Life

Stuff...





Love my rings more each day :)





My parents are in love...





And so are we :)




My husband is a stud.





I knew Camden was full of Pirates!







We love Sunday mornings and coffee shops.





My husband likes making us fruit smoothies like this one:

Moving

I've written on this topic far too many times to make any waves now but still something about knowing that this time will be for the foreseeable future has wrung out my insides.

We've lived and worked in London since April 2010. We've found a good church, made some new friends, felt ourselves (me) losing that connection with old ones, re-learned what it means to be at home with my parents and what it means to be husband and wife on the road.

The changes in the government and the economic climate has for sure dashed any hope we had for really throwing down some roots here. As the fares hike up, salaries stay low, workload increases with the impending doom of the guillotine (unemployment) it's been hard to see how we would ever start our own family and home life.

I think besides my family and a few faithful (you know who you are) the number of friends we've had has been so pitiful. It's been hard to build when everyone is so perpetually busy. For Kendall coming from a very interwoven community of friends who may as well be extended family this has been a very hard season.

And now, as we apply for my US residency it is hitting me all over again that I'm about to be flung out wide to start all over without my sweet and trying Mai, my loving but scatty Dad, my wide-eyed and wandering brother, my chatty and at times pensive younger sis, my bubbly and so strong older sister and her gorgeous boys.

It's that old feeling I had before I left England for Nashville that time- but this time peppered with the sage.

I'm missing them and I haven't left yet. I'm crying but my passport hasn't been approved for US soil.

I'm leaving so I can have a chance of home for my own family too.

If only there were a way of throwing a rope out that could draw Britain and America closer together. I would stand on the shores of New York and call, call, call, home.

Snubbed

What is one to make of things when their sibling asks their husband to be a godparent but clearly has no need for the said one?

If there was ever any doubt that I am not close to my siblings then here it is. And yet, despite my age, the love of a truly loving husband and some times testing parents- feeling like the outsider amongst my brother and sisters leaves me in such loud loneliness.

P.S. Despite this blue tinged note- I wish you all a very Happy New Year.

This book may well kill me

This evening I have been working on one of the chapters of my non-fiction book and getting lost in all the copious material that is now available around me.

I started with current news and worked backwards through the familiar tale of the 'blood diamond'.

I'm not a novice to all of this. I've met and spoken to former child soldiers, read articles, watched the Hollywood film, looked at photographs and even found out that Kanye-I - myself - than- sense-West wrote a song about his internal conflict with them.

And yet, reading one paragraph in a report about how the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) took to amputating women, children and teens' hands and feet (I should mention adult men were affected too) and continued to do so even when the Sierra Leonean government offered them an olive branch in the 1996 elections- broke me and made me cry like a child.

Suddenly the unbelievable cruelty that people can inflict on others smashed me over the head and reminded me that this isn't a pretty book. The things in it won't always leave you with a yummy just-had-a-great-dessert feeling. Life can be brutal and for so many that brutality has become the norm, their history, their face-whilst for the rest of us, we weep at a distance and wish it were different.

I'm still not entirely show how yet, but that's the bit the has to change. It's not 'them' and 'us', it's not 'we' and 'they'- it's just 'us'. That's what I need to find in the middle of all this mess I'm digging and burrowing through.

Help.

Lit

Today I lit a candle and let its small light lift a prayer from my soul to His.

There's a dream in me that won't die. Regardless of what I do, or what happens or doesn't (as the case may be); the dream persists.

It tugs me to wake when I want to sleep and to think when I crave silence.

It makes my breath short and trapped with a bursting imagination and no magic to make it live.

This dream has been, as long as the sun has shone from the heavenlies.

I don't know if my candle will avail much bar comfort me with its fragile, little light.

Dear God

Please, please, please, pretty please with sugar on top or honey if you'd prefer, can we be financially sound so I can write full time?

Could things finally pan out with my writing so that I could be spending this evening planning future books and not only English language lessons?

We would be eternally indebted to you (as we already are) and I would write and write until the tips of my fingers fell off.

In your name,
Amen.

The silver cord snaps

It seems as I get older I am more inclined to dislike and truly resent death. Of course this may seem a perfectly good waste of one's energy when little is as certain as death, but it doesn't wash my mouth of the bitter bile that it leaves.

A friend of mine, Pauline O' Briain passed away recently and I found out when my phone beeped with a new email breaking the dreadful news. It's hard to describe what you feel when someone you last saw with breath in them, a wide, eye-creasing smile and glittery eyes full of life no longer has one. There are few words that can capture the way your insides have suddenly been left hanging suspended in the air- how everything about you stops as you try and reconcile that earth, and all of us has lost another soul's light.

Even as I write this I feel outraged with death. I feel maddened by its blood thirst and disregard for this most holy of gifts that God has given- so much so, am shaking and crying.

I watched two films this week that probably helped solidify this in me. Remember Me and Everything is illuminated. Both of the closing scenes in these films have gone beyond haunting me and left a sad yearning.

It isn't just the fact that moment of death is still uncharted territory until our silver cord snaps or that we go there alone but it's all those we leave behind. We leave them to reminicise, cry, lose sleep, have recurring dreams, wish and miss and hopefully, heal and carry on.

I've been worried I'm losing my God perspective on all of this. He experienced death, firsthand, on both sides of the fence and he is alive to tell the tale (so to speak). He also spent much of His human life comforting us with what would come next and somewhere in all of the riddles and rhymes, hinted He would be there to meet us.

There are those that argue that this life is it - that one day we'll be merely dust. But even despite my fury with death I refuse to believe it has the final say. Perhaps I am being a silly beatnik, but there is too much in this life of ours, too much for it to simply end in nothing.

And so that is where my hope will be - that the one who wept on his knees for his dead friend, just moments before He raised him, understands this grief that lies in me. Understands those who still remember their dead.