8 February 2015 - Much has happened in a year...

Dearest Amelia,

you have been like the first ray of summer in this long, cold winter of mine.

Dear God,

I am sailing out onto the open sea. I have left the moorings that tied down my little boat, the safety of the river bank. Soon I will arrive at a vastness bewildering to my senses

Trying to live as a whole person requires some measure of vulnerability. Martha Nussbaum wrote, “don’t despise your inner world”.

1 January 2015. The beginning of another new year. This new year, there are things for my heart and mind to reconcile - this new perspective I am gaining and my faith.

It is three thirty am and I can’t sleep. I want to write a book on how the heart heals. I’ve supposed myself to have come out, someway at least, on the other side. But when morning is soon to break, and you’ve spent the last few hours watching sitcoms, while the cough in your chest won’t go away, and you have no one to tell all of these to, things feel a little funny.

My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.

The land around me has yet to give itself up fully to the cold; the wild geese have flown off, but autumn is still tethered to the last vestiges of summer, sunlight still dapples the land. In my heart though, it is a different story. It has been winter for a long while.

There will come a time when you will lift the ashes of your despair, and find, as it falls through your fingers, something weightier than gold. There will come a time when a sudden wind turns your fall, long as it has been, into illimitable flight.

Things will get darker, but our job is to shine brighter.