Stillness/Calm

The last few days have been unsettled ones for me. My emotions have been on a roller coaster ride of highs and lows – getting stuck mostly on the lows. Unable to pinpoint the exact cause of my see-sawing emotions, I am taking the obvious route and putting it down to pregnancy hormones. I am not blooming {gracefully} as the books suggest I should be. On the contrary, I am quite grumpy, irritable and impatient at the moment.

But what I feel I am the most is, off center. Like a train not running on the right tracks.

I wander around
Blindly in the dark searching
For something unknown

However, when I saw the prompt for this weeks’ One Deep Breath, I suddenly realised what was missing - making me feel so off center: The lack of stillness and calm in my life.

Forever running
‘Slow down’ a still voice whispers
I don’t stop to hear

When I was pregnant with my first child, I spent a lot of time being still. I spent a lot of time in pray and quiet meditation. Each day I prayed for my unborn daughter. I talked to the swell of my belly, listened to classical music, kept a pregnancy diary and read every book under the sun about the amazing changes my body was going through. I was the pregnancy and the pregnancy was me.

Through prayer I got
The desires of my heart
She is living proof

But this time around it’s been very different. I have done none of the above mentioned things. I feel removed – disconnected even – from this pregnancy. And this is eating me up with guilt. Every minute I’m awake is consumed with my being a mother to my daughter, a wife to my husband and an employee to my firm. I long to be still but seem unable to attain it. I constantly plague myself with questions: do I have enough love in me for a second child? Am I afraid to be still? Am I a good mother? Why is it so different this time around?

I want to love you
Every minute I am awake
But can’t find the time

I tried to do some baby shopping on Friday but as I stood in the shop surrounded by all this baby stuff it hit me that I didn’t have the faintest clue what to buy.

So today I visited the nursery of our local DIY store to buy some spring plants for my garden. I got home, put on a DVD for my daughter and spent the next hour and a half digging up beds and potting flowers. And although I was busy, strangely it was the closed I had come to being still in the last six months. Perhaps it was the cool crisp breeze on my skin, or the colours of the flowers, or the act of creating a hanging basket or of transforming a plain old terra cotta pot into a vessel carrying the beginnings of a display which will in a few months time delight the eyes and give pleasure, that caused a calmness – a stillness – in me. Feeling the stillness of God through nature? Maybe.

I search for stillness
Above the din that is life
I find it slowly

So forgive me for rambling on but these words have been therapeutic. And I hope, a week from today, things will look a whole lot brighter.

Calm I will remain
Comforted by the knowledge
That this too shall pass