I didn’t know how to tell you that it was over. I did not want it to be over. I didn’t want to flinch at the sound of prayer and worship, or feel nauseous at the prospect of walking into a church. I didn’t want to screen the calls of my Christian friends, or ache when my children came home to ask me why ‘Jesus didn’t die but Poppy did’. But it is over – it has been over for a few years now – and every day that has passed since I closed my Bible has confirmed that reality […]
This day – New Year’s Eve – is tempting in its promises. Tomorrow I will begin the life I have been aching for, kind of tempting. Tomorrow I will become more like (insert person you admire), and less like the worst version of me. Tomorrow I will present myself differently, and they will take me seriously. And we shame the New Year’s resolution as a social institution, then secretly harbour our own desperate wishes for blessings and health and attention and change as the clock ticks over – as if between Christmas and New Year we have assessed how little Santa/our loved ones […]
So we’ve come to this. A dualistic, contemptuous, hysterical grapple between two words: yes and no. And, for an opinion poll, no less. Not even a referendum. Give the people enough ammunition to kill one another, but deny anyone the ability to affect the outcome of the war. Because, it does seem to be war now, yes? I don’t know about you, but I feel played. I’m not here for war, and I don’t think you ever came here for war, I think you came here, originally, to breathe deep, to love true and tell your story. To […]
ra`anan I once had a vision about my husband. To be fair, I’ve had a few. Some, I believe, were projections, wrought from my own longing. Some, parables, I thought I could interpret, that I did not yet have eyes to see. But there was one vision I held onto, through every ending relationship, and every test. One that I believed could actually be from God. It came from a question, one day in prayer. Can you show me a picture of what the gospel is like? God doesn’t always oblige me my immediate requests, but this particular day, […]
Community is delicate, deep and coloured. It moves in currents – wild and tidal. It grows, like so many living things, to the degree that it is tended. When I first relocated to Melbourne four years ago, I had one friend. Blindly, I followed him into a beautiful, messy circle of people with whom I slowly began to show myself. I found a tiny two-bedroom apartment tucked at the back of a block of apartments, nestled above the trees. My writing desk looked over the mountains, and the bookshelf was half-full. The home grew as my community did. At first, I […]
When I think of my heart’s journey over the past few years, I remember the time I watched my friend Laurine tenderise a chicken breast. She hit it with her kitchen mallet until it succumbed – limp. I would rather you thought me valiant, in love. Independent, but entirely adorable. Definitely too devoted to make mistakes around men or marriage. Totally wifeable, but too holy to worry about it. That is not the case. The romantic paths I’ve taken over the past four years have twisted and turned and led me to both extraordinary wonder, and to […]
No matter your belief paradigm, Los Angeles is a furnace. This month it has had this eery sheen. Smudgy bronzer lines the gutters of Hollywood Boulevard. We have red carpet covering that corner where the homeless man was killed by police. Is that a woman putting a price on her body? Darling, no. That’s a nominee. The Oscars are the ultimate reflection of a hope deferred. They are the television show masquerading as an institution, the marketplace pretending to be a temple. The top of the ladder, the dream of every kid waiting tables in WeHo. Judgment day. We see the […]
The Sad Days start the same way all seasons do. The wild plants on the side of the road on which you are travelling, start to change, ever so slightly. They might have been sporting little yellow flowers – bright indications of warmth, health, abundance… But almost without you noticing, they somewhat wilt, and then shed. The plants become bare. It’s subtle at first, only a few dead leaves here or there. But as you travel on, you notice them more. Suddenly, there are no flowers at all, and you know you’re in the thick of a new season. […]
‘Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power, and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many directions at once. The masculine chooses a single goal and goes in that direction. Like a ship cutting through a vast ocean, the masculine decides on a course and navigates the direction: the feminine energy is itself undirected but immense, like the wind and deep currents of the ocean, ever-changing, […]
Every plane trip, my randomly selected neighbour strikes up the same conversation. “Are you going home?” “Yeah. I guess.” And somehow, I always figure that I am. My body has, for a month, crawled out of the brief cocoon of America – the corn syrup, yes – the dust, of course – but the safety, too. I have had to sweat out the stalled pain of the things I have had to leave behind, their memory preserved, hardly seeming real. Some days, jet-lagged or genuinely in transit, I feel like I have conditioned myself for loss. As if a relationship isn’t […]