Before The Storm
7 Hail Marys to be repeated every sunset whilst consuming a handful of dust..
Dear Reader,
It has been many months since my last confession. The ability to write often eludes me through these extraordinarily tumultuous times.
The menopausal journey continues her deep work and the last year or so has found me clawing tentatively, like a handless maiden, out of the earth, away from the depths of transitional death, towards the promised new life.
Not an easy resurrection, I find myself wandering the forest blindly, brain fog sending me spinning in circles - have I been down this path before? Is this vista deja vu or a scene from a past life?
Adamant one moment that an event absolutely did not happen - those words were never uttered - even as rusty cogs whirr into slow motion action, tentatively using up energy begrudgingly siphoned away from the vital task of transition; and the next moment re membering, ah, yes, that incident might well have taken place; hmmm, yes, I most likely did say that!
It can be difficult to concentrate thought into a plan of any coherence yet something bold leads me onwards, something old yet new, borrowed from a parallel dimension perhaps, and I cling onto a deep intuition, growing fractionally clearer every day.
Like the strange echo that emerges when we submerge into water, voices from past lives; cheerleading ancestors; ghosts attached to places; the precisely placed words of others (heard or read); curiously translated whispers of nature; and my own true voice - hidden for the intensely lonely decades in which I chose survival over authenticity - rise to the surface and I know now that loneliness is only a projected figment of fearful imagination.
Yay, though I stumble through brambles and slip into muddy banks, yet I somehow carry full assurance that the right paths will appear in time.
There is a sense of safety that I’ve not felt since the freedom days of early childhood when the cloak of assumption that the grownups in your life will always look after and protect you, remained intact.
There are discovered photographs of my siblings and I cradled around my dad, huge grins on our faces, contented smiles and playful grimaces. And the idea of my mother behind the lens, taking the opportunity to capture such beautiful, care free moments on camera, blows my mind.
Back then, we were unaware that despite the cosy comfort we relished in, the threat of stormy weather hovered quietly in the background.