Sacred Fragments...

Today was one of those days.... After a very full to brimming over Summer my mind, body, heart and soul are very ready to simply sit...down.
But what to do with many little bodies, minds, hearts and souls who are ready to create floods and swamps in the garden and jump in them?
It was one of those wash out days. When five girls were lined up watching Arriety at 10 am while the sun shined unusually brightly for an English Summer, and I was curled up with Pinterest and tea, feeling guilty.
It was one of those days where my heart cried SOLITUDE. And I wistfully reflected upon hermits living for years up mountains...And envied them.
It was one of those days where Nola played merrily in the bath till she was prune like and almost amphibian... Until she told me she had caught a fish, which actually was not a fish but a rather large, plughole blocking...ahem, something else.
Yes, she had been in the bath that long.
And, yes, our tiny garden flooded. And the oven blew up, it really did. And muddy footprints were traipsed through the house until I gave up cleaning them till they dried and could be hovered. And half my head was in a poem I wanted to write (quite an angsty one as you can well imagine by this point)...And I was wondering what we might eat for tea, while the meal we'd planned on sweltered in our damp, rather drippy fridge.
And, and, and....
Life constricted, small and shallow, inside my sinews... And I felt bad for not being the change, showing up, mind body, heart and soul, being present, engaged and brimming full with joyful surrender...
And then Tilly came up to withered, wilting me with the biggest smile on her face and a huge hug... And I heard her say something...
"What, what did you say?" I ask her, incredulous!
"Thank you Mama" (They all call me Mama which is unusual for English kids, and I really don't know how or why they started doing it but I like it)
"Thank you Mama! You are the best, you always let us play, and bring us yummy food when we want it, and you let us be Arriety all day if we want to! Today was the best day!"
The day had clearly only fallen apart within the confines of my own mind. No one else had caught on!

I wondered about sharing this day, this fragment. The sacred beauty of it all betrayed somehow in the writing down and the the passing around. But what are our lives if the broken bread of it all is left unshared. Besides, these are just crumbs. I'm well acquainted with crumbs :)
These days I seem to be finding God, in the ambiguity and beauty in the pied rather than the tidy and the coherent.
And so here is the untidy incoherence of one (sometimes) tired Mama. Well a little bit of it.
Something beautiful, rare and precious is being fashioned beneath the tides of tempest. I'm becoming convinced that these are the seas that turn grit into pearls.

Thanking Matilda and Boo for these pictures I just found on my camera ;)

Linking with Emily