Self-Esteem
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Breaking the Silence
The chill morning air was filled with voices, each individual call echoing between the cumulus clustering to obscure the sun. I stood on the breakwater, my feet pointing towards the waves disintegrating into foamy droplets the moment they reach the large concrete blocks, my spine angled back to compensate for the steep stone slope. I stood there mute, as the gulls and the terns, the starlings, the ducks and the cormorants all sang their songs to the numinous nothingness. Cries and chirrups, tweets and twitters and poignant, long drawn out, mournful wails that pulled at something essential, right at my core. And still I stood silent, staring out at the…
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Confessions of an Inconstant Blogger
“Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, Grow, grow…” The Talmud When I read that quote last night, it just about near broke my heart. If even the blades of grass have angels encouraging their growth, then where was my angel? Why was I not growing? Sometimes it’s easy to feel like we’ve become stuck. Jammed into an in-between space where its uncomfortable, we don’t really fit, but we’re not altogether sure how to get out of our stuckness. Or, and this is somehow even worse, that we can see so many ways to get out of our stuckness, and the sheer number of…
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The Bravery of the Wet-Winged Butterfly
I think my true self is a 4 year old girl who believes she is a butterfly. This was my response to Rachael Maddox‘s question on Roots of She: Who do you become when you let your true self out? And my answer surprised me. You see, I don’t think I’ve been that self for a long time. I think I’d half-forgotten she existed. When I was very little, I went to nursery school. The school was divided into 3 classrooms, although I can only remember the squirrel class and the butterfly class. My teacher told my mum that it had been decided to put me in the butterfly room,…
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Journeying with the Time-Traveler’s Wife
I am having a hard time, in my tiny bedroom studio, in the beginning of my married life. The space that I can call mine, that isn’t full of Henry, is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny space. I make maquettes, tiny sculptures that are rehearsals for huge sculptures. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth. At night I dream about…
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A Summer of Self
I know, it’s an opportunity that most of us fantasize about, right? What would it be like to not to have all our time and space and energy and attention taken up by our jobs, our children, and our partners? Just imagine what we could achieve! A regular yoga practice. A slow delicious morning routine. A sparkling social life. A clean bathroom… the list goes on and on. And then we feel the stirring of the slow-burning embers of a guilty conscious. After all, we’re good at our job, and, let’s face it, in this economic climate we’re lucky to have a job at all. We love our children and…
