Red Road (Self Portrait Challenge)

I walk this road with my dogs every day. Walking through golden early mornings or the late blue afternoons. Sometimes I run until my chest aches.

For me this roads leads to sanity. Listening to the trees, looking at the clouds piling up on the horizon, loving the way the dogs say hello to the world.

A mood grabs me

A mood grabs me, slips down the lump in my throat and starts turning and turning in my stomach. It is digging for truth sending earth flying, making my heart choke.

I build careful mental constructs against depression possession. I roll into a small ball. Logic runs the show.

In the middle of the night I question myself mercilessly. I turn thoughts this way and that not stopping until I cry.

I relax and fall into a deep lake of sadness. I roll a stone into the exit. Confusion is left outside. The water laps gently. I come up gasping for light. I’m trapped in my sadness. I can not recognize truth.

I run and run from depression until I am so tired. I turn every thought this way and that.

And then one morning I wake up. I lay down my arms knowing that I cannot control my being. A butterfly flaps her wings in my heart and a hurricane starts in my head. I close my eyes. and My heart opens and embraces not-knowing. My eyes are full of tears, my heart is scared, my body is restless. I breathe into my toes. Deeply.


Five hours later. Alive, awake. My dogs are eating. Outside the wind is blowing. Yellow flowers catch the sun.

Gratitude and freedom

Today I say thank you. Thank you that Maya is happy at her new home, that she slept indoors last night, that she received a chicken drumstick this morning and that she has made new human and dog friends. To me she was not just a dog. She was a smile with a tail.


I’m as exited as a school kid. Today is the last day of work, followed by two weeks of holiday. Two weeks! I can’t wait. It has been a long year filled with new challenges. But now it is all over. All over till next year. I can read and write and paint and sit in the sun and take my dogs for a walk and play with my boyfriend as much as I want. I have nowhere that I have to be at a specific time and no time sheets reflecting every minute spend working.

As free
As the moment

Before
Reflection

Maya

Today I say goodbye to my puppy Maya. I know I’m doing the right thing, she gets sick and bullied often but she also waits for my car every afternoon with a big smile and runs ahead of me with her tail wagging. She gets a bone every morning, a walk every afternoon and runs around all day with her siblings.

She sneaks into bedroom when she believes no one is looking and puts her head under my arm. When we chase her out she steals a sock on her way out.

She has the biggest ears and saddest liquid black eyes I have ever seen on a dog. She looks like yoda from Star Wars.

When I think of letting her go time slows down and becomes heavy.

Red Self portrait two

The photo shows me reflected in my little red car with my boyfriend’s big red bakkie (pick-up truck) behind me. The cars are pretty symbolic of our lives at present. My car is a small red town traveller. It gets me to work and back and has low fuel usage. Florian’s bakkie we take on rural roads where my Fiat would be swallowed by a pot-hole, it takes him to townships where roads are non-existent, it rattles and roars on the highway, it has no air conditioner and it is extremely heavy on fuel. We use my car most of the time. But when we want to get away from it all and take the dogs with us we use F’s car.

I would love to have a lifestyle where I can get rid of little red car and drive the big, resilient red car. But I love the comfort of the small red car. The way she nips into parking spaces, the blessed cooled air, the funky red leather seats, the sound system blaring and the smooth ride.

For me the office is blue and ordered, with air conditioning. I spend my days analysing and simplifying processes. Home is red. It is filled with passions, shared laughter and conflicts. Sometimes things at home gets confusing, it boils with unexpressed emotions and suspicions. I yearn to get away to a place where people put on a cool work mask and the day is spend classifying and arranging life into neat best practise processes.

I find myself balanced between my present life and my future. I yearn for that future, I want to let go, surrender and take life one day at a time. But I fear giving up the comfort crafted from receiving a good salary. I want to have the time to explore myself at home but I will miss the mental discipline imposed at the office.


The question is really: “Can I create a space at home where I can diffuse red with blue and create purple? The purple of far of hills, peaceful yet filled with possibilities?” Mmmm, I think I will spend the weekend setting up an office at home. A peaceful burrow filled with purple shadows and reflected sunshine.

Castles made of sand

I want time to explore myself, my world and my emotion. I do not want to rush of to work in, sit under neon lights all day and rush home, tired and irritated. A part of me questions myself. “Do I think about this too much, am I incapable of happiness because I always find something to be discontented about, should I be happy to have a job a good salary, someones to come home to?”

I don’t know. But today I do not care. I want to be playing with my dogs, rolling on the grass, spending time rediscovering F. I don’t want to be doing the clinical assessment use case. I don’t care about the business goals, the triggers the assumptions and business flows. I want to live and laugh and swim.

My chest feels like there is a rock expanding within it, my eyes are prickling, my entire body is screaming let me out of this office where people are discussing database schemas.

But part of being grown-up is taking a deep breath and getting on with it. Because I get paid to do this and the money pays for everything else.

But one day soon, I will have the time to grow my own vegetables, live in my cob house, study the tarot, have a baby, take my dogs to the beach, study further, update my blog with long poems, write a script, and finish the painting I have been busy with for the last three years. How do I know this? I know this because I am hunting, every day, for a job that I only need to work at three days a week. And it will happen next year. Why? Because I want it so much that the yearning in my heart turns into a magician’s hand. This hand is building my future, carefully crafting the future I dream of, gently smoothing the clay, turning it around and around to make sure all the curves are supporting each other.

A green day

It has been a long week for me and tiring. I got home last night and one of my pups, usually the naughtiest and liveliest of the lot, was lying in a corner not moving. We rushed her off to the vet. Tickbite fever. Again. My heart is heavy with the knowledge that I will have to let her go. Unlike the other puppies she seems to have no resistance against the ticks found in our horse filled suburb.

I love her so, the sad wise eyes, the manic chewing moods, the lop sided ears. And will she be happy in a smaller suburb with a smaller garden away from our large property filled with us, her mother, brother and sister? Why do I have to make a desicion when I don't know what the right thing is to do?

Today I am laying under a tree. Listening to wind playing music with a hundred leaves, drinking in the green and waiting. Waiting for the courage to stride into another week.

Resting

For now. I've been in training all day and I'm so tired I am staring at the screen blankly. But here is a photo from my walk yesterday.

And I made it through the day and allowed the grommel bear out to roam once I got to the safety of my room. Now that she's had her say she seems ready for a nap.

Truth challenges

Truth challenges me today. I am pre-menstrual. Stuck in a VERY small office with five males all talking at the top of their voices. Working on a deadline for documents that need to be issued to my business users at four this afternoon. I’m not sure whether I should burst out in tears or jump up and rip out a tongue or two. Shouting, who cares what you think – no-one. And chanting to myself. “It’s only the hormones, its only the hormones, it’s only the hormones.”

Day like today strips me right down to a space where I need to decide, do I want to be the kind of person who takes my mood out on others or do I want to allow the freaked out me to curl up into a little ball and take a nap somewhere in my womb? Just focus on the task ahead and keep going. I can cry this evening when I get home.

Reflection

I have been feeling sad lately. Not all the time, only when I lie down to relax. I’m not sure where this sadness is coming from, is it hormonal, is it chemical or is something bothering me that I have wrapped up and buried deep in my heart. I lie down, my eyes fill with tears and my stomach starts churning.

It has been an enlightening weekend. I received a phone call from my brother who lives in San Francisco whom I have not spoken to in a while. Even though he is thousands of miles away from the rest of the family he is struggling with exactly the same issues regarding career and self worth that the three of us here are fighting with. It is as if a trigger clicked in al of our minds at the same time.

Most of my weekend was spend working on a job application for a position I’m really, really keen on. So hold thumbs.

I spend time with a friend Sunday morning, talking about life and relationship. Looking at Florian I’m suddenly struck with how fragile our state of relating is. A million things can and will happen to change it. But will it strengthen or weaken the feelings of closeness? Only time will tell, but I’m determined to absorb our togetherness. The good and bad makin up our composition, the fears and the safety, the irritations and the joys. Because all of these transforms us into what we can never be without each other.

Red self portrait

Red is the colour I wear when I need warmth and colour to bleed into life at the office. When blue fluorescent lights and computer screens beg to be reminded of blood, pulsing with life and vulnerability.

Red is to humans what green is to plants. Tears makes one’s eyes turn red.

Truth unfolding

A long time ago, a few years after I came out of rehab, I was sitting on the back lawn, yellowed by winter. Totally bored. I decided that I need a career. I wanted to have something to do. I also wanted to see the world and have adventure, like people in books and movies. I did not want to make lists about going to the library, buying potatoes and remembering to phone a friend forever.

While studying I was pushing so hard. I started feeling stretched and tired and crying a lot.

In order to cope I had to ask for help. Suddenly something new entered my life. Someone opened a door and while staring at the swimming fish and the yellow Chinese tassel moving in the non-existent wind I saw myself. I saw who I was, who I no longer wanted to be and who I wanted to be. I did not really need other’s to feel sorry for me, I wanted to be someone worth admiring.

I pushed and pushed through one, two, three jobs, striving to impress. Ignoring the fearful voices in my head saying, “You can’t do this, I’m tired, I’m lonely”

I kept coming back every time I could no longer keep going, to stare at the yellow tassel and the swimming fish.

And it was great. I had so much energy. I was giving up a part of myself that I have related to forever. A sad, deep still space. I could not move forward while lingering there.

Then suddenly it all stopped making sense. I did not want to rush anymore. I felt like I travelled so fast that I lost parts of myself on the way. The empathy, the feeling, the sadness, I missed them. I wanted to rest in that quiet space again.

But I was scared, what if I lost everything? What if I started travelling backwards? All the way back to the lawn? But I was not happy. I could not remember happiness. I was just pushing and straining and trying to get there. And I no longer trusted others to instruct me. What they were saying did not ring true.

I started praying and sitting in the garden. Just feeling the yearning and wanting so badly the answer, wanting to feel ok. I felt like trying could not get me there. I have tried everything. I would sense my longing to change coupled with not knowing how to change, not knowing what to do. I started feeling empathy with myself. How could I be angry with not getting it right when I so badly want to do the right thing? But I do not know what, why and how.

I now have the career I wanted. I am building towards finding something more. When things start to get too much and I start feeling lost, which I do all the time, and angry and frustrated and ungrateful I can return to the new me. Who is really the me that was always there pushing, but now she knows she is not always supposed to know where she is going and she does not always have to feel good. As long as she has the yearning, together with the resting and the pushing, the birth will fulfil itself. In small cycles, like a flower resting on water. Following its reflection outwards.

A new language

The reply from liz elayne got me thinking about the new language that we forge on blogs.

Unlike a conversation or letter, it is not direct. Our audience is not known. But unlike a movie, the audience and story teller can have direct conversations. We never know who is having a conversation with us by saying yes, I know, I have felt.

This unknown dialog is a conversation of emotion and memory, triggered by images, photographic or created with words.

The blog is like a virtual personality, we tell a story of ourselves whereby we can explore ourself and others can explore us and themselves.

Someone can pick up a conversation hours after we had it and through their memory resonating with ours, reply - unbound by time and space.

When I express a feeling and for the first time I feel as if someone truly know what I mean because they feel it too... I wish I could find words to express what it feels like. But I can't.

Reflections of truth

Today I wake up feeling confuddled. I feel like my brain is still nestled under my duvet even though I am standing staring at the duvet lying (not a spelling mistake) on the floor. My stomach is churning and I feel tearful. WHY? I was still ok when going to bed last night.

Doing my qigong I concentrate on the me who want to have a life of beauty while holding the me who am filled with resentment against going to work. I have one of those moments when everything slows down. I am just the me, breathing in the morning air, feeling curious. There is always a moment of reality and awe where rest and unrest meet. A feeling of absorption when frustration meets truth.