whenever two or three

Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them. If one were to take the words of Jesus literally, which, as per my last blog post, I do not (and think it may even be doing them a disservice to do so, given how rich in meaning they are beneath the …

lost in wonder, love and praise

I've been thinking about Christianity a lot recently, not least because it was a very significant part of my upbringing and a source of great joy and comfort to me until my early twenties, but also because I find myself in a religious community that (like me) has its historical roots in Christianity while not, …

there is only room on your face for one oxygen mask

COVID-19 scares me. Oh, I'm not afraid of getting it myself. I'm in my thirties, fit and healthy, with no underlying health conditions. If I succumb to the virus, I'm looking at a week or two of unpleasantness and a fun piece of history to share with my future kids ('Mummy survived coronavirus!'). What scares …

sewing and sheet glass windows

I feel keenly how she was a significant thread in the tapestry of my life, and now the thread has run out, it's so hard to gather in the others to fill that empty fabric. Hard and exhausting, and how much easier would it be to just... not. To let her absence remain an empty …

broken hearts, broken earth

People talk about being heartbroken. My heart is broken, people will say, and I've always assumed it was a visceral metaphor for the pain that loss brings. To be fair, I always thought that pain was a metaphor, too; it doesn't literally, physically hurt, I thought, it's just easier to talk about emotions in those …

‘bereaved’

once upon a time Looking to the skies for the stars to guide you, and perhaps you do it less as you grow older, but you still look to the north star, your bright, constant reassurance. You still know it will be there, and you, you are my north star, my constant, and now you …

Fearful Bodies: on not-feeling

My mind is too good at protecting the tiny sliver of conscious, self-identifying thought that is the 'me' that perceives it. For days, maybe weeks now, something has been wrong. It's the sort of uneasy, nebulous anxiety that is difficult to rationalise away, different to CBT one's way out of, because how do you focus …

Book 4-ish, Chapter 1. Aka, a reflection on the word ‘again’

Oh look, I've started another blog. This can, more generally, be defined thus: I have succumbed, again, to a strange desire - present in greater or lesser levels pretty much constantly - to publish online a series of short texts which are unlikely to mean anything to anyone except me, again. I wonder why, again. …