Appreciate darling Rose who had packed of lunch box of food unlikely to make me sick. I’m feeling nauseated a lot of the time, very tired, mad dreams. Pretty much like fibro really, being pregnant. I’m unsettled and feeling strange things that are hard to name. Oddly lonely.

Yesterday I was reading Idylls of the King by Tennyson for art homework. I also read a bunch of sites about starting Not for Profit orgs and setting up committees and so on, until the sense of displacement and anxiety crawled so high up my throat I couldn’t breathe anymore. Reading about Arthur, the ordained king and his knights in which he had such faith, their overturning of the old world and their bright hopes, all ashes by end, felt so fitting I cried. Of the original DI board, most are not speaking to someone else who was on it. We start things with such hope and end them in such ruin. And the ones that persist seem to lose all the glow of kindness and passion that brought them into life, becoming mechanical, unwieldy, inefficient, consuming. I have such hope but so very little faith. “Everything anyone has ever thought is true… I’ll be alright, and I’m going to die. Both of those are true too.” Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Phillip K Dick

Here I sit between classes, feeling the slight stretch and pull of my womb growing, eating these small tokens of devotion like a sacrament, feeling blessed, feeling humbled, feeling out of step with the world. In a place where things are not themselves, not as they seem, names that do not fit. Like you, little nameless one inside me.

Rose and I hold each other in the soft hours, away from the critics and the judgement, feeling the faint terror under all our days, the burning love. Do you think we will feel less afraid when the baby is here safely? No, never again, it is to live with your heart outside of your chest. I’ve been here, waking from nightmares where my family are slaughtered, or sitting by the bed of someone beloved who is dying, saying goodbye and trying to fix the details in my mind. I’ve been here, feeling alone and exquisitly vulnerable in the vast darkness and fragility of life.

“The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.”
Dover Beach,  Matthew Arnold

“It’s a wonderful, wonderful life, if you can find it.” Nick Cave