I didn't think i'd blog again but i'll see how it goes. Looking back at my last entry it was all about tears and from that point on the tears kept flowing. I couldn't blog. How do you blog when your heart is breaking? I know some people do, but for me it felt too exposed to express my heart into this impersonal space, epsecially when i couldn't think who would be reading it anyway.

In a few months alot has changed. The walls in this room are cream for a start, not purple.

Finn is ill off school and has just hit Poppy and they are both crying and i need to go and collect Tilly. I was just thinking hte other day about Virginia Woolf's statement decades ago that to be a writer you need '£500 and a room of your own'. i was thinking, well yes, but a nanny too. So often i want to write, it is almost a physical thing in my body, but it's time to cook supper or a child is needing input or whatever. I know other people work out rhythmns and routines to handle all this, but for me, years on, it is still often a tension i don't easily resolve. Tonight it was instant pizza and the tv on constant so i could get some space and do some emails. But it can't be every night. When Shannon was here and i was buzzing at 3 am writing away she said 'Now i see a different part of you, how getting up in the morning for kids really cramps your style!' and there was something in that. Sorry i'm moaning again.

I really must go now. Here in england the sky is dark and i can see the lights from this room hanging in the garden, reflected outside.

Jesus, hold me. I want to be light with you again. Throw me up and catch me. Hold me. My heart feels stretched. i want to lie in a hot bath with candles. I want to float in the night sky on my back and watch the stars, and feel the wind soft beneath me, bearing me up. Swimming, floating through the sky. I want to wake up tomorrow and feel courage and hope. I love you.

Yesterday switched on the radio and it was all about tears! New research showing how emotional tears are different to irritant tears - contain stress chemicals which are literally being washed out. One scientist was saying how tears are excretions, and how all the other excretions in our body are getting rid of waste, of toxins, so tears probably are too.

This morning driving back from dropping Poppy off at school felt such surges of joy. Physical joy, welling up from inside as well as being washed over me. Amazing, especially as this morning i felt so tired, so flat, had to draw on God to just get me out of bed. His abundance is startling, again and again.

And yesterday, Alice and Becky came back for lunch with their kiddies, and saw a new mum, Yolanda, and asked her too. She was so pleased to be included. I had been feeling raw and sore but again it was a joyful thing to have people here, to see the boys tearing round, to be sitting together, eating and connecting lives.

Well i read other people's blogs and its alot about what they DO and i love to hear and to know your lives like this (although to be honest i also want to know more, what's really ticking, how does it make you feel?) But the thing is i don't DO very much. Most of my journeying is internal so like today i want to blog but what is there to say? We went to London last weekend for the celebration of baby Bart, where there was a juggler with a painted face who could balance swords on his forehead while standing on top of a tall balanced stack of chairs, and where i saw people i hadn't seen for years, and where i felt profoundly moved by seeing this precious family surrounded physically by hteir frineds on what has been a long painful journet for them. We then went to the Natural History museum and the children had a wild time with the T-REx exhibition and then downstairs looking through microscopes at various specimins. This is how learning/exploring should be - having to drag then away while they're still having fun. What else? The walls are purple and some leaves outside are still startingly bright green, others are falling and dry. The world is going on, the hum of cars driving by and my blinking computer whirring because it's cheap.
Yesterday I just cried and cried. I opened a magazine someone had left here and my heart thudded when i saw a photo of a beautiful hammock, strung up between trees in Italy, with leaves shading it and a pillow on it and drink beside it. I wasn't crying yet. As i sat quietly i felt God say that he is the hammock beneath me, he is the pillow beneath my head, my sun and my shade, and just to lie there. As i did, tears and grief from deep deep down welled up and i sobbed and sobbed. There's so much tiredness in my soul. So much longing that hasn't been fulfilled. So much waiting and so much that has been lost. When i thought i'd finished, the gentle whisper was, what else? And another wave of grief tumbled up and out. By the time i had to go and get Finn from school my face was swollen adn my eyes puffy. Fortunately it was sunny so i didn't look too odd with my dark glasses on. God keeps telling me it is good to cry, how tears wash and heal, but i often struggle with that because it seems that i have spent most of my adult life crying and i just feel so odd. Also when you have tears streaming down your face and snot running and a sore head it doesn't feel so great. However yesterday i was amazed. Later on in the afternoon i suddenly realised that i felts so CLEAR, so light and so free. I wasn't tired, i wasn't sore, it was like being bathed in light, with clear space both inside and out. Later a friend called and all i can say is i felt her heart. Or perhaps it was God's heart. I don't know her well but when i put the phone down there was room in my heart for this flood of GOd's love for her, of feelings he had for her, which were so beautiful and so pure and loving and intense, it was a joy to experience a bit of his heart for her. I'm thinking out loud, but probably i couldn't have free flowed with that if i had still been clogged up with all my stuff. I wish i'd remember this next time i'm resisting crying.

I often think, what am i doing with my life? And really, what AM i doing with it? But then for me now it seems that i still can't DO much, like others do. I just want to walk gently on this earth. I want to be tender to God and to others. I want to have time to care about hte people and the things he cares about. I want to learn how to offer out my heart in really simple, quiet ways, to be content to walk gently, to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with him.
Lord sorry for being proud and getting puffed up and still being enticed by the outward show of things. Sorry for comparing. Crack all that off me. I want your heart for others, for you.
x

Its a beautiful sunny day here. Finn's been climbing trees while i've been picking up fallen apples. Yesterday i was raging inside for much of the day. Didn't know why exactly, but felt so angry. I emailed Susan Milner and told her all my gripes and felt alot better. This morning i sat wiht God, the sun soft on my face, and was reminded of how loved i am. That it's so simple - he desires and loves me, adn loves it when i bask in his presence. Then ouytward things don't change but I felt peaceful, connected, joyful, hopeful. I long to abide in that place all the time with him, and know no other way than centering on him daily. Perhaps then the blocks in the river may ease and unhinge, and the stream of his presence and love i will be able to be aware of all the time. I want that. Do you hear that GoD, I WANT that. YOU. YOu are who i desire, you're the centre, the infinite perimiter, the source and completeion of all .. is, could be, of all that my heart longs for. You are all the colours in the palette and all the possible mixes too. YOu are wild and steady, with me in the raging and here in the peace. Thank you. All my could be s are here for you, ragged and hoping, you have it all.

Finn is lying on the floor showing me how he has just balanced the leg of a heavy wooden chair on a small delicate clip.
This is FINN, 4 1/2 'I am very very happy to give you the letter, its quite a good letter, i don't know, but if you think it is, this is the joke book, hello, hello'

Gotta go and colect tilly from school now. Adios xx

have just said goodbye to the joneses and jessica and shannon. Our kids are really grumpy because they are sad and already miss them. They all climbed in the van and wanted to go with them. That feeling of crashing down when you have had fun fun fun and ordinary life seems boring without abigail and elisabeth to sparkle and play with. They have played all summer. I have been astounded at how much children just PLAY. Hang out with one another, play kidnapping games or restaurant games or just run a bath and lie in it together for an hour or so chatting. I'd like more of that.
We had a beautiful feast together last night. It turned out it was Andrew's favourite food - roast lamb and then blackberry and apple crumble. We drank red wine and ate this amazing turkish olive bread that debbie brought for us from london. Candles and flowers and red glitter shimmery fabric we had hung like a canopy over the table. Friends family tribe.
The kidlets have their own tribe within a tribe. When they are together there is an identity, a kind of tangible anointing, authority or something. it really is like watching this tribe who with complete joy and abandon have found one another again and love one another without restraint. It's the same feeling i have of being on holy ground when i see my kids dancing, when there are no defences, no self-consciousness, but bare soul expressing, moving. OH la la. So everyone has gone, and it is weird but i don't feel sad today. I felt hugely sad and low last night, but today i don't, probably becuase we have booked some flights to prague in december return price 99p.
So kisses to you beautiful majestic king and queen as you travel with your entourage in your mercedes van, handmaids, prophets, warriors, visionaries, explorers on the way to Dover. We love you. You are beautiful. What an honour and what fun it is to know you all and to party together through life.
Happy birthday for tomorrow, Jessica! I look forward to some girl talk with you next time.
There's a rich deposit in us from all of you having been here. Thank you. xx

this is my first ever blog entry wowee. The stars are bright outside and the walls inside are purple and i have been drinking wine with beautiful Shannon by the sea wall in Bosham as the sun was going down and then eating out yahoo. I do feel a lot of yahoo and wowee. Life is full. God is wild. There is wine and talking and hearing one another's hearts and dreamimng together and risking and discovering who this wondrous creature is sitting with you is - who you didn't even know a few weeks ago. I have loved hearing shannon's story, not just her past dramatic one, but the ongoing adventure of her life, of jesus coming through for her in extravagant ways again and again. So as we talk i see her new house that God is going to give her, filled with light and walls coloured as she has pianted them. there's a garden with a table and chairs in it and lots of tea lights. Sparkle, life, light, safe space, place of dreams, place for dreamers. Shannon thank you for all the releasing you have done for others. I think it's your turna nd your time to be released and to be served in the visions and callings God has for you. we love you, we're for you.

When we came out of the Fox Goes Free pub, the sky was velevety black dark and looked really far away, stretching on never ending, and teh stars startlinly bright and clear. Finn today asked me in the car how many planets there are. Mercury, venus , Earth, Mars.. hang on, EARTH! I had forgotton we are a planet. Now that is cool. Planets like Jupiter and Saturn are, well, far out, huge, hanging in the universe. Funny how i forget that we are too. This beautiful jewel, bright green adn blue from space. BRIGHT. We're his ecosystem here in space, where he inhabited, barefeet running around and a snotty nose 'Jesus! Jesus! Come on in now, its dinner time' 'Coming, mum' being tripped up by his laughing brothers as he did so. And of course he never left and he always has been. We're all like these sparkling jewels, connecting in space, shimmering colour and life, orbiting, tumbling, fiery or cool. Actually its felt this summer more like we've been landing together on this amazing planet. Waking up from a dream, having landed, dazed,disorientated a little, adn looking around discovering one another and its like 'OH so its you. Hi. Haven't met you before but its YOU. WOW. So, tell me your story' gently realising, this is another earthling brother sister its time for me to discover.
Thank you Jesus for just being so cool. You have such a diverse and eclectic ..people. What's the word?
Friends.
Yeah. Your friends are great. You are great. Fireworks in my heart for you, amazing friend lover that you are.

roger 10- 4 over and out. for now. wohee this is fun. xx