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.

This cycle of producing troubles and then preparing against them is very much like pulling a thread that really should have been left alone - the more I pull the more the fabric unravels.

A more subtle form of this revolves around the struggle to accept that, much like a moth to a flame, some relationships burn brightly only to burn out as quickly. Feeling unworthy or insecure we create a goal in the hopes that achieving that will make our love more secure, more equal. Then we're off scheming, preparing against failure, stirring the water in the hopes that it will go clear.

All the while the very deep resources of heart and spirit are being misapplied. Isn't this how we enter relationships that really don't embrace us? The mind is a spider that, if allowed, will tangle everything and then blame the things it clings to for the web it wants to be free of.

I have done this recently, in the hope of love, wanting so badly to see myself clearly in the water while I kept stirring and stirring. Perhaps the hardest thing I've learned and struggle with is that I don't have to be finished to be whole - I just have to turn away from the flame.

We are all frail, we all make mistakes, we all fall prey to a thousand emotions and exaggerations. But these things make us rich not weak, if we are willing to face them squarely. In truth it is not the tissue of our humanity that defeats us but rather our refusal to accept who we are and to live accordingly, limitations included.

Underneath it all, this blindness, in its many recurring forms is the cause of most cruelty. For it is during those moments when we think we see so clearly that we break things that are irreplacable not even realising they were precious.

After breaking many things in my life, hearts and heirlooms, I am humbled to admit that the only differene I see on Earth between being strong or weak is the honesty with which we face ourselves, accept ourselves and share ourselves, blemishes and all.