I’ve just arrived back in LA after 3 glorious weeks back at home. I feel as though I was a fledgling plant under serious heat lamps of attention, encouragement, time and love from my family and friends. From Aberdeen to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and London I was smothered in a blanket of love. That sounds like it could be on a hallmark card or a afternoon movie but I am simply stating the facts. I was at such a low ebb when I began the trip and from close family to friends who I haven’t seen in years I felt held. My dear friend Sadie said once when I had been unceremoniously dumped in a rainstorm in Brooklyn, post wild taxi ride to see her before her theater performance in the East Village, “I’ve got you” as she held me. And that is how I have felt for the past few weeks.
The thing about going through a major life change, making a massive shift, is that nobody else can do it for you. As mum said years ago, when a butterfly comes through a cocoon it is an extremely painful process with blood and all sorts but nobody can help it, if anyone was to try to assist the process the butterfly would die. My cocoon has been love and I have been held but I have to do the rest on my own. Maybe home is the cocoon, the place where transformation can take place because you can literally go to pieces-at one point in the butterfly’s transformation it is simply liquid, formless-and not fall on the ground, smashed totally to smithereens.
Like a ball of playdough maybe you have to go absolutely to pieces before something new can be built. You don’t want a bit of the bridge you had made coming into your new boat that you’re constructing now. Or as Sadie just emailed me this morning, do a ‘soft roll’ which is something a surfer would do in a wave, be gentle and soft and know you will come out of it. So that’s where I am now, very grateful for home for providing the place where I can now begin the rebuilding process. Thank you.
Playing you out with this song from Sadie, So I begin.
Tags: Home, Mhairi Morrison, sadie jemmett, starting again, strength, The bead movement