Compassion

We give lip service to compassion. It is a lofty ideal that, more often than not, we use to calm ourselves when we are pissed off at someone else. For example when someone cuts us off in traffic or the check out chick is rude to us we talk ourselves back from a rage by being ‘compassionate’.

Compassion is more than cutting someone slack.

Compassion is deeper than considering someones feelings.

Compassion goes beyond pity.

I didn’t realise until I got the responses from my 150th blog post (the ask a friend challenge) how integral compassion is to who I am as a person in the world. I meditate on compassion. When someone wrongs me my response is, after the requisite clearing of the angry emotions (I’ll post on this process soon), to find genuine compassion. Finding that place of genuine compassion recongises that we all in this together. Compassion effortlessly forgives.

Compassion means – to be deeply aware of the suffering of another.

AND to have the desire to alleviate that suffering.

I actively cultivate compassion. I focus on the suffering on untold millions and try to take it into my heart. It hurts. It is supposed to. I try to breathe out compassion. For myself. For untold millions. It is hard.

Harder still. Hearing that my oldest friend lost his mother today. A graceful, impossibly strong woman with wicked sense of humour is lost to this earth. I don’t know what to say. Compassion is all I’ve got. Suddenly compassion doesn’t feel like enough.

Home

Home can mean so many things. It can mean our physical residence, our city, our country. Something can smell like home, feel like home, sound like home. We can consider a person to constitute our home. Our home could be where we were born or raised. The ‘home team’ doesn’t mean the members all live at the field/ground. Yet I feel ‘at home’ at my girlfriend’s place and don’t often admit how ‘at home’ I feel in the kitchen.

Have your ever found yourself saying ‘I am going home for the weekend’ in reference to your parent’s house. Only to turn around and and announce your departure from their home by saying ‘Alright, I think we should be heading home now’? I know I have.

Home is a feeling. A safety. An acceptance. Home is familiar and comfortable. Home is nice. We are always welcome at home.

My son understands this concept better than most adults. Being a toddler his world revolves around safe, comfortable places. Home is the thing he understands best. Yet he can feel totally at home in an alien place, so long as the right people and objects are with him (the real reason for a baby bag). Home is like his bar (yes, you remember tip) he asks to ‘go home now’ when he is tired of where he is. He tells me that loved ones have ‘gone home’ as soon as we close the front door after a farewell. And often for hours, days and even weeks after that. But reassures me that they will ‘come home soon’ – meaning our home.

Our place really is like that. It is a space where people take their shoes off, not because I am precious about dirt. That is laughable. They take their shoes off (or so I hope) because they know they will curl up on our couch with a coffee or a beer. They often help themselves to said coffee and beer, too! If the proverbial shit hit the fan, I know some of our friends would be comfortable here. They would crave their things, autonomy and the space their own home affords, but I like to think they wouldn’t miss the feeling of a home.

I know I am home when I smell the sea breeze, or feel my over-sized glass teacup in my hands. I feel like I am home when I smell my husbands cologne when my head is resting against his chest in a hug. I feel like home when my son is cuddled up in my arms. I feel like I am home when I see my kitchen bench. I feel at home in jeans.

What feels like home to you?

The darkest hour

5If you tell me you haven’t had your fair few dark hours, then you are one of two things; 1) a liar, 2) someone who has never lived. This post is for the rest of us.

We know that the darkest hour is just before the dawn. Crazy but true. If you are anything like me, you underestimate how dark it can get. You are craving the light like a fashion junky craves new Jimmy Choo’s because you are certain that it can’t possibly get any darker than this moment. You are wrong. Invariably we are wrong. We underestimate how much darkness we can withstand. We cannot quantify how much darkness we can swallow whole. You know it really is the darkest hour when you stop expecting the light.

It really does not get any darker than pitch black. So black that you are sure a blackness this profound must go on, and on, and on. That is the darkest hour. That is also the switch that calls in the light. When we are immersed in darkness and instead of denying it, hating on it, rejecting it or feeling guilty for it we do something radical; We accept the darkness. Something magical happens in that moment.

The darkness doesn’t devour you are you feared it would. You devour the darkness.

Women, especially, were designed for this role. We are the life-death-life mother embodied. We take light and make it dark, only to make it light again. We are great transmuters. We inherited that gift from our mother, THE great transmuter – Mother Earth. She takes crap, I mean real crap, and uses it to nourish herself. Nature takes dung, rotten leaves and plants, carcasses and breaks them down into fertiliser. She uses fire to cleanse her skin and baby shoots and saplings sprout in the ashes.

Don’t underestimate your capacity for darkness and certainly don’t disown it. Shunned darkness turns into wickedness. Shunned darkness becomes dangerous. Darkness owned is transforming. It wasn’t until I realised that “I could never hurt my baby” was a lie, that my full capacity for mothering was born. It wasn’t until I hurt my husband in the worst possible way, that our relationship could be born. It isn’t until we swallow whole the suffering of the world that our compassion is born. (There are many examples of meditations to assist with this. This is an example that I *LOVE*)

Something I know for sure: Your lightest hour will only be as intense as your darkest. Embrace the dark.

*image credit

Lets talk about … My fine line

There is a fine line, at least in my pretty little head, between submitting to someone else’s will and choosing to find happiness in someone else’s happiness.

You might need to read that one again. It is a really, really, fine line.

This is a really complicated issue. At least for me. The concept of submitting to the will of another is abhorrent to me. It makes my blood run cold and every single cell in my body rebels against it. As a woman especially, I harks back to millennia of women without an avenue to exercise their own will. Similarly though the concept of finding happiness in someone else’s happiness reeks of the feminine mystique, of 1850′s housewives socially trapped into living only for their husband’s and children.

The key here, I guess, is choice. Choice is what we have been fighting for, isn’t it? Somehow some choices still seem to betray myself, my gender. The difference between an enlightened, empowered choice and a choice that flies in the face of my freedoms and rights? Awareness.

Conscious choice makes all the difference. Conscious choice is the only thing that makes the life of a modern wife and stay at home mother different to that of her 1950′s counterpart. I am choosing fulfillment in my role as domestic goddess. They had no other option.

I chose to marry because it was important to my husband. Not out of fear. I chose to remain at home raising my son, because it is honestly the hardest, toughest, most fulfilling thing I have ever undertaken. And I don’t back away from a challenge. What makes my choices, in my mind, revolutionary and rebellious and empowered is that I am aware of every choice I make. I put my life under the microscope and analyse who I am in the face of my freedoms and choices.

I walk a fine line. My priorities and daily tasks are essentially for my family. My self inquiry, my honesty with (and about) what goes on for me in my heart and head in response to this, that is my saving grace. Conscious choice is the difference between oppressed and living breathing empowerment.

I bet I am not the only woman steadily walking this line. What lines do you walk?

(excuse the late post, I am trying a new parenting style today and it is labor intensive.)

Lets talk about…sexiness

A few weeks back, on my hens’ night I witnessed a phenomenon I am only just beginning to grasp. Walking ahead of me (up the enormous hill that is William Street, Sydney) were 3 mid-20something happily coupled women. They were laughing, confident, natural and oozing sex appeal. While they passed scantily clad teenagers, it hit me. I think for a moment I saw what men see.

I remember watching an interview with Naomi Watts where she mentioned that she felt unattractive as a young woman. In her late 20′s her cheekbones ‘arrived’ and she came into her beauty. I think Naomi’s experience about coming into her attractiveness in her late 20′s is more typical than we like to admit. Until we, as women, accept our bodies and own our sexuality we are merely teenagers playing dress up. And it wasn’t until  saw the two extremes juxtaposed on William St that night that this truth really became evident to me.

This is a post I would not have been able to write a few years ago for fear of earning the immature label ‘Lezo’. But the things that make a woman sexy have absolutely nothing to do with the shape or size of her body. Her hair colour or style makes no difference. Her clothes have far less importance than we like to think as well. These things merely catch the eye. What makes a man stare, smile, fantasise about a woman is… ineffable.

What makes a woman sexy cannot be bought. No cream, wonder bra, shaping underwear, surgery, stiletto, hair style or dress has the capacity to make a woman sexy. Sexy is certainly paid for. Sexy is the result of living with gusto. Of putting yourself out  there. Of trying new things. Of a life well lived and a self actualised. Experience is sexy. Experience comes at a price – tears, pain, failure, change, growth.

What makes a woman sexy is behind her eyes. It is the promise of a woman who can stand toe to toe with a man and make him moan without lifting a finger. You must know pain to understand that kind of pleasure. You must know longing to conjure that depth of desire. You must be capable of ugliness to be that beautiful. You must have lost yourself somewhere along the way to own your self that completely.

That night, a few weeks back we were goddesses in motion. Men were magnetised to our sides. Flocked to our table. Fought for a glance. We were playful and open and owned our selves. We bought and paid for our own drinks. Oh and handed out little red heart lollipops. (The tackiness of this gesture offset by the dept of character of the women dolling out the sweets, perfectly aware of the irony.)

I found it life affirming to see that men evidentially agreed with my mantra for the year (maybe longer):

Healthy is Beautiful ~ Happiness is Sexy ~ Soulful is Irresistable

*photo credit

Love is…

I was married this past weekend. Did you see my vows? It tells you something about the sensitivity of my husband or perhaps his skills as an orator to say that his vows barely left a dry eye in the house while mine got our teary guests laughing (not only because I had no voice and sounded like a B-grade sex line).

Now I have never believed that love was blind, but my fortnight of hell – the two weeks leading up to the wedding – and the 3 days since has clearly shown me something all together different. Love is stupid.

Love is stupid AND blind. Love is actually borderline insane. Love cannot read the writing on the wall. Even if it wanted to.

Before the wedding my body began a revolt. I got a cold. The glands in my throat began to swell, swallowing became difficult. In the final days when I should have been organizing final details (like my now non-existent guest book) I was curled up in bed trying to convince a snotty toddler than ‘Mummy sleeping’ was a fun game. I trod on a rusty thumbtack. I pulled a chunk of glass from that same foot a few days later. My chin broke out in pimples two days before the wedding and the day before the nuptials, the day my guests arrived, I began to lose my voice.

In addition to this, the recent flooding in Victoria washed away the only thing I had my heart set on – purple hydrangeas. So the décor was changed from mauve to neutral to cover all possibilities. Fantastic thinking too, because we ended up with green flowers. Yes, Green! They looked fantastic though. Bless our outstanding florist. My parents had their breaks fail on the way to the wedding. No I am not kidding. Oh, and the power went off 30 minutes before I was to walk down the aisle – while I was in the middle of getting my hair done. So my hair was finished off in my parents’ converted bus (it was stationary by now, don’t worry). One of our musicians (a dear friend) dislocated his shoulder. Lucky for us he was staunch enough to drive to the mountains and play guitar all with a shoulder that should have been in a sling!

My point? Yes I do have one – other than to whine about all of the tiny things that drove me insane – is this; if so many things were to go wrong in the lead up to any other event I would have reconsidered. I would have pondered the possibility that the universe/god/whoever was trying to tell me something. I would have read the writing on the wall.

But alas, love is blind and stupid. Instead I had a wonderful wedding. And that night suffered from a gastro bug and since then my cold has only gotten worse, my voice hasn’t returned and I have developed a rash, all over my body. In short – I am allergic to marriage.

If love hadn’t blinded me and robbed me of my intelligence, I would read the writing on the wall.

Happily married

This is effectively my out of office reply. I am currently up the mountains with family and friends and my very very new husband (formerly my old boyfriend and fiance).

I have a habit of running my mouth off drunk. If you have ever had a drunken conversation with me you will know things you wish you didn’t know that you didn’t want to know. (There is a reason I don’t drink often at all.) But there is a time when a propensity to share intimate details with a wordy flair is a good thing – if you happen to be writing your own wedding ceremony.

So without further ado, below are the vows I vowed to my new husband, not 48 hours ago.

In writing my vows, words failed me. How can I express in words a love that continues to grow exponentially? Numbers have even become redundant descriptors – I think we last settled on “I love you infinity*centillion*brazillion factorial”.

How can I express the love I feel at the simple touch of your hand? The acceptance that radiates from your smile? How can I show that each step I take is sured by the foundation of your faith in me. With your support we turn my weaknesses into strengths and with you at my side I set my sights on climbing mountains without doubt or hesitation.

I love you because you are:

• So strong that you hold me together when I am falling apart

• So soft that I fear not when I need a soft place to fall

• So wise that you teach me patience and persistence (and geography, Portuguese and all things geeky)

• So un-judging that I can tell you my deepest secrets and

• So honourable that I know my heart, and my secrets are safe with you

• So unflappable that I am free to be me; wild and gentle as the mood strikes

• So honest that I grow with the guidance of your constructive criticisms &

• So accepting that I am able to explore my depths knowing that you will love all manifestations of me.

Because I love you I promise to see only the highest in you and to honour the best in you by embodying the best of me. I promise to look to your divine heart and to appreciate your humanity, every day for the rest of my life. I will lovingly be your friend, companion, lover, partner, co-parent, yogini, nursemaid, student, teacher, therapist, editor, P.A, Shakti, partner in crime, coach and playmate.

Tying the knot…

When I agreed to finally end our 5 year engagement and tie the knot, I didn’t expect to have any knots in my stomach. And I don’t. Marriage has been inconsequential in my relationship from the very very early days when we both knew we would be together forever. Since we actually got together after a looong and very fucked up (excuse the French, but no-body could think of a more appropriate term) courtship, nobody has questioned our commitment to each other.

I am looking forward to our wedding weekend. 2 sleeps until we leave for our venue in the mountains and 3 until I am a married woman. Or so my bridesmaids and excited guests keep telling me on Facebook, blogs, SMS and phone calls. I am excited, though not for the reasons they expect. I am nervous, too. But I am not nervous about the declaration of my love for a wonderful man – I am worried that my brownies will not live up to their awesome reputation. Honestly. I am considering making another batch.

A dear friend blogged today about her nervousness regarding my nuptials. I get nervous, only because everybody else is. I am afraid I am missing something. What have I forgotten? Will I get to the top of the stairs and the beginning of the aisle and have the gravity of my marriage hit me like a ton of bricks? Should I be freaking out now, so I don’t later on? I am unworried about my vows. I wrote them in one sitting, with very few revisions. I have known what I wanted to say for the past 5 years. I say these words to my future husband regularly. I tell him what he means to me, beyond the ‘I love you’ so often that we need to find new challenges in our relationship because we are so confident in our union.

Weddings are important. I realise this now, I didn’t when I had panic attacks about guest lists shortly after becoming engaged. I didn’t when 6 months ago I picked this coming weekend –  the weekend of the 5 year anniversary of our relationship – as our wedding day. Weddings are important because they are about love. They are about a couple so in love that their love has overflown their hearts and they want to share it with their friends and family.

Sitting here in my state of relative calm, a secret smile graces my lips. I may the picture of tranquility, but I am sick. I was struck last night with a throat infection. And twice in the past week I have extracted objects from my foot. I am not nervous, but perhaps my body has different ideas.

Landslide…

If you are anything like me when the going gets tough you get tea, ice cream and your favourite song. This song has soothed my frayed nerves as I approached and crossed the boundaries of my comfort zone again and again. So it is no shock to me that I crave it now (along with Magnums and sweet tea) as I am super-fast approaching my nuptials.

The power of lyrics has always moved me. Great lyrics move me as much as Shakespeare and Eliot. The readings at our upcoming wedding are lyrics and my favourite poem by Donne and choosing songs for the ceremony took far more deliberation than my outfit. Such is the importance I place on heartfelt lyrics. I have no idea what inspired Stevie to write Landslide, but I have interpreted it to relate to parenthood, partnership, womanhood, teenage fears, friendship over the course of my love affair with it. Like a pair of comfy jeans or an old friend, it comforts me because we have known each other for the longest time. (I am certain my mother listened to this song when I was in the womb.)

This song, to me, speaks to love. Real love. Deep love. The deepest love. The kind that scares you to your very core. The kind of love that makes you not want to move a muscle in-case you break the spell. The kind of love that threatens to paralyse you. It talks about the complications that love can pose and the difficulties you are bound to face together. It talks about how we define ourselves by who loves us, and how well we love them back. Of the landslide of emotion that threatens to overwhelms us, that we pray we can withstand.

I hope you like it half as much as I do. Landslide, Stevie Nicks.

I took my love and I took it down

I climbed a mountain and I turned around

And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills

Well the landslide brought me down

Oh, mirror in the sky what is love

Can the child within my heart rise above

Can I sail through the changing ocean tides

Can I handle the seasons of my life

Well, I’ve been afraid of changing ’cause I built my life around you

But time makes you bolder, Children get older

I’m getting older too

Well, I’ve been afraid of changing ’cause I built my life around you

But time makes you bolder, Children get older

I’m getting older, too. Well I’m getting older too

So, take this love and take it down

Year and if you climb a mountain and ya turn around

And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills

Well the landslide brought me down

And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills

Well maybe, Well maybe

Maybe the landslide will bring you down

Lets talk about…. my imperfection

This blog should have been written 24 hours ago. Maybe more. No excuses here, mind you. I am open to criticism and may she who embodies perfection throw the first stone. Any takers? No? Really? That’s no surprise to me. But it does bring up an important question – Why do we try so hard to appear perfect?

I am no super woman. Yet so often I catch myself trying to be. So when I sat in the hair stylist’s chair this morning, after only 2 hours sleep, with the world’s greasiest hair, a piping hot coffee and grapes from the fruit market across the street, I apologised. Not once, but about a million times. I apologised for not getting my stylist a coffee because I couldn’t remember how he takes it. I apologised for my hair being greasy because the hot water system had been down for nearly two days and I can only bare an ice-cold shower for long enough to wash my body. I apologised for eating despite the fact that I hadn’t had time for breakfast (I spent my breakfast time sleeping and having a cold shower). I apologised in advance for rudely leaving my phone on incase the plumber called. I apologised for not taking better care of my hair. And then apologised for having such fabulous hair that despite rarely conditioning or brushing (yes bad rae!) that it still looked good to him. I apologised for not being my bubbly because despite two highly caffeinated drinks I was not alert. At all.

Honestly, this was my morning. And that only demonstrates the need I felt to be perfect for my hair dresser! On the way home I was to pick up a prescription for my baby and ingredients for dinner. Dinner is covered but the prescription was still on the fridge! Damn. Getting home, feeling that I was doing pretty well, only stuffing one thing up, functioning on caffeine alone (the grapes didn’t go down well) I realised that I had promised my son a kinder surprise. Epic. Fail. Mum. The darling child was happy with my discarded grapes none the less.

I am calling myself out. I am so far from perfect it is laughable. Don’t expect me to be, the closest I will come is apologising for my shortcomings.

PS Oh and I will apologise to you if you find spelling or grammatical issues. My editing eyes only kick in after 4 or more hours sleep :)

The price of motherhood

I didn’t realise how many erroneous beliefs I had absorbed about motherhood until I had my son. Then suddenly all I felt was guilty for all the things I assumed I was doing ‘wrong’. I felt horribly sub par as a mother every time the baby cried. Every time I winced audibly when he attached to my breast, I felt a failure, despite the fact that my nipples were irritated by a cotton bra only days earlier. Somehow, despite knowing better, I was  convinced being hurt my feeding my child was wrong.

Shorty after a baby is delivered (which is a misnomer too, by the way) the hoards of guests arrived. The good ones made the visit short and sweet, offering assistance, but I felt obliged to politely decline any help feeling I ‘should’ be able to breastfeed around the clock and and keep the house in order. Then came the questions of whether he was a ‘good sleeper’ and the implication that if he was I was, by extension, a good mother. Unfortunately, for the first 8 weeks before I began co-sleeping, my baby was a terrible sleeper.

As he settled and I felt like I had moved on from drowning in nappies, breast-pads and sleep that came in 40 minute stretches, the ‘wrongs’ increased. I was wrong to co-sleep, wrong to feed on demand, wrong to rock my baby to sleep, wrong to respond to his cries immediately, wrong to fall asleep mid breastfeed despite not physically being able to keep my eyes open and wrong to drink coffee. And all this in the first 3 months.

I felt I should instantly know what the baby needed, immediately respond putting his needs first without a second thought. Bliss, happy cuddles, contentment and ease where the fantasy I had come to expect when the reality was was filled more with resentment, frustration, guilt and exhaustion. And that was a good day. There were times when I put the baby on the floor for his requisite ‘tummy time’ and rushed quickly from the room to slam doors, punch pillows and cry burning tears of furious frustration. Others where I thrust the baby into his father’s arms and balled myself up sobbing from failure. The days were many where I barely hugged my partner because the idea of touching another person for another minute drove me beyond breaking point. Who knew one could be ‘touched out’?

I relish motherhood. Genuinely so. But I also ball my hands into fists and screech at my toddler when, after a sleepless night he will do nothing but grizzle ‘mummy’. (When you child says ‘mama’ for the first time you never expect to cringe at the word a year later). Just 5 minutes to myself will make all the difference, I tell myself while he clings to my leg as a try to make a cup of tea. And the times you awake without a child beside you and, for the most fleeting moment, forget that you are a parent – only to remember a moment later; it hurts to feel a twinge of sadness with the happiness.

I love my son more than words can say. I love watching him grow and learn. I feel privileged when he brings his bumped knee to me to kiss better and every time he cries it is a dagger through my heart. But without the darker side of motherhood these moments wouldn’t be as meaningful. The potential our children have to stretch us to breaking point is born out of our pure love for them. Our total dedication. Dedication that comes at a price. Unless we openly discuss the price of motherhood in the same breath as the rewards of motherhood, I feel, we devalue ourselves as women and as mothers.

The end game

Two nights in a row, brimming with post ideas, I have sat on the couch beside my mother and laughed. Really laughed. A deep belly laugh that seems to bubble up from within. A laugh that heals, lightens, liberates.

Such a laugh that comes from a place of deep equality where you see yourself in the other and the other in yourself. A laugh that is only possible after honest exchange and frank sharing. The very kind of end game I dare to dream may, one day, be inspired by breaking the unspoken taboo’s of femininity.

So I am sure you will forgive me for laughing with my Mum, until we cryed hysterical tears, instead of writing blog posts.

Rachael