An old feeling settled into my cells over the past few days - I even felt a little comfortable with it, like an old pair of shoes your feet slip naturally into even if you don't like how they look on you anymore.

Fear has been a constant companion in my life and, over the many years of trips around the sun, I've both shunned and befriended it. This love-hate relationship has threatened to define or defeat me as I've realised that, the only way to stay close to the pulse of life is our ability to change, to shed off whatever we are carrying that is no longer alive. To cast off our dead skin because dead skin can't feel. Dead eyes can't see. Dead ears can't hear. And without feeling, there is no chance of wholeness, and wholeness remains our chance to survive the pain of breaking.

This fear encompassed and encased a deep fear that I wasn't, as my true self, enough. Whole enough, strong enough, rich enough, wise enough and, in showing my authentic self, in casting off the layers that no longer served me, would leave me exposed to the elements and the deep sense of abandonment would finally be realised.

I understand that this dead skin takes many forms, a dead way of thinking, seeing, relating, believing or a dead way of experiencing. In essence, shedding opens up to self-transformation. Those of us who refuse such renewal will, sooner or later, be forced to undergo transformation anyway as a result of being broken or eroded by the world. Very often both occur at the same time, we shed from within whilst being eroded from without. 

We were discussing what made us good listeners, or perhaps what made people come to us with their Hamlet questions. Sometimes I'm stretched thin by it but, for the most part, I'm deeply humbled because I think listening comes from a deeper place and it seems we can only hear the living to the extent that we have truly lived, only understand pain and joy to the extent that we have allowed ourselves to be touched by life.

I have heard so much in my life but it's only after the fact that I've felt their pain and even more their true joy in caring for things. To be sure we do not have to experience the same things to receive each other but we do have to experience what is ours to live through before life will show its roots.

What does it take to truly listen? The breakdown of everything that parades between our hearts. If I dare to hear you, I will feel you like the sun and grow in your direction, and you in mine. For when we hear each other, it all becomes a garden, it all becomes edible.

These big Hamlet questions play in my head sometimes and, despite the day to day activities that keep me running, these questions are my real purpose.

Why are we here? Why did I eat what I ate? Drive that way to work? Smile that thought? Say that sentence? And why did she saunter into my contained life? The big why?

I think this is the trick to life, to staying well, isn't it? To feel the sun even in the dark. To grow just the same. To know there is love even when we're lonely. To know there is peace even when we're in this uncertainty. And then it shifts. Then I know.

The stubborn persistent truth is that we don't get to choose who we love or who loves us - the big why is that we're all here to connect. I am powerless to her and her to me because we are within each other. There is a profound connection to everything and love is the only way.

"Did I show you love... because your silence never says ...." This song echoes in my head when I speak to her. My one-word wonder.

I know that over the years, through fear and expectation, my mind has gathered and hoarded places I needed to go, things I needed to have, selves I needed to be. But here I am, without most of them, the goals and wants all used up in learning how to love. But love I do - deeply.

How frequently do we search for a song of guidance that can only come from inside us? The search continues.

My very best friend said, just the other day, she thought that words were 'meaningless sounds that fill the spaces between'. Her reference showed her insistence that actions are what really move life forward and the endless talking is just unnecessary.

It didn't sit well with me, lover of words and creator of stories that, in my mind, were nothing if read as meaningless. But, as with everything she says, I sat with it and watched her play out in my life.

"How can you follow the course of your life if you do not let it flow"? Often the pain of resisting makes us rust like iron and in order for us to re-enter the flow of life we need to be scraped back to our original surface.

Like windows filmed by weather, I wait on her loving hands to be rubbed clear. For human beings, the process of living stains us repeatedly, with pain and disappointment, action and inaction, which can sicken us if harboured or make us whole again if released. Again and again, more than any other life form, we have this majestic and burdensome power to harbour or release the impact of our words but more importantly our actions.

Experience in, feelings out. Surprise and challenge in, heartache and joy out. In a constant ride life rushes in and in constant release, we must let it all backoff.

My words, her actions, symbiotic and stretching, for this is how the earth was made magnificent by the sea and how humankind, how we, are carved upright - again and again - with a collective spirit that sets us free.