Being part of an Episcopal church for the past 9months has been quite the journey. Given the timing of this with the major changes in my life, it’s been a steady home that I’d been longing for. The liturgy calls me to participate and slowly I’ve been getting to know people too, so that mingling after church is less scary (at least on some Sundays!).

This is the first year I’ve been so aware of the significance of Holy Week. Although I’d always been aware of Palm Sunday and what it represented, it never seemed to be something that I needed to engage with. The weight and sorrow of Good Friday that combines with the hindsight knowledge that the actions of Christ that day meant my sins were atoned for, followed by the joy of Easter Sunday as we celebrate the resurrection and all the good news that this brings…these I got…these I acknowledged and (some years more than others) lived in. But Palm Sunday, that was just setting the scene for the real action – I’d always just skipped over it.

And yet, I was reminded yesterday that it was so much more than that. As Fr. Jerry encouraged us to find ourselves in the story I realized there is a lot there…from the crowds singing “Hosanna”…to many of those same people shouting “crucify him” or running away in fear… I’ve pondered this a lot and become more aware of the times that my life is contrary – the reflection of myself that I see isn’t always the most encouraging. It’s hard to do the real work of liturgy…preparing the path for the King.

And today we made it to the Good Friday service with the Stations of the Cross. We’d missed the Maundy Thursday service with the craziness of work, rainy day traffic and general tiredness and I was eager to be in a place to actively remember and participate in the story. Being with a kid who was experiencing the story for the first time (at least at an age where she could engage) was a new experience. This girl has a big heart and a questioning mind. As she fell asleep on my lap tonight, after asking me to tell her more & more about the story of Good Friday, I was struck by what a blessing she is – and how much of a small prophet she is: challenging me to live the words, understand what this truth means and feels like…and ultimately finding rest and peace in it.

I have some great friends. In the midst of this mess I’m going through and all that entails, I have some really good friends.

Good friends who open their typical Friday night family gathering and say “you are welcome, any week, with or without your kid”. Others who listen to the current saga and when I’m ready to give in say “that’s not right, you deserve more/better”. I’m grateful for each and every one of them.

But after all these encounters, I leave. And this weekend especially, as the kid’s with her Dad, I leave alone. The pain of separation hits me again – the alone time stretches ahead of me, as far as my eyes can see. Then I get the two conflicting feelings of wanting to curl up to hide and wanting to run, as far away as possible…something to help me escape from this. Who, in their right mind, would embrace loneliness?

And yet, once again, I stumble upon a “blessing” from John O’Donohue and I stop short – letting the words sink in, wash over me and shift my perspective.

FOR LONELINESS – John O’Donohue

When the light lessens,
Causing colors to lose their courage,
And your eyes fix on the empty distance
That can open on either side
Of the surest line
To make all that is
Familiar and near
Seem suddenly foreign,

When the music of talk
Breaks apart into noise
And you hear your heart louden
While the voices around you
Slow down to leaden echoes
Turning the silence
Into something stony and cold,

When the old ghosts come back
To feed on everywhere you felt sure,
Do not strengthen their hunger
By choosing to fear;
Rather, decide to call on your heart
That it may grow clear and free
To welcome home your emptiness
That it may cleanse you
Like the clearest air
You could ever breathe.

Allow your loneliness time
To dissolve the shell of dross
That had closed around you;
Choose in this severe silence
To hear the one true voice
Your rushed life fears;
Cradle yourself like a child
Learning to trust what emerges,
So that gradually
You may come to know
That deep in the black hole
You will find the blue flower
That holds the mystical light
Which will illuminate in you
The glimmer of springtime.

Oh, I feel those old ghosts coming back – they are so familiar that at times I welcome them in without thinking about it. These are days when I must consciously decide to call my heart to a different way – one that embraces the new without wishing it away. A way that takes the time to shed the shell and allow the new to emerge in its time. Spring will come in due course, until then we catch glimmers and hope as we wait for the renewed life waiting to burst from the ground.

 

 

It’s been quite a couple of weeks – some ups where I’ve felt on top of things, with control over some situations, good relationships around me – to lows that felt like they would last forever and sucked all life out of my soul.

I need to stop and write more – I’ve misplaced my journal, so this electronic journal will have to suffice. It’ll be more edited than the written one, but at least it will be a space in which to capture thoughts and be able to remember where I was…and hopefully see how I’ve grown and transformed!

Today is the start of a weekend with the kid. I was nervous that it would be filled with “I miss Daddy”s and “I just want Daddy to be here”…I can embrace those feelings, get alongside them and acknowledge them for the first few times…maybe even the first 10 times, but when it turns into 20 and 30 times with no end in sight…that’s hard and I’ve been finding myself with no answers and very few resources. The words start to feel like arrows into my heart, filtered until all I hear is “your not enough” and “I don’t want you, I want someone else”.

But this evening has been full of fun, friends, laughter (both with our friends and just together) – it’s been good. I’m not naive enough to think that this is a harbinger of how the weekend will be…but I am wise enough (at least in this moment!) to take this moment, be grateful for it and treasure it. Life is built of many, many moments and I want to make sure that these good ones are deeply recorded for the onset of the storm.

I was sitting at my counsellor’s office, waiting for my appointment and randomly picked up a book that was on the coffee table. It caught my eye with it’s celtic patterns and drew me in when I saw it was by John O’Donohue, an Irish writer and poet who had often attended a Festival I loved back in the UK. I flipped open to the index and saw that there was a blessing entitled “For the Breakup of a Relationship”. The words touched my heart as I sat there, coming back to mind over the next few days so much that I bought the book so I’d have them to hand. I shared them with friends who are on a similar journey and share them here, with some of the pictures that came to mind with these timely words.

 

This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,

Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.

The lack of writing is indicative of where I am – I don’t feel like I have anything worth saying…and that slips into feeling I am not worth anything (isn’t it amazing how easy it is to slide down that path…).

I feel hopeless – I’m consumed by grief. I know the right things to say, but actually believing them and living them are proving difficult.

The only things I have control over relate to me – I can choose where I spend my time, I can build the relationships that matter to me, I can invest in things that bring me joy and life. I can throw myself into these things and onto the mercy of God, who’s grace I’m relying on to see me through. These would be some good choices. And no one can make them for me, they’re up to me.

And yet, as much as I know it doesn’t help me, it’s too easy to look at my ex: the ease with which he has moved on…the support he has around when he’s the full time parent for the weekend…the difference between our circumstances. Not such a good choice – it brings sadness, fear, feelings of not being enough and a dollop of despair.

I know the choice I should make and yet too often slip to patterns that don’t help myself. I’m hopeful that acknowledging this is the first step to making the change. I can be beautifully transformed.

I’m realizing how broken hearted my daughter is. I am hurt, sad and a myriad of other feelings, but I’m not sure that I’m broken hearted – my relationship with my ex has been hard for the past 6 months and even before that it wasn’t easy…getting to the relationship I dreamed for us was going to take work for both of us. But my daughters relationship with her father hasn’t been strained in that same way – they still connect just like they always have…except now he leaves and is gone for stretches. And there’s nothing she can do about it.

Now that is something that tears at my heart. She’s 4 years old and experiencing this grief and a situation she can’t understand, control or fix. Last night she came back from her weekend early – so rather than her Dad dropping her off at school and me picking her up, she came back home, tired after a fun weekend with her Dad and grandparents. She clung to him and wept, begging him not to leave. Thankfully I was rested enough to sit with the tears. As he drove away and she let out deep sobs, I held her and found myself saying “it’s ok, it’ll be alright”. And then I stopped. With tears in my eyes I told her “it’s not ok – you’re sad and it hurts – and that’s alright. I wish I could fix it, but I can’t. The only thing that I can promise is I’m going to keep on loving you. Your Dad will keep on loving you. And there will be good things ahead.”

It’s my first four days without my daughter – well, that’s not completely true…I’ve been away for work before…but this time it’s different. She’s with her Dad and away from our home. That’s new. I’m not needed in any way – or at least not in the way that consumes my days when my daughter is with me. There are some upsides: I can go to the bathroom on my own! I’ll only have to get one person dressed and out of the house in the morning (we’ll see if that means I get to work earlier or not!!) – there’s no questions or talking or requests to join in some game. But, it’s quiet and a little lonely. I’m thankful for the dog who is still here to greet me with her unconditional love and enthusiasm to see me.
The time apart seems to stretch out for ages in front of me – yet I know I’ll look back on it only too soon. I want to use this time to feed my soul – to take care of myself so that when my daughter is back, I can take care of her well too. I want to keep building the best life for both of us.

But I’m feeling pretty scared – fearful of this time that is up to just me to direct and fill, and how well I’ll do at making the most of it – and fearful of how my daughter will return…the potential sadness she might have of returning from being with him and her grandparents, the feeling that I might be not enough for her or her choice. That last one brings tears – I’m no longer my husbands choice for a life partner and that has rocked my world…what if my daughter wouldn’t chose me now either? What if…
Indeed – what if. However, I’m not going to let what ifs fill my days – there is joy to be had, people to hang out with, things to do that give me life, there are some positive what ifs and I’m going to focus on a couple and turn them into action these few days!

I had no idea what this last year would hold.

I might have bailed if I’d known – or maybe done things differently in the run up to the bombshell. But perhaps it was already too late, and really, there’s no way I could have jumped ship early…for me, that’s just not an option.

There were some good intentions last year of documenting my journey – the goal was to become someone happy in my own skin. I filled my life with a lot of activity – much of it good – but took little time to contemplate and invest in relationships…and certainly left little time for writing.

It was a tough year at work and possibly the toughest year on my marriage, which is set to become an ex in the first part of this year. In hoping that I’d find what I needed to dig into inner happiness I was faced with the statement that my husband felt he could no longer be happy with me and wanted out – the bombshell. I couldn’t breathe when he first said that, and even now that phrase “I don’t think I can be happy with you” is like a knife in my heart.

So this next year is going to be the end of what I thought would be the rest of my life. That’s a hard thing to accept – there’s a lot of grief there and plenty of opportunities to look back and wonder “what if”. I know I need to grieve and that it will take time to walk through this. I’m hopeful that there’s a more beautiful story waiting to be written – more adventures that have not yet been imagined – and that I can keep the “if only I’d”s to a minimum.

I start this new year with a great deal of fear and trepidation as to these next months – I want to be able to jump ahead, skip the work of transformation and the pain that invariably goes with change. But there’s also a grain of faith – and if all it takes is a mustard seed of faith to move a mountain, then maybe I’ve got a chance to become beautifully transformed.

It’s a “new year”…so a good a time as any for trying something new.  I can too easily get stuck inside my own head, with familiar soundtracks playing and the never-ending over-anaylysis.  I’d like to take a break from that and I’m reminded that once the words come out there’s a little more space – the crazy monsters deflate (though most of the time don’t completely disappear, but I’ll take smaller) and I feel like I can maybe wriggle free.  So, please pardon the self indulgence, but this is my space to look at my life, and it’s gotta start where I’m at though hopefully it’ll grow and expand.

And so it happens…I’m on this journey of life and I look around and wonder how I got here.  Some things are great, some things are challenging and then there are others that I’m not sure how they got a seat in this vehicle.  As I look at those last guests I have to remind myself that I’m a work in progress, a not yet become, and that the becoming will continue as long as I have faith and keep moving.

Recently I had to stop and look hard at those unwelcome guests – they were bringing me down and stealing the joy from the journey.  They were never happy with where we were, always looked for the worst in people and were no fun to have around.  But I couldn’t seem to shake them…apparently I’d invited them along at SOME point in time.  So I stopped and asked for help.  I had to – they’d started to affect those around me that I love.

It’s only been a first step, and at times it doesn’t seem like it’s taken me very far, but I remind myself today that it is a step, which is the only way to start moving.  And the title for this blog came out of one of the first sessions I had – beautifully transformed – that seems like such a glorious, safe, wonderful place.  And, by the grace of God and doing my own work too, I hope to arrive there…at the place where I am being transformed.  It’s a journey, a process and this day is a chance to participate in it.