My beautiful, kind, lovely sister broke up with her partner this week and urgently needed somewhere to stay. Rose and I have welcomed her with us. My family rallied and gathered to pack and move her and we now have three people, four cats, and a dog living in our 2 bedroom semi detached unit! It’s a little cramped but it’s also rather wonderful to have the chance to live together again. We all get along well and Rose and I have put a lot of time into our family culture, it’s healthy and strong and flexible, and probably just what my sister needs to recuperate.
Yesterday we overhauled the sheds, dug out our washing machine, and shifted a lot of my art supplies into drawers in the new shed. We’ve also been doing lots of caring and calming things to settle the nerves, the raw emotional pain of a breakup, and the bad memories that get unsettled. Camp-fires, games nights, online gaming, good home cooked food, music. It’s been beautiful to see in action.
Rose and I were talking about the sudden change in our circumstances and laughing that if we couldn’t deal with suddenly being a three person household we had no business trying to get pregnant, and that if we couldn’t handle sudden plan changes gracefully we were never going to cope with teenagers! 😉
One of our new residents: this is my sister’s lovely cat. She is so sweet and relaxed and right at home already. Zoe is desperately excited, Tonks is chilled out, Bebe is sulking a bit, and Sarsaparilla hasn’t come far enough into the house to have met her yet. He loves sleeping in the lounge room by the heater in this weather. (it’s freezing in Adelaide)
Her name is Kaylee with an Irish spelling I wouldn’t attempt unless I had it written down! She’s adorable.
We’re a family! We’re trying to get pregnant again the end of this month! And my business is blossoming! I have my first ever art prints back from the printer and they are so beautiful I cried! I have a buyer for one of my favourite paintings. I have mental health talks booking in. I have safe communities to nestle into – I’ve been getting to know the wonderful people in Community Health Onkaparinga, and I’ve just joined a trans and gender queer social activism group which was… Well it was like being in Bridges, the face to face group for people with dissociation and multiplicity I ran for a couple of years. It was magic, like being home, like being among my own kind, diverse as they are. I felt my heart open up and knew these are the places I need to be. This is where I put my energy.
College starts again today – a class on Installation Art that I’m so excited about I can hardly think straight!
I have overhauled my online home too, not as a finished product but to try and better reflect where I’m at and where things are going… Go and explore the menu, I’ve added new pages and rewritten old ones and nested a lot of my paid work information on this site with great care and caution and I’ll see how it goes. Tell me what you think?
I’m so bursting with excitement I got hardly any sleep last night. I feel like stars are burning so brightly in my chest that there’s almost no room for my heart. Someone wants to cry out with joy, loud! To weep with it. To pour it out of us like a river. My life is unbearably beautiful and I’m drunk on hope.
And someone else wants to be still. To sit and watch the bees in the basil. To sit under the cold winter sun and feel the wind on our skin. There’s children playing up the street, and the wind chimes outside our window singing softly. The breeze tugs a lace curtain into a kind of dance, puffs it up as if it’s a gown over a body so translucent I cannot see her, fae and trembling she stands by my window and drinks the breeze, and dances.
I love my sister very dearly and it’s hurt my heart to watch her struggle in a home where she was not well loved. I feel a fierce, deep joy to have her home, for a little while, to hold her close and cook for her and try to help her taste and feel again – this is what being loved feels like. So she can be nourished, so she has the sense of it alive in her, guiding her. It shouldn’t take such courage or cost such pain to pull back from places where we are not loved well. She, none of us, should have to be that strong. We should be well loved by those around us so the dance we must do around each others broken places is a movement from light to light, from home to home, from warmth to warmth, never fleeing into the night and the darkness, never broken by the cost. Always free. She’ll fly on again but we have a precious time where we’ll make our home together, where I can share the home I’ve been blessed with.
I’m not the only one sharing. I have been overwhelmed with donations the last month, often little amounts that I KNOW are costly to give, are, percentage of your income wise, very big indeed. I am buying resources for the networks, and paying for prints, and husbanding every dollar with care. A Blog reader contacted me recently to offer a regular gift of money over the next nine months. I took to bed and wept, Rose holding me gently. How overwhelming it is to receive such support, to feel such… Connection… Gratitude… Such belief in what I’m doing. You share my dreams! And like my art! And read my blog… And help with my networks.
I had a dream, back when I started this. To be useful in the world, and to express myself creatively. I have come through so much and learned so much in the pursuit of that dream. And Rose changed everything! Suddenly I’m dreaming of family and a baby too, my own tiny community within my much larger community. So I started dreaming a new dream, of being useful in the world, and expressing myself creatively, in an ethical and sustainable way. Transitioning my business and networks from a charity model to one of mutuality. I give and I receive, and together, we thrive, we dream, we bring more kindness and honesty and hope into the world.
Sarah K Reece 