Transcendent Existence

Shhhh! She is travelling between worlds right now. You can see her holding the tension of not knowing ~ she is simply breathing into her unanswered questions. Sometimes she drinks her coffee with quaking hands, not knowing where her relationship or her bank account is going.

But this time, she is holding on to the tension of not knowing, and is not willing to hit the panic button. She is unlearning thousands of years of conditioning. She is not being split between the opposing forces of fight and flight.

She is neither naïve nor ignorant. She is a frontier woman, paving new roads & making new choices.

She is willing to making a new transcendent possibility emerge. You may see her now ~ standing at thresholds, or at crossroads ~ breathing into her body ~ intently listening for inner signals. She's learning new navigation skills as she arrives at a most magical moment of her life.

No Heroic Quips. Just Do Better than Me

I wasn’t awesome today.
Please do better than me.

Today is the babies “half birthday’ (six months) and we decided we’d celebrate by eating out for dinner at our favorite restaurant.
I was teasing my son (quadriplegic with cerebral palsy/autistic), playing, and he was being his cheeky self right back at me. Laughing and quipping, it got a little noisy.
That was until a young woman sitting at the next table said loudly, with intent to be overheard, to her friends,

“Maybe she should shut her stupid retard up!”

We all fell into a silence, smarting with shock.
I looked across at Jack. His head had dropped. All of his animation, his light, his laughter was extinguished. His gentle gaze was into his lap when he quietly said the worst thing he could of possibly said,

“I’m sorry, Mum.”

I cancelled our orders and we left.

I didn’t throw a heroic quip at the girl. I didn’t insult her. I didn’t even look at the table. In fact I accidentally ran Jack’s wheelchair into the doorframe as we were leaving because I couldn’t see through the tears pouring down my face.

No matter how much you think you know it, unless you live with a child with special needs you don’t know how hard it is. How complex and difficult it can be. How much a thoughtless,  ego-driven line like that girl’s will decay my son’s confidence. Jack and I live this journey, 24/7.

Its hard.

I’m not sharing this with you for sympathy.

I’m sharing this because I have an awesome community of friends on here.
You are, each and every one, awesome.
So please, do better than me:

when you’re out amongst life, be awesome.

And now we can say "Merry Christmas"

In the pressurised crescendo to the big day, it can be all too easy to forget what Christmas is really all about. As diverse as our populous is, so is the cause and celebration of Christmas Day for each us. And yet, despite in some cases extreme differences about what it means to each individual, if we but take a little time to see, there is still a point of commonality for all of us...

We were forced to do it. We had to brave a major shopping centre, a few days before Christmas to grab some last minute items. The sweat, the throngs of desperation, the madness, the accelerated mental fatigue, the tantrums, the social ineptitude birthing from utter self-centredness in the fight for retail survival... And the crowds would be there too.

Our schedules being our schedules (never dull) it had unfolded that the kids would need to come with me. Five kids, identical twin baby girls in tandem stroller, two tween daughters, one autistic and wheelchair dependant teenaged son, its never an easy journey Christmas crowds aside.
Amid reminders of, "Best behaviour, guys. Let's stick together. We're in the last few days now. You don't want to blow it and hit the naughty list in the last minute!" Their protests fell on my ears deafened by the pulsing ebb of impending throngs as the automatic doors drew back, sucking us inward...

Within forty meters of entry, my nine year old daughter cops a stroller running into her ankle from the side, with the hostile father pushing the stroller hissing at her, "Watch out!".
Shoving powered wheelchair into his path and halting his progress entirely, I caught his eye, "I believe you meant to say, "I'm sorry. Are you ok?"." The now crippled nine year old sitting on her brother's lap on the power-chair, we moved onward...

Entering the depths, I lead the troops into the belly of nonsensical purchasing: The market.
More would follow that first hostile stroller incident, subjecting us to complaints of "taking up the whole moving walkway with the wheelchair" (how inconvenient of us!), a fearless four year old slapping my eleven year old daughter for holding the last pink ball, minor tantrums from my gang when Mum refused to purchase another DSI so "we don't have to share" (where am I going wrong?) and Jack blatantly taking advantage of his disability to barge in, completely jumping the waiting queue, to speak to Santa with the announcement of "Santa, thank goodness! I've needed to talk to you..." And once again, as happens every single year, Santa looked at my kids, looked at me and said, "Are these all your kids?" (who else would work this hard, I ask you?!)

Eventually we made it to the back of a four-deep crowd queuing at the butcher. People were yelling across the counter with items of meat and money flowing back and forth in rapid succession. Chatting with the gang (the kids) as we waited our turn, it took me some time to realise the crowd was laterally shoving one another but not progressing, the atmosphere frazzled, feet were tapping impatiently.
At the counter was a gentle lady, somewhere around the eighty-year-old mark, leaning heavily on her walking frame and trying to be heard over the counter that towered well above her. 
She was trying to buy a piece of corned beef for Christmas Day.

Her frail but friendly voice called, "Could you please weigh that for me? Tell me how much it might be..." the piece the butcher held was not much larger than an apple . However upon weighing it was apparently far too expensive.
She asked, "Do you have a smaller piece?" 
The butcher procured a piece barely palm sized. But alas again, with a slow and sad glance in her purse, it was too costly...
"Could you cut it for me please?"...

My daughter Colby, all heart, grabbed desperately at my hand pleading, "Mum, we have to do something! Can we give her some money? Please!"
"How can we do it, Col, without making her uncomfortable?" All of us huddled, three of us rapidly whispering different theories of how we could help this lovely lady without embarrassing her. Jack, my son, however wasn't sharing and instead kept saying, "Give me the money, Mum. Give it to Jack!", grappling at my hand with his clammy, cerebral palsy grip.
The crowd was shuffling, impatient, blatantly rude...To keep Jack settled I handed him the $50 note that we were still busily plotting to drop in the lady's bag somehow.
The crowd's muttering started to become decorated with audible baubles of "Ouch!", "Oh, excuse me." and "Oh, sorry, mate." A perceptible shift that tells me my son is on the move. I looked up to see Jack guiding his wheelchair through the crowd, ramming whoever would thwart his path (something he never does!) bee-lining for this frail little lady.
"Can I help you?" a voice called. It was our turn at the counter.
I smiled, "Please! First of all, I'd like to..." I began using Jack's distraction to my advantage.

The sweet lady only noticed Jack once he was right beside her.
"Excuse me, " he said to her, and with that Jack smile and a huge amount of effort he raised his quadriplegic  affected arm grasping the $50 note, "This is yours."
"Oh no, it couldn't be..." she protested.
He interrupted, "No, it is yours. It is. Please take it."
She stared at him, then looked about the now silenced, watching crowd.
"Please." Jack said again, "It hurts to hold my arm like this."
She tentatively took the $50.
He smiled and cheerily called, "And now you say "Merry Christmas Jack!""
Her voice shaky, her hand trembling, she said, "Oh yes, yes. Merry Christmas, Jack." Then to the crowd, "Did...did someone drop this?" And the crowd all smiling, shaking their heads, murmuring utterings of "saw you drop it", "sure its yours".
I sidled over, grabbed the handle of my boy's chair and we quietly made our way through the gathering.
We were moving away when the butcher called over the counter to her,
"Here's your corned beef, ma'am.", handing her a large parcel of corned beef. As she again began to protest he went on, "No charge. Already paid for. Merry Christmas, Love!"

Well clear of the butcher's queue, safely camouflaged in the moving crowd, we turned to glance back. This lovely lady was softly crying, happy, the flow of her tears coursing the face of a life well lived. Several people from the once impatient and hostile crowd, strangers, taking time, warmly and gently comforting her.

We all looked upon the image from our distance and a quiet whisper came up from the wheelchair beside me as he looked on,

"And now you say "Merry Christmas"." 

“I am eternally, devastatingly romantic..."

“I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, 
and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ 
It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, 
the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.”                                                                                                                               Catherine Breillat

I Am The Empowered Woman

The Empowered Woman, 

she moves through the world with a sense of confidence and grace.

Her once reckless spirit now tempered by wisdom.

Quietly, yet firmly, she speaks her truth without doubt or hesitation

and the life she leads is of her own creation.

She now understands what it means to live and let live.

How much to ask for herself and how much to give.

She has a strong, yet generous heart

and the inner beauty she emanates truly sets her apart.

Like the mythical Phoenix,

she has risen from the ashes and soared to a new plane of existence,

unfettered by the things that once posed such resistance.

Her senses now heightened, she sees everything so clearly.

She hears the wind rustling through the trees;

beckoning her to live the dreams she holds so dearly.

She feels the softness of her hands

and muses at the strength that they possess.

Her needs and desires she has learned to express.

She has tasted the bitter and savoured the sweet fruits of life,

overcome adversity and pushed past heartache and strife.

And the one thing she never understood,

she now knows to be true,

it all begins and ends with You.

              ༺♥༻                                              Sonny Carroll 

An RWE Favorite

A Sacred Choral

Let our dance of dimensional chords immortal 
penetrate this presence,
a sensual intensity sculpted amid the colours of the sound
caressing the hold on the soul forever.

With his mystic immensity 
the gentility
and passion designing each note;
we transit every vascular flow
of this sacred language intangible.

Our love in this realm made possible
in tone and in rhythm,
abandoning fears and costumes,
giving priority to shared tenderness and passion.

Let us write our song, beloved,
as a romance never before heard,
lest cruel neglect
transpires to end our Love.

MHH 2012