am strong enough for this, I am strong enough for everything. I turn and pass these words onto my children. I tell them every day they are just as strong, even if they don’t know it yet. I place the map in their hands; I show them the stars, tell them to always know where north is.

When we visit Kerry is the only time I fully accept this part of me, and maybe that is why I am so happy there. I accept there is magic all around me, and I fall into it as easily as the kids fall into the sea from the pier – naturally, magnetically, like we are called and our answer is to fall, to pierce the depths.

They know to escape requires nothing more difficult than holding slices of pages in your hand.

Querencia (n) (Spanish) – a place from where one’s strength is drawn, where one feels most at home; the place where you are your most authentic self

turned to my shelves, my notebooks, to my laptop, and wrote words in their thousands. It took me years to find the right ones, but they had a funny way of finding me. Sometimes I would come across them in poetry from centuries before me; sometimes I wrote them unconsciously in a text, a letter, an email. Other times the words screamed at me from

We might step out of the river of life for a few hours or days, but we are pulled back in by life, by work, by children. Much as we want to, we cannot sit on this riverbank and passively watch the world; we are of the world and must return to it.

swim because I have to. It is my investment in my soul that sustains me when I have no sea. It is simply the thing in the world I love doing the most. It is something I could not do without any more than I can choose whether or not to breathe. It is in me, it is who I am, it is how my parents made me.

Anger, once I recognized it as an anchor, as an aid, helped. Once I admitted I was cast off, alone in a sea of absolute nothingness, once I realised how vulnerable and helpless I truly was because the person I loved so much – and still needed – was gone, I cleaved myself to anger, my only anchor in an oar-less, rudderless, sail-less boat.

have to learn to forgive what you are holding onto, to just let go. We carry so much stuff around in our hearts and then wonder why we feel less than happy, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Well, maybe not, it took cancer for me to see that. I want to heal every facet of my body, mind and soul