I want the cherry.

I want the cherry.

I'm sitting by the window watching the rain and listening to raw water in the gutters.

I'm also seeping in the last light as it seeps away (with the summer), and feeling inside me, and on my skin, autumn's approach; and wondering why you've stopped your poetry writing; and liking that you're a computer nerd.

And feeling sad and happy, but more sad than happy, and wondering about the meaninglessness of life/my life.

Yearning to travel and live, I feel trapped in my own skin, my own life; I'm stuck in the pretty-looking chocolate sauce that covers the brownie. But I want the real stuff, to taste the brownie, to feast on the cherry.

I want the cherry.

Croissant

Taking a break.
Lying at the bottom of the garden, with the girls (they sit in silence, close-by, and I know that we are a content and close-knit family), drinking coffee (life without coffee is not life) and eating my last butter croissant.
I love croissants.
Derick visited on Tuesday evening, he packed my fridge full with city delicacies, like butter croissants. He has no idea what a treat it has been, as I've rationed them carefully out; admittedly this last one needed 10 secs in the microwave to bring out the bakery in it.
It's a beautiful day with tinges of autumn around its edges, which is undoubtedly arriving early this year.
I'm off to Sabie River Sun this afternoon, grateful I am.
Happy Friday everyone...

Place of shouting

Morning has just broken. I loved the inky, cocooning darkness of the night struggling to keep its hold on this part of magnificent Africa; sorry for you Mr Night.
I woke at 4:22 with a jolt. Awareness of what I needed to fit into this day, was enough to jolt me again. And I get the most done in the peace and quiet before the phones start.
It's a magnificent day.
A hardly believable, most gentle breath of dawn-icy air hardly caresses my bare legs.
The window is open and I'm sitting close to it; I'm listening to the early birds catching their worms, and breathing in the peace.
Life, today I love you.
God, I always love you, but I know that I'm loving you even more every day that passes. Thank you for teaching me about simplifying my life, on every level. It really sounds easy, but it's not. Rewarding, very rewarding however, it is.
Thank you for today God, thank you for what you do for me. But thank you, most of all, for your constant companionship (I know that you're here RIGHT NOW), your blow-me-away humour, and the great ways in which you communicate with me.
Can I ask you a favor, three things?
I pray for eyes to truly see with; please will you bless Africa; and will you show me what I can do (especially so that I can live an extraordinary out-of-the-box life).
I choose to live passionately, deeply, intensely... I choose to FEEL!

The photo I took last Saturday with Guy, we were walking through Emgwenya township, after our abseil. That is a profile of Imemeza mountain in the background - the place of shouting.

Dark

Lying on my futon in the shadows of the largish, quiet room where I keep most of my books.
I only come here for solace.
It's been a hard, challenging day, I've taken flack.
It's cooler here, soothing.
I've hoovered a house that didn't need hoovering. I've done dishes that didn't need washing. I think it's called managing my micro environment, at least I have control over that.
But I feel better.
On autopilot I was able to realize the depth of my negativity.
I was able to see my challenges and to know that every single one of them was an opportunity.

Affirmation: As of this moment I make a fundamental commitment from the deepest place within me that I'll no longer stand for mediocrity, and I dedicate myself to living the life I was destined to live. My best life

Paradise road

Been listening to an incredibly rumbustious (in the most magnificent sense of this beautiful word; I LOVE words!) version of Paradise Road.

It's a version (Jannie Moolman) that tingles, prickles my skin, unmanageably pushes up my pulse to sky level, and - simultaneously - breaks my still very tender heart (oh but for last week this time, I might have done things differently).

"Come with me down paradise road, this way please, I'll carry your load... There are better days before us, a burning bridge behind us."

With the broadest smile on my face, a bright red coffee-filled bodum plunger in my right hand, my Swedish coffee glass in my left, I careen around the house to the music and words; my greatest dance movements ever are oiled, smoothed by the polished oregon pine floors, despite fresh blood still on my dance floor.

"Cone with me down paradise road, it'll change your life..."

Track 12: I still believe in love

Happy-sore, I know I'm alive. I have emotions and I can feel them, even if it means fingering ragged-bloody-broken nerve ends....

Don't turn away

The dawn yawns, hinting of autumn; the sun is sluggish, unusually, to rise and evaporate the night's milky breath. Nevertheless, as I walk through the garden tweaking here, tweaking there, the sprinkler on too, I breathe in deep, in deep - to below the sleek, taught muscles that encase my very gut - the dew laden ozone, the gift of today.

Cool enough to warrant a light blanket, I sit back on my rickety-battered-outdoor couch and begin my pages, next to a steaming, white porcelain bowl of green tea.

Dear God, I pray for wisdom and understanding. Writing, like I did yesterday, of men's hearts, I pray especially for the wisdom and understanding of those intricately wired, delicately balanced, nuanced, enigmas that are much more than the sum of our parts.

To an extent that I allowed it, mine is broken; I'm nursing the purple bruises and tenderness, my proneness (yesterday to sobbing) to weeping: I had put it out there believing.

I'm left foundering and wondering what changed, and why the wind's (gone with) direction altered?

I will not easily be trading mine again on the stony-cold, mortuary-like floor of the heart stock exchange.

But simultaneously I will not stop putting out my tendrils to where, often naively, I believe the nurturing sun and rain of growth and potential to be. I'm reminded of Bach's words of wisdom:

"Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them."

And so I again consciously move from
Doing to Being...into the space that Robin Sharma calls 'free flow':

"Free flow is a state of living where you have present moment awareness. Every cell within you is engaged in the moment you're living."

Second best sucks

Give me HOT, even give me COLD, COLD, COLD, but never give me LUKEWARM.

LUKEWARM revolts me, and I'll SPIT it from my mouth and on to the ground.

(Oh but for those who can live in the truth at all times...it sets everyone free. I pray to be one that that is always truthful, even when it is most uncomfortable, and momentarily hurtful to myself. Especially then.)

I pick flowers for everyone left by the wayside... And especially for me, because I am free, truly free.

Like a fleeting shadow, I will silently leave in the night, pulling the door gently shut behind me; without even a click, I'll be gone with the wind, but intactly so, and walking into the dawn-on-my-face...

Like a dandelion on both my open palms I'll breathe you away, but with sadness and nostalgia for what could have been; but with blessings and good wishes too, that you find your ground, your earth, gently land, put down roots, and flourish. (In so doing I am even freer)

Goodbye. May all your dreams for love, happiness, joy and peace come true. May you be abundantly blessed with just good things, and by His love. Goodbye

Van Gogh sky above my tree

I'm lying in my undies on the grass in the garden. Under the peach tree

Last light on fern fronds and silver-velvet lamb's tail

Christ's bleeding heart-coloured cannas point back to heaven. Oh how I have fallen

The sun sinks behind the hill. Instant transformation from humidity to chillidity, instant coffee thoughts churn towards autumn

I tell all the men who cross my path to protect their hearts. Why don't I take my own advice

My heart, and one iris, for your ear. Van Gogh

Notice regarding my best life

As of THIS moment I - publicly - make a fundamental commitment from the deepest place within me that I'll no longer stand for mediocrity, and that I dedicate myself to living the life I was meant to live. My best life.

Only He knows the true heart of men

This is where she routinely sat, watching television until at about around about 21h30-ish when she would feel for her walking stick (she was recovering from a double whammy, at 78, of tick-bite fever and pneumonia, which almost cost her her life, what a pity that it didn't), and get up, and open the three sets of security doors, to let out her three dogs into the garden for a piddle, before reversing the locking up process, and going to bed.
Except that last Wednesday night they somehow got in, dragged her to the pantry, looking for her money and a measly digital camera, then brutally murdered her with fists and a hot iron, so much so that one eye was completely out of the socket, and the other almost. And the flesh burnt from her arms.
A 78-year old woman with a walking stick.
She was found the next morning broken and face-down in her own blood, in her own pantry.
It needs to be confirmed, but this was apparently visit number two, the first took place four-years-and-a-jail-sentence-ago.

This morning, at 09h00, they appear in court in Belfast. I must be there at 8h00, so that I can find a place to shoot them from; I'll have to deftly move between a wide-angle and zoom, pulling the trigger as I go.
I must also find forgiveness in myself, because judgement is God's prerogative alone.
Only He knows the true heart of men.
Unforgiveness has a destructive, bitter root.

Gone with the wind

Walking home across town, my heart misses another beat.

I had chicken breyani with Celeste. But no wine for me for forty days while I'm in the desert, but making my Lenten journey to Jerusalem, for the crucifixion.

I'm on life support.

I'm also Gone with the Wind; it's a staid-even-paced-hurricane of my heart that calms me down, but simultaneously pushes up my pulse in anticipation of 'a REAL life. A life full of God's riches - marriage, children, grandchildren. I know, woah, it's a big thing to say upfront. But that's me.'

The fine-hard-constant rain begins to come down, flushing my-face-and arms-and-legs. I push into it.
The farmers in the valley call it 'kieza'; the fine-hard-welcone-rain that can come, and hover between the low-slung, pregnant sky and an increasingly sodden earth for days...with neither lightning, thunder, nor wind as companions.
That's when I cocoon myself into my bed, amongst books, hand by the fireplace. And a goofy smile on my face as I stare dreamily south eastwards.

Rudder heart torn in three

Clattering blinds in the late night gusty wind that, gratefully, cools those living on the escarpment edge, and frightens away nervous, dawn-avoiding mosquitoes.
Waking up at 3, with anxious tendrils winding and wiling into by core, clutching, tugging at my intestines, I hesitantly drown a relaxant in the dark before sprawling across my mattress and darkly spending an hour and half's meticulously planning. That leaves me exhausted, but strong and resolved. And my rudder firm.
On another (love) note, tonight, my heart is torn in three: it's Gone with the Wind

In the detail; I'm beautiful/ugly

When alone here, which is mostly, and mostly my choice, I choose to be only in my underwear, so as to be as unhindered as possible.
Clothes get in the way of my work and my creativity, they also regularly hook-up - against me - with their partner-in-crime, humidity.
My nakedness, or semi-nakedness, also serve as humbleizers... I'm reminded of my mortality, that within my finger skin are finely crafted, perfectly engineered bones; let's never forget the bigger picture. Never (no full stop intended)

I catch a wonderfully erotic, albeit slight, whiff of my own armpit.
My man smell is erotic. For me. And I'm reminded of history. Mine. And other men. And their armpits and man smell.
Mine is not the history of art.
Beautiful/ugly.

Heatfleshtrash

Yesterday afternoon. I spent with a friend of mine. Listening to the story of his life. In a park near his house. That is a park near my first house, except my access was from the other side. And that was ten years ago.
We had dinner in a restaurant that I was last at in 2000; an unhappy, insecure and fraught evening with James.
Then a night out together in-the-rain-on-the-town. We went to a bar/club in Illovo. With a cab. Thank God. It rained alcohol inside me and I let down my beer-soaked vodka-tinted hair.
I saw Steffen and forced him, in a way important to me, to acknowledge me; not that he has any obligation to ever do so.
I walked-and-floated-and-danced-and-drank-and-pissed-and flirted, all in nice clothes.
Then home in the smelly cab, and an episode of Heatfleshtrash that lasted until three pm today.

[i write this later, it doesn't flow, as in words; welcome to disjointed:>>]
Lying on a fine-haired arm. Talking sore and pain and intimacy. Then a. Wonderfully. Greasy. Wimpy mega breakfast in a suburb from hell, walking distance. That I quite liked. Because at/on edge means you're alive enough to notice: goose flesh-prickled skin. And wide eyes; those are not the effects experienced by dead/the.

Valley/of/desolation

Californian poppies, just two: yellow-orange.
Cherry tomatoes, at least two thousand; bright fire engine red orbs scattered across the Irish green herb garden, beneath a bleak Sunday mid-afternoon sky.
As if suburbia central, which its not, the new 'neighbour' at the top of the street running into mine, has planted an old and shoddy-slender red/white/striped lighthouse, me-height, right next to his socializing area.
When I drive past I can see his varicose veins flourishing on tree stump legs; throughout the day and early evenings, I can hear him clearing his long-time smoker phlegm, there where he sits on wire mesh garden furniture next to his electrified lighthouse.
Meanwhile I procrastinate around the house in my sweaty, humid nakedness and avoid eating until the last minute.
I'm going to shower and then complete my letter to God; I desire a mountain top experience.

Sharp, bright red

Walking down a path, can't see the next turn.
Tiny insect vibrates with life around my one quarter-empty coffee cup; it, the mug, is my favorite, made of smokey brown transparent glass, a family heirloom from the eighties.
Cat stalks a morsel of a lizard across the soaked, soggy lawn to beneath he bedraggled lemon tree that used to be the joy of my life.
My thesis yanks the chains at my desk and crooks it's skeletal finger at me: get your ass here, you're almost done.
Cross-legged like an effete gentleman on the outside storm-battered couch, dampness seeps into my T-shirt and shorts...the rain, unusually, came in horizontally under the verandah last night.
Stef's fountain gurgles, chortles, much happier than me.
Sunday's are for my rest, but not this one.
Lee sends a picture of his brown legs, and writes from Zinkwasi that the fish-eagles are calling from the lagoon. I'll have to go and see.
The lines around my eyes are deep today, as are the black smudges encircling my sad puppy dog eyes; black stubble weeds and wends its way up my face threading to enforest me. Yes, new word, don't Google it, yet.
The sharp, bright red of the pineapple sage flowers hammer and nail hope into me upon my crucifixion.
I am not the living dead

Liz, I need more practice

I have a new friend. And we have, immediately upon meeting, committed to complete and utter honesty; and that we will - at all costs - hold up a severely honest mirror to each other.

This is what she texted me last week, possibly hours after meeting, about this blog:

"You're right, the bio is interesting and the blog itself sleep-inducing. PS: "eternal sunshine of a contented soul" should be made into the title of a nostalgic novel or a black and white romance thriller. Hahaha." 

I chuckled my head off. I also remembered a truly inspiring piece - http://thewritepractice.com/how-to-catch-more-life-in-your-writing/

  - I'd read earlier in the year on Joe Bunting's exceptional The Write Practice blog, of which I'm going to include a large chunk of, right here. It begins: 

The poet-monk, Thomas Merton, said in his New Seeds of Contemplation:

If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men—you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.

I walk in the cold. It stings and soon my cheeks grow so numb I can no longer enunciate my P's and  M's. The holly shrubs are the only green thing here, and the skeleton fingers of trees reach up to the bluefrozen sky as if they pray for warmth. They will pray through the darkness of night and get none.

Behind me is my home and inside sits my computer. I recently won a blogging competition and today's bar on my web analytics is climbing to heights I've never experienced before. But I left the stats for the cold because we do not live for digits on a screen but for moments like these, alone in the woods, staring at bare trees which grasp for warmth. Aren't we all grasping?

I started coming here to meditate when those digits were single numbers that looked lonely and cold on the screen, and now I come here when they are great giants, almost crowding out my computer and my comprehension in their black weight. I come here because I must. I wouldn't be able to bear it all without these walks. My mind would snap like one of those wooden treefingers.

This is what meditation has taught me:

Gratefulness.

I am grateful for those wee little numbers and I am grateful for the giants. Who could live without gratefulness? And by live I don't mean eat, breathe, sleep, and go to the bathroom. I mean eat so that the food tastes like manna, breathe so deeply it's like your lungs fill up with cloud and you exhale it out so that it fills the room and seems to cover it all with a holy mist, and sleep as sound as a child after a trip to Disneyland. I mean to really live.

To write well you must live. You may write without living, but what kind of writing would it be? Not the kind that will change the world, that must be said in certain terms.

The Challenge

Coincidentally, though, this life I'm talking about sometimes comes to us through writing. While I had glimpses of this life before, it wasn't until I began writing that I was truly able to grasp it. Words can be woven together to form a great net to throw over life, tie it down long enough to slurp into your soul.

This is what The Write Practice is about, then. Not just learning to write but learning to live. Not just learning to weave words to get a paycheck or some internet glory, but learning to weave them into life-catching nets that can bring life to the whole world.

So my challenge to you today is this:

1. Are you experiencing life? Right now. In this moment?
2. Is your writing bringing life not just to you but to others?

If not, then you might need more practice.

Communion

Mike S Vancouver said on 28 January:

I found your blog because today I played - yet again - with how to share that people can communicate to commune - to be in communion with each other - and in that "field" the idea of A Beautiful Mind (title of course borrowed from the film) appeard and when it did I googled... and found you.

And yes, people can communicate to create communion and can do it with intention and skill. It seems hard to interest people in the ideas - in part because while it can lead to riches it leads only indirectly to (monetary) wealth.

So thanks for your writing.
Mike

 Beautiful Mind said...

Good morning Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to commune with me here, to communicate - freely and without expectation, except for the purpose of communion - with me, sharing your ideas. 

I believe that you are spot on, that people can communicate to create communion... And thank you for doing so with no expectations of 'pay-off' in the worldy sense. It is for precisely this reason, your words, that I will never, for one, monetize this blog, because I come here only to "communicate to create communion". This I do humbly, without expectation of a 'return', nor under duress.

May your ideas, and your humility, serve to help change this battered, broken and hurt, but magnificent world, into a better place, one good deed and broad-smile-for-a-stranger at a time. 

Have a wonderful day. 

charles

Deep summer

It's the most perfect deep summer's day on God's earth, so much so that the day and the summer's beauty, it's in-your-face magnificence, shovels in deep to me and clutches and tugs at, and entwines it's tendrils around my heart.
I foolishly want to hold on to this forever. I foolishly allow myself the illusion that the autumn, followed by winter, will never come again; that the fact that it's now darker at 5am is but a fragment of my sun-battered imagination.

Head start

There's a power you automatically access by getting up at 5am, it's inherent in the dawn, and the rising sun infuses you, it, with.
I walked through the busy garden breathing in, it, deeply.
And I picked a double-handful of plump, bright green chilies.
Also a gem squash, and a bleeding mouthful of young-berries.
Then I poured a porcelain-white bowl of steaming green tea.
Then, searching for my centre, I sat in my single, old and faded deck chair (this is not my season for loving, it will come again) and met Him at the pages...and thus we walk through our secret garden.

Dirty hands

Today was hard. It was also bleak and ugly. I've struggled to keep my chin up, and to continue believing that, behind it all, the sky is still blue.
Insipid and rancid, are the other adjectives that fritter away at the raw edge of my mind.
Alex and Colette have just left. They came to pick hard-green-velvet figs from the overladen tree at the back fence, there by the veld.
My hands are now horribly tacky with the hideous fig milk; we filled a green Woolworths packet with the milky-sticky fruit.
I fetched a ladder from the storeroom. Alex climbed up and into the heart of the tree. She's one determined French woman.
We walked around the garden, and past many of Steffen's touches. He's very much here today. But not.
Another storm threatens on the immediate horizon, the umpteenth today. I long for it to break loose.
I'm sitting by my window on the garden. Time to make coffee and read. I was given an unexpected respite today, I'm probably squandering it with procrastination. But, I suddenly remember while typing these words, I am human. Very much so.
I press a spade deep into the hard earth packed around the kilometer-long tap root of my procrastination; I shovel out more questions than answers.
Alex left me a bottle of green fig preserve on the kitchen table. The green baby globes in the murky bottle are from my tree.
It's very hard work making green fig preserve. Alex does stuff; she gets her hands dirty.
Maybe it's time I threw myself into the fray...and got my hands dirty?
The storm-chilled breeze cools my arms, and ironically the first hard drops fall as the thunder becomes more muffled.

Hardus

Inside me the pressure of all that I need to do thrusts my insides hard against my outside; I don't know how I'm going get everything done. It's an awful feeling. Yet, like a living-dead circus animal, I plod methodically on, ticking one item at a time off my enormous to-do list.
It's a sticky, clammy, hideously humid day that makes my outside want to go inside; pressure all round, everywhere.
A storm hovers on the periphery of the afternoon, also on the edge of life, but - very worst of all - there's an unexpected week-old cyclone breaking at my heart's epicenter; most painfully of all is that the storm's deadly silence is deafening.
I rip off my limbs and self-cauterize the endless, sliced and jagged nerve ends as fast as I sever them.
I WILL get back to me.

[The photo is Steffen's, and the vegetables are the garden's.]

Heart's in Hartwater

Why's my heart in Hartswater? Because life is stranger than fiction; and when you open yourself up to it, adventures will grab you by the throat and drag you off kicking and gleefully screaming.
I live out of the box.
Minutes before getting into bed I'm perfectly at peace on an idyllic Saturday summer's night. Crickets in un-rhythm.
Frogs.
The trickle of the fountain at the back of the house.
Cat paws rapidly on a wooden floor.
Wind in the branches, billowing the curtains and snuffing out the tsk tsk tsk of stars calling to foolish man on broken-perfect earth.
My heart's content. And happy. Even excited.
I see a face in my mind's eye.
A week it's been.
Most unlikely of places.
22.

Character and superior quality

That last day of last year I walked from Delphino's, beneath the imposing St Blaize lighthouse, and along an almost main street of Mossel Bay. I was a road below the one I should have been in. (But I always maintain that the only way to find yourself is to get lost.)
The sun was blazing. My legs and arms were summer holiday bare, baking. The sky was cobalt. The ocean a deep blue, and extremely inviting. I remember, sharply and clearly, like it was this morning. And I was happy, with a spring in my blue and white slip slops.
Dirk picked me up in that 'wrong' road.
We had only met four years ago on the 'Net, swooping words, songs and poetry, never physically. By sheer coincidence we happened to both be in the town at the same time.
We had a marvelously long and lingering lunch, with cocktails and champagne, at the Cuban Havana's. We caught up, the connection was as if forever. Kindred souls.
At lunch he decided to begin a blog dedicated to good food and poetry, intermingled with exceptional photographs, which was born days later: 'Pomegranates & Poems' (www.pommegranatespoems.blogspot.com).
At lunch he shared some song words of Lize Beekman and promised me her cd, 'Ek het jou lief'. It arrived here before I did.
Sitting outside now, about to taste my first plunger of Sabie Valley Pure Farm Coffee, the words from Lize's 'ek was al daar' wafts outside from the darker, cooler indoors and caresses me just as the breeze caresses the fine blonde and brown hairs on my arms. Arms still brown from the holidays.
I'm reminded that life is about incredible connections with other human beings. Dirk is one of those incredible human beings, a man who has only love and goodness to offer our world; my life's enriched because of him. I'm looking forward....

Life is also enriched by the finest arabica coffee, I maintain. I grab the foiled coffee bag from inside and read the packaging:
"Along the Hazeyview Sabie road, nestled among the beautiful indigenous forests of the Lowveld, lies Rivrbend Farm, the home of Sabie Valley Coffee.
"This 100% pure arabica coffee is grown on the misty mountain slopes of the majestic Sabie Valley. After it is hand picked and sundried, it is roasted and packed by Tim and Kim Buckland who pride themselves on its freshness, character and superior quality."

Only and hour and a half's drive away at most, I know where my next exploration and road trip is going to be to. But for now it's to my desk and to wrap up the thesis for my masters: Damocles' sword.

Snapshots from The Artist's Way: Simply throbbing

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music -- the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

- Henry Miller

I took these photos in Cape Town on 3 January.
First Derick and I visited Knead in Muizenburg for breakfast, the newspapers, and the morning pages. I loved the art deco coffee shop-bakery-surf shop-in-one experience.
Then we drove to Kalk Bay and easily, despite it being the height of season, found parking directly across from Kalk Bay Books.
There I bought a copy of Peter Godwin's 'Mukiwa'.
Looking at Derick in the photo, I believe we were both immersed in the beautiful day, in being alive, in books, and a rich world "simply throbbing with rich treasures and beautiful souls".
Now, 1700 or so km away, I open 'Mukiwa' and see the inscription, reminding me of the beautiful souls surrounding me, that I inked in there: "Thinking of Zim Alex, with Pretoria Derick, and anticipating Dutch Jesse - at Kalk Bay Books on a perfect day! Tuesday, 3 January 2012"

However, on the other side of my coin, I remember my 'manicness' those few weeks at the end of, and at the beginning of the year.
In retrospect I was completely spent, the mere carcass of an ashen firecracker fallen back down to earth, but desperately seeking meaning.
Alone at home, here beneath the billiard-table verdant mountain (Imemeza in Siswati, for 'place of shouting') and at the very edge of Waterval Boven, I am back at me, and with Him. I live here for a reason. I live here because I have chosen life

Snapshots from The Artist's Way: Height of stupidity

To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information with.
With our own eyes we see, and with our skin we feel.
With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand.
But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.

- Sophy Burnham

(Photo by Torquepics; Ronelle took this outside Mossel Bay while I was there at the very end of last year. Thistle; I love thistle.)

Snapshots from The Artist's Way: Paying attention

My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her: success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
In a year when a long and rewarding love affair was lurching gracelessly away from the centre of her life, the writer May Sarton kept 'A Journal of Solitude'. In it she records coming home from a particularly painful weekend with her lover.
Entering her empty house, "I was stopped by the threshold of my study by a ray on a Korean chrysanthemum, lighting it up like a spotlight, deep red petals and Chinese yellow centre.... Seeing it was like getting a transfusion of autumn light."
It's no accident that May Anton uses the word 'transfusion'. The loss of her lover was a wound, and in her response to that chrysanthemum, in the act of paying attention, Sarton's healing began.

- Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way (and photo by Steffen Fischer, recently taken in his Dalecross garden)

Window on the world

When I was younger, and a lot dumber, I thought I had to search for the world. I have since learnt, from reading Buddha and the Desert Fathers, that in fact the world will come to you. If you wait, if you're still, if you sit in silence. It's a lot easier, and a lot less energy consuming.
Every morning I sit at my window with hazel eyes large and kid-like with expectation: so what is going to happen today?
I make few plans, definitely not a single-year, nor a five-year one, and I'm not even sure what's coming next month.
But I have never been let down, the world comes to me. Always. Without fail. I expect the best, and that's what my plate receives.
In my light blue, fine striped pj bottoms I sit here with two cats in my lap, my coffee on the sill, and watch the dairy truck pass, the birds in song, the garden tap trip, the red-chested cape robin and sharp yellow weaver stick-leggedly play in my paradise.
And the world comes to me, and I am in the world.
And I am filled with the fruits of the Spirit: Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-control.
I am blessed.
I give thanks for the gift of this day, and for being alive [no full stop, ever]

Warrior of light

The rain has stopped and a bright orb is visible in the thick bank of silver-gray cloud that's enveloped my part of this wonderful world since Monday.
It's rained non-stop and the evacuation of the tourists in the nearby Lowveld began yesterday as rivers broke their banks.
For me this was a glorious time celebrating my favorite weather, but especially a time of focus and dedication - from dawn until dark - of breaking the back of my work for the current edition of the newspaper, also my eliminating my list of admin-related tasks long neglected, and my dedication to becoming more streamlined, to simplifying my life, and eradicating debt from my life forever.
[That felt like the longest sentence I'd ever written, hopefully it's readable?]
I have to thank my father for his love and for his help, and that he has turned his expert focus on to me; I have the best brains in the business on my side. And, of course going without saying, divine assistance.
I am living this year differently, I can feel it. And more aware than ever I am of my failings and weaknesses - thank you to everyone whom has the balls to hold up the mirror to me, so that I can see my true reflection, as ugly at times as it may be. Thank you for your guts to be honest (I'm not scared); the truth inherently sets everyone free.
I need to thank Steffen for the more than two incredible, fantastic years he has shared with me; he has emerged from his cocoon an upright, steadfast, God-man who is changing his world, and the world at large, into a better place with each step forward he takes. Fly you, FLY, on eagle's wings...!
Steffen, I am honoured to have had my path cross and then intertwine with yours; I believe that despite our small-world self-centered needs, you are learning that you serve a much greater purpose on this planet: it's a story of love, and dedication, to the greater good.
Steffen, you are indeed a warrior of light. Thank you.
I am blessed [no full stop intended]