Why is it a place of division that renders me whole?

It was in the wild I found peace.

It was standing on the open hillside peering out that I heard the gentle heartbeat of the land; quiet, steady and ancient; it is dancing amongst its ancient stones that the spirit of the land rose up to touch me and soothed me with its wild words. It knows of the fevered intensity that lives inside me, the tides that cannot be tamed or gentled. It knows the secret messages written on my skin and the silent words that issue from my tongue. We know each other from long ago; our untamed words already said.

It was amongst the wildflowers and smoke, that I felt the turbulent waters of my heart rushing pell-mell into a future I didn’t know how to define, trying to find a tangible definition of themselves. It was there, in the wild northern winds I felt the coded messages of my pounding heart tumble and stumble into the daylight; disoriented and unsure of how to express themselves in such a loud, brash world.

It was standing in this place that I found myself open to you. My naked heart vulnerable with stories etched over it in languages I find myself incapable of articulating although their messages ring bright and clear. It stands open to you and with my feet planted firmly in the roots of an ancient past, I tremblingly open myself and bare my heart for you to read it, not knowing whether you can see the encrypted stories that are branded upon me. Where is your rosetta stone? My heart, my soul and my purpose is written here as sacred as an ancient parchment. You read me as though you were born speaking my language.

I am a child of chaos. I hold secrets in my skin.

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.

Go loudly.
Go quietly.
Go alone.
Go in company.

Just go.

Go boldly.
Go rebelliously.
Go passionately.
Go hopefully.

Go.

Go openly.
Go epically.
Go on a bedknob.
Go on a broomstick.

Go always.

Go forwards.
Go sideways.
Go up.
Go down.

Go.

Go with heart.
Go with faith.
Go with blessings.
Go with me.

Go now.

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.

There is a space in my mind where It opens up to create. Inside that space, I have found my home. It is going to be an unmatched smorgasbord of colours and patterns and art and words. This will be a house for the explorers and the adventurous. There will be maps everywhere and words will open doorways. It will be a place of opportunity and inspiration. A house for those who have dared and won. It might not be a gentle house, but it will be a vibrant house. It will resonate with energy and delight and laughter.

There will be stars and stripes and spots and flowers and herringbone and ticking and patchwork. There will be reds and golds and brasses, coppers and ochres and turquoise and pinks and greens and black and white and blue. It will be an irreverent mix of the old and new and they’ll combine in a complicated dance that stands on its own terms. And there will be American diners and Rust and Africa and there will be Boats and Driftwood. It will be a house of exploration and adventure. It will be a house of second chances where the discarded becomes beautiful; convention and matching be damned.

And I will revel in it and dance with my eyes closed and the music turned up loud. And I will bake at midnight because it’s magical and I will make food with glitter in it, because I can. Life and food should be glittery and shiny and special just because it can be. Glitter is NOT optional. You will also be extraordinary and we will dance in a garden under a full moon and make love in smugglers’ caves and sing sea shanties and write until the sun rises when we will fall entertwined and sleep with our dreams touching.

And maybe I’ll write a book, and maybe I’ll garden. But perhaps I won’t. But there will be a shed and maybe a boat to sleep in and I will dream amazing dreams of gardens and intertwining light and magenta horses and Boudicca and the Iceni and dragons. I am a warrior in my own life and I make my demands and offer no sacrifices.

Extraordinary people demand extraordinary lives and will accept nothing less. I was angry but I watched a film and I was reminded of the importance of hope and determination. Now I’m so full of vision and vibrancy that I feel like there’s colour in my veins and if you opened me up, inside I would look like a melted wax crayon picture, with eddying pools of colour swirling inside me in a constant dance of creation.

Can you see your future and is glitter optional in yours?

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.

Do the Vendigum live at the North Pole?

What I want to know is this …

Where did all the magic go … Where are the space aliens, the flying cars and the dragons? When did we stop hiding out in caves and wishing to find smugglers and buried treasure? When did we stop dreaming about being the famous five and start watching the sort of reality shows that have our brains leaking out of our ears to escape to a world where questions open doors.

What the fuck happened to starry nights, and old castles and secret agents? Where did the fairies go to? Why do we live in a technologically advanced world that can send us to the moon and can’t create cars that run on happiness. Why can’t we fly like Peter Pan? WHERE are the tree houses and the woodland swings and the banana boat adventures?

Are there no more sorcerers and magic and demons? Where are the giants hiding? Why don’t we pick plums off trees and go picnicking on secret islands? Why have we stopped looking for adventures and myths and legends? When did our collective minds close? Did it happen gradually so we didn’t notice or with a creak and a reverberating clang that we have long since forgotten?

What happened to camping in farmers fields and milk fresh from the cow? What happened to home baked cakes and scones for tea? What happened to climbing in haystacks and sitting with ladybirds on our noses? Why don’t we take our little rowboats out fishing any more or dive off rafts in the middle of lakes just for fun?

Why are there NO SECRET PASSAGEWAYS? Where are the circuses and acrobats and the campfires? What happened to the secret societies and the vampires and the werewolves? What happened to climbing trees and skipping and merry-go-rounds?

Where are the dancing penguins and the magical chalk pavement pictures. Has Mary Poppins got too old? Did Captain Hook ever get out of the crocodile? And white-water rafting down the Amazon and Canibals and Voodoo  and Witch Doctors and Telekinesis? What happened to them?

Do Gods retire or do they die when you stop believing? Do Gods eat other Gods when one religion subsumes another? How can we find the pot at the end of the rainbow? Are leprechauns really Irish?

When did camping become regimented squares of grass instead of getting down with nature? What happened to the escaped tigers and the big cat sightings and WHAT ABOUT THE YETI??

What happened to the Wise Women? Who runs with the wolves now? What happened to Crocodile Dundee? And what about dreams and interdimensional portals? What about ghosts and telepathy? When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, was the rabbit really big or Alice really small?

What about gypsies and nomads and bedouins – where is their space now? Why is the scale so big? Does God give private audiences? How long IS a piece of string? What happened to flesh-eating hamsters and homicidal feet? What about alchemy and the art of transformation? What about invisibility and flying and love potions? What about Time Travel?

These are just some of the things I want to know. What about YOU?

Autumn Love

Physical attraction is just an introduction. It’s what says ‘hey, I’m here … SHARE yourself with me’. It isn’t just an end in itself, it’s a beginning, an opening, a blossoming. It’s a series of moments when your head and your heart seem to be working in perfect harmony to say “YES, give this a chance, be honest in what you feel, what you see, what he opens in you”.

That first phase is beautiful, gilded, untouchable. It’s dizzying as if he’d grabbed you by the hands and swung you around until your feet lifted off the ground and you felt as free as a child again, with the same sense of wonderment at the world around you and for this person who has opened this world up to you again.

The beginning is all rushing through autumn woodland in the crisp, smoky air breathing it all in so deeply, as if you’re afraid it might not be there the next time. It’s opening yourself up to rolling down hills, dancing though cascades of burnished leaves and watching your breath hover in front of your lips like a tangible magic, waiting to be given away.

It’s a first step in the joyous running, jumping, tumbling dance of you and I. It’s a glorious spinning pirouette, it’s that ultimate freedom where your heart frees your body and it transforms into pure beauty. We find ourselves entwined, intertwined, and caught up. We become a pure version of ourselves, open, translucent and glowing with an inner light. We arch under the touch of each other, connecting in ways we cannot fully know, for the workings of the heart are a mysterious thing.

Our sensory capacity is heightened, widened: we are more open. We become who we are and we shed our outer shell. It leaves us closer but vulnerable and yet we cannot help ourselves. Each touch is a thrill, visceral in its intensity and yet there is an insatiable need for more, a need to connect, a need to see deeper inside, to touch the places that remained a secret until you unlocked them.

The sheer physicality of us is an artist’s delight, and as artists we revel in this: the shape, shadow and texture of one another. It’s a smorgasbord of sensory delight but as is always true: art makes its demands. It requires truth and depth and sense of something greater. Art knows the truth of us, and of our beginnings:

We can always be more, but after this, we can never be less.

My heart is dappled in the light of my past...

It wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t always full-to-the-brim with life-changing ideas flowing one after another like a multi-coloured rainbow of potential, and lying together in the early morning watching dappled sunshine on rustic century-old walls or playing each other at long distance scrabble and dancing around the kitchen making lemon tarts that make your mouth pucker up in bitter delight while singing along to the Beach Boys and dancing like your body has taken control and you have no idea how to get it back. It wasn’t all talking by fires into the night and standing on hillsides in the arms of a man with an artist’s soul while the wind whipped wild and cleansing through us.

It has been a long time coming.

There have been other times. Time of dark and misery and desperation when I have struggled to swim through the overwhelming waves of loss, that at times threatened to engulf me. I have found myself at times in the raging darkness that roared so loud that it rendered me nearly immobile until my reaction to getting up, getting out, to doing and being and life was to curl up, foetus-like, reaching for a blanket in the dark and say ‘No more, please God, no’ because the thought of one more weight upon my shoulders would have crushed me.

There have been times of loneliness. There have been nights of sitting one one side of a bed and feeling more painfully alone than I ever have on my own, watching the rhythmic breathing of a man whose idea of love was pathological destruction and how I yearned for something good and solid and real in the light of the chaos of my life that I overlooked the horror until it overtook me and forced me to look it in the eyes and fight for my sanity or break in a way that time wouldn’t be able to heal.

There have been the times since then where the cracked shell of the egg I hatched and ran like crazy away from  look vague and menacing in my memory  and the serrated edges of the seemingly innocuous eggshell seems to hang over me like my own sword of Damocles. The fear of them drives me crazy until I become almost feral in my fight against shadows of memory that cling determinedly to my mind, like barnacles that are only half-real.

There have been times, year after year, of frustration that has risen up, geyser-like at my position: primary colour in a grey landscape until I explode, scattering trails of bold colour after me as I follow the pathways of my life. There has been boredom so ripe that I have been forced to eat my way through the gingerbread walls that held me prisoner.

Perhaps it is all of those things that have brought me to here, to joy and finally to the beginnings of a future. I don’t know but there is one thing in which I find myself steadfast and certain. My outlook, my vision was always my choice. Perhaps it was that that got me here.

But now the shadows are in the past. They dapple my heart but they are only contrast and depth, not pain. But for now, there is art and joy and love and a future that’s winking at me and inviting me to come on in.

I’d given up on finding a name for the shape I was looking for, and thought the hole needed to be carved bespoke. I’d spent too long being other shapes that I had forgotten where my boundaries lay. I stopped seeing what was THERE. I had stopped listening to myself and asked the world what I should do, and got a million answers in response, all of which were partly right. I forgot that my destiny evolves AS I DO and what I choose to do does not restrain me still but gives me a platform to build on, to mould around myself and make into something other than the neat-and-tidy, well-ordered pigeon hole I so dislike.

Sometimes all it takes is for something to move for everything to shift and suddenly fit into place. In the unlikeliest of places, answers stare you in the face and when it happens, you can feel the OH YES barrelling up from your belly and erupting in a geyser of laughter and joy. It just happened to me and made me feel like a bottle of champagne: fizzing and happy and full of life and potential and creativity. It opens up things inside you and it brings back those childhood feelings where you thought that anything in the world was possible, just because you WANTED it, those feelings where faeries were real and danced on the tips of your fingers and the moon was made of cheese and your absolute certainty that if you travelled far enough, you would find places where houses were really made of gingerbread and armchairs really did grow wings and fly.

It’s the magic of possibility that I forgot and the feeling that EVERY DAY is an adventure. I am poised and ready for stories of smugglers and giants and cannibalistic shoes. I am open to streaming, gilded lights in gardens and magenta horses wearing pearls on magazine shoots. I am standing on the edge of a precipice with my arms out wide and my hair streaming and READY to take that step that will send me cannon-balling through life, scattering the conventions that have held me back like skittles.

It took a series of moments standing by a carved out hollow in a hill in the moonlit dark in the wind and rain to find that CONNECTION again. That feeling of remembering, of roots and ancestors and potential. It took a place of power to remind me of my own. It took somewhere exceptional to remind me that I am.

Knowing that I was a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit was my catalyst. It kept my mind open and promised me quietly, night after night, that answers would come and opportunities would come knocking. Vigilance, it said, was the key to growth and in a moment where I most needed it, answers came. If I hadn’t been open-minded, and more importantly, open-HEARTED I might not have paid attention. I might have dismissed it. I might have let it pass me by. I didn’t. Instead, I embraced it. I took a deep breath and said YES.

Time to dance

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.

Don't let your fire go out

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
– Ayn Rand

Sometimes words reach inside you and pull out something special, touch a space deep inside you in a way that an author could never have intended, and so it is.

In the same way, far beyond your intentions, you have begun in me a process that is unstoppable and unleashed a force greater than any I have known. What you have unleashed inside me sees itself reflected in the many facets of life as it passes me by, and leaves an indelible footprint in my being as a result. I expect nothing of you as payment and yet I hope that I have done the same in you.

There is a beauty in the way that you recognise the many facets of my mind and do not seek to constrain my mental variety but support me while I find my own way, stumbling in the half-light from one island to another in the hopes of reaching a place where I can settle and be satisfied, where the hunger inside me will not yearn for travel, freedom and discovery because all will be held within.

The places that you have opened inside me shows me clearly where my imbalances lie, you bring my weakness to light so that they can heal. With you bolstering my heart I can find a future that fits me and lets what is inside me trickle out in a steady stream of joy rather than burst out of me erratically in a whirlwind I cannot cope with or constrain.

I have spent years as a chameleon, being all things to all people: one by carefully orchestrated one. To each I have shown a facet or perhaps two, carefully reflecting their own interests back at them, and cautious always to be less than I am so as not to intimidate or overwhelm. I am a square peg that fits firmly into round holes and forgets how to extricate itself. You show me a way to be free to be myself; to shed my chameleon’s skin and wear my glittering, shimmering multi-coloured skin with pride. It is through the holes you have opened in my heart that I can begin to see an opening, a future and an answer to the greatest question of all.

In the time between now and then, I shall hold those words close to me and remind myself not to let my fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark.  I have a world to set alight with the tales of my dreams and I cannot forge ahead with my light extinguished.

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?

You watch me with your indigo eyes

You watch me with bewitching eyes.

I used to dream of your eyes, repeatedly, for years before they caught me that moonlit evening under a bridge. I would wake from dreams about indigo eyes in a way that tilted my world on its axis, and sent quakes running through my foundations until I became accustomed to the incredible rocking fragility that my life was balanced upon. I never knew what these dreamscapes meant, just that they would come and you with them. It was a time for waiting back then. A sense of anticipation had settled, blanketing us like a heavy fog. Only now does it begin to lift.

You cried out to me in dreams. There were so many times and so many voices but yours was always distinct, and the whispers stayed with me into waking where you remained a vague sense of impending importance. For so long, everything was indistinct and ethereal, providing no more than a sense of undefined connection. Connections came in moments, in dreams, in looks, in words. They introduced themselves in a wave of sensation that rolled through me. I have waited for this for so very long.

Experience made no sense without this. Life was a series of vignettes with no context. I was a gypsy with no journey. There were signs everywhere I turned that sent me in the same direction, a million different ways. Each way I went brought me steps closer to this. I have spent lifetimes seeing more than you could believe was there. How could I speak of what I saw with such a limited vocabulary? I ached in the absence of speech. Each sight, each sound, each moment evokes in me a symphony played out on my heartstrings. I see colours leaping, soaring, intertwining in beauty, in sadness, in love and in loss. My words beat out on a celestial drum, audible only to those who are are waiting for my message. I and mine hear in a microscopic semophore and our skin ripples at the reception. Our history is eternal. We are older than time.

THIS is the moment we have been waiting for. This is a time for the the threads finer than gossamer that link us to resonate with purpose. This is not time for uncertainty. This is our time to shine. We were once those who stood aside and waited in the shadows for our moment. We have held ourselves back in shades of grey for age upon age. Hold this moment in the palm of your hand, touch it, feel it. Know that deep inside you that the moment you have been waiting for is here. These are the moments where you cast your locks aside and open yourself wide to the honesty of us. We are the truth exactly as it stands.

This is now the time to step out of the shadows and declare with honesty our simple truth. These are the times of depth and danger. These times are dangerous in a way you cannot see, cannot control and cannot hope to define. Watch as we begin to weave connections with gentle, indefinable art. These are your danger. These connections once made cannot be retracted. We are the power of creation. We are the foundation of all the times to come. Everything now relies upon our courage, our honesty and our ability to transcend the everyday whilst we are immersed in the minutiae of daily life.

This is a time of exceptional people, depth and intensity. It’s time to buckle up and yell your heart out because this ride’s on the way and it’s not stopping. We’re all Charlie in the great glass elevator as it begins its hourney toward the celestial heavens.

Adventures await.