a living life.

I’ve been wanting to tell you some things.

Or show you somethings, maybe?

Wanting to share things that are true and beautiful and painful and just - a living life, I guess.

.

This summer held all of life in such a crystal clear way it was hard to be in at times. There was so much beauty rubbing alongside the absolute pain of what it means to be human that it took my breath away. There were days in my Mother in Laws garden, the sun making rainbows as we watered plants she toiled over for years, for the very last time. We watched our children play, sat with her by the window, and photographed the light on her chair. We took our kids on a plane for the first time post-pandemic; a house with a pool and pomegranate trees, Sicilian food and light that had a magic all its own, both nourishing in deeply pleasurable ways. There were night skies we all laid underneath, whilst talking about space and time and our existence here on earth, holding hands in the dark, spotting shooting stars as we floated on our own big rock. I photographed families and weddings and creative acts of imagination and all of life was in those places too - genuine, ugly, beautiful, human. My cameras malfunctioned and I made photographs that will never be born because of it, but the fact that I still remember them and have them somewhere inside me makes me believe in magic and art all over again despite it all. My son had his first seizure in three years. And then he had more. Pain and fear slipped into sleepless nights and waking moments and when David Whyte said ‘pain is a way in’ he was right, because I have been acutely within my body for the past six weeks and it’s honestly been exhausting. I notice when I’ve been holding my breath a moment too long, or when every part of me feels too alert, too primed to run. There has been little to do but to be here now and I think that’s like the point anyway? But whatever. A blessing and a curse. My son turned 13 and there was so much joy and many giraffes (he loves giraffes) and his friends came to celebrate him and he told me that his favorite gift was a book of photos taken over the past 13 years of his life that I made him because I needed him to have tangible evidence of how insanely loved he is, I needed tangible evidence of this beautiful this life of his ? There were selfies taken in golden light where I looked at myself and checked in with my body and tried to reconcile the two, taking the individual components and making myself a whole. I met people in the care home who were lost and confused and tried to make sense of how our meat suits and minds are so fragile, and thought again of the description of old age as second childhood. How we all just need to be loved through it, just like the first childhood. I watched my husband sit with his Mum. On one day she wasn’t quite able to register where she was, who she was, who we were. The next she held his face in her hands and told him he was her baby whilst they giggled. There have been Thursday ballet classes which made me realize endorphins are a thing ! and that I just haven’t really needed them through external sources for quite some time ? which makes me really fucking hashtag blessed. Whilst walking to class last week I thought about how the shock and pain of these months had been working its way through my system. I played with the pain, got curious. I asked myself if the worst thing I could name happening to me happened, how would my life continue? In that moment, I knew very deep in my bones that it all would have been worth it. I didn’t think it, I felt it. Every single moment of love, of them, of being here, is worth every ounce of pain. And I thought about that thought and felt that feeling and knew that it would all be ok.