by tashmcgill | Nov 25, 2014 | Family, Friendship, Relationships, Travel
I need another suitcase. This beauty has accompanied me more than 100,000 miles and she’s starting to show her age. She’s been the perfect size though – an ample fit for a two week journey that’s not overly cumbersome to deal with. She’s modern, sleek but not flashy. Practical but with a splash of colour and a curve here or there. I’ve packed her this morning in Tennessee to realize that she’s on her last run home, while I’m leaving again from a place I’d like to stay. Time to talk tough to myself and start the next leg of my journey home. Here goes.
Dear Heart,
You will be ok. I want to remind you not to wear your heart on your sleeve but we both know it’s too late for that. You’ve dug yourself a hole you can’t get out of now, invested so deep in a place that’s far too many miles away from where your life is everyday. You’re a bit of a fool, really – but a sweet one.
You should own up to the fact, you could have stopped this years ago. Put your foot down and refused to get involved but people have this way of crawling inside of you and taking up space. The ones that are making a home for themselves in there now are too good to throw away and you know it. But you could have pulled the plug before it got this hard.
So you need to toughen up. You’ve got a couple of hours til your next flight and it pays to remember there’s a whole other family of people you love waiting there, not to mention your family back home. If you wouldn’t spread yourself out so much, maybe you wouldn’t have this problem.
Just acknowledge that every hello comes with a poignant goodbye. Every goodbye is easier when you’ve planned the next hello. And this is a cycle you’ll probably be in for life now. So toughen up, Heart, get on the plane and then you can let your tears swell.
Every year you hope and pray that this year will be the one you travel one way. Every year you find a little more home here and find it a little harder to re-engage back there. Every year when leaving, you say – next year, I’ll unpack for good.
And if we’re honest, you suspect that time is a clock still ticking on things working out the way you suspect they might. You think you might have stumbled on the best of the best but it’s not something you’re brave enough to admit yet.
Here’s the truth of it, Heart. You’re lucky to have found something that is so hard to say goodbye to. Lucky to have people to return to. If you will keep expanding the boundaries and letting more of them in, you’ll always be travelling somewhere. Maybe there’s no unpacking for you anymore. Maybe you’ll always be travelling between here and there.
Maybe it’s time to accept, Heart, that home is the people and life will be a series of journeys between those you love – unless you’re prepared to give one of them up? No, I didn’t think so.
Dear Heart, you are a brave little soul. You throw yourself into loving people with everything you have and wonder while leaving feels so much like being torn apart. But without this pain, you wouldn’t have the joy of coming home. You, Heart, are at home here with these people. Truthfully though, your next stop is home too, and the next. Enjoy the travelling. Tonight, you’ll land somewhere new and begin it all again.
Good luck – you will be ok.
Self.
by tashmcgill | Oct 1, 2008 | Bodies, Culture & Ideas, Family, Health
Last weekend was the 31st anniversary of my grandmother’s death from breast cancer, a disease that she fought, along with hundreds and thousands of other women around the world. My sister is running here to raise money in Vancouver shortly. She ran first in Indiana with my Aunty Val who runs a breast clinic type scenario there. In just a couple of weeks I’m visiting a dear friend who has encountered the disease this year.
Growing up in a family of women, it’s hard not to associate our breasts with our feminine identity. I’m not one of those girls that gets indignant about propriety either. Just about any pair in the world has an uncanny ability to grab attention one way or another on any given day.
I’ve been thinking recently, watching a friends teenager growing with the signs of pregnancy, other young girls in the youth group growing into their adulthood and all that entails, how spiritual the connection between body and soul can really be.
Especially because of all that the breast represents; conflicting images of pleasure, life, beauty, sex, womanhood, strength, vulnerability, dependence, desire, nurture, sustenance. I think about how these things are both physical and spiritual. Partly they are physical and present by way of our own enacting or being, but they are also spiritual because of our character and intention behind these things.
Could it be that the spirit and nature of our divinely created womanhood finds genuine expression in our physicality – not just in the functionality but the presence? These parts of my body that interact with my conscious mind and feedback the condition of my own self? I am imagining, as with men also, our soul stretching out and filling all the physical property we pertain to it…
So when this intimate part of a physical/spiritually connected self is involved in any act – breastfeeding, sex, illness, even day to day posture and image.. surely that related to the Imageo Dei that we see within ourselves.
I am wondering, how to help with the healing of that image. How to help mould the spirit and soul to it’s new form. How bring purpose and space back to the functionality of the spiritual nature of nurture, sexuality etc. Not there is any healing in me beyond deep, soft words – but there is a walking I can do alongside, and a holding of hands.
I do this for my mother, my sisters, my grandmother, the many women of my family and for my friends. I wonder about my future – children to be feed and loved at my breast, a husband to be satisfied always. I think about life, bodies, spirit, soul .. and I find myself amazed at science and beauty. What is life that we fight for it, rage for it, cling to it… but the opportunity to love over and over?
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
— Dylan Thomas
by tashmcgill | Dec 22, 2004 | Culture & Ideas, Family
The New Family Christmas
Each year that passes our family christmas evolves a little more. Mum’s partner (whom I adore) has been part of Christmas for many years now, but in recent years his children have become more part of the celebrations as well.
It’s a weird thing. It’s not as simple as adding another gift to the pile under the tree. It raises questions in me that are difficult to answer, and creates strange and conflicting emotions, that are difficult to contain.
It’s never as simple as the love that Mum and her partner share being the complete circle. In fact, that love is like a pebble being thrown into a lake, and the ripples slowly move out to envelop everyone.
The first ripple for me, were the photos of grandkids. Be careful in understanding here. I really like my de facto stepsisters, what little I know of them, and the kids are gorgeous. But it’s strange that the first photographs of grandkids to be displayed in Mum’s house, aren’t our kids.. my kids, or my nieces and nephews.
The second ripple bounces off the first.. because it reflects that the house that was once ours, changes by definition when it starts to belong to other people. See, I want with all my heart to be warm and embracing to the faily newcomers, but the cost seems high. My family home becomes filled with people and photographs of people that begin to belong to this house too.. but I don’t feel like they belong to me, or that I belong to them.
The third ripple is when we start to alter the family I’ve known all my life, to accomodate others sensitivities. This is where I start to chide myself on being selfish and proud. At the family Christmas tree decorating party, Mum put the family photos we had done away, so that said step-family wouldn’t feel left out. But inside I screamed.. I feel left out, of this new family. I battle this.. how to keep the original family sacred, whilst treasuring the new.
The fourth ripple does come down to gifts under the tree. With all my heart, I want to include and embrace this new family, but how do I give a gift to someone I barely know that is meaningful and not tacky, that doesn’t appear contrived or obligatory.
When all the desire in the world is to love, and yet love is painful and uncertain.. how do I do it?
How did Joseph love a son that wasn’t his, as if he was his own? How must Joseph have felt naming that child, in place of his real Father?
Help me God, to love this new family and to be fully part of it, to enjoy everything it has to offer and to make my own contributions to it. Help me not to be angry at what is lost, but to treasure what is gained. May something beautiful grow from the hard soil of my heart.
