A tribute to my sister.

So I have been thinking about writing this post for a while.  And I'm feeling like there's no way I could do justice to writing about my sister in a simple blog post.  There's just so much to say about her, and I honestly don't think I can put words to the connection I know we both feel.  But I'm going to try and say it, and here goes.

On the right you can see a picture of us.  And even when I look at this photo I feel emotional.  I'm crying as I write this, feeling into the 'shared soul' I feel we have.

We were like peas in a pod growing up - and the fighting, laughing, playing and inventing in that pod definitely played a huge part in shaping me into the kind of person I am today.  I attribute my sense of humour, my trouble making abilities and my ability to annoy people to this pea pod.  Hollie was how I got to practice at being annoying.  She was easily annoyed so it was great training ground.  And I loved her for it because she was my ultimate challenge.  If I could make her laugh when she was really annoyed, I was the happiest person in the world.

Now we are 'grown up' (well I still feel like I am 14 years old so I'm not sure about that bit) I am so amazed by what we are bringing to the world, our families, our communities and our friends.  We support each other in our stand for honesty, openness, ordinariness, vulnerability, development, being daring and extending ourselves to our wider worlds by bringing our internal and external lives to these blog things. 

Just a few things you should know about my sister:

• As she parents her beautiful children (well they are actually mine, she just looks after them A LOT), I am being parented too.  She has taught me so much about how to be with human beings so that they feel loved, allowed to be themselves and held firmly through the thick and thin of journeying towards being a fully fledged human in this world.
• My sister is relentlessly kind.  She brings her generosity, her love, her giftedness, her creativity and her humour to her family and friends each day with such grace and abandon.  And people feel loved around her. 
• When she has negative feelings about people or feels annoyed with them, she has the capacity to look inside herself, find out what's going on and truly forgive people in a way I am amazed by and so deeply thankful for.
• She always speaks up for what she believes in, even when it's really difficult or causes trouble.  Her belief in what's true and real permeates everything she gets up to in the world. 
• She loves me very much and always understands what I am on about even when many people think I am bonkers - and this bullet point made me cry just a little bit more so I can now barely see what I'm typing. 
• We talk so quickly to each other about really deep things that when we are in conversation alone, I'm pretty sure not many people would get what on earth we are on about.  
• Every time I go to a workshop and spend lots of time and money learning something, it just takes one small conversation for her to get an automatic download of what I have been learning because she's so clever, emotionally intelligent and probably a psychic.  
• She always brings me little things that she knows I will like if I am at home working.  And it's her joy to give little things because she knows it will make people happy.  
• She loves her children in such a deep, fearless and full on way that's filled with laughter, tears, tantrums, domestic melt downs and hilarity.  She sees the humour with her children and is their guide, their friend and their soul mate.  She truly plays with them, and gets out of their way so they can be the unadulterated, untethered expressions of life that they are. 

So, I feel deeply blessed to have the fierce love of this sister, this person who knows me, loves me, sees me and gets me in a way that makes it wonderful to be here, a way that makes me joyfully cry my eyes out when I write a blog about her.  Thank you Hollie Holden (your real name is still Hollie Prior btw) for loving me and for sharing life with me.

If anyone is interested in knowing this incredible person, she has a wonderful blog and facebook page called Hollie Holden - Notes on Living and Loving which has me laugh, reflect and learn each day that she posts.

I do not know what anything is for.

In this last week I have been experiencing a newly emerging gentleness that is dancing around as the edges of me.  A blurring of the line between me and the rest of the world.  It's like the boundary of my skin has become more like a duck down duvet rather than a definite, sharp ending.  The world feels closer in and I feel more vulnerable, more penetrable and softer.

It's like I can see things and feel things in a way that is no longer definite.  I feel I no longer know anything for sure, like the hugest curiosity about people, life, nature and objects has been poured over me and all definition has been washed away - to reveal the technicolour mystery of the most inanimate objects.

Things like sound, air travel, water, the body, glass, trees, flowers, wood have become infinitely interesting to me.  The fact that we talk to each other and then things happen between us or because of a conversation is a revelation.  How food gets converted to waste in my body is mind boggling.  Laughter is a deep and earth shattering thing.

What if you were another me ?

When I was travelling back from New York recently with my Mum, I forgot my mobile (cell) phone as I had plugged it in to the socket in the hotel foyer to charge while we were waiting for our ride to the airport. I realised I had forgotten it when we got to security at JFK.

In my family there is a history of people being pretty angry when one of us 'messes up' in this way. So I was amazed to see that the moment I started giving myself a hard time, I calmly put down that thought and then dealt with what needed to be dealt with (complex process of getting Kevin the driver to liaise with Pablo the doorman and taxi-ing my phone to JFK at great expense!) instead of going down that road.

Thankfully I was with my Mum who was really calm and sat with me while I waited and let me use her phone to organise everything. I was watching her as it all unfolded and not once did she get cross with me.

And then I noticed. What if I treated everyone as another me when they did something wrong (just like I think Mum was doing) - what if I pretended that it was me who had 'done it' - what would I do then ? How would I feel about them ? What would I say ? What would I do ?



I know we give ourselves a hard time (not only others), but if I could find the compassion in my heart to treat myself kindly when I mess up and then do the same for everyone else, that would be pretty wonderful.

The other thing that I cottoned on to is that maybe because I have learned not to give myself a hard time, my Mum didn't have to give me a hard time either. Maybe we're connected more deeply than we think.