It had seemed like a good idea… I was feeling tired and low, so on a whim, booked a train ticket and hotel to a random destination in France.  So far so good, but then I got cold feet and a sudden case of shyness…  But then I know that I’m a creature of contradictions, with warring inclinations alternately sending me off on adventures and then making me hide from them.  Basically I’m a brave wimp.  Is that impelling or introspective?  Either way it’s time for me to explore ‘Finding my French Feet’…

My inclinations are all at odds again….  On one hand there is…
The Extrovert me!
I write and put my personal stuff out there.  I give speeches and presentations.  I even take charge and am decisive.
Sometimes…
And I like being that person…

But then again there’s…
The Introvert me…
Look for me on another day and it maybe that you won’t find me, since I’m staying safe and still, hidden blithely out of sight.
And I like that version of me too…

It means that I’m a mixed up marriage of a girl with gypsy instincts, hitched to a stay at home hermit.

So the gypsy in me frets to flee my responsibilities and set myself free for a while.  It’s such a wonderfully liberating ideal.  But then my inner hermit gets cold feet…

Despite my misgivings I still bravely boarded a Eurostar train.  And suddenly, there I was, in the city of Lille, in France, on my own.  And so I had to own my sudden shyness.

I had embarked on a mild mannered adventure, breaking my norm, expanding my horizons and insisting to myself that I must practise a language I rarely speak.  So I’d made the journey and so far so good, but still I needed some time to adjust to my new solo world and overcome my protectionist fears.

Smartly marching off the train, I floundered around on foot until I finally found my hotel – hidden away in plain sight.  I must have walked past it at least 5 times.  Oh well – I didn’t earn the nickname ‘Crap Nav’ without good reason…

But having found my new home I wasn’t quite ready to adventure yet.  Instead I quietly caught up on work in a café, with a croissant and hot chocolate for company.  Then hid away in my hotel room to sleep and read my time away.

The heated world of France outside my room intruded into my idyll.  The bars, cafes and hotels surrounding me were full of people watching football, as France played a World Cup round against Uruguay.  I could tell from the never ending cheers that my host country had won, so my inner gypsy pushed me out to revel in the atmosphere.  And when the revelry reached fever pitch, my hermit took over and I skulked off to the quietest, least threatening restaurant I could find for dinner.

As I sat with an aperitif waiting for my starter to arrive, I mused that being middle aged is interesting…  I’ve definitely lost the confidence of youth, but now I have more knowledge and surety.  My gypsy and hermit tendencies may be constantly contradicting each other, but at least these days I’m good with that and I know that on my path, I can make my own rules.

I realise too after half a life time, that the French I have learnt over the years is stuck in my brain, so that’s as good a metaphor as any I can think of for where I am in life.  I have amassed a set of skills and experience.  On my little sortie into France it was time to add to those – to speak and act in a different lexicon.  Time too to stride out into the world, be a bit of a braver soul, an unashamed tourist and an observer, encore…

Somehow after some time I eased in and found my French feet.  The next day was a shamelessly touristy one of shopping and walking, as I wandered around, happy as a clam.  My French wasn’t perfect, but it served, I got by and on the whole I was forgiven my linguistic imperfections.

 

Being in a city, I didn’t expect to get eaten alive by (what felt like at least) 60000 or so avaricious mosquitoes.  I was covered in itchy blistering bites from head to foot.  Then again all the gluten I’d consumed into my gluten intolerant body had given me indigestion.  I decided this was all part of the experience and headed for the nearest Pharmacie, there to consult with a man in a white coat who recommended homeopathic remedies to me in a typically French fashion…  I chose to keep enjoying myself and that minor medical misfortunes were of no consequence in the grand ‘weekend’ of things.

Whilst my gypsy let me play Russian roulette with the food to get the full on French experience, my hermit told me to avoid the strong French coffee – that was one food intolerance TOO far (the stuff makes me seriously ill).

The next day I had a late breakfast in a little enclosure on the pavement outside my hotel which faced the Gare de Lille – the city’s train station.  I sat watching the road works and the people go by, including 8 soldiers cradling their macabre rifles as tenderly as if they were babies.  I’d already seen them at the rail stations I’d passed through in France on this trip, but to see armed soldiers on the street like that felt raw and odd.  I rationalised it as a show of protectionism, given recent terrorist events in this country, but it seemed odd, just a couple of hours from my English door, where we’ve had our own share of similar atrocities.

An American tourist oblivious of my musings wandered in past the street barrier, seeking ice cubes for her for her flask – asking the waiter in a mixture of French and English.  He shook his head and I tried to translate.  “I looked the word up on google” she said adamantly.  Then she asks me if she could buy some from the hypermarket over the road.  I explained that it was Sunday so it was closed.  “That’s strange”, she said.  “That’s how it is in Lille” I replied with a Gallic shrug.  I spoke to the waiter again and he reluctantly purloined some ice from the bar for her.  “Your French is fluent, do you live here?” She asked.  Suddenly I wasn’t such a shy a stranger…  Cue another Gallic shrug – “I’m just here for the weekend”…

Another day of sightseeing / meandering ensued.  On a tour bus, there was some light and friendly French chatter with the woman sitting next to me.  I’m particularly proud that I made her laugh, when I pointed out the bird sitting atop the proud head of very serious statue.  I made someone laugh…  In French! She hadn’t seen the bird or the joke at first, but a few words and a dramatic mime had her laughing and frantically snapping away with her phone camera, hopefully to share the joke with who knows who back home.

Lille is close to the Belgian border and still has a distinctly Flemish flavour, especially in its architecture.  On the bus I saw a city of history and modernity, the two sometimes neatly dissected and often fiendishly integrated.  At the end of concreted side streets I’d glimpse churches of astounding beauty and gargantuan proportions.  Behind road works and sitting amongst rows of modern terraces, ornately façaded buildings would suddenly assert themselves to my senses and let me admire them from afar.

The bus whizzed us pass the cathedral, statues and civic buildings – ancient and modern.  We skirted the old quarter and admired its historical tweeness.  We craned our necks to fill our camera lenses with giant towers -precariously shooting our photo prey in between the silhouettes of the couple sitting in front of us.

Disembarking the bus I made my way back to hone in on the places I wanted to pry on some more.  First stop was the Old Market, where the locals come to buy fresh food produce and then get a beer at the one of the surrounding bars – to smoke and talk and create a cacophony of crowded Sunday sound.

I dawdled through the old quarter and stopped for lunch outside a bistro on a sunny street.  Having read that Lille followed the Belgian fashion of drinking beer rather than wine, I plunged in and ordered a Leff Ruby – a lager of a rich red colour and gorgeously fruity taste to go with my Tarteflette.

I lingered around the flea market housed in the square of the deliciously ornate Stock Exchange building, then wandered back to my hotel for a nap.

Later on I found a Moroccan cafe where I seemed to be the only tourist they had seen in a very long time.  The waiter bade me to sit inside, but I asked to sit out on the street explaining that I didn’t like football (which was loudly blaring from the incumbent TV attached to the wall).

The only other customers outside were a young couple, who seemed to be smirking at me.  Feeling the discomfort of their attentions, I ignored rather than engaged with them…

I know my Moroccan food and am fluent in menu, so confidently ordered a lamb tagine, washed down with water, since no alcohol was on sale – at this Halal establishment.

The food was scrumptious and I slowly picked it apart and devoured it, watching the street comings and goings in the shadow of a huge and beautifully ornate church.

Feeling the need of a drink to finish off my last evening in France with a suitable finale, I headed towards the tourist area.  Suddenly I lost my nerve again.  The bars were crowded and noisy.  I circled them all at least 3 times, until finally I told myself to get a grip and just sit my arse down at the nearest one.  I drank more Ruby beer and watched the world go by, then followed the sound of music, around the corner in the Place Charles de Gaulle.

I sat myself down on the wall of the fountain, alternatively watching water splash and then the couples who had gathered to dance tango to modern Latin beat.  The sun sank down.  It felt like a gourmet slice of heaven…

Despite my occasional timidity, travelling alone is liberating – you set your own agenda, you make the decisions and the only ego you have to tussle with, is your own.

As a creature of contradictions, I’m a little home bird hermit that loves to nest in peace and I also have a gypsy spirit (and Traveller’s ancestry in my DNA), so necessity has been the mother of invention when wanderlust calls and I need to fly the confines of the familiar, soaring over the horizon of my fears.

So maybe my inner gypsy and hermit are not at odds after all.  In fact they allow me simultaneously to adventure and keep me safe.

And if that is yet another contradiction, then it is also a choice and one I know that I will keep making, as my adventures through life – huge or tiny, continue.

~ Sandra Peachey – Timid Adventurer

PS: My book – Peachey Letters – Love Letters to Life has been featured in Psychologies Magazine and The Lady, it was also honoured as a Finalist in the 2015 International Book Awards.  

Another calendar has closed;

A new year with fresh pages, beckons me on.

As I turn the next leaf, I will not start anew;

since I’m taking myself with me where ever I go.

So I shan’t be making resolutions or casting spells;

Just starting afresh in each new given moment;

I’ve learnt a lot in 2017 – I’ve laughed, wept and wondered too;

I’ve loved and worried, shaken my fist and hidden in dark corners – mainly in my mind.

I tripped on, and became a doormat; then travelled, changed direction and dreamt of different dimensions.

A full moon turns the tides tomorrow – a wolf wagging the tail of another lunar cycle – new and millennial.

Next year is nearly here, so it’s time to celebrate again: a new day, a new month, and a myriad of minutes.

I wish you clear sight for 2018;

with a wide open heart.

May you love freely and learn much;

laughing loudly and often.

Being blessed with a deep well of forgiveness;

All of which will lead you on to health and a wallet of honeyed abundance.

As earth’s children we deserve so much – so here’s to a brand new year for you and for me – whole and healed and happy.

Here’s to 2018.

It was an odd, emotional day – I had some scary news about someone I love and I wanted to be with them, but my car had developed not 1 but 2 faults…

I live in a village and it was a busy shopping Saturday close to Christmas. I ponder my options and feel that I can’t do nothing, but neither can I take a risk… I need my car to be in full working order.

Everyone is busy, the roads are crowded, but I decide to be accepting and, well, nice to anyone I speak to today. I have to go to 3 garages before I can get sorted and saved…

At garage number 3, at the back of a lonely industrial estate, a man in oily overalls comes to my rescue. It can all be fixed – cheaply and quickly. I sink gratefully onto a plastic chair in their cold waiting room.

My knight in oily overalls finds me there and asks if I’d like a cup of tea while I’m waiting. I answer with ferocious gratitude that I would LOVE that!!! He sees my stress and brings me 3 chocolate hobnobs too – “because you look like you REALLY need them”, laughing at me and caring for me all at once. I smile, inside and out. I thank him sweetly. He tells me that no one is looking – so I can dunk them too…

He is my Hobnob hero and has made my day… Out of all this, I’m just happy to know in this crazy world that laughter, customer service and biscuits are all out there too.

Once saved and sorted I then got to where I wanted to be, safely…

And you know what? ‘Nice’ rules and so do Hobnobs!!!

Dear Dad

It’s Father’s Day today and your birthday tomorrow, so thoughts of you float through my consciousness on this particular day, in this juicy month of June.

Not that you were ever bothered with all the commercial trappings of this modern fad of a Hallmark day; but still, this is my absolute favourite time of year, since June really is MY month.  My birthday is only 3 days after yours after all, the sun is high and hot and the evenings are lusciously long and light.

And after a long and difficult Spring this year, it’s time for me to be reborn; delivered into the summer, with a new number for my age along with fresh dreams and schemes to be hatched then fledged – to take flight to only my heart knows where.

And today I dream of you Dad. I was 23 when you died, so now, as a middle aged maiden, I’ve lived my life far longer without than ever with you.  But if I count the years, those numbers are somehow unimportant to me, because of course, you are always with me.

Me at 15 and Dad at 60

I have decided to linger on your legacy to me today and it comes to me in many ways…

The older I get, the more I seem to look like you and sometimes your words fly out of my mouth – passed along the line of time, from who knows who, before us.

Memories are composed of thoughts and feelings, so when I think of you Dad, I feel love and I always think of that as your greatest gift to me. I was so fortunate to be planned and wanted and appreciated, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that love and like go hand in hand. Yet we did genuinely like each other and were easy in each other’s company – so I can see how this shaped the way I still like to gently debate the world and then laugh uproariously at it – usually with words twisted into a perfect pun or a clever curve of connected thought.

You left school at 14 to learn a trade, but still you were an avid reader. You read to me every night at bedtime and so I know my love of words and literature, ignited by my imagination, most definitely came from you.

And there are the practicalities too: as a plasterer, you taught me to be fearless about DIY – I have wall papered, tiled, sanded, sawed, chipped and hammered, whilst many of my female friends looked on in awe. I have to say that in these middle aged days I don’t really want to do any of these things any more; but when I delegate those tasks out, I like to smugly think that I actually know what I’m talking about.

You told me once that I was a country girl, not a ‘townie’ like my mother; following instead in your rural (size 12) footsteps from your native corner of Cambridgeshire; even though, as I smartly pointed out, I grew up in a city. “It’s not about that” you said with certainty. I certainly know that I now live happily in a village, as does my brother and I don’t think this is down to serendipitous chance. We both had the nurture of spending time with our beloved grandmother and Aunts, chasing geese, collecting eggs and milking goats; all freely idyllic occupations compared to the strictured squareness of our other concrete childhood urban world.

And I love the countryside – whether to sit, wander or be walking through it or trying to constrain it in my garden; so much so in fact, that I simply feel that I have just a natural, easy affinity with it.

Along with the easy comes the harsh too… Despite being recklessly gung ho so often in my youth, I find more and more that I can so easily now be defined by fear too – a constant preoccupation of yours, to a degree that would often make you cry out with terror in the darkness of the night.

In body I’ve inherited your flat feet, though this means that as therapy, I went to dance classes for many years as a child and am now, when I set my muscle memory to it, very graceful and light on my own ‘plates of meat’ (as you always called them). When I don’t think about it though, I clash, crash and am extremely clumsy – but that’s me, a constant dichotomy of characteristics; some which I get from you and your family before you, some from my mother and still, some more – all my own.

You not being here is a physical fact of long standing, but over 30 years since your passing, I can still miss you, and yet still feel that in my head I can talk to you, and that somehow, you will always understand and be on my side. It goes without saying that I  feel, deep down, that I can take your pride in the things I have achieved in my life for granted.

I’m sure I could write another 20 letters about the traits, lessons and DNA you passed on to me, but ultimately you told me that you wanted me to be happy and true to myself… In this, I’ve both succeeded and failed; but pondering on it now, I know that for a very long time now I have been fearful and miserable, yet now it’s time to come back into the summer light of our birth month of June, so to smile and start again.

And already Dad, I feel the quickening of our (re)beginnings in joyful June.

As a fitting end to my latest letter to you, I’ll recount the joke, you told, ad infinitum, all throughout our life together…

“Why did the owl ‘owl? Because the Woodpecker would pecker.”

Oh dad, you’re so punny…

Bye then and bless you.

S xx

I currently have a special Father’s Day offer: You can buy the paperback of my Love Letters to Life on Amazon for £11.99 or you can get an author signed copy on my website for just £7.99 including P&P.  You will also find my book on all good book selling websites around the world.

Featured on the BBC, as well as local and national media (including Psychologies Magazine and The Lady), the book was also honoured as a Finalist in the 2015 International Book Awards. 

‘Peachey Letters – Love Letters to Life’ takes the best posts from this blog, adds new content and wraps it all together in a sweet bookish structure. 

It’s an easy yet satisfying read, which sees love in everything we do in life, from the big themes to the tiny, trivial minutiae of it too. 

• Buy the paperback on my website – here for just £7.99 including P&P 
• Or get it from Amazon for £11.99 and from all great book websites anywhere in the world. 
• You can also buy it in Kindle format

If you want to get in touch, you can contact me by clicking here:

My external plaudits include the following – being:

* The Director of LifeWork Consultancy & Coaching;
* The Author of Peachey Letters – Love Letters to Life and Co-Author of The F-Factor.
* A 2015 International Book Awards Finalist, in the Women’s Issues Category;
* The Winner of a Women Inspiring Women Award in 2013;
* Being shortlisted for Women’s Coach in the APCTC Awards 2014, also nominated in 2012 & 2013; and
* Being nominated for a Networking Mummies National Recognition Award in 2015.

 

The news from Manchester is devastating… The unbearable thought that so many loved ones will never return home. That so many will have to go through such agonising grief and trauma.

Like so many, I cried for them all…

And we hear how the community pulled together and how taxi drivers ferried people home free of charge and my heart aches in a different way.

This awful act was perpetrated by sick fanatics. People who seek to destroy in order to create hate, fear and pain.

In this sense I’ve decided to honour all those who have lost so much, by not being scared. I’m going to continue to live my life as before. So if I want to go to a concert, I will and not even think about it.

And I’m not going to hate or retaliate. Neither blame – I know that the perpetrators of this vile act do not represent the majority of Moslems.

I send my condolences to those who have lost. And finally my thanks goes to those who have supported them.

I just didn’t now how to finish this post until I watched the coverage on the news tonight.  At the vigil held in Albert Square in Manchester was a banner that read:
“Love for All, Hate for None.”

I can’t add anything to that.

~ Sandra Peachey
Blogger & Believer

It was the 16^th of July and a Monday – that I remember clearly…

I got a call – I had to get to the hospital quickly as my mother had been taken in…
“Don’t die today, please” I thought with irony “I’ve got such a busy week…”

Oblivious to my plans, she left this life anyway, as it was, in every way HER time, and suddenly none of the things that had been so important to me just seconds before, mattered an iota…

I like to remind myself of this at times – what is REALLY important – when I stress and chunter about details, discussions and deliberations.

I think of that day now and can’t even recall why all my worry and busy-ness were so important at the time; only instead feel a loving ache and a knowledge that though part of her is gone, my love for her remains, changes and is with me, whatever I have on the To Do list in my life…

— o0o —

I currently have a special offer: You can buy the paperback of my Love Letters to Life on Amazon for £11.99 or you can get an author signed copy on my website for just £7.99 including P&P. 

Featured on the BBC, as well as local and national media (including Psychologies Magazine and The Lady), the book was also honoured as a Finalist in the 2015 International Book Awards. 

‘Peachey Letters – Love Letters to Life’ takes the best posts from this blog, adds new content and wraps it all together in a sweet bookish structure. 

It’s an easy yet satisfying read, which sees love in everything we do in life, from the big themes to the tiny, trivial minutiae of it too. 

• Buy the paperback on my website – here for just £7.99 including P&P 
• Or get it from Amazon for £11.99 and from all great book websites anywhere in the world. 
• You can also buy it in Kindle format

If you want to get in touch, you can contact me by clicking here:

My external plaudits include the following – being:

* The Director of LifeWork Consultancy & Coaching;
* The Author of Peachey Letters – Love Letters to Life and Co-Author of The F-Factor.
* A 2015 International Book Awards Finalist, in the Women’s Issues Category;
* The Winner of a Women Inspiring Women Award in 2013;
* Being shortlisted for Women’s Coach in the APCTC Awards 2014, also nominated in 2012 & 2013; and
* Being nominated for a Networking Mummies National Recognition Award in 2015.

 

Truth is a tenet that I live by.

I write books and blogs splurging out my inner most truths – whether they be painful, trivial or funny – since I believe in doing so I will learn from them.  And I’ve discovered that if I share that learning, then others get to empathise and learn their own lessons too.

At the moment though, the truth is that I’m having a hard time with life.  To my amazement, I find that I am feeling an anxiety so deep, that it has permeated my being to the core and constantly tortures me; despite everything I have done for so long – learning and being in order to live a cleaner, clearer internal life.  An internal life that will give me the best grounding for my external life – the world I live and work in and the people I interact with.

Yet here I am, feeling constant anxiety, coiled like a poisonous snake sleeping in my solar plexus.  As a coach, my belief is that there are lessons in this protracted, painful scenario that I obviously need to learn; but hitherto I have struggled with what these are exactly, having been so caught up in the drama of the recent life events that seem to have triggered them.

Since truth is one of the most fundamental rules for living this life of mine, then of naturally I have constantly shared and aired it and made it my modus operandi.  This means that I get to dump all the junk of life and of a life time’s conditioning, and as a result have consistently honest interactions with everyone around me.

But the truth about my truth is that I don’t… Not all the time anyway.  And certainly not where it counts, because I believe that the anxious situation I find myself in now, (in several areas of my life) is a direct result of the fact that I have not shared that truth.

Instead I kept a lid on my truth and there were a number of reasons for this.  Sometimes it has felt too difficult to share.  Sometimes I felt that it was unnecessary and not something there was time for.  That it just wasn’t wanted. Or that to share it would lose me something that I wanted to keep.  At other times that it was pointless because I wouldn’t be listened to and in fact I would be undermined for it and told that I was talking nonsense.  Maybe although the person I wanted to tell my truth to, was important to me, I was of no consequence to them. Sometimes I was too tired to make the effort or take the consequences.   Instead I got into a habit of getting angry and frustrated and either keeping all this to myself or moaning about it to anyone but the people concerned.

I’ve been silently doing this for nearly a year now and it’s built up to a pressure cooker of pain, without a proper release, waiting to explode…

As a result – different things have happened in different areas of my life.  In one I walked silently away – on the surface, whilst screaming inside.  In another I have allowed my silence to become a scape goat for other people’s noise and folly.  In both cases the common thread was that I allowed it to happen in the first place and then I allowed it to continue.

Fundamentally I failed to live my truth and now I am literally suffering the consequences.

Finally – now, going through the pain of this, I am living my lesson.  I already knew all this, but I just wasn’t prepared to speak my truth.  I was scared and so I bottled out of it instead.

But facing up to it has be a lot less painful than the tumultuous anxiety I’m living through right now.

The problem is that it may just be too late – the damage is done and history has been forged into a certain rigid steel shape which can’t be bent or altered back.

So – what’s done is done – it’s time to move on, reflect and not make the same mistakes again.

Now of course, having learnt, I speak my truth, yes – where others have sought to blame me, I have spoken, splurged it and shared it until the point at which I’m sick of it and I just want to be silent again.

And whilst I have my truths to air – others do too.  Their versions of it.  Their reasons for it, just like I do, and they’re different. Damn!  Now I have to argue, now I have to justify. That’s not what I want.  That is one of the many reasons I kept a lid on it in the first place.  Damn!

Perceiving myself to be a ridiculously balanced and understanding person, I acknowledge other people’s points of view. I can see that there could be a variety of individual truths.  Sometimes I can be swayed to the other side and at others I have to hold my own council.  And sometimes there is no alternative but to agree to disagree.  But oh so often lately, I have found this a pointless exercise in a particular relationship, so I have just acquiesced and kept quiet.  And this silence has bled into other areas of my life.

So eventually life threw a brick at me to stop me in my tracks, because where I had kept quiet, my silence was taken for complicity and culpability.  So that made me a target for blame.  But that was where the brick stopped for me – I may have been quiet, but I refused to take the blame for something I could not control, in complicit silence and meekness.  Even thought a battle line had been drawn and I was expected to surrender.

As I could be heard above the noise of the battle, I was forced to fire shots back and shout.  This shouting and pouting has not been easy and it has caused a lot of shock waves – not least for myself.  So I made my volleys, said my piece – laying out all my long truths in this war of attrition.  But the other side has the bigger guns, so then I had no alternative but to sit back and wait for an answer.  Unfortunately it’s an answer which is a very long time in coming back and upon which, I place a great deal of anxious importance.

And whilst all that was coming to a head, fate suddenly opened a door that allowed me to take a step back to the other situation – the one I had walked silently away from.  I couldn’t quite believe it – I was getting a second chance to resolve with words, the scenario I had failed to solve with silence.  And I hadn’t even asked for it, instead it was just offered to me.  Suddenly I had hope.  One good thing would surely lead to another.

But my cherished invitation didn’t turn into reconciliation.  It never happened; instead the silence intensified – broken by random Morse code communications that served to reach forward and then retreat.  It was so frustrating.  All I wanted to do was to listen and then in turn to talk.  So I tried to be patient and ironically silent, to get to this goal.  However anxious people want certainty.  We like structure and arrangements to help us to feel safe.  And I got the opposite.  Whether this was the truth of the situation or not – it felt like my time to talk was never going to happen.

So one anxious situation fed another. My mind now had two things to worry away at.  Sleep stopped favouring me, my appetite left me, and I couldn’t sit still.

So I had to seize control somehow and put an end to all this – again.  But this time, not silently.  If I wasn’t allowed to meet and speak, then I couldn’t be prevented from writing.  So that’s what I did – I finally let my truth out, putting pen to paper and then sending my words on their way.  Maybe they will hit the mark and maybe they will just fly away, scattered into the ether, but now I have let them out and let them go.

And that’s it.  I’ve done everything I can do for now.  In one situation I have shouted and in another I taken to the pen.  Maybe it’s a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but at least no more horses are going to escape.

So this is what I want to happen now:

That the blame is withdrawn universally, and we work honestly and courageously as a team to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.

That my words are heard and heal a breach.  That in doing so a greater, deeper connection is made.  One that lasts a life time – and leads to partnership, love and commitment.

I would like these things to come to pass with those people and places I face now, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  Maybe, once the lessons are learnt, we get to go on and put them into practice elsewhere and in doing so, somehow do more universal good.

And that, today, is what I have to say.

In sharing it I’ve decided to turn the enemy of my anxious thoughts into the friends of my purest truth.

May that truth in turn serve the greatest good; beyond all expectations, egos and emotions.

Yours truly,

Sandra

Newly Noisy Truth Teller and Sooth Sayer

I currently have a special offer… You can buy the paperback of my ‘Love Letters to Life’ on Amazon for £11.99 or you can get an author signed copy on my website – for just £7.99 including P&P…

It’s not me.
My name’s not anxiety.
I’m not a sufferer.
That’s not what I choose to be.

But what it is,
is a coil wound tight within.
Centred in my solar plexus
and curling a fist round my heart.

Another hairy hand reaches into my beautiful brain,
flicking my neurons and kicking my thoughts.
Then running them ragged – round and round.
And that’s just on the inside…

Outside the world goes on… Innocently or ignorantly.
Pushing my alarm buttons. Red for ragging bulls.
Starting stories and then stalling the ending;
keeping me waiting for the final fatal denouement.

Please just tell me what’s next. It saves my frazzled brain
from creating a thousand relentless stories.
Without the truth I have to surmise surprises.
And when you are silent, I swop the white noise for inevitable pain.

I fill the void with words – writing the book of our story badly.
In the worse chapters I’m screaming, screwed to the floor.
Or I’m forced to push and poke, shouting for an answer.
So spare me and talk to me. I don’t want a 1000 words, just the final one.

Don’t make me the tail wagging the dragon of dangerous decisions.
Go easy on me, and free us both from the rigid complexity of history.
Stop this silence and your burrowing in the dark.
You are only throwing up stones where you should see the sun.

The darkness is obscuring my face, while you avert your eyes.
So you don’t see me, hear me, or feel my faltering fear.
It’s not me this anxiety, it’s not my name, or the vein of my life.
So just open your heart and your ears to free us, so we can just be;
Who we are and not just a problem with the label of anxiety.

~ Sandra Peachey – Anxious Poetess

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