Love

It's the witching hour. I hover between my world of familiarity and the next. Truth reigns at this hour and I get close to my core. Feelings emerge, rise to the surface but they are not to be exposed to the glare of early light, not yet.

I kiss goodbye.  I hug him tight. And he hugs me back, a long hug. His pure heart is like a beacon of goodness shining ever wider in the world. Lucky world. I did good.

Goodbyes are tinged with sadness. Now alone, the tears flow. It's viscerally felt, the love of a mother. To send one's youngest child into the world alone, off in a big plane on a great adventure is a milestone of great weight. It's enormity can only be felt when alone. Now, alone.

I've never lost the wonder of getting on a big jet knowing that soon I'd be bang in the centre of a new culture. The world has more good than bad. It's all one big adventure. This was our final conversation over crumpets and honey whilst the rest of the neighbourhood continued to dream.

It's an inescapable fact of my life that so much of it has been lived in this house, or that house. I live here and my loves return to me here, and go there.

'I love you more than anyone loves their mother,' my eldest child wrote on my Christmas card, and although that's not possible, it expressed the love, as deep as the ocean, as wide as the river.

There is so much love in my heart. Right now I feel them all around me, those I love and even those I love who have gone to God. I know with certainty at this moment that I have been deeply loved for I feel this font of love extending out, reaching in. I feel the circle of life.