Holding My Breath
This one’s for the lonely. Hold your breath with me. Close your eyes and let it out slowly. You are ok. We are going to be just fine.
“There is much mental suffering in our world. But some of it is suffering for the wrong reason because it is born out of the false expectation that we are called to take each other’s loneliness away. “
Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out
It’s too easy to fall back onto others to fulfil the emotional and physical expectations of what it would feel like to be present in our own lives. We live so vicariously in our own skin through the people we experience our life with. Their reactions, words and responses to us begin to shape our own perception and satsfaction with life. We fill our loneliness with other people because we are so terrified of ‘aloneness’. Aloneness requires we know ourselves before and beyond the reactions, words and responses of others. It requires we are physically present in our own lives without interaction or touch from another body. It means we feel each breath and step, and own it. No wonder we would rather fill up our loneliness.
As much as the body aches to be known, the spirit to be loved, the mind to be explored by ‘Others’.. so it longs to be known by the occupant. Take a deep breath and dive into ‘aloneness’… you will find loneliness is not so bad.
Love Love Love
we never think things through
We fall all over each other
And there’s no telling exactly how this ends
cos we fall over each other to get to it
I certainly need you
red wine nights and moonlight songs
It’s so much waiting at the door
it’s as little as needs to be said
between the dawn and the dusk of it
How many days must we do the same old things
To get to the same old places that only bring us back
To misery
Your love is a lightening strike
A deep, dark warmth on a cooling night
A walking contradiction I can’t go past
so I come here again
how many days must we do the same old things
still find one another at the end of it
Said the Lover of the Beloved
“Who is this that grows like the dawn, as beautiful as the full moon, as pure as the sun, as awesome as an army with banners?”
Song of Songs 6.10
All jokes about clusters, vineyards, fawns and gazelles aside .. isn’t this the most stunning line you have ever read?