The cycle breaks us
unless we break the cycle.
After each turn,
each tumble
we'll see the markers
for an exit.
It'll be our choice
whether to take it.
It'll be our choice
whether to chance
another circuit.
But never doubt
it's our turn to pick.

Seeds or Stones -
whatever you hold,
lay them down.
Let your hands unfold.

Once in a while take a rest
from pursuing well-being
and practice your ill-being,
a time for holding your heart
in its sadness.

Then, when next grief springs up from the darkness,
you may be better equipped to bear the weight
and to use the now more familiar tools to shape,
to form your pain into something that includes a hand hold.

You will then have something that maybe slows the unfolding,
the unravelling that would come with uncontrolled mourning,
something that allows you to carry it with less stagger
as you walk through your trauma, and, while you're no less sadder,
you may have greater access to that part of your heart,
that side of your grey matter that allows more focus
on where, in time, to lay that burden down.

After a while of enjoying
the greens of the trees
and the mottled breeze,
I let the view sink in
then fade into the long view,

After my heart settles,
that's when I focus on the sapling,
stark in its youth.
I wonder about the speckled leaves
and the cracked bark,
then I follow the flow of the branches,
taking each in turn,
eying each branching to each tip.

It's then that I realise
there's one branch
that holds onto 2 severed,
lesser limbs.  

They look like they are attached,
part of the whole,
but the truth is they are detached,
precarious perhaps,
but enjoying wider movement,  
a greater degree of freedom.

Should I release them?
Should I lay them down to rest?
Or root for the deceit?
Leave them holding on
for as long as they can?

Then the breeze rises
into a gust,
and the choice is taken away.  

That's when I find myself weeping.

There's an art to sitting
with someone in their pain.

There's a quiet art
to letting the shape of it
form in the quiet,
in closed fists
in cloaked words,
in short gasps for intervention
and to resisting the urge to intervene
with anything other than a tear.

There's an art to it I'm sure.
But sometimes it takes a child
sitting with a grasp of charcoal
to do it justice.
---

There's an art to sitting with my pain.
There's a dark, quiet art
of letting the shape of it
envelope me, hold me,
squeeze me til the breath of it is gone
and I can fill both lungs afresh,
deep and light in the shade,
by the song in the brook,
the song from up river.

There's an art to it I'm sure,
cos I get stuck mid-breath,
mid-cry.
I can't hear the voices in the water.
I gasp alone, circular breathing
the snot and the dust
and I'm left choking again.

There's a dark art
and it fills my canvas,
charcoal on white,
with a corner given over
to a faint grey light.

But I can't hear the brook.

god is not a proper noun.
It’s more a job description.
Jesus is very different:
god embodied in a person

So, don’t go exploring
a systematic doctrine.
Begin with seeking out
a person worth discovering.

There was a little boy
who was so sad and so scared
all he could do was be grown up all day
(or as grown up as he knew how).
That was how he could
keep wading through the sadness and
climbing over the scariness
while keeping his eyes on the important stuff
while keeping his mind off the sad and scary stuff.

But eventually he got to end the day, and
that’s when he turned off the light and laid down.
That’s when the sadness and scariness grew louder -
so loud that his eyes couldn’t stay on the important stuff,
cos they were closed.

In fact, it was in his sleep
that the sad stuff and scary stuff grew more important
and the other stuff
(you know, the friendships and the purpose-ness),
well, that became like a dream
– and not a good dream.

The weird thing was that
the more he lay with his eyes closed, and
the more he got to rest his eyes
on the sad and the scary,
the more tired he got and
the harder it got
to lift his eyes and
to lift his feet and
the easier it was
to roll away.

If that had been the end of the story,
then it would have fed the sad and scary
and the boy would have never got to
lift his eyes and
lift his feet ever again.

So, we can’t let this be the end. Cos if
‘it will be alright in the end’
and it isn’t alright yet,
then it’s not the end, is it?

So, let’s all write some more.