I have about two or three days until moving out. Almost everything from the house has gone, expect me and my things. I am the world's greatest procrastinator, especially when it comes to upheaval that I haven't asked for. So what are the things that I can't say goodbye to? I lived in this house while my father was dying. I moved here in September 2005, four months before he died. He visited me here when he was much more ill than I realised and I made him roast chicken and apple crumble and he lost his voice trying to hide his tears. This house was here when I got back each night from the hospital. Numb and exhuasted, I was offered food and homemade wine before I went to bed letting music wash over my tears and lull me to sleep. I came home to this house on the evening that he died. Someone lit a fire and we watched a film that I can't remember, I just remember the room full of people held me together. I'd moved back to London just in time to spend my father's last few months with him. It was a gift. I got to spend some time with him everyday, to experience a closeness that went beyond words that we hardly had in all our years as father and daughter and I got to do something for him before he died.
It was also at that time that I started a writing class and discovered how much I love poetry. I started writing everyday on the train until it became a best friend. My senses so sharpened by pain and fear, I saw fragility and temporality in everything and a voice that I knew but had never heard, came spilling out onto the page. I even got a poem published this year. So another gift from my father who had always wanted to be a writer.
The turning point to the greiving came when I started my coaches training with CTI. I'd spent a week in Spain on a yoga retreat with www.yogaunderthesky.com in the heat, eating delicious food, talking, chanting and sun bathing and met a friend who had done the courses. I knew they were for me. I started them in November and came back after the first weekend feeling truly and blissfully conscious and alive. Fireworks night lit up my window with the all possibilities of a juicy, technicolour life. Four courses later and I've made life long friends, I have found something that I really brings me to life and met some of the most grounded, vibrant and wise people who lead the way to others. And that's what's led me here! I was in New York after the last of the Intermediate courses and I looked up Co-Active coaching on Blogger.com. I found Jamie and her Starshyne Productions blog. That led me to More to Me, then Boho Girl, Ink on My Fingers and my friend ScruffyMummy so many other really inspiring women leading inspired lives.
So here's to new beginings and new friends!
The House of Belonging
Sometimes everything
has to be
enscribed across
the heavens
so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.
Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that
first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.
Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out
someone has written
something new
in the ashes
of your life.
You are not leaving
you are arriving.
~ David Whyte, 1997
