Resonances

I met with a woman yesterday from a mixed race family and she spoke briefly about some of the challenges she faced including abuse from both communities. I felt a powerful sadness listening to her maybe in response to things unsaid.

That set off a chain of thoughts and feelings in me. That challenge of where do I belong which resonates so powerfully with me. Feeling like I didn't belong in my birth family and, as a child, fantasising that I was adopted. My sister seemed so much more at home than me. Learning to hide what I felt and what I was so having a secret inner world which I gradually lost touch with until the spiritual experiences started to happen when I was 21.

Never being able to comfortably locate myself as working or middle class, still not able to comfortably see myself as a Christian or not one, wondering if I am still a counsellor since when I do practice I don't feel it is kosher. I have accepted the label as 'academic' since I feel I do belong to that old tradition of eccentricity and bloody mindedness and I have been too successful to pretend to be not. Although my work remains edgy and my writing is getting less academic and hopefully more poetic!

I do feel that I learnt at an early age to shape around people's expectations of me or rather what I read those expectations to be. This shaping made it harder and harder to know what my shape is which is why spiritual experiences are so blissful for me. I feel I don't have to shape in the presence of the numinous. 'God' knows my shape there's no point in hiding. What a relief that is.

I have met people especially women who have shaped so much that they don't know who they are and what they want since they have had no practice at that.

Meanwhile I dodged the showers this morning and bits of a poem came to me on the bike which might 'shape up' later.

Best to all,

Bill on bike