Intrigue out of Paradise

So I just came back from La Caleta. The place is a paradise for me.

Back to my home in Bristol and my job with Huawei.

Yesterday was a deeply emotional day in going to the plane to leave Tenerife and La Caleta. I had only been there for a week and it made perfect sense why I was going back to this when I arrived. But after one week of La Caleta I had forgotten all the why’s. Or they seemed like a distant memory of a different life.

Today, though. I have had so much energy. MORE energy than when I was at La Caleta.

Actually, at La Caleta I was considerably slow and low.

Somehow. Despite feeling so resistant to coming back, I am excited to be here. I’m excited to see what happens in this unknown, weird, repetitive lifestyle. I’ve got to find somewhere to live. My job has changed to something far more challenging than what I was doing before.

Plus there is more money than I’ve ever had before. OK, in the grand scheme of things it’s not good pay and I feel everyone I’m working with should be being paid more. BUT it’s still more money than I’ve ever had before and the job is an experience that intrigues me.

I wonder where I’ll be living next. I’ve got two-ish weeks to find somewhere. Living in buildings is quite interesting. I much prefer waking up and working in fields. Which is my normal summer life. The format of living in a brick box with other people, whether you knew them before or not, is a dynamic changer that I’d not really noticed before. Or I’d forgotten about. The space I live in is the property of someone else and I’m paying a fee to dwell in it. In a field, the field is someone elses property still but I bring my own living space and most of the amenities are completely communal and probably temporary.

The field living is much more simple to abide with in relation to needing to change your social environment. Just re-pitch your tent or move your vehicle. You can’t move your living space when it’s in a building that you pay for, so you can’t simply change your social home environment. You have to try to feel good with the people you live with. But it doesn’t always work, sometimes you need to move. There’s no telling if you’ll mesh well with the people you live with at the next place, either.

Also you and they will change over time. I love the people I live with now and I like where I’m living but it only suited me perfectly when I signed up to live here. Now? I need something very much different and my current natural way of being isn’t ‘in flow’ with the social environment. I gave my notice at the start of January and have just come back on holiday so… As per. Leaving this one up to fate – a little like how I found this place and people at the start. A moment will happen, I’ll make contact with someone – I may already have done – a visit will happen, an arrangement will be easily reached. I don’t have to worry about this. Of course I’ll be looking but I will know when the right path has popped up.

Just like with this one.

And if not?

If it all goes wrong and I don’t have anywhere to live and don’t feel able to continue my commitment to work?

Then I fly back to paradise, until summer time, then back again after.

The meaning of life: I’m coming out and I don’t mind if you think I’m mad. It’s working very well for me!

Four and a half years ago Peter Fellows stuck his middle finger up at the man, packed up his jobs and his bags, started using the name ‘Nayaru Lovegood’ and went to find the free people of earth to learn about life.

Here I am again in some sort of full circle cliche. The likes you see only in the movies where returning to a mundane lifestyle is justified and realistic. Some people call it “growing up” which is a horrible thing to say to anyone at any time in their life. I’ve learned so much over this four and a half years adventuring. In some essence the adventuring hasn’t stopped it’s just that the format has taken the shape of choosing one particular lifestyle in one particular corner of the world.

You see, as much as anyone who hasn’t worked out what life is can try to believe – I have worked it out. I’ve worked out humanity. I’ve worked out why we’re here. The big question of “What is the meaning of life?” I have realised the answer but there’s almost no point in me telling you the answer. Until you’ve done your journey to discover it, or even on the way there, it won’t make sense to you. It’ll just seem like imaginary nonsense. And that’s fine. I don’t need you to understand that I know what life is. I don’t need you to understand that this is not a belief for me. It’s a knowing.

Regardless, I will be attempting to write the answer out here further down the line.

The truth is you may have found yourself here and reading this precisely because it lines up with where you are on your own journey of discovering what life is. I am not even totally sure why I’m writing this now, it wasn’t my intention, but here it is. It’s probably for you as much as it is for me.

Before I had these answers I used to believe that having the answers would make life a simple easy thing. In many ways it does, but finding the answers is just one step on the journey of life, albeit a monumental step. Implementing these answers into my being is the next big step and in many ways I feel like I have at least got one foot up there, there’s still a whole other leg to wrench up. It’ll take a while and it’ll be both painful and fun.

Knowing what life is doesn’t make pain and hardship vanish it just means that growing from that pain and hardship happens with greater speed and depth. Knowing doesn’t make you never make mistakes ever again. Part of the journey is rehashing over and over things we thought we’d learned. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we get distracted. Sometimes we let other peoples journeys affect ours so much that we lose where our path was for a while.

So here I am with a rented room and a 9 to 5 job. This is a way of living I previously decided was ridiculous and never something for me. The first difference being now is that I don’t feel trapped. Why don’t I feel trapped? Because I know I have a choice. I have chosen to do this as readily as I could choose to not have it anymore. I could give my extra stuff away, pack my bags and hitch hike south over the horizon to the sun and warm. Many don’t have that privilege. Many don’t feel they have a choice. Very few know that there is always a choice. Many look at the choices that are being made by everyone else and unknowingly limit themselves to having those same choices. Those that break this mold generally have the most interesting stories to tell. I always have a choice.

The second difference is that this is a new experience for me.

Over these last years I spent a lot of time following a “spiritual” path. It started off with the idea that “it would be nice if there was more to reality than what we see and touch” while at that time believing there was nothing else at all. On this journey I listened and listened and watched and played. I spent a lot of time with broke and broken hippies, spiritual teachers, other people on a spiritual journey and many people who have no interest in the idea of anything more at all. As my testing of spirituality developed I lapped up any and all teachings I could. But the thing is that there are so many people with different ideas and feelings and beliefs that actually using anyone else’s model without tempering it with your own experience can be as misleading as following a religion. You have to make your own mind up. You have to read your own experiences and not just take someone else’s word for it.

So at this point do I count myself as spiritual? No. Because for me this is just what life is and doesn’t need the extra label to describe it. But I occasionally call myself spiritual so as to relate to someone else’s life journey.

Like I say. I have the answers. But this does not mean my life has become a rigorous timetable of worship and ritual. These are not requirements for understanding what life is and why it is here. They are things you can do if you want to. There are a lot of teachings in the world that claim to be requirements, commandments, vows, self-sacrifice. But the truth is that the idea that anything at all is required for supposed “enlightenment” was created by people intending to create control or otherwise were living in fear. Fear of what? Fear that when they die there is somewhere bad their soul might go. But I can tell you with certainty that whether a vow or requirement or commandment or self-sacrifice these are things that anyone of good heart and mind will just do as part their being.

And what need do we have of a sacred day when every day is important? I don’t want to provoke a religion debate, although I guess in essence my entire post is on that subject.

There are a lot of teachings and teachers out there that preach about staying positive. Unfortunately these are teachings of repression. You can not learn from your negative feelings if you are always staying positive. Your negative feelings are there for you to learn from and what’s more is that they damage you further if you cover them up with staying positive. Staying positive is one of the most negative ideas being preached in our time. Of course it may not always be appropriate to act on your negative feelings at the time of experiencing them but you can always acknowledge them and then bring them up when it is safe to do so. That way they don’t stay with you.

So, for what it’s worth, let me try to answer these questions as best I can with words: “What is life”? “Why is it here?”

These questions have two very distinct potential answers, the first one is the easiest to entertain and until four and a half years ago it’s the one I wholeheartedly entertained, while being disappointed and a bit angry about.

1) Everything in all of reality is a constant string of random accidental catastrophe’s leading to the existence of life. (Which can very easily be translated as: “Nothing matters.”)

or

2) Everything is connected in such an intricately complicated way that the bodies of humans do not have the ability or capacity to perceive or sense reality in a way that can easily be interpreted. The source of this is what makes up everything and is simultaneously in everything everywhere, including us. It does this so it can experience experiences through everything’s experience. It lets everything happen without interfering how it happens so it can experience the things happening. It lets everything be unconscious of this because it would skew the perception of the observer of the experience. Everything in existence is either living, loving, trying to work out how to live or love or is there to be a platform for life or love. The entire universe is infinite diversity in infinite combinations. Nothing anywhere will happen exactly the same way twice. Nothing created will be created exactly the same way twice. No one anywhere will experience the exact same horror as another. No one anywhere will experience the exact same joy as another. Absolutely everything that can happen, has happened, is happening or will happen. Life is happening just to experience what life and love is. (All of which can very easily be translated as: “Nothing matters.”)

So in essence the bottom line of life is that nothing matters. People who are anti-religious and anti-spiritual look to people who follow religions and think they are deluded. Many are – but you know I’ve learned something far more complex than that. Many people turn to religion because they have become aware that there is more to reality than what they see but they don’t have the tools to explain their experience where a particular religion they are exposed to can explain at least a little. So they turn to that for the rest of the answers.

Reality is a big scary place when you don’t know what it is. If someone or something can fill in the gaps for you making it feel safer to exist in, it can seem only logical to listen to them or it.

I really have no problem with accepting reality as I see it now. I am completely content with the idea that I am over the head deep in a romantic delusional fantasy of what life is. Because, you know what? It bloody works. It works so well that I’ll live in a fantasy for the rest of my life because even if I’m completely and utterly wrong (I’m not) it’s far more fun and productive than the version of me from five years ago and before who believed there was nothing more to life than what we see and when we’re dead we’re worms.

The biggest tragedy of life is that we are all part of the same power of creation that creates everything, but most people don’t know it. We all are constantly creating our realities but most of the time we have no idea we’re doing it. We don’t always choose our circumstances because we don’t often know what we need. We can always choose our actions even though sometimes our circumstances lead us to believe there is no choice. What happens in our lives is directly a result of what we need in order to grow even if we don’t know it. We are constantly choosing who we are and it never ever stops. Our fears present themselves to us so that we can learn to not be afraid anymore or learn how to take the right action. Life isn’t a big fluffy game of daydreams and illusions – but also it is. Things only matter as much as we make them matter – it’s a matter of matter mattering as much as we make it matter. But also… everything matters.

And don’t you worry your little head if you think you’re developing some sort of messiah complex. Everyone should go through this at some point in their life and then subsequently shut this thought process down because of the implication of it being a mental disorder that requires being locked up in a mental institution and fed drugs for. Because reality IS responding to your life, your thoughts, your actions. That’s what it does. The same things keep coming up in your life because there’s something you’re not learning or addressing. It’s very rarely anything ever that you can directly manipulate, as such. But if you’re paying attention, the flow of your life will make sense every step of the way. Every part of my life has been a completely required part for who I am now and who I will be. The abuse as a child. The self abuse as an “adult”. The calamity and desperate situations I’ve found myself in. All the friends and love and freedoms I’ve come to know in my life. I sometimes day dream about “what if ‘this’ happened instead” but frankly I wouldn’t take any of it back. I welcome the bad as much as I welcome the good because I know that if the bad comes it’s life telling me I’m doing something wrong like not paying attention or avoiding addressing something or learning something. I will feel low and I will feel elated, up and down for the rest of my life, all relative to my experience and growth. But with this wild knowing of reality I can face this powerfully with a “COME ON THEN! SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT!”.

Life really is a swirly whirly roller-coaster.

So why am I renting a room and taking a 9 to 5 job?

Because there are experiences here that are new to me, I’ve no idea what’s going to happen, I absolutely chose it as much as I can choose out of it at any time and I’m here to learn more about who I am and see life doing its thing through all of everything and everyone around me.

Life has become really quite exciting.

I think I cracked phobias

At least for me.

I can’t begin to tell you what the last quarter of a year has been like for me. I think I’ve felt just about every bad feeling that could ever possibly felt. I’ve been as far as panicking in fear of my life, as far as I could ever panic, anyway.

Fear. I’ve been so full of it over winter it makes sense that now because of who I’ve become, I have learned a lot from it.

Over the last month I’ve noticed spiders. Big enough for me to usually be scared enough of to not want to go near, not big enough to have me hiding and involuntarily twitching. But I was distinctly noticing the absence of the very familiar irrational fear that’s present when I see them. I even removed one of said spiders just by getting it to walk on a piece of paper and then taking it outside. I didn’t chuck the paper, I didn’t get a saucepan (which is usual) to contain the spider on the paper, I very calmly released the spider outside and neither me nor her were in danger or terrified.

The next thing that happened was visiting my friend who has a very small, but very definite, snake. Norbert is his name, there’s a very proud picture of him round my neck on my facebook page. The first time I saw Norbert I wanted to touch him to make some headway against my phobia but I couldn’t and I got twitchy as per usual. It was really hard just being in the room and looking at him.

I can’t exactly tell you that I intended for these phobias to be going away like they are. I haven’t consciously done anything with this goal in mind since the first time I saw Norbert as described.

But what I can tell you is that about two weeks ago I felt once again the fear and anger I felt when I was child and all that horrible stuff was happening to me. The feelings came back to me in such a flood I felt like I was losing control. I was so afraid I started imagining he might even break in to where I live now to kill me. I couldn’t think straight but I knew I had to wait it out and let the feeling calm so that I could think straight and work out what I had to do.

When I calmed down I realised what it was I had to do: Face him.

Not right away. When I’m ready. I have to try to see if he even understands or remembers any of what he did. If he has any remorse at all. He might not. I’m ready for that possibility. That’s ok. The only important thing is for me to face the greatest fear I’ve ever had. However terrified of snakes and spiders I’ve been, they’ve never been as scary as the idea of him, or the idea of facing him.

So I think that’s it. Maybe my phobias even stem in some way from this greatest fear of mine. Maybe my mind interprets them as being less of a threat now that it’s realised there’s something bigger that’s been locked away deeply for 18 years.

I’m filling myself with love and I’m releasing the fear.

I can’t wait to see how I’ll turn out.

Edmund Jones, the Joker of the Forest.

I’m a couple of months late writing this now. I couldn’t bring myself to face my feelings about you, Edmund. That’s why I didn’t come to your funeral. I could have come but I was scared and I didn’t want to say goodbye. I still rather don’t!

You are my hero. My real life hero. You’re the hero who I got to meet, know and grow up with! When I think of all the people I’d most like to be like, you’re right at the top of the list, the list has very few non-fictional people which means you bested the likes of all the superheroes too.

I’ve finally just read the letters you wrote before you left, it took me a while. Asides from not wanting to say goodbye I knew that reading whatever it was you had to say would have me questioning my own behavior at present. Or perhaps I mean, you made me face myself just by being yourself. Which is you, you’ve been such a loving, positive, honest person, there may have been times in my past where I was becoming a dishonest person, you helped me back on the right track even though you didn’t know it.

I actually questioned my existence when you left. I hadn’t heard from you in a few years but I knew you were off somewhere being amazing. I had been intending to come find you and go adventuring with you. We would have taught each other loads, we would have had the best laughs echoing the length and breadth of every valley we came across. And we’d have probably went our separate ways at some point before bumping into each other again in the farther future for more shenanigans…

So maybe I’ll come looking for you anyway, and maybe you’ll come looking with me. You’ll be with me forever and you’re the voice I choose for my conscience. Which is rather difficult for me right now because you’d find it amusing how much I’ve lied to myself this year, so now my conscience has your laugh and your voice. Great! Well at least nights on my own will be more interesting now, haha!

Love.

PS: I feel I could write a legion more about you but I’m not going to. I think I’d like to use my voice and my eyes when I talk about you. I don’t know if any amount of text will do you justice and I’m not even going to try.

My depression story

This is pretty much an exact copy paste from somewhere else but I felt it was worth putting here. 🙂

Our society was the biggest factor to my years of debilitating depression. But I didn’t actually work that out till I was well on my way to recovery. Discovery of this then rapidly accelerated my recovery. I had childhood abuse reasons for depression too but I actually managed to have dealt with these in my teens. Here’s my story to explain why.

Other than the abuse I received as a child I was actually really lucky. I was born in a city but when I was just three my mother moved with her partner to an abandoned cottage way out in the country, no electricity, just about all the freedom I could possibly want, I could wander and explore and utilise my imagination in any which way I wanted to.

School was very hard for me. I was raised very differently to all the other kids who had money, electricity, smart clothes, an easy bath every day. Which all meant I didn’t fit in and was largely not accepted, I was bullied for most of these reasons at some point. So as a teenager I tried very hard to get away from the lifestyle choices of my mad mother and become accepted with everyone else. Indeed when I was just 16 I got my own apartment in the local town. This was really when the depression started to set in. Try as I might to fit in with the social norms I slowly found myself being drained of happiness. Not to mention I was really missing love and acceptance in my life. I had really good and solid friends by this point but at the end of the day I was still returning to my apartment to spend the night on my own, romantic relationships filled some gaps but them ending just escalated the overall loneliness. By the time I was 18 I found anthetamines and cannabis and I marveled at how they made me feel happier and more love than anything else in my life ever had. I never took anything highly addictive like cocaine and I must stress I wasn’t addicted to drugs, I was filling up an emotional gap in my life which I wasn’t entirely aware of doing, at the time I thought I had just caught the drug addiction that everyone always warns about.

It wasn’t until I was 22 that I allowed myself to quit that life. By this point I was intentionally homeless, it didn’t make sense to be on welfare for a home I never would spend time in. I had cash in hand work to pay for my food and drugs and I was always welcome to stay at numerous places. I was a very energetic, fit and sociable, depressed, drug user. I was not a dirty mess that vegetated in a scummy apartment with clothes smelling like piss, I helped people out and did triathlons and fun runs for charity because I could. I was also not a thief or anything else stereotypical of drug users. I knew a lot of people and all of them were happy to see me, actually this was the happiest time in my whole depression. So at this time, as I say, I allowed the people who cared about me to convince me that I had to stop. So I packed in the drugs and got myself on welfare so I could get an apartment, the cash in hand wasn’t enough to achieve this. Once I had the apartment everything went downhill rapidly.

I felt forced into the prospect of going and getting an every day job doing something I didn’t want to do, working for someone who doesn’t care, working with people who are only really your friends at work while serving people who look down on me. Every day. Every day? Something in my brain told me that that life wasn’t worth living. Why in the hell am I supposed to spend my life doing things I hate? Because that’s just the way it is. That’s just the way things are. Deal with it because everyone else has to and also children are starving in Africa so get over it, your troubles are nothing. I tried the antidepressants and they made me feel unnatural, I got a very light effect similar to one of the drugs I used to take, which felt counter productive to stopping drugs. I was also very aware of feelings that did not feel like mine. This all felt very fake and dishonest, I was also not happy with the huge list of definite and potential side effects, chief among them being “may cause suicidal feelings”.

So I got stuck into MMORPG’s. For two and a half years I spent my life inside various virtual worlds. I’d be roaming the lands questing. Fighting mythical beasts. Saving and aiding fellow players/humans. That virtual world had more worth and fun than anything I could see in the real world around me. My welfare was changed from jobseekers benefits to disability allowance for depression and anxiety, and I just sat there having fun and interacting with people. I slowly stopped caring about the world around me and that includes myself. My teeth are damaged forever from neglect and sometimes I’d cry when I woke up because I was awake. Reality no longer was good for me.

Fortunately by this point, age of 25, my mother was not so mad and I not so angry at her. I called her up one day and through tears of desperation, smelling of sweat, grease soaked through my hair and teeth as brown as beavers I told her I didn’t know what to do. I had considered suicide but decided I would never be so cowardly (Edit: This isn’t a judgement that anyone who commits suicide is a coward, in many ways it has to take a sense of courage to take any life, especially ones own. For me I felt like suicide would be giving up, which felt like cowardice at the time). If mother hadn’t driven the 150 miles to collect me in her van to live with her, I don’t know where I’d be right now. She didn’t know how to help me, but I did. I just wasn’t capable of administering the help I needed without help.

I decided the next best step to getting on some sort of track was to get back into college since that was the last time (almost ten years before) that I had any sort of direction. College started about ten months after mother rescued me from my pit. I found the interaction with lots of other humans on a daily basis really empowered and encouraged me. Infact when I started the two year course I didn’t believe for a second that I’d make it past winter holidays without quitting. The support of my fellow students and tutors kept me going. By the end of the two year course I had all sorts of friends and was easily able to engage with life and people, happily, without the need for drugs to provide artificial happiness. I’d even found myself a job that felt like a second family which made serving people who don’t care,  a bearable issue. By this point I was able to force myself to be happy with this monotonous lifestyle. I could be happy with it. I will be happy with it. I can be happy with it. All the while knowing that it wasn’t straight forward to stay on that level of happiness, I had to deceive myself on some levels in order to stick at it.

But then a miracle happened. A rainbow family gathering happened right on the outskirts of the town I was living in. All sorts of travellers and hippies from all over the world came to live in a field for a month. Every single person there treated anyone with the same respect as they would a brother or sister. They accepted anyone, whoever they were and wherever they came from. I visited them during the day when I was working evenings and mornings. After 5 days I quit my job because I could not miss that experience, not one second of it, it was only going to be there for another three weeks.

I had planned to return to normality after they were gone. But in those weeks I listened and observed. I learned that real freedom is possible. I experienced feeling love, unconditionally, by hundreds of people.

So when the gathering packed up and everyone went to where they were going next, I packed my rucksack, took my last 10 of pay from the old job and started travelling around the country.

Everyday now I decide what I do. I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow or next week and I didn’t know what I’d be doing today. All I know is that I get to spend as much, or as little, time with/meeting people. I have more people I love than I know what to do with. Every day is a different horizon. I’m well loved and I get to live by my own rules.

I’ve never been happier. Maybe this isn’t true for everyone but of all the people I spend time with, the ones who are locked into 9to5 jobs are bored and just accept things because they feel they have no choice. The people who do what they like are the most happiest and inspiring people I’ve ever known. I can only believe there’s an obvious reason for this.

We’re meant to live free.

I work when it’s necessary like helping out, chopping wood for my fire so I can cook my food, that sort of thing. I’m just adding this bit really because I know someone will want to suggest I’m lazy and don’t want to work. I have no problem with working, I’m not strong and fit because of magic. I just can not and will not work for the machine or anyone’s expectations. This is the only life I’ll get and I will live it doing things that make me happy, not what people tell me I ‘should’ be doing.

After all, no one consulted me about if I wanted to be alive. It’s my right to be happy and not ordered into file and rank. I’ll never be depressed again.

Something that applies to everyone..

This is your story. You are the hero.

Mum met her Mom.

As much as I’ve been going through some profound internal and external changes in my life this year, so has my mother.

Briar was born in Canada in the late 1960’s to my grandmother Edna, who was in her mid-teens at the time. The socially determined “best thing” to do in those days if your child had a child at a young age and without marriage prospects to the father: Was to have your child give their child up for adoption. So that is what happened to my Mother and Grandmother. Briar had a few different families she was fostered with until she was eventually fostered in England about ten years after her birth. During that first portion of Briar’s life she was not treated appropriately, I only know bits and pieces as she’s never really opened up to me about the details but suffice it to say that for a very, very long time she often seemed to regress to the emotional states that she experienced then, often reliving the trauma she felt. One example of this would be that when I began to grow tall, into a man, if I were to be moody or arrogant occasionally (like a lot of teenagers do from time to time) she’d feel threatened by me even though I would not be necessarily directing that energy at her or necessarily because of her, her feeling intimidated would tend to push her towards lashing out or becoming very frightened and sometimes hysterical. Indeed some of that still lingers in some ways but she has grown emotionally stronger in the last years especially after her fiance passed away and my sister has been in care.

She’s been in contact with her mother and sister very rarely in the last few years since she located them and this year it occurred to me that perhaps the biggest step she could take towards healing herself would be to actually go meet them in person and also face some of the ghosts of her childhood that have been still clinging to her. The thing was, on Briar’s part, was that she wanted to meet her Mom and family so badly that to try to achieve this would be potentially setting herself up for the biggest let-down in her life if it didn’t happen. Which, I feel, for her would have been unbearable, so for her own sanity she chose to accept that she was never going to be able to meet them. I had originally planned to finish college this year and work my bottom off to save up enough for her to go, I then realised that this was going to be a ridiculously hard thing for me to achieve and actually, if I had taken that route then I feel that time would have not waited that long for Mum to meet her Mom. So I set up a fundraiser site and wrote a brief story about the situation, Edna has needed a lot of health care for a while and there was some question to how much time she had left. And it happened! Many many wonderful people donated to this cause and within two weeks we had got enough money for Briar to fly to Canada! There was some paperwork things to sort out and she needed a bit of convincing still that she needed to go sooner rather than later (jobs and bills be damned!) and that she needed to go on her own (there wasn’t enough for me to go with her like she wanted but also I really felt this needed to be her journey) but she went! It was nice that I was the last person she got to see in England before she was on her way, I’d been travelling and this last meeting was pure fluke, or the universes plan I might say.

So she met her foster-brother from her childhood at the airport and her foster-cousin, they went to visit their old haunts and memory lanes. She stayed with her sister and nieces (my aunty and cousins, who are beautiful), she met one of her brothers, her aunt, her grandmother (who sorely regrets the decisions made at the time of Briar’s birth and has given her a ring from her grandmother) and of course her Mother, Edna.

In the time Briar was there she got to take a role of ‘Big Sister’ and ‘Eldest Child’ which is a very new and unusual feeling for her. She got to help care for Edna and even sat in on a meeting about the support Edna was receiving and was able to provide some constructive input. Edna had an awful lot of things to tell Briar and did tell many, but sadly due to her condition she often fell asleep mid-sentence. When it was time for Briar to leave for the plane home, Edna really held on to her and did not want her to go.

The next day, Edna passed away.