earthed

I arrived, 26 years ago, folded and compressed, a gasp on my mother’s lips, curiosity on her cheeks, a tiny miracle held on my father’s chest. My birth was planned and calculated, sterile. Brought by morning’s light.

I wanted to leave, early on, when hearing the loud turning of this world, the air heavy with so much. I was less than one, cold and white as a moon. My father kneeled and prayed for hours. God asked me to stay. So I stayed. I refused to say a word until I was three, holding it all in, building momentum in my small body.

Despite the heaviness, the impositions of the world of who I should love, how; despite the severe aloneness that followed me everywhere, the acute lack of belonging. I stayed.

I stayed and fought my way through – losing love and finding it, losing god and home and always returning.

It took 26 – to accept, finally, that I am here, that a great Something, a great Someone, has blessed me with a purpose so much bigger than my meagre self. A responsibility to serve, to stay.

I began writing when I was ten. Loving, earlier than that. Loving the trees, in awe at their roots and solidity. I searched for that solidity my whole life. For something un-moveable. For a grounding that is stable. My world changed often: moving my bearings from home to home, then one day, my mother almost whispering we’re leaving next week. Moving to a land unknown and so far from the world I built for myself.

I searched for stable walls around me: on ground always moving. I thought of building solid identities of myself to grasp on. I was skilled, a chameleon changing shape and colour to fit my surroundings, yet my inner landscape was always the same. Yearning to belong.

I am here now, no longer in snakeskin. I am full of the sea, and my roots hold me in place, roots going down from the spine, into the earth. After 26 years I have found the only place of solidity – soul shaped and luminous. I no longer need to dress myself in familiarity to belong to a world that never belonged to me.

I see inside the places of wounding, the nooks of my body that hold in them pain, others tenderness. That, too, is welcomed here, now. Honouring these stones of grief, the aching of loss within bones, honouring this search for finding god.


26 years of prayer
and renewal.
of learning how to die, over and over,
of knowing loss like an intimate lover
26 years of poems
music making, dancing secretly until my feet blistered
26 years of being a wave in a god of sea,
oscillating, departing and returning.
26 years of loving
and finally
of wanting to stay.