Month: May 2012

Letter 28: To Celebration

Aside peacheyletters Love Letters , , ,

28 February 2012

Dear Celebration

You I have always loved … in quietness, in gratitude, in the multitude of a crowd, in the pleasure of a twosome, in a knot of girl friends … on the sofa alone, on a Friday evening, celebrating the end of the week, with a curry, with wine and my favourite TV programme on standby …

I love the very thought of celebration – the preparation, the joy of creating an occasion to come; a coming together to love, to laugh, to eat, to dance, to watch, to share … to whatever it is that that we are celebrating.  You I have always loved …

As a child I remember a Smartie covered birthday cake with particular joy … Ah that ritual too, that we teach to our young: to bring the cake to you – the celebrated one, to blow out the candles to applause; to wish, to laugh – then be sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to … How many billions of times has that celebration song been sung?  Sung to so many ages, to so many shining faces reflected in the candle light?  All those songs, smiles and candles coming together, across so many years, across so many corners of the globe, sang to babies, sang to oldies, sang to tag and celebrate special tide marked years in our own creation – this birthday ritual is a celebration of life that we are all part of, in unison … And a cup cake with one pink candle in it is a celebration and your favourite slice of Victoria Sponge on an ‘un-special’ week day is a savoured celebration too.

And I cannot always wait to be the subject of the celebration, so I seek to create my own festivities – I mark the days, I make the arrangements. My natural born impatience never lets me miss this, even if sometimes it is just quietly with my family, as sometimes, even I, who loves the limelight – shuns the limelight; and so it is perfect for me that my family are there – as they were always there, reflecting me and celebrating and demarcating my existence in their existence.  It is a family ritual, in our tiny genetic family of three, that we always come together on these birth day anniversaries.

Lest I neglect you dear friend, I seek to embrace you at all times, to see your possibilities in the every day, in the simplest of coming togethers.  And if not cake, then food is so often part of even these tiny rituals.  To treat – to eat out. To be cooked for and treasured.  To create a meal for those who come into the orbit of my home – to celebrate them, to nourish them, to bring them to me.  To always celebrate.

So celebration is gratitude too: savouring a little carnival moment, raising my vibration with the gifts of all I have, all I am and all I do; and joining in with the gala days, hours and seconds of those around me, in body and electronically.  I love to ‘ye-ay’ and ‘hurrah’ and employ the exclamation marks of joy!!  I end every day with a litany of all I have to be grateful for – the situations, the gifts, the people, the compliments, the lessons learnt, the sunshine, the rain and sometimes the pain that shapes me to here, to now, to this single point of celebration, this current breath, this life that is the celebration of my own creation.

I choose to think in terms of celebration: to relish it, to seek it, to see its’ possibilities.  I choose to create celebrations tiny and celebrations huge and the panoply of all in between too.  I want to see celebration in my every day existence … and when my head seeks to chide and criticise (and it does all that still – so often), then I can pause and say to myself – what am I grateful for right now, what can I chose to celebrate in this moment, on this day? And so often the chiding demons continue to conceal, and so I continue to count my blessings and this is how I move, I vote to change those dark criticisms into enlightened celebrations …

As a coach too, for me, my role is to celebrate those who come to me for direction, for support, for illumination.  And I will shine the light on their gifts and gratitudes and remind them just how amazing they truly are too, these celebratory creations sent to me.  Every coaching in itself is an act of celebration and for that I speak as someone who is still coached myself; so in turn I turn to those who show me that my reflection is praise and that I am understood and hurrahed and of course celebrated into different, more difficult directions when warranted too.  So some celebrations are sometimes tougher roads to travel, yet always worth it when you know that celebration enervates, raises and ultimately gains you to glory.

YOU I have always loved Celebration, and all my ‘Love Letters to Life’ are celebrant acts: they all bring you along, weave you in and out of the silken fabric of my being, of my creations … all of which, in turn, are of course, celebrations.

This then is the ending of my celebration of Celebration …

       Ye-ay, hurrah, woo hoo and lots of love to you!

S xxx

PS: To celebrate the success of this blog, it has now been turned into a book…  Follow this link to find out more…

Letter 27: To Me

peacheyletters Love Letters , , , ,

27 February 2012

Dear Me

Well this one – the letter to Me, feels in so many ways like the hardest letter to write …

Where to start ..? How about before the beginning … I’ve got a real sense that I wanted to come into this life … that I chose to be born, that I jumped up into the universal ether and said ‘me, me, me please!’ And yet how many times in my life did I wish that I had never been born … Yes … so much emotional pain, so many tears; and then again how much love and laughter has there been ..?

What can I tell myself here? That it is all perfect, that it is bonkers, that it is beautiful to be me …

And I wonder how I reached where I am and then I look back at the tide marks in my life. And always it comes back to this – one hot summer day, a 6 year old me ran across the road to get an ice cream from the ‘ne nah’ van, and the man in the van misheard me and gave me a lolly instead. And when I ran back, crossing the road, I was knocked down by a car and never got to eat my treat.  Now all things considered it wasn’t so serious and soon I walked and ate ice cream again; but I still bear scars from that day to this day, and part of me has often wondered if I have EVER got over the habit of looking the wrong way and getting crushed as a result …

And on the path to adulthood there have been bullyings and beatings and there have been swings and roundabouts. And I remember sunshine and laughter too, I remember family and friends and seaside happiness. I remember pets, dresses, love and arguments all mixed in to the melee of my memory. The path to me, always being me, always now. Yet so often wanting tomorrow, wanting the day to be different, the place to be different, to be with different people; yes, hankering constantly to be away from me, today …

So Dear Me, what defines me now? My nature, my nurture, my memories, my life’s search, my research – to me? They all play their part. I was born with blue eyes – nurture and life’s literal happenings have never changed that. I am naturally influenced by the people I grew up alongside, walking this path through our lives, sometimes in slow motion and sometimes in quick step. My memory fluctuates – much of my childhood has disappeared into a vacuum … I try to remember land mark birthdays … strangely gone, void … yet still – here I am.  And always there were choices, whether I knew that at the time or not … And I chose and then I chose again and so I chose to be me.

So how would you describe, label or define Sandra Peachey?: daughter, sister, friend, cousin, aunt, niece, Miss, Ms, colleague, boss, teacher, coach, goddess, sex kitten, author, dancer, actor, artist, singer, girl friend, mother (to be), wife (to be), Human Resources Manager, shop assistant, cleaner, cat lover, siren, muse, house wife, gourmet, chef, joker, lover, Leader, Queen of Support, Circe, Cassie, Sandy, Sandie, San, dog breath, Peaches, bitch, angel, saviour, role model, nemesis, babe, babes, bab … the list could quite possibly be endless. What a fabulous, never ending lexicon of my life, of me … And where will the list go on to?

And these labels are opinions, are subjectivities, are passing thoughts … Who am I really??  I am love, I am creativity, I am giver and nurturer, I am laughter, I am the gravitational pull that guides people into their own true orbit, into their own beauty and light.  You may or may not really see me or hear me, yet that doesn’t matter.  I will be visible where I need to be.  But if you DO see me, then you will FEEL me too.

There have been ups and downs, there have been past regrets. Yet no ‘now’ regrets, for all that has happened has led to me now, and where else could I be? Who else could I be? I chose constantly, I live free, I create, I prescribe, I revive. I was born blonde and I stayed blonde; accident prone and lovable; clever and loquacious; attractive and sensitive: me, me, all me.

Now as a love letter, where does the love come in to all this, Dear Me? Well as it happens, I was definitely born to love: to give love, to receive it, to spread it, to write about it, to be it. And the hardest thing, so often, is to love myself. Yet love myself I do: I must, for from that springs the rest – of that comes the best, of me.  And my letters are not just love, they are catharsis and celebration too and so I dare praise myself, just as so often, I have chided myself – yet now is always the time to rejoice!

And my letters are gratitude – so I give immense thanks for those who are in this theatre of my life – in the audience and on the stage.  I have toddled, walked, crawled, danced and ran through my life with a whole cast of characters: some have stayed, many have gone; and the Acts have moved on and the scenery has changed, and who knows where the plot will end. I feel there MUST be rapturous applause at the curtain call, for after all – being me deserves that – doesn’t it?

So Dear Me – I applaud you / me! Here’s your standing ovation – your love letter, your magnum opus. My love in a letter, my life in a letter – Dear Me, that IS me … for now … There’ll be more …

For ever yours,

   Sandra xx

PS: The ‘Letter to Me’ and all my letters have now been published – follow the link here to find out more…