38+

A grey drizzly day blankets us. Not the best day for going to Donegal, but we go there because we don't really have a choice. Perhaps it will be a bit brighter up North. Perhaps we will be able to take little detours along the way to make the journey as much the point as the destination.

It is good to be the age i am - 38 going on 39. I feel, despite - or perhaps because of - everything i'm going through, like a rider that now understands the horse. Life is the steeplechase we run and i am the horse. I am also the rider. A fence is coming up - we will jump it. A water trap looms, we will get across. Come now, i urge myself. Around me my parents and family look on, they encourage and urge me. All their love and teaching comes back to me. Each moment we live is a moment we have lived. I recall all of lives lessons - their proximity and warmth allow me to.

Be more forgiving. Allow memory in. There is room for mistakes and the lessons we learn from our mistakes. There is no need to be right - or wrong. Just to be. Just to exist. Just to understand without the words, that is enough.

The poems are a great source of healing. They soothe and calm. I am being held by them. After everything i have been through i'm beginning to be able to trust them again - the words, the music. I have a different relationship with them. A relationship of equals. I understand what they can do and what i can do with them. I am no longer pulled, but dance in their glow.

Li Po, William Morris, Blake, ... poets who walk through fire and then write about it - not with ego the way war journalists report from the front line, but with humility. They do not observe from the sidelines, they are the soldiers of the soul. They have done battle and like all soldiers know that the fight, though necessary because they could do nothing else, holds no seduction or glory, only lessons.

I am beginning to trust again in the music and the words, i am daring to. It is the beginning of possiblility again.