There are so many lessons here, and as I gently sift through them all, it is this one I wanted to share today, one that I learn from him, even in his death.

Many of you know Dad as Steve.

But I want to tell you about him as Dad.

Who Dad was, is reflected in his last words to me, in the middle of the night a few days before he died. I had been checking on him relentlessly, until eventually I said ‘dad?’ and he said ‘it’s alright emmy’.

In a tone that offered comfort, and care, and confidence. He was alright.

And he wasn’t annoyed, or pretending, he was alright, and he was saying emmy you’re alright too, it’s gonna be alright.

This is my dad.

The loud picture of him that we all here in this room know, is that he loved to bloody talk. But the softer edges of that picture, the quieter bits, sometimes unseen, show him as so much more than just a talker. He was kind, and reflective, and philosophical. He offered an unwavering stable and grounded presence. He was consistent, and enduring. He was someone you could trust when he said, ‘it’s alright’.

Dad lived many lives, not just over the years, but all at once.

He’d spend the day fencing, followed by flute practice. He’d nurse then build some furniture, and on the weekends go skiing or horse riding.

His youtube subscriptions feature japanese joinery, konogan car reviews, airline travel critiques and kayaking adventures in Scotland. He was more than a thorough researcher, he was a dreamer. And I am so grateful that this trait was inherited by us three girls.

Something that I’ve reflected on in Dad’s death, is that in how our adult life we’d say ‘sorry dad’ in a tone so knowing of his forgiveness that it bordered on not being sorry at all.

‘Sorry dad’ we’d say as we’d do the thing then ask later

‘sorry dad’ we’d say as we’d do the thing before the lecture

‘sorry dad’ we’re grown ups now,

What it said was we’ve got this,

And there was this knowing that he knew we did in fact, got this.

He accepted our mistakes, our fumbles, our independence, our growing up.

And this was evident in the way he allowed us to say sorry dad, in a way that wasn’t deep with shame, but light in knowing he’d accept us regardless. He provided the foundations and accepted that ultimately we had to learn for ourselves, and sometimes get it wrong.

Sorry dad, meant being sorry, but knowing that he wouldn’t hold it against you, it was truly safe to be sorry, because he loved you anyway.

Today though I am sorry dad, I’m sorry the world took you too early, and I’m sorry to be sad here when I know you wouldn’t want that.

Sorry dad

We all know Dad was forever a teacher. And even in Death, he still teaches. This week I am taught by him, about his essence that can be carried on in my life, or in all our lives.

This essence of him that could say ‘its alright’ with so much ease, even in the face of death. That could accept, and forgive, and let go with so much ease.

The final lesson, being one that will forever be learnt, will continue to live.

Frank Ostaseski speaks of lessons learnt by the dying and grieving. One of the loudest notes to me in his book ‘The Five Invitations’ is the remarkable nature of our ability to let go, to accept, and to forgive, when we are close to death. And he asks, how can we do this a little sooner? So we can live more fully. This, is my practice.

x

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Recently in the oncology ward of my home town’s hospital, the palliative care doctors pulled us aside.

‘We work with the idea of parallel truths’ is what they told us as we tried to grapple with this sense of aliveness and hope, alongside close proximity to death, and warn out concepts of ‘giving up’ or ‘fighting a battle’. What is life? Multiple versions of reality all mushed together, creating this messy, unfathomable and chaotic kind of kaleidoscope; constant movement (impermanence), uncertainty, fear, ways of navigating fear, heartache and break and hunger. Death. Connection. Birth. Growth. Death.

A big question these last few months has been what is hope in the face of death? It seems to evoke two opposing ways of being; one reality that gives life and another that accepts death. Can the two coexist simultaneously? I still haven’t figured it out. I have had many thoughts, but have been left wordless. Wordlessness in a world saturated by words - the truth may be that things are messy. And messy things like these seem to interplay and overlap like double exposure and like parallel truths.

It’s not lost on me that at a time where I’m grasping and gathering… with life and death and hope and truth that I have picked up my camera and started creating double exposures. Capturing little parallel truths of mess on-top of mess - because thats what this experience feels like. Each exists on its own and not without the other. It’s chaotic, un-contained and always moving.

Show me your parallel truth in a multiple exposure? Many moments all at once in life and death and hope and presence.

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I turned 35 yesterday. To mark this moment, I jogged 35km down the beach, up the river and along the train line back home. I ran before dawn, through sunrise, and into the heat of the day. I practiced the idea of running as meditation; it is just this moment, and then there is another moment - a completely new one.

I’ve been meditating a bit more recently, and found that it opens up little pockets of my brain where maybe my soul gets to seep into presence and I can express myself more creatively. If I try too hard it doesn’t work though.

I’m reading like 4 different books simultaneously and it may take me most of the year to finish, and I’m practicing being ok with this, as a slow burning lesson. Just like meditating, it is this moment that counts, not fast tracking to the end - this tiny moment of not even one step forward but just noticing my foot. It is one line in the book that I read mindfully, that I let sink in. It is deep listening; it is sitting still.

Last week I didn’t wear my air pods on the train during peak hour and I heard two high school boys chatting and one said to the other ‘It’s such a nice day today, did you see the sunrise this morning?’ And I felt a wave of hope deep in my little heart.

I listened to Konda who reminded me we can always ‘begin again’ and I felt hopeful in that moment too. That’s essentially what a lot of meditation is; beginning again. Getting distracted and beginning again to be in the moment.

I started writing an essay on Hope which is now perhaps a series of essays beginning right here (in this moment!). Alongside this I picked those 4 books and a podcast with journal prompts to learn from and to create from. I love a little experiential learning project. I love the Zen teaching of a beginner’s mind.

Frank asks, are we paying attention to the endings of things? Can these inform how we live? How do you end a breath? An essay? A life? Can I sink into the presence so much that there becomes little tension between the beginning and end and next beginning? Can I sink into the presence so much that the ending of this writing will just flow out and a new page will begin again. Can I be openly present to the ending as well as the beginning? As much as I surrender to one moment, surrender to the beginning again, can I surrender to any ending too?

When Adam talks about the tension we create in a yoga pose, trying to expand and contract at the same time, it reminds me of how Tara says to have a strong back and a soft belly, and I think of how maybe we need hope, but we also need the presence of reality too - and how do these sit in tension with each other? How do beginnings and endings sit in this tension together too? How do we feel hope and hold it with presence?

In the yoga pose, it has felt very uncomfortable, this tension of physically expanding and contracting at the same time, and that has been reflected in my tension and questions of the purpose of holding hope and presence or reality in one body too. I have noticed discomfort with tension.

I am learning about what good hope is when there is an end. And there are so many endings. The end of my breath, the end of this essay, the end of life. Where does beginning again fit in with this, and how can we breathe more space into that moment that is trying to expand and contract simultaneously. This is my meditation.

Yesterday I went jogging, trying to hold presence, and hope in my uncomfortable tension all together. Today, it feels like it is a dance that perhaps I can explore with love. Explore in meditation, in my learnings and essays on hope to come.

The above picture is taken in Mataram, Lombok Indonesia, in a time where there is both joy and despair, hope and hurt, and light and dark all co-existing. And here, is the end of my essay. x

An angst feels like a yearning. An undefined desire.

I’m turning 35 in the heat of the summertime, which is soon. I feel scared of something I cannot name. How funny that I want to grasp the thing fear FULL but can’t. What a twirl of contradicting actions and inactions. What a tension. I feel heavy dread for something I cannot see.

I have been netting the mulberry bush to savour her berries, I don’t mind when a bird gets in for a treat. I gently recover her. I fill the bird baths with water one by one. I watch the butterflies dance, but my eyes cannot seem to focus. Blurring motion on the edge of my periphery. Much like what my mind monologue sounds like.

I read somewhere that conveniently, cacao is a natural anti inflammatory, so I stir myself a rich blend of cacao, dosed with sugar. I take a sip of thick warm and hearty chocolate and it sinks me into the day bed on the back porch.

I see the birds. I don’t know the names of any. There is one bird that wakes me up each morning, the wattle bird I come to learn. A coarse morning song I only here at dawn. A natural, yet harsh alarm bell. I watch a bird pecking at the weeds between the red brick path, a spotted turtle dove, I learn.

The call of pigeons is nostalgia. My granny’s house in Melbourne’s north in the 90’s. Before gentrification. I’d never heard pigeons before. But there they were, among the geraniums. I began to associate them with the city, with concrete jungles, with dumpster truck smells and unwanted visitors. Maybe boredom, coldness, loneliness, like a stark crow call on a lost highway. Pigeons feel haunting, for reasons beyond me.

I feel like I’m going backwards. Like I’m losing my brains, my knowing. I feel like I am often seeing something but unable to grasp it, like a faint whisper I am unable to decipher the words of.

I am feeling nonchalant about the birds and angst about my being. I am itchy. How long does it take for an anti-histamine to kick in?

The birds of my backyard are busy and my palms are sweaty.

Yesterday I was on a high, today I have woken to disorder and disarray. It is a little bit exhausting. And where I wonder do the birds sleep?

As if searching for the wrong kind of answer I open the browser to Facebook and scroll through judgement and hate just to confirm the world is a terrible place. I feel my heart-rate increase to outrage and let it sit there, unable to do anything about it. As if searching for the conclusion of the self fulfilling prophecy of powerlessness. Perceiving no autonomy and no knowledge. And so I exit the browser and search for something with the birds again.

A honey eater sits in the almond tree. Sometimes there are half a dozen of them, bathing and bickering with each other. Like siblings. I wonder where my siblings are at.

The neighbours dog barks as if he can smell the flesh parts of me that are trying to get out to somewhere other than myself. The flesh parts that are sure there’s something else out there for me, if only it could be concocted. That dog reminds me I am alone and for now I’m living somewhat harmoniously and ignorantly with the cobwebs and dust of my moving mind and the cobwebs and dust out here by the garden shed.

I’m alright. The birds of the backyard are moving moment to moment to moment. I’m alright, my mind can move from moment to moment to moment too. And this moment will be gone. And tomorrow the wattle bird will call me at 520am and I will open my eyes to another moment, and then another and another and another. Without even opening the garden shed, the birds plucked my mind into an opening of possibility. Nudged me back into my knowing of the temporary nature of this moment, and the human-ness this brings.

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...

When we puff up our chests, our bellies lose themselves. We become pulled around by this fluttering heart of armour, but at what cost? The cost of losing our own gut? Our own wisdom? Sometimes I think the chest puffs so big it squishes out of sight all other possibilities that could exist. Possibilities of learning something new, a different perspective, a warm connection…we forget our feet and can't see another path (or even the path we're on), we become disconnected from our bodies and other bodies (let alone the land).

It feels that we are polluted with bigness being harnessed to power over all.

We risk missing what goes unsaid. The poetry, the quiet silence, the freedom in unknowing, the opportunity of re-imagining.

We risk missing the subtleties that life, the earth and whatever spirit or soul desire we could have, has to offer.

The humble ladybug that’s propped itself up on the park bench beside you. The morning air on your cheek as you briskly walk to the train station during peak hour. The way the last of autumns leaves, the ones winter is yet to consume - the way they bask in the morning light. The way the birds seem to play. It's not just this essence of presence that we risk missing either. It's the nuance, the complexity, as David Whyte would say, it’s the conversational nature of reality, that I think, we risk missing. The ebs and flows, the multi-stories that layer our existence, that move, and morph and meander to creases of unforeseen humility, that we're so unaware of with our masks on, chests puffed, and souls kinda seeming desiccated now, with this all this noise.

A new teacher of mine, says we'll do some working home. Not home work. We'll work on this stuff so we can make our way home. Back to our bellies, warm and rich not with power but with connection, with community, with compassion.

It is with curiosity of what things may be if we breathe into our bellies not our chests, that we may find companions in this being. That we may compose a new breath of being that holds space for seeing what otherwise goes unseen. For listening, deeply listening, what otherwise, goes unheard.

What's it called, this rise of ego from one person's fear, when it expands widely, deeply? When it infiltrates so many facets of this world; from interpersonal connections to inter-political systems. When it's not just your big, loud SUV cutting off traffic and polluting the air, it's what is confirmed and re-affirmed when we allow Big Gas to assert and maintain their Big-ness and further pollute our spaces. And we as a collection of beings can't seem to let go of our own armour - our spaces are polluted with such power.

As I work my way home, I can recognise what it feels like when others speak to me through a voice smothered onto itself, constricted by it's own throat, as it's puffed chest narrows the airways. This person cannot see me, they are preoccupied in protection, in power (in fear? In ego?). And I am learning when I too am not connected to my own belly's wisdom, when I cannot feel my feet, when I cannot see the macrocosm of unknowns that could exist or simply, when I am not quiet enough to hear my own belly breathing, to hear words uttered by someone somewhere because I've quietened down the pollution of my own power.

At a micro level it's recognising my ego, at a broader level it's recognising systems of power I uphold. My coming home is an un-doing of myself, it is an unravelling, it is a quiet-ing as to open up my senses to what is - outside of my own puffy chested armour. It is finding companions in curiosity, it is learning and re-learning over and over and over again, to un-do myself so as to open the doorway to my belly. To drop the puffy chested armour so as to encourage an open-hearted deep belly breath. It is to re-connect.

I want to be heard, screaming. I want people to turn and stop and see a god damn exclamation. I am exclaiming. Something.

Can you tell me what you see?

This day is lingering, the stillness of it, pestering. I am a tree unmoving to the season shifting. I am a tree begging for something.

And there are things. Somethings. Lurching at the front door of my body. Crawling on my skin, creeping through crevices trying to get in. Eager and wanting for a home without sin. This body I call home has been overrun by rodents I never willingly let in. They chew on my insides; the curtains, the carpet, the cushions of my couch. They’ve infested every nook and cranny and won’t be digested.

I sit here in awe, having uncovered this very raging war. I’ve been busy at work, managing these fucking critters. Tactics have included overconsumption to flood them out, but they’re hidden. In the way I keep eating even when I’m full, in the scroll for the next reel, in the scattered action of distraction. They’re hidden. They’ve infiltrated my army, before I had a chance to take stock. I didn’t take stock. I went in guns blazing, heart stuck, goals flailing. They bent the barrel backwards and now I’m really fucked. When did this house become a battlefield? When did this home become not my own?

Today I saw David Whyte ask ‘are you willing to be shocked by who you find inside yourself?.. are other people’s bullets inside your body?’ and he said, he said: let’s go ‘..to that empty room beneath the breath where everything comes back to be repaired.’

This house is not meant for the uninvited, I decided. I opened the windows and it’s walls began to breathe. Open for repair, open to the air.

Let me fall into this space between the breath, where I’ve heard there is some rest. Let me fall with the leaves now. Let me step back from the front line, let me surrender to something a little more tender. Let my bleed be a homecoming and let my heart tumble towards opening.

1

My preferred time, is before the Day breaks. Before the sky lightens. At dawn, when there is still a soft sleeping to the world. With a knowing there is a shifting, a sense of imminent becoming. I always wish this feeling would last, as if time is a noun made out of something strong and solid, as if time is some permanent structure that stands by your side. But it keeps moving and perhaps it’s because it does keep moving, that it feels the way that it does. Possibly love for flowers is like this too - a deeper knowing of cycles. Of loss. Of movement - of the impermanence of things. Dawn allows the gentle witnessing of this moving, malleable magic. Like fresh sheets on a familiar bed, like the first roll into a body of water where an ocean lapping on our skin is so in contrast to our warm body - that is the magic of dawn.

I’m finding traffic inherently violent, but the inside of a car driving down a highway so soothing. And it feels that so much of life is like this, sticky contradictions I’m often afraid to hold.

I feel most at home when I arrive to a foreign place after a day of moving with everything I need, carried. And carried are my thoughts and carried are my weights on life, on traffic. It’s cathartic, in these experiential lessons of metaphor.
The howl of the wind picks up and scatters my thoughts and they spiral into a dust storm. Some go out to the sea for peace, yet often I find the thunder of the ocean doesn’t make me calmer. Instead, it throws my storm around.

I get a stiff back in the stifling heat, and things begin to stir inside me. And I wonder if this is aging, or lack of stretching, or a product of historic trauma fractures, or a lesson on acceptance, or something else…I’m not sure. Maybe it just ‘is what it is’ and some-time the stirred up stuff will simmer and settle. I’m not super sure on many things it seems.

I lie on my back with my legs raised upwards towards the sky, and my eyes have nowhere else to look but upwards too. I let my thoughts drain out of me from these eyes, and these ears, and let them soak into the dirt.

There is a collectivity in seeing that others are on the trail, and also a dread of having to share space. There is worry about the intimacy of this, the vulnerability of this. I don’t think that I’m particularly brave, despite people often announcing it of me. I go on, and as time goes on, as the trail goes on, there is a dispersing of all that has been tangled. It’s wire-y, but there is a coming undone of. An unbecoming, homecoming of sorts. A deeper trust in self that I am often not conscious of. I roll over, allowing my storms to roll on over and out, providing permission to the wind, to the waves, to the warm hug of my sleeping bag, to let go. I let go.

I’m stirred awake as day breaks. Properly awake; I have a cuppa in bed with these ever-moving thoughts and feelings. I walk the dog to the beach and dip myself in the moving sea as the skies begin to shift from dawn. I dabble inwards taking a peek at my insides.

On my 34th birthday this month I was binging peanut M&M’s like I was binging Robbie Arnott books. I’ve heard something is going on with the stars at the moment, and I haven’t figured out if I want to know more or not.

It’s March now, the seasons are shifting and I’m reminding myself I shift too. See you soon, friends. x

The other night I left an event after a brief social encounter with two friends. A chat in public, pretty performative and polite. You know the ones? I didn’t participate and instead shied away from my perceived fake-ness of it all, no longer wanting to fraud myself into thinking I COULD BELONG, I COULD BE ENOUGH IF I JUST PRETENDED. It was one of those conversations with lots of eye contact, big hand gestures, and exclamations but you’re kind of talking about nothing? Those ones that don’t secure any depth and don’t solidify any connection. Those ones that now in hindsight are probably indicative of our late 20’s (which I’m well past now). Perhaps it was the heat, my tiredness, my therapy session that week - but I found myself not playing the game. I instead just listened and observed, learnt that perhaps we talk about surfing more than we actually surf. I felt this growing old on my soul. Afterwards, I walked to my car and drove home, alone and grateful to feel zero expectations of my behaviour.

I noticed I had that feeling, you know the one? The post-social-angst feeling that queries ‘do they like me?’ In this case, the feeling more prevalent due to having not complied with perceived social rules (my own or others I’m not sure).

Historically, I reflected, I would know of myself, that I can thrive socially. I can have bubbly smiles and I can be charismatic. I can be, I know, a chameleon, to blend in as necessary. My expert skill. I can lead, when there is no leader, I can follow, when a leader needs a follower, I can take up as little or as much space depending on what others might desire.

On this night, I gained a profound reflection: That all my life I have engaged in a customer service role - not in employment but in mostly every social interaction I have ever had. I have the ability to determine within a matter of seconds who you want me to be (whether you’re aware of it or not), and I will morph into that (whether you’re aware of it or not). I can figure out how to serve you, naively believing the exchange being friendship or to be ‘liked’ and belonged and therefore worthy of existence.

I’ve been learning that this skill of morphing has been my attempt to feed the part of me that says I do not belong, that anticipates rejection at every turn. I’ve been learning, that serving you in this way actually creates inequality, dishonesty and uncertainty. And, it’s exhausting and anxiety provoking. With all humans my customers, I realised I wasn’t serving anyone but my own insecurities.

I realise the depth of this experience after an insignificant social interaction might seem severe to some. However, after 33 years of performing during every waking moment, I have come to be tired. I have come, to delve a little deeper into the human experience - my human experience. And what it means to be authentic, what it means to show up for yourself, as yourself, and have the ability to show up for others. To be in relationship, not just sitting on the edges with big hand gestures.

This is what I want for my future. To trust in that I do not need to comply with whatever social norm exists (in society, or in my own head), but instead engage with the world around me, from a place more real. From a place that is my own. To come home to myself and meet you there.

This means ‘friends’ may drop off, I think. At least that’s what the therapist knowledge gives. This makes sense, as relationships that are founded on chameleon like behaviour do not stimulate boundaries or trust. They feed off engrained patterns of being that mostly allow fear to drive the story. By disrupting the pattern, we disrupt the feed and maybe these actions of insecurities will run dry and die.

I endeavour now, to go out into the world, in an attempt to be non-chameleon like. To challenge myself to be present in and with the world whatever that may look like in any given moment. Maybe it’s bubbly smiles one day if I’m feeling joyous maybe it’s not. There is not one right answer here except to wipe off the layers of masks and to just be. And by just being I will be able to feed a different story, not dominated by fear but maybe by connection.

So, see you when I connect with you,

Em

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Miley went on to introduce her next song called 'high' which seems kinda fitting not that I know it and you may have some kinda bias, conscious or unconscious or becoming about her or this context, but 'you can be anything and everything that you’ve ever wanted to be all at the same time; everything that contradicts itself can coexist in harmony'  sure is one hell of a piece of wisdom I'd like to sink into, soak in, and swallow wholly. My cousin Ruby once said to me on the topic of the grass being greener elsewhere and internet life being one dimensional and creating constant comparability and never acknowledging complexity…that we can romanticise our own life. We can create our own poetry in spaces that don’t fit into the same mould we see trending in other places. And it can be always evolving as is the nature of our lives. It can be many things all at once, and different tomorrow.

I couldn't find that speech again after hearing it 4 months ago packing down my house, until this week. This week, I found myself sitting in a bedroom on a hot January day drinking raspberry cordial, slowly unpacking all that was packed 4 months ago, and it found its way onto my Spotify playlist. And this moment presented to me, what I'd like to take into 2024: permission to sink and soak into my own evolving being, to accept the constant cycles of change, and to fall in love with that. Make poetry in that. See the serendipitous in that. Allow a space that is contradicting and multidimensional, a space that is mine (and not just online).

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Recently I squatted roadside in the western ghats, southern India. Parked my bike with my friends and found some lush greenery to park my body and pop a squat. I could still see the road, the scooters, the tuk-tuks and the buses pass, my friends conversing on the corner-curbed edge of the road. As I squatted, the wet grass of a humid jungle was refreshing on my skin and the coolness of the earth there greeted me with delight.  My trickle of wee joined the trickle of the stream I squatted on. We each took it in turns as the chai of the previous hillside town moved through us as quickly as we had rolled down the downhill. Our bikes and bodies littered the roadside just as leaches then littered our bodies - and the sweet tickle on my butt haunted me with a new lens. We flicked leaches off our shoes, our legs, and stuck our hands down our pants to flick them from the crevasses of our salty sweaty parts. No longer embodying the sweetness of the surrounds but swearing over these blood thirsty worms. We laughed as we rushed to pull up our pants before the traffic converged.

I like squatting butt naked, letting those fleshy parts that never see the sun embrace the earthy  elements of the day. Next time you find yourself needing to wee, I encourage you to pop a squat and see.

last night the ocean was

the warmest I’ve ever felt

and it swirled heavy like

my eyelids do now

And there was lightening

And a tiny slither of pink

on the horizon and

Somewhere to someone -

That is life

with depth and light and warmth

and for once the wind

was something I didn’t want to quieten

it was

This wild thing,

and it was obvious there was no distinct thing

that separated the wind and ocean

they were part of the same.

And there was this other Lone woman

among a beach of many

and she stood there

in the warm ocean with the wind

and her hair was wild and

we mirrored each other

with a strange calmness

like the earths wildness was also in us,

rather than simply happening around us.

5 years ago I probably came close to death. I wish I could say that day changed me, in an obvious and organic way. But if anything, after the initial calm, after the healing, I returned. Perhaps deeper than before, returned to the well of engrained, patterned ways of being that I subconsciously allowed to consume me. Habitual anxiety. The drudge and dread of the grind. Back then, I told myself, don't forget this feeling, this courageous, calm feeling of resilience, openness, gratitude and importantly, of grief.. But I did. I got sucked back in. With an unspoken, unconscious, added weight of a more vivid understanding of mortality, of fear. I forgot those feelings I had in recovery. I took on the persona of having overcome something, of having triumphed -  which returned me.
 When people asked if I had any lingering effects I said absolutely not, and I see now that I ignored the altered sensation in my lower back that only I'm aware of, that I cradle sometimes during yoga, that tugs on me sometimes, as a reminder of what I lost that day. I tell them absolutely not, as if the rocks beneath my feet don't totally freak me out these days, as if I don't get vertigo now, as if heights don't trigger some post trauma stress.
I realised only last year while climbing Cradle Mountain that my 'absolutely nots’ were masking my very real life experience, my authentic self, my genuine truth. My ‘absolutely nots’ were contributing to my digging a deeper hole in my well of unconscious being, of not being honest with myself. I wanted to be unaffected, that person that overcame and triumphed but I realised I didn't want to be returned.  I see now, I don't want to triumph over such a lesson either, I don't want to have overcome something but instead, meet it, with open arms and an open heart, and knowing that demons will be there, and I want to greet them, walk with them.  And I want to greet life the same way.

So, although I had no revolutionary moment that day 5 years ago, I've slowly been creating an internal one, deliberately with openness and honesty - opening up paths for my own truth.
I am not unchanged, and I totally embrace this moment of remembering and honouring that day and what I learnt and am learning. I am carving out a path from that well and I'm not returning.

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