Confidence is being open to connection. It includes openness to intimacy, acknowledging and allowing my real self and accepting my truth. I honour my strengths and weaknesses and I build courage to share my heart. It also includes calmly and assertively communicating my needs, despite pushbacks and challenges.

In this poem I continue to imagine the embodiment of parental love. It is an extension of my previous short poem (a Haiku) called Parental Bone-Weariness.

A friend recently shared the poem ‘The Invitation’ by Oriah Mountain Dreamer in which the following words deeply resonated with me:

I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

Roshi Robert Kennedy SJ, an Irish-American Zen master and Jesuit, put the following challenge to us after we sat in silent meditation at the Earth + Sky Dojo (meditation hall) in Dublin. He said: “Why are you here? Why are you doing this? You need to know why you are doing it because Zen demands a lot from you.”

I was probed by an aggressive man while on holiday in the Irish countryside. I didn’t expect it coming during a time of peace and consolation. Like a trained interrogator, he asked question after question on the subject of my personal life. He laid into me about not doing enough paid work in my career. I gave him the benefit of the doubt – thinking it would be good to give him a half hour of my time. But I shouldn’t have given him a minute!