This is how we are celebrating 

• Poppy cutting her first tooth 
• Star finishing the year at school with awards 
• Passing our rent inspection 
• A very good week with new contacts and opportunities for my art and mental health work 

And is how I’m going to wind down from meeting a lot of new people, having a lot of exciting opportunities possibly open up (which I’ve learned to be a little careful about counting before they hatch), and the inevitable come down from sharing personally in a presentation yesterday. Staring induces dissociation or, if you want to put it a different way, induces a meditative, restful state. Same thing, different language. 

Staring deeply into a fire is one of my life’s true pleasures, along with the glorious smell of wood smoke on my skin. 

In about 20 minutes there’ll be some potatoes in those coals and I’ll be here, thinking about how I used to have the hearing voices group around for these, remembering dead friends, and talking about the future. I step out of the everyday and into another place where time runs differently. The night will fall and the stars come out like memories of fragments of poems I once read. I’ll be here with my daughter in my arms and the smell of smoke in my hair.