I am back in Canberra, back to the rhythms and practices that are helping me regain good health.

Diary of a chronically exhausted vicar image

The treatment I receive with a chiropractor tends to open one’s emotions. So, returning to the practice today after three weeks away after my Dad died, I expected to blub, and splutter, and cry the Niagara Falls right there on the table.

Last night, watching episodes of Spicks and Specks and QI, laughter undid the lock on the emotions and I cried, unexpectedly.

Today, I did not.

I was fully prepared to, hoping to, even, to release some of this crap so I can get on with my work.

It’s not that nothing happened.

I feel more openness in my spine, my body.
I feel reconnected, body and soul.

But I do not feel the grief more keenly or consciously, the sadness any deeper.

I am more aware of my muscles and that good ache that comes from having exercised them with the return to my pool in recent days.
I am less weighted by the exhaustion of the grief.

I do feel, perhaps, more aware of and attentive to the nothing, the empty, the being bereft.
I do feel, perhaps, more at peace with the utter depletion of my self.
Perhaps that is enough for today.

But, although crafting the liturgy was a fairly easy stepping back into rhythm straight off the plane, I am still quite incapacitated on the issue of composing a sermon for Sunday … [postscript: or I was. reader, within an hour of writing this post, the sermon has also just about written itself. cue sigh of relief]

And I still look at those words ‘my Dad died’ in shock that I’m not rehearsing for the one day it must happen, but living this new, unwelcome, reality.