Year: 2012

Letter 20: To (a life of) Choice

Sandra Love Letters ,

20 February 2012

Dear Sandy

I remember about a decade (or a lifetime) ago, I had a boyfriend who was a unique breed at the time … he made a living selling goods on EBay and a good living at that.  He decided to leave his high flying career in the rat race and then simply set up his own business working from home.

Now at the time, this freedom of choice struck such a chord with me – I had just come out of relationship with another man who told me that not only could I not work part-time, as I had wanted to, for so long; but in order to get the decent house of our dreams, we would both have to work long and hard for the next 10 years …  We clearly weren’t compatible, but that’s another story …

Now with this new man, a new way started to dawn … here was someone who had decided he wanted it his way and had created a new reality for himself … one where he would get up with his body clock (around 11.00 am), take sunny days off ‘work’ to sit in the garden with a book, and chose who he sold to / worked with.

Now I was good with the whole lie-in and garden thing … but to CHOSE your customer felt distinctly strange … You see I had come from years of service to whom ever the corporate world had put in my path … the good, bad and occasionally the mad …

So the seed was sown, the possibilities were laid out before me and still I did not see that being MY path … I had a well paid, managerial, lofty position in the corporate world … and so my fantasy slowly started to form – I would work part-time, (eventually at some indeterminate point in the future).  For – let’s face it, I was just some one who could NEVER be self employed, that was beyond the realms of my capability and reality …  Yet still I as I worked away, corporately, for those long and difficult hours – I was tired and stressed and frequently found myself doing things that I found completely unpleasant … oh woe was poor little princess me …

And then that man left me and so I forgot my pipe dreams and carried on and left those plans behind, and instead bought myself more golden ties to keep me bound into the inexorable existence that was created for me and which I only knew how to embrace.

Well dear reader, guess how this story ends???  I left that world behind, eventually …  And the changing was painful, drawn out and difficult, because although I wanted to alter my life and live my dreams; that all just seemed impossible without a future map and banks full of money firmly in place.

And so I sought support and aspiration, and STILL, over dithering months and years, I would not commit to change.   Then finally, one day, one decisionless day, in the company of chosen people; someone special took me and bodily shook me and said “Sandie you have just got to make the decision, just make it now and commit to it”.  And I wanted the words and I needed the physical intervention to shake me out of my world and off my Plan A path.

And suddenly it all became easy, the decision now made, then the doors opened, my support came in and the world changed into a place of my choosing.

Now this brave new world is not all one of plain sailing, yet now I sail where I chose and I get to chose my crew mates, colleagues and clients too.

Over time, over those seas – the deliciousness of choice, of having things MY way, has become more and more desirable and indeed necessary to living my life.  And it IS my way, though I sometimes share this journey and will steer with others.  Some people would call THAT choice compromise and yet for me this is choice too – given freely and from my core centre – to sail, ride and walk the ways I want, with those gifted to me, on loan to me in life, to stay a short while or be there for the long distance of my life.

And my passion is to have my choice and even more to guide others to have their cake of choice and then to eat it too and to know that every one, who wants to, can have their own cake of choice.

I love that choice.

  Yours choosily

       Sandra x 

PS: Did you know that I can chose to be Sandra, Sandy or Sandie?  Any name given or transformed, by choice too 🙂

PPS: If you would like all my letters in book form – follow the link here to find out more…

Letter 19: To the Friends Who are Family

Sandra Love Letters , ,

19 February 2012

Dear Friends and honorary: (take a deep breath here …) sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, uncles and aunties, etc, etc and so on …

My blood ties are few … I have a mother and a brother living, and my dear departed father provided me with a whole crowd of first cousins and through them many more seconds and thirds.  Somehow though we were out of kilter with them in family history and we stay in rare Christmas card and family funeral touch …  No children for me and my bro, no living grand parents, aunts or uncles or anything else and so that is our little Peachey family …

So there is me – ‘friend’ to a few … sometimes called sister … I always wanted a sister – ideally a twin one; there are twin girl cousins out there in the family tree; yet not me.  Not quite an only child, but spaced from my big brother by nearly 8 years and we were together in the early years, then separated through adolescence and distance and caught up with each other later in our lives, when our dad died.

So friend becomes sister, becomes honorary Auntie to babies … this role given by friendship, affection and love extended to you, as a non blood relative.  You get to love the expansion of your friend’s lives.  The title is given as a gift and in return you give gifts back … as ‘cool aunt’ your brief is to spoil those darling children rotten when you have the ways and means at your disposal … 

So you grow up and grow older, watching the babies follow in your wake, establishing the patterns of their lives … watching the changing facial features, the family characteristics – now like their mum, now like dad … grand-dad … cousin … who knows who?  The inherent fascination and dissertation of seeing the lineage reflected and altered in unique genetic combination.

And as my world is filled with new generations, so too is my mother’s.  No blood grand-babies for her, so she becomes honorary Nanna to two.  So proud I am she does this, that she is allowed to shine and show her capability for love and generosity; and when I take her round to meet my friend’s babies, they all hang round her, for she has a child like quality which pulls them in.  Straight away, the purse is open, gifts are given … I remember HER mother too giving me sixpences, and so it goes on …

In my childhood, there were aunts and uncles and they came with affection and affinity, though rarely were there parental friends around to be granted the honorary given title I have gained in abundance.  So even now, after a quarter of a century of being an Aunt, I am so surprised at how I am accepted, welcomed and you can see – loved by those who had no choice but to have me there, to have me to share.  Now they see ME, not ‘just’ Auntie, for many of them have grown out of the title now and as I am Sandra to my life long friends, so now too to them …

And else where, I am known as ‘Auntie Sandra’ to ALL the family – adults and children alike – a huge loving reminder of the affectionate part I play in their lives. 

So the single girl creates a family, gets to hug the children and give them back … then time flows on and she becomes a strange new creature of honorary familyness – a Great Aunt indeed! 

So it was that I held one baby in my arms and looked down at her and then, so little time later, it is HER son in his turn, in my arms … I hold this new born personality for hours, looking down at him, held and sated with the special milky love that comes with cradling a precious new life.  So in that room there is Mother, Grand Mother and Auntie, all quietly together, loving this new little lad. 

Then how quickly quiet turns to toddler noise and we move on and on, inexorably, pacing through life with the new comers beside us: sometimes stopping together, sometimes in step and sometimes continents apart; and I am woven into the fabric of their living, of their memories and mostly they come closer and some shy away; and shying away is allowed, since this is not necessarily unconditional love, but it IS acceptance, just like I gladly accepted the gift of them into my rounded, bonded Auntified kind of life … 

And is it coincidence this love spills over into my vocation and how much I love my clients, those whose orbits I circle in; for as I love to be cherished, I love to cherish too and to me coaching is cherishing and loving and nurturing.  Sometimes this is soft supporting love and some times shaking love, but throughout time I would tell my babies the score if that felt required; and still they love me and still we move on and where ever it is we happen to go; we all move on in love.

   Big love and hugs,

         Auntie S xxx

PS: Peachey Letters has now been published as a book, to find out more and purchase your own copies – follow this  link…

Letter 18: To Song

Sandra Love Letters , , ,

18 February 2012

Dear Song

I am puzzling over whether to address you as song singular or songs plural … either way,  you know what I mean and you know how much I love you. In fact I love you so much that I am semi convinced that the reason my memory is so slow, is that my brain is simply over loaded with song lyrics … especially ones from the 80s … oh and the ABBA back catalogue of course …

I love listening to you, I love singing you, I love dancing to you. There I was this very evening in fact – dancing the night away and singing along; part of a jostling happy crowd, in the semi darkness of a singing, dancing, drinking homaging kind of a place and, it  has to be said, doing justice to all three of those activities … ah, the power of the multi-tasking woman …

And from childhood I saw myself as pop star, opera star, musical star … yes I would open my tonsils, so the dream went, and out would come a voice of such power and beauty that glass would shatter and icebergs would melt … When I sat and watched the old Saturday Afternoon, BBC 2 film musicals, I’d see myself on screen, the girl in the gorgeous dress, who could act like Ava Gardiner, dance like Cyd Charisse and sing, like nothing else on this earth …

When other people did not recognise this about me, it was always received with a sense of puzzlement.  In latter years I have wondered if I am akin to one of those deluded people in the Y (on earth) Factor programme – the ones they have on in the early audition stages; you know – the musical wannabes who have that implicit belief in their own amazing talent … yet we, the public, see and hear them with differently filtered eyes and ears …

Then at other times, some one will hear me, see me and praise me and I am content with my own localised stardom … for now any way … there is still time on this earth for me to be a mega star yet or indeed to get my next fix …

And here’s the thing – singing in public still takes me wildly out of my comfort zone and the sound of my own voice can either mesmerise me or make me wince … so here is my ultimate vulnerability, a badly made recording of me is attached … singing ‘Love Letters’ of course.

I trust Dear Song that you will take this as a compliment and not a caterwaul – that’s for your ears to judge. Either way I’m gonna love you … it’s a love I was born with, it’s a love that’s unconditional and it’s most definitely a love that is real …

    Yours tunefully,

          Sandie Super Star xxx

PS: If you love the written word and pictures, as well as song, there is more of both in the Book version of my letters – follow the link here to find out more…

Letter 17: To Photographs

Sandra Love Letters , , ,

17 February 2012

Dear Photos

Well I don’t know about love … really it’s more of an obsession …

I love those moments captured in time, I love memories revived, I love staging and posing and yet again the naturalness of a split millisecond of beauty or frieze framed action.

I hoard, I treasure, I capture on camera. I love photography as an art form, as part subject / part picture taker’s product. I love that they can provoke an emotional response in me and I will devour their pixels again and again. And photography can be instant – a quick snap taken on your phone or it can be orchestrated, seen through long lens, filtered by light, changed by perspective and by these means it can be glamorised or turned to black and white. It is life seen through an artificial eye … life that can be cropped, coloured and manipulated by machine to another identity, an altered ego, a new id changing our form through light and digicality.

And in this instant age, we can flash our images immediately around the world and sit back and wait to be ‘Liked’ for it …

Of course I can loathe too – that wrong moment, that piece of flesh seen and frozen for public view. Yet I can quietly forget those images, un-name myself, just delete that piece of camera memory; and so photography becomes a polished performance of simply the best of me, of my times, my loves and my creations.

In my hoarding places, literally thousands of photos live, sometimes in the dark, sometimes to breath lighter air … I have sepia representations of great grand parents, babies now grown up and old, records of places travelled and of loves lost and friends found on cardboard and in computer they wait … to be seen and to be loved …

So here is a fraction of all the pictorial love I possess … a life of love in photographs …

    Mind the birdie …

         Sandra x

PS: If you love the written word AND photos, there is more of both in the Book version of my letters – follow the link here to find out more…

Letter 16: To My Mother

Sandra Love Letters , , , ,

16 February 2012

Dear Mum

Unexpected presents are fabulous aren’t they?  And I got one from you on Valentine’s Day.  A bunch of peach coloured roses and carnations … peach from a Peachey to a Peachey … Thank you so so much!  For this I cried, with happiness, with surprise and appreciation, because this was such an act of generosity to me and not the easiest thing to organise when you are wheel chair bound, in a nursing home and not surprisingly, given everything about who and where you are now – in body, mind and environment, that it is usually all about YOUR wants being met and met NOW!  Is THAT where my natural impatience stems from, I wonder ..?

Several weeks ago I was hauled into the head mistress / AKA the (nursing home) manager’s office to be told of bad behaviours, possible causes and then courses of action.  I went to you next … “Why did you do it?” I asked gently and you said there was a voice in your head telling you to … So that’s what drives you on now … What voice organised roses for me then, I think smilingly today ..?  I must remember that, when the other, darker voice is at work on another day in our lives …

So this is our now.  Mother become child.  My brother and I take you out and about and have to look after every aspect of your care as we go.  And one day I observed lightly that it was our Karma – we neither of us children had children, so now we were taking care of our version of child …  My brother smiled back …

There is so much water under the bridges of our lives now.  So many tears, so many shoutings, such anger, such blame.  Yes blame, such a heavy, self victimising blow of a word, of a deed.  Oh I blame blame blamed you for so much, for everything, in between those times I thought I had struggled away to be a different creature, a creature of light and laughter, the blonde haired cherub of your proud creation.

Then always I would return to you to break the news … that I was back in black …  And more blows reigned on you – no grand babies, no soft Nanna lisps to be loved and spoilt … my heart breaks to think you will probably never have that from your line.

From my babyhood on, I never doubted that you loved me, though at times you tried hard to disguise the fact, in some very extreme ways.  Your own childhood was lonely, broken and unloving and you told me you had decided you would not repeat the histories of your mother and father’s poor parental conduct, with your own children.

You were one child alone, a little girl with chestnut hair and an indomitable spirit, who refused to go to school one cold day because the colour of your tights weren’t right … who skated, loved the cinema and had a cat called Spitfire … I loved those stories of your life back then.  Though too there were the stories of betrayal, loss, ridicule and shame – the darker stories that were also woven into your life fabric.

And we shared more stories on long weekend afternoons when we watched old black and white movies on the sofa, together.  You knew all the decades old gossip of every star, gleaned from escapist movie magazines of way back when and I took it all in.

Then the tides of time turn and we grow up and grow old and there were more years and many more tears between us two.

It is an oddly natural thing to see a sort of reflection of you that is so similar and yet so very different.  Sometimes your face appears in me, sometimes your voice and oft times I have called the dark chiding hateful voice sometimes spiralling in my soul – you too.  ‘You are just like your father’ you would accuse, and he would sometimes say ‘you’re just like your mother’ and then in another moment I would be different to her.

The constant family comparisons …  The fascinating DNA lottery that gives us both blue eyes, me with blonde hair, you with dark.  Father and brother with brown eyes, father dark haired, brother fair and so on and then our myriad talents, skills and personalities – our very mysteries of making, born and nurtured.

You were born in Scotland.  I loved that – it marked me out, made me more exotic!  Yet some how Scotland rubbed off, as you left it at 18 years of age; it did not hold in your voice and there were only small clues in our Sassenach lives … some words, some poems, a Broons annual …  So a lot of your life was left behind there and I hardly knew any family from back then, except for my Nanna.  You often compare me to her – your mother … my popularity, my nature you said … that which is so different from one, is so like the other; now there is one particular photo of her cradling a baby me and looking at it now, you know exactly where I sprang from …

It is not for me to compare us in nature, since she left this world when I was six  … just too young for remembering much except the gifts of sixpences and dark chocolate she would save for her grand children’s visits to the dark little flat in Birmingham.  But there is just one more happy story, amongst the many stories to be unfurled …  You in hospital mum, having just given birth to me and Nanna comes in to room so excited and cries “where is she, where is she”, wanting to meet and know me for the first time.  And always that story was told with such pride and laughter.

And there is so much more, so many stories, so much to say and yet really, so little.  Now it boils down to this – the blaming has had to STOP for me.  I try to journey away from that, from so called past misdemeanours.  It has taken so long and I kept on blaming until recent history; even when I had tried to fix, to analyse, to change.

Then one day I literally woke up and realised, that all those dark words and actions were not really you.  Through out all your life you have done the best with what knowledge and resources you have had; and so then I was just left to love.  And love changed a lot, love created a force field around me and radiated from me, to stop me barbing and griping … and with out that, you had to love more too.  Now it’s not a complete cure … there are times when I am tired or facing a low moment and it surfaces again.  Yet I know, come what may, that I have escaped hate and guilt and I can always say, truly, that I love you.

  I love you, mum.

     Sandy Bach xxx

PS: My mother lived with Parkinsons Disease and if you would like to donate to the excellence cause of care for, and research into this condition, please follow this link…

My Valentine Gift from Mum …

Letter 15: To Every Woman

Sandra Love Letters , , , ,

15 February 2012

Dear Gorgeous

I am writing to you – ‘Every Woman’ with so much love in my heart.  You, who represents all of our sister kind, you who is every woman out there, in what ever shape, how ever you are dressed – body AND soul …

What is not to love about woman?  We are the miracle of this planet, we create, we care, we are the very blood in the veins of life, in every degree.  Yes, man is there too and I acknowledge his role, his shape; but this is YOUR letter my gorgeous Goddess xxx

And I know you in so many ways, as Goddess, Damsel, Crone, to name but a few of our flavour, our hue …

For so many of us, our lives in this modern mess of life, are a dichotomy.  We always knew, through out the millennia and the recent centuries, that behind every great man there’s a great woman and slowly, in this Westernised world, our voices came out from the nursery and the kitchen sink.  Then in our own mother’s and grandmother’s histories, man’s war took the men from our hearth and we kept the home fires burning and we fed those fires and we manufactured the killing machines of war, keeping the life of our nations, turning.  And still we loved and danced and made babies …

And then our free-er daughters ran free, stepping in the masculinity of sex with choice, work with trousers and the heady prizes and loneliness of leadership.

So my wonderful woman, like children we have tested our boundaries and we lived tied by kitchen sink chains for millennia and then we tried suits and swagger for our recent decades.

And yet despite all this being out there in the ether of the earth; I know I dreamed as a small child of being a beautiful Damsel, waiting to be rescued by a prince on a white horse; and a field of multi coloured horses have galloped by since … So the waiting Damsel became a Damsel in Distress, turned bitter by lack of love and worn out from driving the wheels of the man’s world of work and play.

So many of us fabulous females know this story, this dichotomy of being pulled so many ways – being bound into a life of straitened female destiny (wife, mother) AND an endless modern male morass of choice and push (wage earner).

So many of you my sisters, have started to seek, to live, to be, to find the Third Way in our ‘her’ history, our her story, our herstory.   To cherish the many millennia of our mothers and to honour our recent female fore bears their trail blazing to our modern day selves.  We seek to heal, to redress and accept the many faceted female characteristics that make us, and to take them and make them our own; forming new paths in this wonderful womanly world.  To transform from a ‘Damsel in Distress’ to a new archetype – the ‘Damsel in Success’.  Having our cup cake and eating it, wearing the shoes we chose, to walk down the streets, up the mountains and along the path ways where we dare to dream the way forward …

That was and is my journey, to being a Damsel in Success, to finding my way; making the path easier by knowing, loving and being myself, in all my girl glory.

I chose to be a Damsel in Success, in the form that works for me, facing life as part of the fabulous feminine-kind that I was born to and I know now – born for.  Knowing my self is being woman; woman who was man made and can be man, sometimes, when the occasion is called for … to take charge, be business like … then back to blonde, back to girl, back to friend, back to mother …

So from me back to you – Every Woman.  So many of us sisters are finding the Third Way now and we come together – to learn, to share, to support and to lead the way – the third way: some to trail blaze, some to shine a soft light on the world of woman AND of man and of course of our co-creation – child …

With women’s hearts, as natural creatures of love, the combined power of our feminine pulse is immense.  So feel that feminine power, the strength of sisterhood, the love of many millions of good women … each one an amazing piece of nature and then nurturer of dreams, of babies, of creations and so we are back to love – again; my gorgeous, fabulous, Every Woman …

    With lots of love and chocolate

              S xxx

PS: As a ‘Damsel in Success’ I must honour and acknowledge the organised sisterhood of the same name, of which I am part; and of which I am both member and leader.  An early convert to the cause, I have the joy and privilege to work alongside it’s founder Lucie Bradbury and all of the fabulous team she has given birth to and nurtured; to support women to live the life of their own success, with natural feminine ease.  She has presented so many of us with the choice and opportunity to see and walk the Third Way, and my love and gratitude can know no bounds for that … S xxx

PPS: You can find out more at: www.damselsinsuccess.co.uk, where you will find your local UK group – and you can see ME in action at the Burton on Trent group …  S x

[PPPS: Dear Reader, if you liked this letter, you can buy your own hard copy of the complete book by following this link…]

Lucie Bradbury, my ‘Angel in Chief” & the next generation of Every Woman, her daughter Summer Grace …

Letter 14: To the One

Sandra Love Letters , , ,

14 February 2012

Hello You

I’m waiting for you … patiently at the moment as it happens.  That’s rare for me … patience is a virtue that’s definitely in development for me a lot of the time.  But right here, right now, I’m being good and patient.  I’m just scanning the horizon softly, biding my time.

At other times I long to see you and start our time together, but it’s fine that it’s not now.  I know it will happen when the time is just right …

It will be so worth the wait.  You will be amazed at just how good it is.  My love is so good – it’s like nothing you will ever have known and I have yet to discover too how your love will look, feel, sound, smell and taste, in every dimension of our being together.  I’m so anticipating our unchartered voyages of discovery, revelation and laughter.

As man and womankind, we are born with the gift of love … there is the physical realm – affection and ties that bind us together so we support and survive and there is also passion – the life force, pushing us to pleasure and procreation.  Next there is the realm of being seen deeply, of finding a kindred spirit, of feeling part of something bigger than yourself, being recognised and reflected back in all your glory.  There is simple togetherness, rubbing along as a couple, facing the day in company, a thousand million words and silences; touches and flashes.

But then I have known so much love in my life.  The word has been said to me and at me and by me, so many times.  I used to guard what I gave; I was spikey and defensive, because I felt I had been unfairly attacked by it in the past.  Then I decided to change, to open my heart and give freely and in the flow.  Now as a tactic, neither of these paths seemed to have lead me to any where in particular … except perhaps towards heart break or inertia … but that is the past, my Mr One and now it is time to move on.  It is up to US now to create a new époque – one that is grand and quiet and which sweeps away the hurt past and sees our many lessons in love as our future joys.

Where shall we move on to you and I?  I sense it now, glimpse our time together – these future memories which will be ours alone.

How will that love be, between you and me?  It will be what it will be, that is our little secret for tomorrow, when our time becomes today.

Do I dare to call you ‘soul mate’?  Several times already in this life I have had those words uttered to me, so I’m guessing I’m allowed more than one soul connection!  Such a label doesn’t really matter to me my Mr One, because we will write our own book of life and of love, together.

Will we have a different kind of love?  I really believe that you cannot love two different people in the same way, so that will have its own perfect consequences for us and so I can move to you, new, free and unfettered; surrendered and sure.

Well now, it’s nearly the end of another Valentine’s day and I have faced the day happily.  I have given and shared love, I have celebrated; I have walked the woven fabric of my life and I am contentedly biding my time.  For the time will come, OUR time – that’s a simple fact, a knowing for me.  So I will prepare myself well and be as realistically ready as I can be, in body and heart.

Which means that I’m loving you already and I’m so looking forward to you, my Mr One.

Happy Valentines Day, darling.

  With so much love,

         S xxx

[PS: Dear Reader, as a Valentine gift – to yourself, or anyone else for that matter, at any time of year, you can buy the book version of these letters by following this link…]

Letter 13: To God

Sandra Love Letters , , , ,

13 February 2012

Dear God

Today I am saying dear ‘God’ and that’s what you have been for much of my life, although sometimes, rarely, I have denied you altogether, since you didn’t seem to make any sense.  Then again there was a long period where I lazily hedged my bets and said that you MAY exist, for how could I know for sure?

I learnt of you via religious / Christian family ties, at Church, at School and through my bed time childish prayers.

I have spent much time with you, neglected you often too and now, we seem to co-exist, I believe, happily, most of the time.

But we know you and I, that there are times when I have fallen out with you, because I just believed, that you had got it wrong, that you were causing and inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering.  That you were, basically, to blame.  For if YOU had created ME, then how could I be the cause of all this so called misery, in the way that many modern wisdoms would dictate?

And there have been times, even very recently when I REALLY wondered what in heaven you were playing at … why you had created this turn of events, this misfortune of constant occurrences.  I just wouldn’t let you off the hook … I cried, I begged, I ranted and I cursed and still you stayed your course.   Falling out with you is such hard work and I hate being angry, but I was so angry with you.  Yes, I can say it, I was so very angry with God.  Where could I go with that?  What higher authority could I appeal to ..?

I just had to find the way, get it out of my system, in every way – body, mind and soul  … so you waited patiently … rock of ages.  Even when I blamed you angrily for all sorts of things – minor imperfections of happenings, broken things, difficulties, trips and tears.

At times like these you are GOD.  Masculine, patriarchal, bound in church stone.  In this God guise, I have accused you of being fusty, cruel and callous.

Yet as I have moved away from Church, I have stayed with spirit and so you have transferred and transformed to Gaia, to Mother Universe; you are the spirit behind and beyond the physical world.  The Universe is life force, creation, vibrancy, love and fortune.  The Universe is flow, positivity, she guides and glows and takes you with the flow.

The Universe is friend, is on my side, giver, sun shine provider … mother of all.

So as you have facets, then my love will flux and alter with the tides of your being, in both my mind and my heart.  Love shapes and forms and one expression of love is prayer.  I pray in many ways now, putting my intentions out there, expressing my gratitude, sharing the love.  This very letter is a piece of prayer.

I make my peace with you now, well most of the time; though it seems I ride a roller coaster so often and I’m not sure what will ever change that.  I used to ask for an even keel … that wasn’t to be.   Instead I play out the soap opera of my being, entertaining those around me with my constant stellar happenings, my seeming unconventionality, my breakages, my laughter … well may be that is my purpose, my created path or may be just a part of my own eternal puzzle of being.  So I surrender …

You are always the ultimate constant; so please forgive me, please teach me, please help me to see the way and shine the light – yes shine a light for me so that I can shine a light for others … for that is when I experience real love.  And the love of God that passeth all understanding is a gift, and a gift I greedily and gladly receive.

Thank you, for everything.

Love, Sandra

[PS: Dear Reader, if you enjoyed this letter, you can buy your own book version of my collected epistles by following this link…]

Letter 12: To Food

Sandra Love Letters , , , , ,

12 February 2012

Dearest Food

If music be the food of love play on … if music be the love of food, game on … if food be the driving force of all else, then I’m a very happy girl …

Food drives our physical life, it fuels this temporal body and is one of the longest, most enduring loves of my life …

You see it all starting with a tiny baby, curling its toes with pleasure at milk time and then moving on to the natural strangeness of solids.

It is a fundamental love and though YOU may eat to live, I most definitely live to eat and I LOVE to eat.  So call me a gourmet, call me a foodie or call me a greedy hog … that is how it goes with me.

There is the pleasure of preparation … first the shopping – the choosing, the selection, the lingering dreamings of meals to come.  Then gathering everything together for the feast: assembling, fettling, chopping and stirring the raw elements into a new, delicious entity.  Testing, tasting, tempting yourself with what is to come.

The impatience of waiting and finally … readiness, yummy-ness and happiness, as you consume your labour of love.

Taste … an oft neglected sense.  Often ignored, when it should be pampered, praised and perfected for the pleasure and glory of sustenance.

So I devour my love in every way.  I treasure and hoard cook books, slavering and anticipating over pages of pictures and food words.

For years I have pursued ingredients … herbs, flavourings and spices of every hue.  My freezer is filled with future joy.  I love the unusual, the divine, the out of the ordinary.  Then, when routing through the hoarding places, there are numbers which read ‘out of date’ – by years and years and so, I harden my heart and toss them out, unconsumed, unloved and left to moulder in the outside world.

Eating is an entertaining, an ecstasy. It takes you on voyages of new adventures, outside your door … in its’ pursuit I haunt and hunger around restaurants, cafes and tea shops, regard the menus – the very lists of love – and then wait for the love to arrive and so to begin.

Cooking for someone is an act of love … you are nourishing, treating and testing them.  And for ‘cook’ read make a slice of toast or create an elegant 5 course dinner party: the whole range of complexity is included here – it is ALL love.  Though the toast MUST be made from the best bread, taken close to burning point, then spread to every corner with melting butter; part soft, part crisp, all delicious …

Food is reason enough to share, to come together.  A social mixture, a treasuring of family and friends.  The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach … yes food is proof of love, to man or woman or child.  Food celebrates and food cements the tide marks of all our lives.

Food forms the structure of our days, punctuating our playings and our labours.

Food takes you on journeys, food tells the stories of a place, of it’s history and flavours and impacts.

Food is always there for you, greedily needed, a constant craving.

So what ever way you look at it … food is love.

   For ever yours

       Sandra

[PS: Dear Reader, if you liked this and my other letters, you can buy your own book of them by following this link…]

Letter 11: To the Lost Lover

Sandra Love Letters , , , , ,

11 February 2012

Dear Lost Love

I waited, not always so patiently for you to come to me … Over years, over tears, over dreams. Tumbling desires, stumbling steps taken halteringly towards you. False starts, then true strides to the man, to the one, to the lover, the faithful friend, the father, the sharer.

You’ve worn different faces, yet the end result was the same … a heart open, a heart broken, first by me and then, squarely, by you. Loving and unloved. True love and passion and comfort and life long togetherness, blessed … But not for ever blessed; tested and turned instead.

Why have you not seen me, fully? You saw me, were dazzled, then blinded … Why my lover, why is that my story, what purpose could that possibly serve?

It is not my karma to be left bereft, alone – I was born to love, born to fly. So is that my dichotomy? I cannot love AND fly? Why not ..? I want it ALL. So it seems my Icarus wings melt and I fall to the sea; I bide my time, build my wings and soar skywards again and again, oh and again. Gliding, coasting, heading for supersonic space and instead falling back down to earth – grave and gravity drawn.

So I left you and left you again and then I decided there could be no more leaving … Leaving was a far greater pain than the stain of staying. So I said I must change and change I did. I did everything to stay and then YOU turned me away … Once and then again – and I was so wounded, so rejected. So I took me to a nunnery. I stayed out of your path. I travelled to wisdom, I healed, I learned the lore of love. I listened I prepared … I waited.

Then I started the final journey towards you, slower, waiting, calling you softly, whispering to you as I waited … Composing a symphony of love, writing a lexicon of our life. Then the time for you came closer and I started to glimpse you in odd and twisted guises … trying you, testing you, discarding and ignoring the impure pre-versions of you.

And then it was your time. And you knew me, you heard me and I waited coyly, so sure of the outcome. You had heard my music, came to my clarion call. I knew your face, your words and, as I called you with song, so you spoke to me and wooed me in song too and told me of your love, before you would speak the words, in an Avatar.

So I was sure and certain – my call was answered, I knew your love words and heart promises before they were spoken. You breathed love before we cleaved. We wove, we danced, we dived, we planned. We fitted, allostericly locking into each other’s lives.

My life turned on you. I depended on you for the change; we wove a fabric of family and connection, love, praise and cohesion. A ring bound our promises and committed us to our forever future.

And I was free of my former life, now part mother, part counsellor, all lover, all me – too free.

Amazing love, sparks, passion, laughter, life bound together. There is nothing on this earth that can touch that time; that time that has cost so much and yet changed so little, when all is said and done, in the final analysis and yet strangely, it changed everything …

Then just one argument, just several words played. Forgotten by me, picked on and used by you. Festered on and faltering, heart altering, shattering, trashing, destroying.

So you were not mine to keep, my lost lover, not mine to treasure, to keep for ever. A rock crumbled, the footing lost, no anchor. Instead a missile, throwing me to your very own wolves, serving me up to your demons of rejection and fear and lack. You were first dazzled by me and then cruelly blind to me. Love now a four letter word … pain always a four letter word.

My heart could not hear your words. “Why why why?” – I cried to heart hardened ears – both yours and God’s. Why? When I had waited so long for you, I had served my time, I had learnt my love lessons, I was the best me I could ever be. Why? It was sheer insanity and death and grief and pain.

And life lives on, lungs still breath, the heart in so much stiffened pain, still beats. The sun shines again and there is laughter, there is the home of your own heart, with it’s infinite capacity for healing and it’s wanting to love and keep loving. There is a wisdom learnt, an ability to grow and cope and eventually to accept what passeth beyond your understanding.

Acceptance was so hard, so un-vindicated. Heaven could not wait, it seemed for me. It was a wrong doing, a divine mistake, wantonly and cruelly created. Why? To punish, to balance, to teach?  To push me back to square one, alone? For what purpose God? Why that cruel blow?

So I had to die, again, harder – to live again, more. To be more me, to shine freely and unfettered. To let you go … To create a new attachment, a thin umbilical cord, stuffed with love, letting go love, the cord getting thinner and thinner through to breaking point. We cannot ever completely be detached … you must know that …

Now it is a new year, a new me. I choose to cast my stones of intention and keep loving and moving to my light.  Now lost lover, I let you go – lovingly, to your own future without me and yet carrying a piece of me with you, for ever impacted, no matter how you try to eradicate.

You are lost to me and you were love to me and now you are past to me. We had our time and it was right that it was then.  So no regrets.  This is now, this is our tomorrow. Let’s go beyond our love, let’s do more, soar more, find our true freedom.  We are all done now, we are good now.

     So good bye lost lover and fare thee well.

          S x

[PS: Dear Reader, we always have love and to help to keep it and create it, you can buy your own copy of the complete book of letters by following this link…]