Gypsy mistrel adventurers

You never think it will happen somewhere as banal as a supermarket queue, this self-acceptance thing, but it does. It happens when you’re standing there in rolled up jeans and a holey jumper with chipped nail polish and hair all awry behind the perfect woman, who on a Sunday afternoon is turned out immaculately with perfect makeup and blow dried hair and an outfit that could come straight from the pages of Cosmo and you don’t feel like any less of a person for it.

I’m not a woman who wears heels and skirts and who spends time curling her hair. I roll out of bed into the nearest thing I can find, twist my hair out of the way because I can’t be bothered brushing it when I know it’ll be a tangled mess in half an hour anyway and power into the day. I’m cool with that.

I’ve got chipped nail polish and my fingers and my toes don’t match … and often my socks don’t match and I forget to do the washing until I run out of clothes. I have holes in my socks and holes in my shoes and perpetually have wet feet. I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head where my keys are or if I did the thing you asked me to. The best answer you’re going to get is probably. Deal with it.

I have piles of half-read books all over the place and socks down the back of the sofa from all the times I fell asleep and forgot to get up and go to bed. I push myself beyond the bounds of human endeavour and then crash for days. I couldn’t tell you the time but I could tell you a story. Perhaps about the time I went on holiday to Morocco and got propositioned halfway up a cliff. It’s okay. It’s just how I’m made.

Yes, I talk in metaphors and allegory and quite often round and round in cirlces until I can’t even remember where the starting point was let alone where I’m headed. I’m a dreamer, a creator, a storyteller. It’s my job to have unrealistic aspirations. It’s built-in contingency for making dreams come true. I’m a pragmatist too if you’d only listen.

I’m a wandering half-breed, gypsy mistrel adventurer. The horizons call to me and the winds whisper and sometimes I dream I can hear the strains of music from far distant shores that are carried in with it. I don’t rightly believe in home. I’ve never been anchored anywhere long enough to justify the title. Instead I consider myself at home when I’m immersed in the journey, when the possibilities are endless and that glorious horizon’s there, just waiting for me. I’m not powerfully driven by stuff. I don’t mind small spaces and attic rooms.I don’t need more than that and that’s okay too.

It began when you called me from the place where dreams and waking meet, unknowing of the words that issued from your tongue. You are ignorant of what formed at your request, of the connections that were forged, of your intention in the moment of creation. Did you call for redemption or temptation; am I an angel or a demon?

There in the half-light, in the shadows between day and night when nothing is as it seems, you laid me down, laid your lips on mine and still I don’t know if this is death or awakening. I am undefined by definition for my edges lie in shadow, unseen. Still, do you know who you called?

You spoke in whispers and tongues and thoughts. You traced an identity onto my body through love and I lie branded invisibly with the marks of my lover’s touch. It was art and love that made this, that defined this, that called power-to-power and settled in a yearning soul that could not be sated.

I DEMAND and you answer me; heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind. I hear the echo of you in my mind when I cannot touch you. Each moment together is imbued with a visceral intensity, countered only by the emptiness that rings with the imprint of your absence.

This began as something else, something bigger but it morphed and transformed and somehow became smaller, more accessible, more tangible … it became ME. Because transformation is where I’m at right now. It’s a whirlwind that picked me up in 2006 and said “Here it begins”. And it began, and since then, it’s been whirling and changing and I with it until I am more than a sum of my parts, until I have become something other. I am now the diamond to the carbon I was… changed beyond recognition, the vast unbearable pressures of six years making me stronger and more brilliant than I could ever have dreamed, yet of the same foundation.

In six years, I have journeyed to a place beyond fear. I have walked, willingly and blindfolded, into each and every circle of hell. We have explored the insides of each other and it has stripped me bare, until I have only one fear remaining: a fear of not doing it, a fear of restlessly remaining, a fear of BEING LESS. And now fear has gone, faith remains. Faith in myself, faith in something bigger than myself, faith in destiny, in work, in passion and in my right to want more.

It won’t be easy, I know. I’ll fall down and land with bloody gritted knees, I will awaken to days that overwhelm my heart with grey, there will be days where I will need armour to fight my way into the world. I have FAITH I will pull myself back up. I have FAITH that light will come and I have FAITH that life will fight to help me carve my place in it. And I will do these things because I know the alternative is to not do these things, to stand by and let them go and that is worse.

I’m an unlikely candidate for this. So was Joan of Arc. But still, destiny brings us to these places where the only choice is DO or DO NOT. Which would you choose? Joan of Arc had God, and I have a dragon that lives under my skin, breathing smoke that leaves tangible stories upon my skin which fade on waking and a lingering sense of possibility.

You don’t look at me and see truth. You look at me and see me with a veneer of your own perception, which is invariably less. I am exceptional and demand a life that meets me on my own terms. That doesn’t mean perfect. I am not and never have been. I have flaws, spaces in me which leave openings for others to join on. I know who you are and where you fit.

I am a warrior of sorts. I was born small and fierce, a hybrid of two ancient nations; a child of pirates and cliff dwellers. I am of sea and earth. Both answer a yearning that is deep within me, and they tether me to my destiny with intense physicality. I am a child of adventure and exploration, of justice and mercy. I am a child of all who came before me, and mother of all that will come after. I am not a gentle woman, I do not soothe and gentle. I am a woman in all the brutality of birth, fighting for life, for beginnings, for potential. Birth is beginnings, potential, possibility. For birth is where we are, where I am: poised on the cusp of something that will change everything.

Leave me wild and open, to burn with love and faith and HOPE

Somewhere out there, in the great wide world, there are sparks. There are people in whom dreams, ambition and desire cluster together rubbing off each other until in a whirl of excitement and frenetic energy, they burst out in a spark of inspiration. Some people are born full of fire, barely contained, and spend a lifetime in sparkling anticipation that one day the spark will catch and *BOOM* suddenly there will be flames and heat and all that potential will MANIFEST.

A spark is a point of creation. It’s where it all begins. Creation is the very first frontier, by its own definition it’s a melding and a joining. At the point of creation,  the possibilities are infinite and unconstrained. Limitations come later, imposed by a desire for definition and shape, to mould creation into something more than amorphous possibility.

Fire is a cleansing, purifying, transformational FORCE. It’s elemental and reactive. Unfettered, it can rage in a way you could only see as destructive but leaves ashes for the phoenix to rise from, reborn. It’s an opportunity for all that has gone before to be redefined and reconstructed. It takes strength to open yourself to change in the wake of this destruction and it will bring you more than you know.

We are, and have always been, children of fire. It’s a time of TRANSformation, a time of REformation. We mould the future from the ashes of a dying civilisation. It’s the dawning of a new era, an opening for a new way of thought, a new beginning. If it is faith to believe in yourself and your future, then it’s a time for faith. If it is destiny to know yourself and use that knowledge to brings your ideals to bear to enhance, to create, then it is a time for destiny.

This time is not hard for dreamers: it’s a call to arms. Only OUR weapons are not designed to main and kill. Our weapons exist within us. Our weapons are words, are touch, are compassion, empathy and understanding. Our building clocks are imagination, creativity, art and connection. We are open to the gilded warmth of opportunity. Our outlines are no longer fuzzy with hope, we are AFLAME with passion and joy! This is our time to shine, our time to share who we are, what we are made OF.

When you are lost in the dark, remember all it takes is a spark to create a flame and light your way. Never let that potential be drowned and strangled in the hopeless, neverending grey. It is too easy for a spark to go out, damped down, to forget how their glorious warmth and light enables others to unfurl like flowers under the summer sun.

Chase Your Dreams

Everyone has a point where they say ‘this is my limit’. This is where I stop, where I settle. These are the defined edges of my life. These are places I am not willing to go beyond.

I live amongst people who’ve found their edges of their experience, who’ve defined their boundaries, who’ve found a place where they want to settle. They find comfort in the stopping, in the settling, in the shapes that form in the settling. They celebrate in china, and hydrangeas and welcome mats. They accept their boundaries with good cheer, bonhomie and a grateful inevitability.

In amongst these settlers I am a pioneer, a journeywoman chasing a vivid dream like a butterfly across a rainbow sky. I haven’t found my limit, haven’t found my place to settle. Occasionally, I see a fence or a wall, and I think that perhaps this is it, this is my time to stop questing and to settle, maybe this is where the rainbow ends for me, but there is always a chink in the fence, the walls are always scalable and the horizons are always too enticing.

There is always treasure to be sought, there are always horizons and adventures and I WANT THEM ALL. There is always the next big bright and shiny thing, the next big ‘but what if I did that thing?’, the lure of experience. There’s a neverending stream of possibility that feeds my soul I can scent it out in urban jungles, on wild clifftops, and in gentle lush valleys. It leads me gently into places I might otherwise fear to walk, caresses me like a lover and whispers to me of faith and beauty. It is too much to refuse. It opens me up and says DANCE, LOVE, DREAM.

It’s an effervescent streak of dreaming, that can lead me to treasure more precious than riches. It draws me out to dance under streetlamps at midnight. It finds me standing in a new city with a small bag and a duffel coat, just like Paddington Bear just landed from Peru. It leaves me with the same wild hopes I had as a five year old child with the same unblemished hope that somewhere out there, life is EVEN BIGGER than my dreams.

In a world where the finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is the ultimate goal, I want to live a life founcing from rainbow to rainbow, sliding down rainbows backwards and tumbling over clouds in a pell-mell race to find what’s beyond. My time of settling in not now, not yet and maybe not ever. This is my time to chase VIVID dreams.

These Are EPIC Times

He asked me the other day, ‘is there anything you cannot do?‘. No. In my mind I am an acrobat, a ballerina, a showjumper and a circus performer. I’m a psychic, a dreamer, a writer and an artist. I’m an entrepreneur, an explorer and a healer. I refuse to put limitations on my dreams for fear that they might manifest and become real. I refuse to give in to limitations because they make me less than I could be. I REFUSE to be less. It is my right to be all that I can be, and by all that is good and holy, I WILL take that and I what I create with it will be STAGGERING.

These are not ordinary times we live in. We are not an ordinary people. We are an introduction, a taster, a precursor to a rebellion so vast it is beyond the comprehension of many. And I don’t mean a political rebellion, an uprising of the people. I mean a rebellion of the SELF. This is a time of accelerated spiritual development. This is a time when we take what is inside us and make it real. These are the times when we find our voice, when we stand up holding our values aloft and say I DEMAND a life that recognises and values the WHOLE of me, that respects me, that INTEGRATES me. I want a life that is driven by VALUES, that is holistic, that CELEBRATES me as an individual.

This, it’s our time of CONNECTION, where advances are not made in measurable steps, where success is measured in love, not money. The opportunities we have to open and share ourselves, right at this VERY MINUTE, are limitless and yet never have we been more restricted. We have the whole world at our fingertips and we hide behind personas and anonymity. We cower behind fear when we could reach out and touch each other and find beauty and connections in ways and places we never dreamed. This is THE AGE OF DREAMS. It’s a time for sharing our realities, and respecting that dreams HAVE A PLACE in our world. It’s about recognising that when we think big, we achieve big things. As a collective, we are an amazing force with the capacity to change the world we live in. It is time to stand and be recognised, to stand firm, to stand proudly in your skin and say ‘This is who I am, and I have a dream.‘

"Do I belong to some ancient race? I like to walk in ancient places. These are things that I can understand" The Levellers.

I was eight years old the first time I stood in this place. Eight years old when I walked in this ancient place and eight years old when I found my spiritual home. This is a place of myth and magic, a place where to just stand and breathe is a declaration of something greater, where answers are freely given to those who dare to feel their shape.

This is a place that defines you, that lifts you up and sends your heart on a journey of exploration. It’s a place that washes you from the inside and leaves you lighter. It speaks to you of history, ancestors, blood, bone and destiny. It opens you up, and dares to you explore beyond it’s surface. It says to me “stand here, clear your mind and open your heart” and you wait for the wind to whip wildly through you, eddying in violent peaks until the chains that held you down have been washed free and you can begin to see how you are touched by the subtle brushes with something other that paints you as exceptional within your own mind, because you know in the most profound of ways that to know the heart of this place renders you as more than others will ever be able to see. You know that the others who come here will never penetrate through to the heart of the horse and that this is yours alone to bear.

It’s like a blood brothership but there is no sacrifice demanded here. All that was ever demanded has been willingly given and returned many times over. It is a soul connection: like recognises like and demands to be heard. There is a place in me where the horse fits as if it were made, and there is a space that I occupy within the horse, that has been there since before time. What walks here is eternal, infinite and beyond the scope of many. It speaks with a low voice of a reality that was long ago jettisoned for a life more practical and less sacred.

This is my place to connect and my place to taste the shape of the answers to the questions I never really needed to ask. This is the ancient place I walk and the place that has been my home through many incarnations. This is a place that has been home to wisdom and warriors. In this ancient place, I walk upon hallowed ground.

Sometimes in life, there are moments. Not ordinary moments but moments where everything inside you floats up like muslin on a summer breeze and your heart sighs and somewhere deep inside you a lock turns and everything shifts and you know that nothing in your life can ever be quite the same again.

These moments are when the spirit reaches inside you and feels your heart beat and whispers quietly inside your mind … Now it’s time to JOURNEY. These are the great leaps, the intuitive leaps, the leaps of faith. These are the times when the magical things happen when you’re ready and you least expect it, and take you to places that you never even dreamed of.

These are the moments in life where we become connected, where heart, soul and body merge to become one and your past, present and future connect to set you ablaze with light, hope and passion. These are moments that you alone can experience and you alone can define. These are the moments when dreams and reality can merge to become more than a future, but forge a destiny, fired by your soul’s purpose.

It’s a rite of passage. It’s a moment where you step from one side of the mirror to the other and suddenly you’re looking back at yourself with a clarity and purpose that was cloaked before and now it has been whipped away clean, and you are looking with fresh eyes. These moments are the keys to transformation. They alter us irrevocably. The take everything that makes us up and offer it up to the Universe with no demand and what we receive back is more than we dared hope for. These moments refresh us, renew us and speak to us in a language older than time.

These are moments of resonance, of connection, of divinity. More than that, they’re a glimpse of the ineffable, beautiful, mysterious art of the cosmos. They’re an audience with God. All because you opened your heart and let the spirit move you.

It’s time to dance.

It’s time to let it all go, open it all up and let it all out. There’s no right and no wrong, there’s just you in the dark and the rhythm that flows through you, there’s just you in the moment when your mind is blank, your emotions are wild and the music courses through your veins like a rush of power.

THIS … it is celebration. It is primal, all encompassing joy. It’s is a moment of pure truth, that requires nothing of you but the willingness to embrace it. Your body moves in ways you didn’t know it could. It responds to the music. The rhythm calls and you answer. It’s a conversation without words. It’s beauty without definition and it’s life. It doesn’t require justification, it doesn’t have consequences. It’s just there.

This is not a place where fear lives. Fear holds you back. Fear inhibits. Fear keeps you still. Fear detracts from everything. Fear holds you separate from the joy and the rhythm, from the expression of freedom that flows around you. Fear takes the dark and makes it unsafe instead of filled with possibility. Fear is everything else. It’s the demand for logic and answers and consequences and these things only. Fear tells you that if you can’t explain it, it’s not real. Fear is the demand for control and an unwillingness to let yourself go JUST FOR ONE SECOND and see what happens.

But do you know what? Life is like dance. It’s where participation is necessary – not just necessary but FUNDAMENTAL. It’s where standing on the sidelines or fighting for control gets you nowhere. Because we get the most out of life, when we surrender to it, to what we feel, to how we see, to our truth because it means that we are TRUE to who we are and when we do that, we begin to fulfill our destiny.

Your dance may be different to my dance. Yours might be gentle and mine might be fierce but the truth is that they are what they are and they’re as beautiful and bright and perfect as you are when you surrender to them.

Dance recognises that need in you to let go, to unleash, to unburden. It forces you to recognise your body, to appreciate it and use it. When you truly let you and get into the groove, there is no comparison, no ‘if only I was more …‘ because you’re exactly right and phenomenally beautiful exactly as you are because in that moment, it all comes together and you see in a crazy kaleidoscope way, that nobody can pull off your moves more perfectly than you and that … it BOOSTS you, elevates you and makes you more than you knew you were before.

It’s a reminder in the everyday humdrum of that rhythm that takes your heart, your soul and your body and makes them ONE and that all it takes is a moment of surrender to find that euphoria again, because keep down inside you, the music continues to play.

Faith is integral. It sits inside you, defining and forming who you are. It’s the core of you and it makes you who you are. It’s individual and perfect and answers all the questions you have that you can’t articulate. When questions rise inside you: drenched in depth, darkness and doubt, your faith is what takes them, soothes them and gives them the answers they crave. Some people choose a faith that has a name and some don’t but it’s a reflection of the person inside and deserves your respect. It’s a part of you.

Who we are demands recognition, in our similarities and our differences. These are the places where we join to each other. The difference in our shapes provides a perfect fit, and our connection is unified by respect and understanding. We are in constant evolution, reactionaries in a world where nothing stays the same. We must celebrate this. We are joyful and freeform: wide open to possibilities and potential and beauty. We find it everywhere we look. All we have to log in, connect and already there is more than we could hope to be inspired by. Why hold back? OPEN UP. Show your heart, your soul, your frailty and your strength. Reach out and touch another heart. You never know where these beginnings will lead. TAKE A LEAP.

We live in a time, where we value the ability to hide ourselves, to show nothing more than a veneer or ourselves and consider it enough. This is exactly the time when we must take our courage in our hands, bare more of ourselves and CONNECT. There has never been a time with the potential to bring us closer together, to connect that which is beautiful and precious inside us, to inspire each other with the things that move us. Share it. Love it. Show it.

This is not a time for closed minds. Oh my heart bleeds for you that all you can see is such a narrow path while the world blooms around you and drenches the heart and soul with the beauty that some can only dream of. Curse me on street corners if you must, while your declamations of my damnation ring in my ears like the peals of a church bell, colouring the world with hues of your ever-present ego.

This is the part of ourselves where we are most vulnerable, where we can most easily be touched, where we can most easily be wounded. We owe it to one another not to hurt each other in these places. We have an obligation to each other in baring ourselves heart and soul not to wound one another this way. This is the part of us where to see empty space is not a marketing opportunity to be exploited. These spaces are sacred: they can only be filled by the giving of yourself.

Wild Woman

Under the veneer of polish lies a wild woman, who is unfettered by expectation or status or material trappings. She listens to the beat of her heart and DANCES down the street to the rhythm that lives inside until her heart thunders inside her. This is a woman who can listen to the messages that come on the wind and sees her world grow under the rain and sun. This is a woman in tune with everything around her.

This woman is not constrained by status, by expectation or by social nicety. This is the woman who screams into the wind, and makes demands of life and heart with her voice, her body and her soul. This woman is wild and primal and elemental. She is brutally, vitally and savagely ALIVE and demands the same from you. She comes from a world where you have to listen to your heart to survive and her awareness prickles along her skin in messages of danger and certainty. This is not a woman for whom half-measures, moderation and middle of the road are options. Refusal to give all you have can get you killed in her world, just as the refusal to give of yourself in this life can kill of parts of you you won’t miss until they are lost to you.

She is not a woman to be tamed and gentled, she will not be domesticated. She’s like a wild animal: born to roam and beautiful in her savagery. She is not a woman afraid to demand, nor afraid to take. She sees it as her right as a woman. She is feline in her approach: all sinuous grace, and coiled like a spring, ready to pounce. She is a predator and holds it within until she sees her prey. She is woman who respects strength and thrives on challenge. She will not prey on the weak, for they give her nothing. To comfort is the domain of another. Hers is only the immediacy of the moment, the truth of now, for what else is there, truly?

She can be seen like a shadow out of the corner of your eye or in a half-asleep moment when your mind is both dreaming and awake. She is the innate confidence that holds me upright; it is she who stares out of my eyes with a ferocious hunger; it is she that recognises what lives inside you and drags it out of you with a gutteral groan and gentle sigh.

She is a woman who sees the secrets branded on your skin. They can be hidden from others but not from her. To her, they are written all over you, line by line. She knows you intimately. She knows your scent, knows when you mask yourself and try to hide.To her, it is as obvious as her next breath. But she has compassion and will hold your secrets as a mark of her respect.

She is the essence of woman. She lives inside me. Does she live inside you?

This is a year of promises, of journeying and most of all it’s a year of integrity. This year is about creativity, art, soul and giving it everything I’ve got. It’s about evolution and transformation and not playing it safe.

As a mark of my promise to myself, I took a small step this afternoon and treated myself to a piercing (or more accurately, four). It’s not the actual doing it that’s the step but the fact that every time I see myself in the mirror, I will be reminded of this afternoon in a small, sunny city and the promise I made and the step I have taken on the road I have chosen. It’s a sign of a commitment to myself, to my heart, to my future.

I’ve never felt so inadequate. What ifs appear everywhere, secreted in head spaces and quiet moments, turning my world upside down – what if your best isn’t good enough, what if you’re just not as good as you think you are, what if you’re just not ready, what if it all goes wrong – and all that quiets them is looking deep down into that core of myself which is quiet, still and certain and says ‘You know you can do this. You were BORN for this. You have far too much inside you to dedicate yourself to a life of getting by’ and I breathe and the world rights itself just in time.

It’s about finding a dream and holding on to it, and when the ground crumbles away under your feet, holding on that bit tighter and not caring that your hands are dirty and bleeding and sore but you’re just that bit closer to making it real. This is a crossroads. It’s one of those defining moments that comes in life where you choose whether to woman up and become the person you CAN be, or whether to let the dream go and say ‘thanks but no thanks’. I can’t let it go. I’ve got YES! ticked by default.

These are not easy choices. They’re not meant to be. They come when you’ve been through hell – and life says: so, you’re running out of fucking fuel but you have to choose NOW whether you’re taking the easy road or the hard road. It’s beyond imagining how much bigger and harder and insurmountable it seems. It feels as through you’re dragging yourself from one catastrophe to another, but you make your choice and suddenly the harder road doesn’t seem so hard. Because the truth is the choice is where fortitude is required.

Defining your dream and committing to it stretches you in ways you can’t imagine. Your mind is pregnant with imagination and your heart swells with courage until you feel like you’ve stretched grotesquely and you’re all out of shape. Your dreams are bigger than your reality and you don’t know when the two are going to realign into some semblance of normality.

Face the truth. Hold your mirror up and look hard into it and recognise who stares back at you. Do not see what you would prefer to see. See the raw, exacting answers you need. Find your truth and hold it triumphantly aloft.

If I could be, I’d love to be softer and gentler. I’d be the one soothing troubled waters and gentling the turbulence. I’d be comfort, guidance and tolerance. I would bake and sew and live a quiet life. I would wear an apron and high heels and dole out milk and biscuits and discuss art and politics as comfortably as x-factor and eastenders.

I am none of these things.

I am a perfect amalgamation of my forbears: cliff-dwellers, pirates, visionaries and men of the sea. I come from courage, ambition, justice and art. It’s my foundation. But my journey? That is my own.