Sunday's child

The last week has been crappy, as well as the one before it. This is partially health related, but mostly the fault of work, which is hell. Our stress levels are off the scale. So how do other folks handle this level of stress and still stay sane?

Well, some go to therapists of course (sorry, too broke for therapy), some rely on anti-depressants (sorry, I believe they make things worse), and a large proportion take to alcohol in copious amounts. However, since our lives turned mega-crappy, neither Richard nor I have touched a drop.

So why didn't we drink? If ever there was a time to numb the pain, to silence the terror, the last two weeks have been it.

Funnily enough I don’t think it has ever occurred to us. Sometimes, like now, life can be so unrelentingly grim that it brings its own anaesthetic. As physical pain causes the body to release endorphins, so extreme emotional pain can bring its own cocoon. And after the hell has passed, there is only peace and simplicity left. Nothing else remains.

Today nothing else seems important other than the bright sunshine streaming through my window as I type this. The pretty field outside, the intense brilliant blue of the sky, the hug from my little daughter as she tells me I’m beautiful. Life is pretty much perfect, right this moment in time.

I hope you have a joyous Sunday, whatever you're up to!



Rachel T - I keep coming back to the images from this shoot. I guess I think they're beautiful.

If you don’t mind, since it’s Sunday and meaning-of-life stuff is supposed to happen on the Sabbath, I'm featuring an extract from “the Witches” by Anne Rice.

“Peace of mind can be obtained in the face of the worst horrors and the worst losses. It can be obtained by faith in change and in will and in accident, and by faith in ourselves, that we do the right thing, more often than not, in the face of adversity.

We are the only true moral force in the physical world, the makers of ethics and moral ideas, and we must be as good as the gods we’ve created in the past to guide us.

I believe that through our finest efforts, we will succeed finally in creating heaven on earth, and we do it every time that we love, every time that we embrace, every time that we commit to create rather than to destroy, every time that we place life over death, and the natural over what is unnatural, in so far as we are able to define it.

If any revelation awaits us at all, it must be as good as our ideals and our best philosophy. If that isn’t so then we are in the grip of a staggering irony. And all the spooks of hell might as well dance in the parlour.

There could be a devil. People who burn other people to death are fine. There could be anything.

But the world is simply too beautiful for that.”