2014: the word is love

A few days ago, I spent a very comfortable and refreshing couple of hours reading through all my writing/journaling from 2014. Much of it is not publishable (not very good/too dramatic/might lead to a loss of job) but, particularly with my bad memory, it was good to look back on the year and remember. It has been, as I have alluded to in a few posts, a challenging year. I'd like to write a beautiful blog post, looking back and summing up the year with a few clever metaphors and a touch of humour thrown in here and there.

The truth is, I don't know how.

I'm still processing many of the things that happened last year. I'm still trying to work out what I think about so many things.

I've started a few "sum up" blog posts, and I just can't finish them. They all feel too big, or too fake, or too forced.

I have a good friend who once said that she found that she had a word for different seasons of her life depending on what she was learning or thinking or going through at that time. As I've read through my (sometimes highly emotional) writing from the year, and when I think honestly through all that has happened in my family, at school, in my head and heart, it is clear what my word is. Love. I'm in a love kind of place write now. But it is not heart-warming, fall backwards onto your bed, gooey and sweet love. It is hard, sometimes burningly painful, stretch you beyond yourself love.

I tried to write a list of "lessons on love" but, although real and true to me, it ended up sounding cliche and dramatic and sort of cheesy. In sum, I've learnt that relationships are worth pursuing, fully and wholeheartedly, but with eyes wide open to the risks that they bring. The degree to which you open yourself up to love, and loving people and places and things, is the degree to which you can by hurt, by love and by those people and places and things. Donald Miller wrote in his book "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years" (which I highly recommend, by the way) that there is "no joy without pain." Love and deep relationships can bring so much joy, but they take so much work, and, sometimes, pain. I think, though, I think, it is worth it.

One of the poems I studied with my Lower Sixes this year was Sir Walter Raleigh's The Author's Epigraph, Written by Himself. I made my students write their own epigraphs, which kind of freaked a few of them out but ended up being a really great exercise. I wrote my own, which is below. At the end of it all, I want to be someone who moved and loved, fully and completely, disregarding the risks.

Epigraph 16/09/14

Remembered here is one

who moved

and loved

fully and completely

(who spoke for and heard

those who needed voice and ear

and left each place

a little better for her presence)

disregarding the risks

of doing so

and propelled by

a joy, peace and love

not her own.