Seen through a window mist dimly

My heart is full from these rainy roofs,

from a yellow-gabled window interrupting purple slope,

sage green next to white next to rusty red,

cedar shingles seen through a window mist dimly;

from wooden animals carved in a far-off land

     now lined up along a window ledge,

     always travelling by standing still.

Though this is just a small town on a damp day

and my coffee is bad and my toes cold,

there is some mystery here beyond the misted pane,

just out of reach of my grasping mind.

I have travelled to this place in search of a presence beyond

but the mystery meets me in a wet sidewalk like any other

and in the simplicity of metal roofs carrying rain down from the sky

– another journey upward turned down.

Bursting into the fug,

a little girl spins around the pillar singing

“Sun, sun, mister golden sun!”

and while he isn’t shining down on us today

her yellow hair and rippling laughter are my sun,

and the mystery

is in me.

This is not my town

nor the cafe I wanted to sit in,

but resting my feet on a window ledge

something inside me comes home.

Another journey outward leading in,

always travelling by standing still.

(Tuesday 9th April 2013,

St. Andrews-by-the-Sea)

My Own Darkness {Guest blog for Reflections on Darkness}

Today I feel privileged to have written a guest blog for friend Brianna Kocka's project 'Reflections on Darkness: Words to Light up Our Darkest Months'...

"Can we even see our own darkness? It shrouds us so that we walk around blinded, ignorant of the shadows we cast as we go.

A Thursday night, driving home from an evening lit by conversation and laughter over a shared meal. My husband Jeremy points out the way I have just cut off and insulted a friend, thinking only of myself. I can’t see it. I protest and defend, explain and excuse, insisting on my own unflickering light, clawing back the darkness of an accusation that threatens to snuff out for me the evening’s warm flame."

Read the full piece here and then explore the other wonderful writings that have been posted by various people since January, each a very different, personal perspective on Darkness.

Comforting food for a winter's day: Sausage and Bean Casserole

The slow cooker is a wonderful invention! And so is the sausage... And the humble bean. Combine all these wonderful things with a few other wonderful things and you get the most perfect supper for a cold winter’s day. It’s comforting and tasty, with savoury and sweet flavours balancing each other wonderfully, and with a beautiful hint of smokiness too.

Now, usually I get my ‘sweet’ mostly from the can of baked beans I throw in – and I will do this again when busyness demands! – and my ‘smoky’ from chopped, fried (smoked) bacon; but today I didn’t have any bacon and I wanted to use up a tin of navy beans that’s been gathering dust in the cupboard.  So the smoky is coming from smoked paprika, and the sweet from tomato paste and some maple syrup, as well as the sweet potato. With locally grown or produced sausage, onion, garlic and maple syrup, and herb salt used to season, I am pretty happy with the ingredients of this particular stew, and can’t wait to eat it later once the slow cooker has done its magic! We’ll serve it with jacket potatoes (baked) – their skins crispy from the olive oil and sea salt, and their insides mashed with local sea-salted butter. Mmm! Only three hours to wait! J

Ingredients:

4 large sausages from our local butcher, in chunks

1 sweet potato, peeled and diced

1 large organic onion, diced

2 cloves organic garlic, crushed

  ½ red pepper, diced

Large tin chopped tomatoes

Small tin organic tomato paste

Large tin white navy beans (haricot beans)

A handful of leftover black beans (optional!!)

2 Tbsp or so maple syrup

Some generous shakes of smoked paprika

Some more generous shakes of herb salt (e.g. Herbamare)

Some grindings of black pepper

A few sprigs of thyme, leaves only

How to make it:

Saute the onion, garlic, sausage, sweet potato and red pepper in a little EVOO (olive oil).

Throw into the slow cooker along with all the ingredients and cook on high for around 3 hours. And it’s THAT easy!!  ENJOY!

The Year in a Word

A few days before 2012 reached its timely end, my friend Joanna asked me a question I wouldn’t have asked myself and that I didn’t instantly have an answer for. She was the perfect person to ask me this question, since she has become good at exploring it herself on her blog: What word would I pick to sum up my 2012?

I thought hard about this as I pottered around the kitchen making us poached eggs on hot-buttered crumpets, letting my mind wander back over the last twelve months.

I recalled our recently gained permanent residency in Canada, my corrective eye surgery in June, and my choice to pull back from some work commitments in order to give more of my time and energy, while it matters, to Amélie. And I remembered the unexpected pregnancy and early miscarriage that only some friends and family know about but that, now almost a year in the past, perhaps I will begin to write about. So, with all these memories, the word that came to me on one of my trajectories from stove to toaster was this: HERE.

“Is that allowed?” I asked her, lifting an egg out of the swirl of simmering water. A noun or an adjective seem worthier of summarizing a whole 365 days. But HERE was the word that came to me, so I told her what it meant to me as we sat down to the orange goodness of free-range eggs seeping into buttery crumpet holes.

Firstly, I mean being HERE in the sense of physically here in Canada. There has been something unexpectedly settling and comforting about gaining permanent residency after more than four years of temporary visas and some uneasy moments of transition and uncertainty. But our new immigration status has come at the right time. It takes longer to really settle somewhere than you might think and the four year mark finds us with roots having grown deep down into this New Brunswick earth, well and truly committed to this place and these people as far into the future as we can foresee or predict. Because, of course, settling means more than just being here in body, but also being here in heart and spirit and will. And we are – for better or worse, for richer or for poorer, four years having already given us a good test run on those highs and lows. No-one can throw us out now - unless we commit a heinous crime of course! – and that feels good.  (Being able to stay, that is, NOT committing a terrible crime.)

In 2012 I also made some deliberate choices to be more HERE, not always trying to be everywhere and ending up nowhere, not always waiting for life to be how I want it to be before I ‘show up’ and give myself to what IS. The biggest choice I made was to work less in order to be around more for Amélie. And, again, I don’t just mean being physically there for her, but with some energy and creative brain space to spare because I’m not trying to juggle 101 things outside of the house and ending up with only the rat ends of myself to offer at home. Pulling back, pulling IN, was both a hard decision to make and also felt like an absolute privilege and gift to me for this season. Hard because though some of my deepest desires have to do with being a mother, this is also the area in which I feel I fail most consistently and dismally. And, apart from that, parenting and Stay-At-Home-Mum work is often thankless, endless and somewhat monotonous, whereas work outside of the home is more measurable and challenging – often more varied – and usually brings more recognition and instant ‘reward’. But though in some ways I struggled to make the decision to put more of my eggs into this precarious but precious basket, I was ready for it: ready to try and fail and try again, ready to actually attempt to give myself more fully to what and whom I profess to value most. I have also been keenly aware of the luxury of this choice – one that not many have – and the fleetingness of this season in our family life, one in which it still matters to her whether I’m there or not. So although trying harder inevitably brings more failure and heartache, there have still been enough moments when I have KNOWN that I was more present, available and invested than I would otherwise have been, to make this a choice I could never regret.

Getting my eyesight corrected with laser surgery might seem too trivial to feature in a summary of the ways in which I have been HERE during the past year, but it was a significant step for me, and not just because I have been blind as a bat all of my adult life and can now see perfectly! I have always felt rather hidden behind glasses, as if it were these paltry frames and lenses rather than my eyes that really got seen, and I have been torn between resenting and feeling comfortable with this. So taking the risk of having my precious eyes pushed and prodded (and burned!) felt a little like a courageous coming out of hiding, as well as representing a choice to spend a decent amount of money on myself for something I would have in the past considered superficial, vain and wastefully extravagant. Since being given the gift of new eyes, enjoying wearing eye make-up more often has felt similarly significant as a choice to shine rather than hide – and as a push against the inner voices that still whisper their reproach. In the wake of my surgery it was very telling for me to realise that part of me still wanted to be able to have regular ‘glasses days,’ meaning days when I could somehow hide, or at least try to! But I can’t hide behind my glasses anymore. I am Here and I can SEE!

Finally, perhaps it’s hard to imagine how a miscarriage could have anything to do with the word HERE. Although it was my fourth miscarriage after (it now seems, miraculously) having Amélie almost nine years ago, this one came out of the blue after we had mostly come to terms with only having one child. So this pregnancy and its loss at 8 weeks, near the beginning of last year, brought with it so much suppressed longing, tentative hope, fear, sadness and loss – past and present – that you would think I’d wish to be anywhere but ‘Here’. But the surprising gift of this situation was that I felt, really for the first time, able to simply be present to the rollercoaster of desire, hope, fear, longing, pain, sadness and loss that life took me on, and not try to wish it away, deny it away, even pray it away, as I have in the past. For the first time I truly, deeply knew that nothing I could do, say, think, imagine, feel or, yes, pray could control or predict the outcome, for good or ill. But I could be Here, Now, in the gift of the moment, and present to the truth of what I was experiencing. And, incredibly, I discovered that there was true Life in that ability to be present Here and Now – even if it’s painful – rather than always thinking Life is elsewhere or waiting for it to be otherwise. So I just let myself cry a lot, and that was good. And then I mostly stopped crying, and that was good too. And I was truly ALIVE.

So that’s what I realised over breakfast with a friend. Although when I think back over 2012 there are a myriad of moments, days and weeks that I zoned out, stressed out, numbed out and was far less present than I would have liked to have been, still I am encouraged that I have been able to be just a little more HERE, and in some significant ways and situations. And I want this to grow. I don’t want to miss the one life I have been given.

What about you? Grab an egg as we leave a year behind and look to the next, have a think, and tell us what 2012 meant to you.

A Good Question

Never underestimate the power of a question.

Don’t dismiss it as mere herald to the all-powerful answer,

Or despise its uncertainty as feeble or unsafe.

A good question is full of life.

It bursts with the curiosity and promise of undiscovered worlds.

Its key turns the lock of never-opened doors.

So don’t let your own question spill heedlessly from your mouth.

Instead, turn it,

Like a hard toffee between tongue and teeth.

Savour, smooth and hone it.

Hold and admire it, a wild bird balanced on your faltering hand,

And when you release it to another’s charge,

Be ready for it to return to you unfamiliar,

Changed beyond recognition,

And pulling in directions you did not predict or desire.

Learn to listen,

Just listen,

And to let answers be extended questions.

Likewise, when another’s question comes to you,

Don’t push it away if an answer does not spring instantly, comfortingly, to mind;

For this question’s gift was fashioned in the ferment of someone else’s strange soul.

A question should be given space

To roam through forgotten rooms.

Perhaps at first it will seem to bounce like a discarded rubber ball,

Its lonely thud echoing against the emptiness of abandoned space,

Bareness of untrodden floorboards.

But refrain from picking it up to thrust again into a cosy pocket,

And its ricochet will knock open closets,

spill chests,

split windows,

Drawing invisible arcs to connect random points,

Until the tangle of lines

Suddenly

Reveals a picture.

This picture you may pick up

And wonderingly exhibit,

Or carefully fold to store in your heart’s chest.

But the question?

Let the question bound on...

Life's Small Things

A few things brought this 3+ year old poem fresh to mind yesterday:
1) I finally found a beautiful recycled glass jug at Ten Thousand Villages to replace the one the cat broke all those years ago; and we christened it last night, filled with water to rehydrate the cells after some lovely ruby red Carmenere.
2) Brianna's kind invitation to guest blog on her 'winter survival plan' brain child, Reflections on Darkness, has encouraged the light-dark motif to begin playing around the edges of my winter-slumbering consciousness. As I wonder if words will come again, I recall that they have come before.
3) As life continues to meander through its many patches of shadow and brilliance, and as I fail and succeed, fall and pick myself up again as much as I ever have, this poem helps re-ground me by reminding me that today's struggle and this year's struggle are also yesterday's and last year's and next year's; that mine is yours and theirs and ours and God's ("In all our wanderings, in light and in dark, you are the journey and the journey's end."); and that the hope and longing - and the journey in and through and towards them - remain constant, and must be kept alive, and are really what counts.
"How we get there is where we arrive." (Richard Rohr)

SMALL THINGS

Today the cat broke my treasured water jug, a wedding gift from friends.

I cried as I swept up the shards of glass.

Today a friend spontaneously ploughed our oppressive mountains of snow.

We were left with miraculous open space, and the faintest hint of tender green.

Today something was irretrievably lost.

Today something was given, something gained.

Today I was ugly and angry with my daughter over nothing important.

We both cried, and I wondered how I am wounding her.

Today she asked for a kiss on her bumped head.

I marvelled that my loving touch still holds healing magic.

Today love was trampled and neglected.

Today love was simply asked for and freely given.

Today power was abused and vulnerability wounded.

Today there was connection, and tenderness, and healing.

I am a lover and a hater, a hurter and a healer, a bully and a friend.

I am control-freak one moment, carefree singing the next.

I am light and dark, good and evil, hidden and revealed.

Driven at times by an inner force of injury and rage,

Love rises at others to turn my small choices to good.

I am hopeful and despairing, as life’s small things bring loss or gain, fracture or growth,

As small things reveal the great circle of death and life before which I am powerless.

I am a small thing – powerless, yet powerfully held in the greater circle of love.

And so I watch the fall and the splinter, helpless to prevent or repair.

I know the wound and the wounding, and the barriers to love.

I hope, too, for the unsolicited miracle of healing,

For all that restricts to be pushed aside,

For the gift of a wide open space in which love can grow up

Like a tender shoot.

Rachael Barham – Thursday 26^th February 2009

An affirmation: on returning home after being away

Isn't it such a gift to go away and leave one's everyday life behind for just a little while? And then isn't it also a gift to return to it, hopefully refreshed and with perspective regained and energy renewed? 

This is how I am feeling after a flying (but very precious) visit to my dear parents in England. I love the fresh eyes this gives me for my home, my everyday tasks, and especially my beloved two. It reminds me again (again, again) of the preeminence of love, and the smallness and pettiness of the concerns I can get caught up in. And so I long to recommit myself to this life, these dear people, the tasks and days I have been given, with all that I am and have; and particularly to commit myself to love above all - to love in all its patience, kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, trust, and delight. The sort of love that my small self, caught up in it-self, cannot manage, but that my True Self - centred and sourced from deep within and far beyond - can receive and live as gift. 

So this morning I re-member a simple meditation and affirmation that I wrote last summer on returning from six weeks in Europe, and I offer it to you too, as a way to re-call and rededicate yourself to the life YOU have been given. Because "This is my life!" Try saying this out loud, with a shifting emphasis on each word in turn, and feel what this means for you and what it releases inside you.

          THIS is my life.
          Right here, right now.
          It is not elsewhere
          and it is no different than it is.

          This IS my life.
          I cannot imagine myself out of or beyond it.
          Neither can any shortcomings,
          disappointments or misgivings
          alter or remove what IS.

          This is MY life.
          No-one else can live it.
          And only I have the power to choose 
          what it is
          or what it can be.

          This is my LIFE.
          It is not a game or a show
          or a dress rehearsal.
          It is LIFE itself, given to me,
          and more than the sum of its parts.

          THIS. IS. MY. LIFE.

          (Tuesday 28th June 2011)

What Love Does {More Reflections on the Most Excellent Way}

With foot on the garden fork, its prongs sunk into the roots of another vigorous weed, I lend my weight to the downward push and upward lift. Though it feels too late, I am finally making space for things to be planted and grow up in this thirsty ground. Roots separate from earth, extra soil and needed worms are shaken off, and the dandelion joins a growing pile beside me. Also beside me, a little girl makes circling turns of the vegetable plot, asking her questions and sharing her worries as she walks. 

I am so grateful Love came to me and called me today. I am so grateful that the To-Do list was left behind and that I remembered what love is and does. 

Love makes space for the other.

Here the space is created by no errands to run, no people to see. And here space is created by a task that allows togetherness without intensity: our eyes don’t often meet but our hearts and minds can, and there is the rhythm of the push and lift, and of the circling turns, to keep us both occupied and yet available.

And so, as I dig and she paces, I ask her questions; and there is no way she could know from my casual tone and downturned eyes how deeply I long to hear her answers, how infinitely precious this conversation is to me. I cherish the way a soul hides its secrets, and then how it unfurls these secrets, like a fern in the spring, when it senses that safety and acceptance are coming out to meet them. The unfurling happens slowly at first, then with growing boldness and freedom, as each new leaf or tendril meets the sun and moisture it craves. 

I hear this growing boldness and freedom in her voice – in the confusion she expresses, the emotion she begins to convey and the rising desire to hear my response.

And as we talk and the relief starts to flood her veins – simply that she is heard and understood and loved – she tells me why she had been so silent walking home after school. She was thinking, muddled, worried, and deciding she would talk to God about all this swirl later, when she went to bed. But, she tells me, it’s like God has already heard her and already answered and helped her through this conversation. Even before she really prayed. She was amazed and grateful to realise this. And I was grateful too: that Love came out to meet us both today, and that Love created a space for us to meet each other.

And isn’t this what love does? Isn’t it always running to meet us? Always longing to be gracious to us and rising to show us compassion?*

Isn’t love what makes space for us? And also what fills the spaces between everything and inside everything, by always going out of itself, out towards the other and down into the low and thirsty places? 

Doesn’t it always answer before we call and hear while we still speak?*

We go inside together, and while I’m washing the dirt from under my nails I tell her that if she ever wants to talk about these things again she only needs to ask. She’s silent for a moment, but the freedom is still there to be vulnerable, and she ventures: “I’m wondering what you’re thinking now. Are you thinking that you’re glad this conversation is over, that it went on too long?” 

I pull her to me and look into her eyes – because there are times when the eyes do need to meet – and tell her softly, truly, that I love to talk about these things with her, love to hear her, always love to hear her.

Because that’s what love does.

* Luke 15:17; Isaiah 30:1; Isaiah 65:24.

On the most excellent way: Rocks and remaining

Two small sections of my dreams remained with me when I woke up this morning, and I was somehow reminded of them by the slow and rhythmic swing of the hammock this afternoon. The one I will reflect on today was of a large rock that I was unable to move despite my best efforts. On waking, the familiar words “If I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” joined this dream picture; so later, on my sunny hammock, I turned to 1 Corinthians 13, that passage beloved of weddings and quote books, to be reminded...

Love: The most excellent way. Also the most challenging way: often so difficult to truly find, then fraught with pain and failure and disappointment, and oh-so-hard to remain on and walk well.

But, I reflected today, could this most excellent way be so hard largely because it is so simple and so unrewarding in the ways I desire to be rewarded? I have no great longing to move real mountains with my faith or my prayers, but there are plenty of metaphorical mountains I would like to see completely out of the picture. It is so easy to believe – somewhere deep inside, though often not consciously – that it is the removal of certain situations, challenges, imperfections, sadnesses or deficiencies that would finally complete my life, making me utterly happy and fulfilled. Another angle on this metaphor is that moving a mountain or a rock has a certain thrill and triumph about it; its removal (or moval?!)  is a concrete, measurable, noticeable achievement. And who doesn’t love those?  Thus it is also easy to believe that experiences of achievement and accomplishment are what I am lacking and need to pursue.

Yet, in my dream, the rock I was trying and failing to move remained, and the challenge was issued – is constantly and wordlessly issued – despite and in place of this failure: to make love my goal and my priority. In other words, this dream task I was focussed on and failing at was not really the needful, important task at all. The task I’ve been called to, and that all of us have surely been called to in different ways and contexts, is simply (and challengingly) to love. Though maybe the way of love has the potential to be less challenging if I really make it the focus of my desires, energies and priorities; if I turn my back for a moment on the rock that calls me so urgently and ask instead what it would mean to love, just to love – here and now.

And so, today, I faced a whole day with nothing in my diary; no appointments, no great tasks, no worthy achievements awaited me. But what I did have was a family I love and who I am lucky enough to be loved by in return (as if this love began with me!); and a home to tend and create for them, a task that often seems so small and yet so never-ending and thankless. Such an apparently thankless and endless task begs the pointed question: what, in fact, makes me ‘something’? And what makes me ‘nothing’? 

To (try to) move mountains without love, I continue to learn, is what makes me nothing. But to turn my focus away from the mountains – either the great challenges and imperfections, or achievements and glories – and bend down to love, even after I have failed at this task twenty times already today? This is the most excellent way.

 

This is how I learn to remain in his love, and I have discovered too long and slow that apart from this love I can do nothing.

So, today, the rock I turned my eyes from was my ‘To Do’ list, and the tyranny of the computer, and the ego demands of ‘productivity’ with associated recriminations of ‘uselessness’; and the bending down and reaching up to love took the form of tidying my kitchen, preparing a simple summer lunch to share over conversation with my husband in the garden, hanging laundry in the sun, walking to pick up my daughter from school, and giving her space of time and heart to talk out her eight-year-old worries. And here’s the unsurprising surprise: it was precious, and priceless, and simple, and satisfying. No doubt there will be days to turn love towards the moving of mountains (can the two not come together?), but not today.

Herald

Raise high the standard of spring!

Hold up the budded boughs,

As you stride through greening woods,

Your skirts lifted from a gold leaf floor.

See, dancing birds follow in your train,

While others circle overhead.

Hear grateful brooks herald your coming

And frogs sing a chorus of praise.

As you pass,

Bare branches still too proud to bow

Know that spring’s sap will soon

Force them, clothed, to their knees.

So, lift high the standard!

Winter, lay down your frosted arms,

And earth, yield again with joy,

That all might see and

sighing

surrender.

Rachael Barham,

Friday 1^st May 2009,

Chickadee Lodge, St John River, New Brunswick.

A lot can change in 48 hours... (and cooking with milk kefir)

A lot can change in 48 hours. For example, all the wonderful people that have made your working year so rich and such fun can suddenly all leave. :-(  And your work can all at once be over - completely over! - for the next four months! You can go from having time for not much else except the necessary tasks of life, to having extra time and energy to do things like... hang out with friends and cook new things!
So, all this being true, I plan to be posting some of my new creations on here  as the spring and summer progress.

Another thing that can change in 48 short hours or less is that ordinary milk (and by that - for me - I mean local, organic, raw, unpasteurised, unhomogenized milk, since that is milk in its ordinary, natural form!) can be transformed, by sitting in contact with 'kefir grains' (actually a 'symbiotic colony of yeasts and bacteria') at room temperature, into kefir. This particular transformation is thanks to the gift of kefir grains from (the real) Julia Roberts, one of those amazing people who have just exited my life, stellar thesis and all!  And I have been really loving how easy the kefir is to make.  Just add milk to the 'grains' in a loosely covered mason jar and then strain 24-48 hours later!

But what is this stuff?! Well, think drinking yoghurt meets sour buttermilk. And, as for the 'grains', think cottage cheese meets blobs of gristle!  Yeah, not that attractive! :-)

But this stuff is a superfood for the gut and digestive system (read more about it here) and so well worth making or buying, and either drinking or adding to recipes. I don't like the taste enough to drink kefir on its own, so we use it mostly in the 'berry green smoothies' that I made for breakfast this morning (scroll down on this page to find my recipe) and sometimes in dishes like Soaked Oatmeal Pancakes and, for today's lunch, a new experiement... a ranch-style dressing.

I was inspired to try this by the house salad served at our local Bistro with their homemade ranch dressing, and which I sometimes ask them to add smoked salmon and capers to for a yummy, healthy, good-carb meal. Today, with all this time and creative headspace on my hands, I made my own salad with locally farm-grown spinach, sliced courgette (zucchini), capers, wild sockeye smoked salmon, hard-boiled local free range egg and with my new dressing drizzled over it all.  It was delicious!  And I put an extra dollop on my plate to dip raw cauliflower, broccoli and orange pepper slices in - still feeding those mitochondria!

So why not give this great dressing - or just plain old kefir! - a go? And, if you are already a kefir fan, tell  me what you do with it...

Homemade Ranch-style Dressing with Kefir

An easy-peasy dressing that is brilliant with a spinach salad or to dip raw veggies in, uses up my homemade kefir and is good for me!

½ cup raw milk kefir (or buttermilk)

¼ cup raw milk Greek yoghurt (or sour cream) – more if you want a thicker dip

2 tbsp EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil)

2 tbsp chopped fresh chives

¼ tsp Herbamare (or sea salt)

A small clove of garlic, crushed

¼ tsp onion powder

½ tsp dried dill

¼ tsp dried thyme

A generous amount of freshly ground black pepper

A few drops of liquid stevia (or some maple syrup)

Options: a different blend of herbs, fresh or dried, would also be yummy.

Put all ingredients in a mason jar and shake to blend.  Hey presto!  Store in the fridge or just eat!

You can't contain a child

You can't contain a child

Let one loose in a field

And she will run, fly

Too much life in the limbs to walk

Always the full charge

All this waiting life calls for dash and tear

Tearing to open this moment’s present

To be present to it all

Saying the words I hate to say

We are sitting opposite each other in the diner waiting for our breakfast to arrive, her pale little face elflike below the new khaki beret. The mad rush to get here in time, her infuriating slowness and indecision, my sickening nagging and unnecessary criticism – these fall away like water below a dammed up stream. Above the dam created by this break in our routine, by a time painfully carved out, the water settles and stills. It’s as if I’ve been caught in a torrent of frustration and needless stress, and I’ve wounded with my thrashing limbs and thrashing words. Why do I do this?

The table between us, the sitting and waiting, is distance and time enough to stop my thrashing and look around me and come into my right mind, right heart, again. I look across at her and see the precious, fragile thing she is and I take her elfin face in my hands and look her in the eyes, hoping my shamed and loving gaze reaches deep into her soul, and I say the words that still come hard, get stuck in my throat:

“I’m sorry.”

I tell her it’s not her at all (her eyes show me she needed to hear this); that’s it me and I hate it and I’m sorry; that she is the dearest, most lovely thing to me (eyes open, soften and brighten as love and delight begin to heal what should never have been), and that I hate the words that come out of my mouth – so small and mean – even as I hear myself saying them; that I know these small, mean words are flowing more often, more freely, these recent days (she nods shyly in assent) and I don’t know why or how to stop but I see it and will try, and I’m sorry, again.

“I’m sorry.”

Oh how I hate these words as well: Hate that I have to say them; hate what has come before them and made them necessary. I hate them because they are so small, too, and never seem enough. They can’t roll back the waters of time as I wish they could; they can’t affect a miracle of absolute healing and oblivion; they can’t guarantee that this same devastating flood will not ravage our world again next week, even tomorrow. I hate them because they wound my ego and lay me bare to the reality of my power and my misuse of it, of my desires and their constant disappointment, and of my apparent helplessness at times to be anywhere close to the human, woman, wife, friend, daughter, mother (oh yes, especially mother) that I long to be.

If I hated these words less, maybe I would hate my hard, critical, harsh, unkind, careless, uncontrolled, hurtful words more? Enough to hold them in and hold them back? Enough to stop the torrent and step back from the edge of that crashing, hurtling, shattering precipice?

But though I hate the sorry words, still I love them and need them, as much as a drowning man needs the rock that agonizingly stops his freeflow freefall down the raging river. Though they are hard words, yet they soften – the hard places in me and the hurt places in her. Their very hardness is solid ground for me if I will cling to them, and a foothold for the long climb back up if I can stand on them and move beyond.

Moving beyond means accepting the forgiveness that I see mercifully, graciously leap up in her riverblue eyes from who knows what deep, clear inner spring. It means accepting the truth that I am, today, not mountain-climber, rockface-scaler, summit-reacher; but simply one who ackowledges the need to start again, again, at the foot of the towering cliff, thankful to be on dry ground and be given the chance to try again.

It is a humbling, praiseless task, this trying again; but a timeless one too. Even those who have dedicated their lives in monk’s cell to the pursuit of God and holiness and right-relatedness (I remember this with growing courage) embraced this task as worthy life’s work and spiritual discipline. I would expect more from them (from me) but this is the age-old truth and tale:

A curious outsider asked the burning question, hoping for spiritual enlightenment: “What do you do in your cell all day, Father?” The old man replied: “We fall down and then we get up again.”

So I get up again.

And I open the story book we had forgotten and had had to go back home to get, wasting ‘precious minutes’ and provoking one of my frustrated tirades and her hot tears now dried. She moves around the table to sit next to me and be able to read along and see the pictures, and we are together again – warm limbs and happy imaginations, healing hearts and hungry tummies.

We find the place where we left the story last time, and we begin again.

“Always we begin again.”

(attributed to St Benedict of Nursia)