Tairngir tellings

I have been reading that anxiety and panic can produce intrusive; disturbing thoughts and feelings that are hard or seemingly impossible to resist. I have struggled with anxiety and stress this year in particular and intrusive and disturbing thoughts have clouded my days on too many occasions to count. I have times seriously wondered if there is something really wrong with me and that I'm not safe or trustworthy. This link: http://www.calmclinic.com/anxiety/signs/intrusive-thoughts is a good introduction and has some good information on anxiety and intrusive thoughts. Now that I am a counsellor these intrusive thoughts can be the images or feelings conjured by my mind in response to another's trauma, along with older ones that are results of my own historic events and fears. Thankfully now that I am a counsellor I attend one-to-one supervision and have been able to discuss this issue with another counsellor and learn helpful techniques but more vital to my heart that I am not the only one, that it isn't the end of the world and it doesn't make me a bad person.  If any of this resonates with you then I urge you to seek help and speak to someone you can trust. The clouded heavens have cleared only when I recognise these thoughts as malfunctions of a stressed and anxious mind and not secret, oppressed desires or memories that I am helpless before. I need not add to them weight that will only further embed the track-ways they create through my beautiful but complicated and imperfect mind. Our TV culture can also be unhelpful. I have tried to limit how much news I watch as the negative can flood an already stretched mind. News of murders, rapes, assaults, children being harmed can leave my beleaguered brain ravaged like a sea cliff face during a tempest. I am learning (all too slowly it can feel) to give over these unhelpful thoughts to someone who can be trusted to remind this world wrecked heart of the truth of me.
And I pray for myself and others from Romans 12:2 - Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Listening intentionally; intently to another's burdens can leave me feeling burdened and numb. I am now a counsellor and have chosen to tread very deliberately onto this winding path of another's journey past. Sometimes it is my own past that comes back to my mind like a lightening flash when the person across from me shares, but sometimes the flash is the flash of a camera that captures a raw negative of an event/situation that leaves my heart aching and my head out to sea. Often the burden settles into a recess in my mind after the person sharing their story has left and I am reflecting back on all they have told me (thankfully). I always pray for the people who share themselves in my work and that has helped often, but sometimes something seems to stick and I can't just carry merrily on with my life. I need a process, a deep place within another that I trust to place this precious pain and terrible picture; captured. I know it will be in the Father that I find this place, but the process will include others around me who will listen to my weighty words and tell me it's ok.

A waft of burnt out scent
reminds me
that death cometh.
I look into the flame
of the next
and see myself
frail and unsteadied;
by the slightest breeze.

I am reminded that you
chose to speak
in a still small voice
A tone that wouldn't
blow the life out of me
but would bend me
toward everlasting fire.

I:
your smouldering wick
you wouldn't snuff.
Guttering:
you've held
your breath in agony.
Inflamed:
you've soothed
with a sigh.

As I blow
out my lights this night
I wonder if
that smoke scent of death
is not just a reprieve
a rest for a new day
and chance
to be alight once more.

Sweep me off my feet.
Give me something to believe.
Lead my tread down
the cliffs,
that slide to the sea of sorrow.
It's been a long time
since I felt
the salt sweep past chin
and tumble onto breast.

Grief has become
the shadow of a lodestone.
Losing none of it's mass
and increasing in density
as it sinks deeper
into the inky mire of hurt within.

SO...
point the way
and off I'll fling
flitting from the night
as a moth to the light.
Limerance: live life lively;
take pictures of passing photons
and break baked bread together.
Lift wet wine that washes
and paddling;
pull, push positively
towards the theo-all;
thus thanking tomorrow.

I find myself with an hour to spare after a day of assisting a young man to understand why he has to learn, and how to read, and write what he is learning and thinking down. He understands the alphabet which is a start, and he has a small vocabulary but he can't spell. He might have spelt 10 of the words from the previous sentence corrctly (but wouldn't have seen them all as been necessary)and it would have taken him a long time to get it written down and that would have been from me transcribing or him copying it from a written source (either the internet or from my writing it down first). He is studying Motor vehicle repair and maintenace and I imagine hoped he would be spared from having to write paragraphs or even sentences down. Our western world will no longer accept this way of working. He can't just be allowed to learn how to fix cars, he must stare at that ever intimading space that he must fill in a way he has not learnt to do to any real degree in 17 years of being on this planet. If he cannot learn, and it is likely that literacy and numeracy will elude him for his whole life, then our world has no place to offer him. No area where he can know that he contribute and feel valued for the skills that he does have , and those he will pick up during his life; all because he cannoot read and write to the demanded standard. Having grown up with dyslexia myself and felt to a lesser degree the shame and frustration that must be his due to not being able to deliver what is demanded by those older and wiser than himself, I can't help but wonder if our culture and society in the long run will destroy his curiosity and enthiusasm for those things he enjoys and is proficient at. Is it possible that we can all agree that at some point reading, writing, and numeracy wont ever (bar a miracle) be his bag. That we can stand by his side and guide him when necessary and instill the knowledge of his worth when he gets to excel at what he can. Don't get me wrong I love reading and writing and I have done a lot of both since I was fifteen and discovered the joy of losing myself in someone else's mind and imagination, and since discovering the near ecstacy and relief of being able to express what I think and feel freely with almost no bar. And so I want everyone to experience that fulfillment of who they are and what ther are capable of, whatever that looks like, books or no books.