Finishing out the year with a bit of a wee wobble

Ten years ago this month, I left my homeland and departed for the shores of California in order to define for myself a whole new life as a wife, an immigrant and an adult person no longer attached to the stories and reputations of her youth and family. Do I regret it? Yes, for many reasons I do feel a desire to go back and change the decision I made. Home, not this new one I inhabit but something intangible I once belonged to, makes my heart ache daily. Sometimes with such a depth and intensity I have to manually crawl myself away from it to come back to what is good in my present. I also know I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I did not make the somewhat brash decision to feck it all away for ‘true love’. Life unfurls as one darling chapter after another sorrowful one and that’s the great pain of it all. It never stops, the give and take, the joys and the hurts. What makes for a truly well lived life is how much we lean into each chapter and how honestly and gratefully we can let go of it as we pass through to the next.

We are living now in the betwixt and between place of the end of the year. The solstice has passed and the light cracks through one second at a time to shake off the dark, dank dust that has settled on our days through winter. It’s a good transition, and it marks our own turning to an inner state of self-reflection, a craving for change and a rebirth of the person we wish to see ourselves as for the coming season.

This year I have now been a mother for two years which is mind boggling. The me of before is far away and gone and the me of now is so different and still obscured to myself that I often feel lost in a sea of non-being. However, I love so many aspects of who I am to my daughter and to the younger version of myself who would be delirious with joy over how much purpose I live with now. While I do wish I had some of the free time I had before I had a child back though those hours, months and year I now can recognize were often lived with an overwhelming sense of purposelessness and ultimately, wasted. The tension of the longing or homesickness for, not my old life but my old ‘what ifs?’, and the wearying but wonderful revelation of what is now is quite a wild ride. To feel this in step with the shifting of the year feels primal, ancient and gloriously cyclical. Oh so entirely human and simultaneously spiritual in the inhale and exhale of was and is, slumber to wakefulness, weeping and carrying on.

So I look to the new year both with a heavy sense of sadness I just can’t shake, and a little flame of hope that never seems to get fully snuffed out not with every hardship I witness, experience or carry for a loved one. It’s endearing the flutter of the human heartbeat for goodness. As we see in the new and out the auld, let’s hold fast to each other and how things we thought were hiccups in our histories can actually in fact be the correct path chosen only illuminated as such once we see it in context of the wider forest of our life’s story. After all, it is all temporary and how we experience our lives is largely impacted by how we think, interpret and respond to the circumstances of them. We are all out here a wandering’, feeling trod upon and striving for something more; what you feel is entirely universal and it’s so beautiful our sweet soulful pursuit of the fulfilled self.

Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland. May 2015.