip over my own children? Because, of course, they are so slow. They take their precious time, stopping to scratch their butts or fix their shoes or point out someone they know (sometimes) or (more likely) a dog or it its errant poo on the ground. They notice everything except me, it seems, as I flex and curl my hands and take deep breaths because patience don’t come naturally here, and we eventually make it to the spot where I kiss them and they run onto the school grounds.

Then I take my time, creepily hiding behind a tree branch to watch them scamper off to their classrooms then emerge seconds later, reconvening on the playground.

Cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz made a project of walking around a city block with everything from a dog to a geologist to see what they saw. She writes, “Together, we became investigators of the ordinary, considering the block–the street and everything on it–as a living being that could be observed. In this way, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the old the new.”

It’s alarming how much my children teach me when I’m trying to teach them. While my attentiveness is typically self-focused, they never fail to notice the world around them: the yellow flower in the middle of the grass, the rare piece of litter, the way the wind blows a leaf across our path. The Kid analyses and draws conclusions that help him feel in control; Little Brother searches for words he can read to show off newly acquired skillz. They reveal the world to me, but more importantly, they reveal themselves.

It’s a good day when I pay attention.

And before these walks, even before the part in the car where I say a prayer over them and remind them of what is true that they can take into their day, there is the moment before we leave the house–actually, TK came up with it and now when he forgets, LB reminds him (teamwork makes the dream work)–of saying to their toys, “To be continued.”

The other day I finally heard it, and when I told TK I love that he does it, he explained, “Yeah. To be continued. It means the story is still going.”

It’s perfect timing, I guess: as I get older, and my eyes aren’t what they used to be, these two are teaching me to see all over again.

This morning I woke up a bit depressed, which makes sense because it’s my birthday, and big feelers such as myself have an ambivalent relationship with all things that are meant to be one thing: birthdays=happy; Christmas=merry; sports=fun. There’s also the tiny detail that I’m on my forty-third of these damn things; who allowed that to happen? All my peers and I are becoming middle-aged, and our parents are becoming (gulp) elderly. I did not see this coming.

And yet I did, every year, because one of the big things I feel is anxiety, which is like bad fortune-telling for the perennially nervous. So I’ve been preparing for middle age awhile now, just like how I start thinking of myself as my new age (and my children as theirs) months in advance. What a buzzkill.

It didn’t help that last night’s sleep was delayed and fitful (#preciouschildren), so I woke up with a headache and an urge to kill. But I dealt with that by going to the grocery store and buying myself a cake (the boys told me to get chocolate mud; I got a dye-filled rainbow sprinkle and they can SUCK IT), then going on a long walk through several beaches that echoed the eternal hikes I used to take when training for that cursed 60K, minus the blisters and hopelessness.

Deja vu is real, y’all. Everything that goes around comes around, and all that. Especially when you have kids and get to relive childhood through them, and also witness their need to live by constant repetition. A year ago, it was The Kid who demanded I draw a love heart on his hand every day so that he could press it and send/feel hugs from me; now (well, for one day at least), it’s Little Brother who grabs for the sharpie and sends me sideways grins as he presses the heart.

I remember the “last run” I took in Central Park in New York City; it felt freighted with meaning; then I returned for yearly visits and redid it every time. Not the same, but not totally different either. And there was the running route by our last (fourth) house here, to which I ruefully bid adieu when we moved, then a friend reasoned that I could reenact it whenever I wanted after dropping the kids at school. Which I did yesterday.

One way or another, you can always come back. A novel I recently read refers to this as the tidal life–the coming and going and coming again nature of life, the way people and places return to us, and we to them. The other night when I put him to bed, LB started crying and saying he doesn’t ever want to leave this house. He, we, need an unbreakable, unchanging home. I think we’ve proven to them–over the course of six in the past four years–that the house may change, but the home sticks.

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents,” said Carl Jung, and if there’s one gift The Husband and I have given the boys, it is lives lived–all over the place. Adventures accepted. Memories made. Stories to be told. I’m working on some of those stories now, but these are the ones that include the boys–fiction based in real life that I’ve invited them to help me with, which may be a mistake because I didn’t count on them having so many opinions. Kind of reminds me of when TH and I were wedding planning and I’d ask him about a colour, or decoration, and he’d make the mistake of not saying “whatever you think.” Everything kind of reminds me of something, marks left from moments already lived that keep coming back: LB pointing to the remainder of red marker in a heart shape on his hand, urging me to wipe it off then forgetting he even asked, so that I get to see it not just once, but enduringly.

I wanted to believe, and I did believe, that things would get better. But later I discovered, I guess, that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done. It’s already happened…It’s the power to believe that you can see, that you visualize, that sense of community, that sense of family, that sense of one house…And you live that you’re already there, that you’re already in that community, part of that sense of one family, one house. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there. –John Lewis

One of the decor items The Husband and I bought from the overpriced furniture store near our new home was a glass jar for our outdoor table. Since we placed it there, we’ve been filling it with shells: not one lump sum of them dumped in, but a few here and there, grabbed during our respective walks down to the beach ten minutes’ walk away, or after my swims down at the beach over the bridge, as I shiver in the sun and try to feel my toes. We each come in after these procurements and make our deposit, and so the jar is slowly filling.

We had the boys’ teacher/parent interviews yesterday over Zoom, and after some technical issues that left us a minute late to the first one (and left me seething through anxiety), we heard about each of them from people who truly know them: who see The Kid’s creativity in solving problems, his ability to be funny without knowing it, his growing and beautiful social interactions and his confidence at public speaking; who see Little Brother’s ability to be funny while totally knowing it, his need for eye contact and approval and physical closeness, his sunny demeanour and love of reading.

Can I tell you how many tables I have sat at, across from people who did not know my kids, across from school staff who said things like “he doesn’t sound like a fit for us” or who had an eye only for weakness? Those years-ago-now meetings can still pierce my heart but they no longer lord themselves over me because we are in a different place now, one where the road has turned and the light has become more and more visible, the hope springing up more and more often. These boys are becoming themselves and it is glorious to see. And to see it be seen.

It’s been compared to the underside of an intricately-patterned rug, this life we live that often only makes sense in reverse because, as it’s happening, the threads just seem chaotic. Especially right now? I would go further and say that it often just looks like a pile of shit that you did not order and would like to send back, thank you, but then there’s the moment when the rug is flipped over–or, maybe, the moments when it’s briefly flipped over, and the intended beauty is clear.

But until, and between, those moments is the now-but-not-yet living, which is full not so much of the beauty but of knowing, trusting, that it is there. That it’s coming. It’s what Maria Popova calls “almostness,” what John Lewis refers to as “living as if.” It’s defined by a yearning, an incompleteness that I remember best during a few periods of my life: like when I was single and waiting for TH, or when there were three of us and we were waiting for LB.

I believe we are intimately acquainted with grace in this yearning; that, indeed, if we are focused only on preserving the way things are instead of seeing the now-but-not-yet of this world, we are missing that closeness with grace that the yearning provides. I once read that the longing of God stretches across history–we see it in the three days before Easter, in the whole of the advent season, in our own lives. When we miss it, we miss everything: how grace aligns itself to us not so much when we’re fighting for things to be the same, but when we’re recognising the Much More that is always just out of sight. When we live toward this More.

“It’s hard getting ready,” TK said from the backseat on the way to school the other morning as we listened to a song that said the same. And he should know. It is hard. And even more beautiful.

Then we’ll be waving hands singing freely
Singing standing tall it’s now coming easy
Oh no more looking down honey
Can’t you see?
Oh Lord 
I’m getting ready to believe

Last week, after a fortnight-long break fuelled by holidays and laziness, I got back into the water.

The water I speak of is the ocean, and it is frigid, as this is winter in the Southern hemisphere. I’m one of those people whom, months ago, I would have pegged as a lunatic: wetsuit-clad pain-seekers devoted too much to exercise.

But here’s the thing: after the pain subsides and the feeling comes back to my fingers and toes, the frigid water is actually enjoyable. And this isn’t my first time at this particular kind of rodeo–I remember runs through Central Park during blizzards, accompanied only by the rueful shared glances with other weirdos.

I’ve been this way for awhile, it seems.

This way meaning both “the way I am” and “in the direction I’m going” which is to say, away from what feels comfortable and safe toward what is unknown and unpredictable.

It’s not a bad way to travel, if you can handle the minor inconveniences and occasional hypothermia.

“Back on my bullshit” is one way to describe it, and I relegate that phrase to recaps of the oopsies, both large and small, that I seem to repeat: overlubricating in social situations (you know what I mean), resorting to sugar and breading for comfort, losing my temper over the same stuff with the kids, pole-vaulting into cynicism and its familiar shores.

Luckily, there’s a grace that goes beyond my bullshit, that renders my efforts to “be better” or “do more” so minor as to be ultimately inconsequential when it comes to both my fate and my faith: I am held by what has been done for me, not what I’ve done. So these repeats often turn into redos: sometimes with the same results, but often with tiny movements forward, toward more freedom; more grace.

Was I thrilled to wake up with a hangover on Saturday for the first time I can remember in awhile? No, and neither was my bathroom. But the moments shared the night before–sun setting and champagne flowing as four of us shared life together and spoke about what we mean to each other–those are what last longer. Grace.

Do I enjoy the mental unraveling I feel when The Kid devolves into an anxiety spiral and I struggle not to lose it? Not a bit. But what I can love, what I can even rest in, is the moment when I see a tiny shift in him–a “but” that prefaces not another worry but a realisation that there is more he is seeing now that he wasn’t before. And the thought that my own journey is part of what helped him get there. Grace.

Repentance, redemption, change: these are the language of grace, but they do not hinge on me getting life right, on having a game plan for improvement, like they do on me sprawling at the feet of grace and watching as it lifts me, moves me, like the waves send me to the shore, where home and a hot shower await.

Which is harder: parenting a kid who doesn’t want to go back to school, or homeschooling that kid and his brother?

Answer: they both suck. And these are the lose-lose moments of motherhood, the isolating and excruciating struggles that I must walk alongside them through because I cannot not walk with them, my body and soul tied to them messily and inextricably and eternally and inconveniently and beautifully.

Hello! It’s Tuesday morning.

The boys went back to school this morning, despite collective parental fears with every informational email from the school that this would be the one announcing suspension of onsite learning; that we’d be returning to the hell that is homeschool because COVID numbers have gone up here (though nowhere even near the same league as what’s happening back in the good ol’ US of A). That email didn’t arrive, so we did: at the school gate on this sunny morning, one mother, one happy kindergartener, and one anxious third-grader.

So our return was both excitement- and tear-soaked, happy and sad and everything in between. And with every repetition of the question from the unexcited one–“But why is it the law to go to school?”–I both felt the recognition of myself at his age, and the frustration of being compelled by circumstances and emotions beyond my pay grade.

What I’m saying is that this is hard and I’d rather be catching up on old episodes of Gossip Girl on Netflix. That is the familiarity I crave: images of the streets of New York that I last watched when I was on those streets, living a decidedly less complicated life (in that no one depended on me for their well-being/survival), but also…a less full one. One marked by less frustration with what was, but more yearning for what was not yet.

When I walked those streets, countless as they were, I would rarely get lost–owing not just to my familiarity with them but maybe more my unwillingness to stray from the areas I knew and frequented. But when I did run aground on some unfamiliar spot, I only had to find landmarks–a known building’s spire plunged into the sky, a street sign with a number or name–to know where to go next.

The Kid is in the unfamiliar territory of not having a therapist at school with him, of not having someone dedicated to just him, and though he’s managing his schoolwork beautifully without help, he has decided that this is not a street he enjoys traversing. There have been tears, so many of them, and I struggle to not feel them as an interruption to the smooth sailing I prefer, even as–and maybe because?–I see so much of myself and my own young (and often current) struggles in his own. Fighting against change, clinging to what feels safe. Resisting movement in favour of a dropped anchor.

And then, by grace (another Great Interrupter), I remember my landmarks–like a fire in the night or a cloud in the day or a whisper on the wind or the North Star that led to freedom–the breath that is the truth of what I believe: we are not being interrupted, but unfurled, like the sail on a boat driven by winds beyond its control but always, always, in its favour. So many of the choices I made in life, the paths I wanted to take–those were the actual deviations, and time after time I was set right, moved back on course, by what felt like interruptions but were grace gently leading me where I was meant to be.

And so I tell them this, in whispered moments at bedtime, in tearful ones putting on shoes, in still ones in the car battling traffic outside and anxiety inside, I tell them this–not that they’ll be okay or that it’s fine or any of the sayings I’ve heard that were meant to brush away the interruption–but this: that their lives are a great story, one of hard parts and easy, storms and sun, but stories full and beautiful, told by a grace that will always lead them home. And then I hope and pray that, like me on my good days, they’ll believe it.

I’ve been reading a lot about brain integration lately, and if this topic isn’t appealing to you, then you sound like me before I got into it. I stumbled there, as I do into most things, and the route was–per usual with many discoveries–driven and marked by desperation (see: my move to New York City, most notably).

Lockdown and homeschooling–two areas we’ve just exited and could be entering again soon–left me flailing, and the life preserver came as it always does, in the form of grace, this time manifested in a couple of podcasts and books. A common theme kept popping up there, within words like regulation and dysregulation, integration and differentiation. I found that my brain could do with some integration, and that much of my frustrations come from attempts to go from dysregulated to regulated, or from trying to balance integration and differentiation. And failing at all of the above.

Again, this is supremely boring if you don’t know anything about it or don’t think you need it. And maybe you don’t. But for me, it’s been oxygen. Because for me, lately, the sources of dysregulation have gone from being the occasional intrusions–children’s needs, social obligations, annoying people–to life itself, the uncertainty of the current moment and survival within its consequential question-shaped existence. Oh, and Zoom meetings.

We’re not in lockdown now, just school holidays–which holds a few similarities to quarantine, particularly in the brutal Sydney winter (see: 60-degrees-Fahrenheit highs, frequent rain that always brings rainbows along with it). This is the epitome of first-world highs and lows: being smothered in children and their demands one minute (did you know that Hyundais are made in South Korea and also five- and eight-year-olds apparently need 50 snacks a day but NO REAL MEALS?) and sitting on a beach splitting a bottle of rosé with a friend the next.

These are the moments of note–the peaks and valleys. The driving thunderstorm and the glowing rainbow; the gale-force wind and the beating sun; the constant intrusions and the moments of serene solitude. Less tangibly speaking: wounds and healing, chaos and peace, waves and calm. Yet the extremes, while most noticeable and often necessary, do not make up the bulk of life. Nor are many of the moments I characterise as extreme actually that; they just feel that way when I’m more attuned to drama than evenness, peaks and valleys than rolling hills.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that integration is about experiencing most of life as it actually is: not as disturbance to be swept away or annoyance to be avoided, but as nuanced narrative to be lived. Letting each moment be what it is, and seeing that most of it is not waves that will sweep me out to sea but the rocking rhythm of water that always takes me home.

“Mom, you’re meditating, aren’t you?” The Kid asked the other day, and after the moment I had to appreciate his growing awareness that includes his recognition of my need for space, he followed it up with, “That’s boring.” Also fair. This growing awareness has its own ups and downs: the trip to his former therapy centre to collect his folders, now relics, and say goodbye to his therapist, a journey made with the guidance of muscle memory rather than Google maps, past rather than future. The ups. And the moments in bed just before sleep, spent ruing the definition of cool and his perception of its presence in others but not himself. The downs.

One of my books talks about our “organised adaptation to suboptimal experiences” and girl do I know about THAT. Living life as an exercise in coping. But watching, with time and experience and grace, as it becomes more. As I return to the breath that signifies so much more than just that. The rhythm that is a home, the core of everything, the idea of returning itself: re-turning and re-turning and re-turning back to what matters, what is real: love that shows up; freedom born of saying “no” when that is where sanity resides; prayer and liturgy and breathing that remove me so they can deliver me back where I belong.