Find yrslf

The wild saturdays are back.

8.56am

I could fill a book with all the things I didn't say.

A conversation in the early morning light left me thinking about all this year has been.
Full of learning and growing, successes and failures experiences, doubts, joy, wonder, feeling loved more fully than I ever have before, getting to know myself in way deeper ways and confronting all the pieces I don't like.
It's been misunderstanding and reframing.
It's been love, time and time again.
It's been anxiety and fear, guilt and shame.
It's been honesty.
It's been asking questions of everything, scratching away at all the noise and finding out what's at the very core of this. What is important when everything you thought you knew implodes?
It's been letting go of everything I thought people wanted me to be.
Just be.

I'm getting more sure that every person is a great person.
I'm getting more sure that it's worth being kind to yourself as much as it is worth being kind to others. I'm getting more sure that you should say the things you're scared to say.
I'm getting more sure that we all pretty much want/need the same things, but we all talk about that and pursue that in different ways, and that's ok.
I'm getting more sure that stopping everything, lying under the stars and just looking at them is always a good idea.

What a wonder it is to live in this world. What a wonder to experience all of this. To fuck it up magnificently and then try again. How many times will I do this in my life? How many times will we all?
It's a great embrace, isn't it. We're big, we're small. We're everything, we're nothing. We're anything at all.

I feel it all.

Here

Where my favourite pictures were taped to the wall with masking tape. 

Where the bed I slept on would sometimes fall apart in the middle of the night. 

Where toast reigned. 

Where we scraped the ceilings and listened to Emily King.

Where I'd run to Mairangi Bay and watch the reflection of the sunset.

Where anxiety kicked me in the face.

Where I found out what it was like to have someone you could speak in stream-of-consciousness to.

Where double-decker buses took me to the city.

Where I could sleep with the curtains open.

Where I wouldn't stay long.

Where I wanted to be when I was lying in a hammock on the other side of the world.

Where I slept in the back of a truck once.

Where we went surfing.

Where I found common ground.

Where I lost my sleeping bag.

Where a lady with a dog called Theo took my photo.

Where I felt a beginning that looked like an ending.

Where we raced the tide.

Where the sun is setting behind the hills I can see from the overpass.

Where the stars are.

Read this if you want

To anyone who thought I lost my faith,

I wanna shout about how I’m sososo human. How I’ve effed up in so many ways and caused myself and others pain that I wish we didn’t have to experience, but we do. I I see the world from a way more humble place than I used to, knowing that I’m a stumble away from crumpled on the ground. I feel like that's all of us. I know about how life is fragile. I know about how it’s also beautiful, ugly, ridiculous, wonderful, so full of meaning and so meaningless all at once. I guess we’re big and I guess we’re small.

I’ve sat lonely and quiet with my questions and my fears because I’m scared of disappointing anyone who invested into me. Because I’m scared that you’ll look at my decisions and write me off as off the rails. Because I don’t know how to tell you that saying you’ll pray for me feels like a cop out. Because I don’t wanna disregard what’s personal and true for you. But man, I do wanna be honest, and I feel like my silence on where my head and my heart have been hanging out lately isn’t that constructive.

I know I went away and came back different, and I know that was bound to happen. I didn’t ever imagine it would be this much. I’ve been afraid that Malawi will get the blame for my ‘loss of faith’, that’s the last thing I want you to believe. Malawi didn’t do this to me. Malawi provided the context in which everything I ever thought I knew about anything could be deconstructed. All the illusions, gone.

Now I rebuild. 

All this means is that I wanna learn to live in the trust that truth wins, whatever that may be, and that if grace is real then it’s big enough for all of our humanity. 

It means that I’m not signing up to anything out of fear. I’m not searching for any kind of high. I’m not trying to be anyone else’s saviour. 

It means that I’m wide open.

It’s had me terrified. I’ve felt an urgency, that I have to figure this out before it’s too late. But maybe all ‘figuring it out’ really is, is realising that I never can. Anyone who says they can is lying. There are people much wiser and more intelligent than me but none of us are gods.

We’re all just figuring it out, doing our best with what we know.

Let’s have grace for each other. Let’s talk about stuff. Let’s figure out why we’re uncomfortable talking about some things. Let’s dance outrageously outside the cages of our beliefs. Let’s search for radical truth. Let’s not look at religion in any of it’s facets and make a god out of it.

I was driving back to Blantyre after a trip to the lake, the sun was setting. Bright pink and serene, a perfectly defined sphere balanced above the horizon. You could cut around the edges. But I’ve seen representations of the sun’s surface and there is nothing calm or serene about that. It’s raging hot fire, always changing, always the same. There’s no cutting around the edges.

What we can see from here isn’t the same thing. And I’m sure if we visited the sun it’d be another story all together.

Maybe God is like that.