Once upon a time

I spent most of the night before my exam tossing and turning, worrying about our field, our city, our country and our world.

Earlier we took our dogs for a walk through the field. Most of the field was gone. Covered with construction buildings and machinery. The beautiful grasses gone, the soil, which has never been turned, ripped open. The city is covering every little bit of earth with concrete. It breaks my heart.

I want out. I want to move somewhere where there are no cars and no people and no building or plastics.

Where there is respect for nature. For her many rituals and faces. Where people do not believe that she has been sold into slavery and is under their dominion.

Where the same tree stretches towards the sky for a hundred years. Every year her leaves gets closer to touching the stars.

I am sad tonight.

I am starting a new yoga class tonight.

I am done with exams for a month and a week.

ps. Today is better. Today I will open my heart and listen for an answer. Tomorrow I will answer this wonderful question by Kirsten.

You've stumbled across a genie in the lamp and lo and behold, you now have 3 wishes. You can't ask for material wealth or cause any harm (not that you would). What would your 3 wishes be?

I feel happier just thinking about it.

pss. Thank you all for the exam good wishes. Depite my sleepness nights they gave my thoughts wings.

Exams

Just a quick note to explain my absence. I am studying for my mid-term exam which I am writing on Monday morning.


This is my last exam and then no University and lots of fun and blogging until end July. So wish me luck and see you all soon.

A moment of truth

Earlier this evening I was listening to Yazoo. I closed my eyes and listened very carefully to her voice until all thought was gone. Suddenly I’m 17 listening to the same music. With all the strange thoughts and feelings that filled my reality.


Just for an instance. Then I’m me at 35 again. It feels strange to be a person from the past being observed by the new me. We are two separate people yet also the same. Where are memories stored? Somewhere in my brain my past waits for the keys to unlock her thoughts, emotions and sensations.


She is nervous and uncertain yet her world is filled with beauty. I wish I can save her from her future. More and more drugs and allowing herself to be abused by anyone she hopes will love her.


Until all the beauty and sadness is gone. Just a grey curiosity is left. An inability to feel deeply, to relate to paintings, music, friends, nature, love. Her empathy with her world is gone.


For years.

Until I started the journey back to myself.

It took a long time.


I am so deeply grateful I found my way back.


I am still her yet more.

I know someone who is doing what she believes in. If you have not yet seen Jen's post about Open Arms please go have a look.

D. H. Lawrence - Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait,
for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down,
over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap,
in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums,
into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips,
and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown,
earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black,
black snakes are innocent,
the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now,
and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet,
to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid,
I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head,
dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air,
so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god,
unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up,
snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror,
a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness,
and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind
convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole,
the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon,
I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Lawrence, D. H (Taormina, 1923 ) Snake

(Apologies to DH Lawrence for fiddling with the length of his lines. The perfectionist in me could not stand the way blogger was re-arranging them so I tried to arrange them in a neater way)

Speaking our truths

We discovered a snake during our walk today.

Half of its body was stuffed into a bright yellow plastic bag. Its shiny black helix will never again uncoil and flash through the long grass

My cry of distress is echoed by the wailing of chainsaws. Hundreds of trees are being cut down to make way for the Gautrain. The train will allow people to commute between Joburg and Pretoria, help to alleviate traffic congestion and cut down on fuel emissions. Unfortunately the price tag of R80 makes the “golden train” inaccessible to most South Africans.


Another example of our government wanting to force change, without possibly considering the bigger picture, involves the possible prohibition of parental corporal punishment. Government hopes that the abolishment of parental corporal punishment will curtail child abuse and lessen violence in a society where many believe violence to be the only powerful choice accessible to them.

At first glance their concerns seem valid. A study on South African attitudes towards corporal punishment and child socialisation confirms that the strongest predictor of severe corporal punishment was an attitude supportive of the use of physical punishment.

“Out of a representative sample of 2,497 men and women over 16 years of age from all provinces, population groups and economic backgrounds, 952 parents with children were surveyed specifically on corporal punishment. 57% of parents reported using corporal punishment, most commonly on children aged 3 years, with 33% using severe corporal punishment (beating with a belt or stick), most commonly on 4-year-olds.” (GIEACPC, 2005, p30)

It seems clear to me that there must be better ways to teach our children responsibility than the use of corporal punishment only. Furthermore a vulnerable, defenceless child should also never be exposed to severe punishment techniques. But will abolishing corporal punishment truly decrease violence in society? Will a single solution disperse the complex interplay between socio-economic factors, parental corporal punishment, child abuse and violence?

Does a correlation seems to exist between the Government’s conviction that it can address child abuse by legislating domestic behaviours, and parents’ belief that they can beat correct moral behaviours into their children? Is the problem not maybe that many children are never taught to critically assess their choices and take personal responsibility for their actions?

Unambiguous links between corporal punishment, a child’s long term development, child abuse and the escalation of violence have never been established. In addition little research has been done regarding the effects of poverty, levels of education, social and economic pressures, cultural and religious beliefs, the legacy of apartheid, and the effects of family histories on child abuse and violence in our society. Understanding the complex interplay between various issues and actively engaging with them could well be a more sustainable answer to child abuse and violence than merely abolishing parental corporal punishment.

While watching a program about the violence in our country, I hear a man say: “Somebody should do something.” I find myself asking: “Who is this mysterious somebody?” Maybe that somebody is everybody.

Why wait for rules and laws enabling us to make effortless decisions? What if choice was never meant to be standardised? I have a duty to myself, those I love and those too ignorant to know better, to be courageous. I can talk past the lump in my throat. Why is the fear of being too little or too much, of not being what my parents or their great grandparents want us to be, driving my choices?


I can take responsibility for those things that are within my sphere of influence. I can choose not to use plastics, not to teach my children obedience through fear, not to stand for abuse because I am a woman, not to tolerate racial discrimination actions or thoughts towards others and I can start producing my own vegetables thereby saving the tiny plot of land currently used to grow my food intake elsewhere. I can make a difference to the environment, to those less fortunate than me, to my children and my children’s children.

Every day I can be daring a hundreds of small ways. I can resist the urge to be cruel to someone who hurts me. I can make responsible consumer choices. I can assess each situation with compassion in the millisecond before my conditioned responses kicks in.

I get home feeling sad and guilty because I could not move past my fears in order to stand up for myself and my beliefs. But why am I angry with myself for needing love and approval?

I find a safe space and sink into my fear until I find a child bewildered and crying. She does not know how to handle all the messages coming her way. She was never taught to choose, only to do what is right.

Her need to do the right thing is overwhelming. However, the right choice is concealed by hundreds of conflicting messages; messages from her parents, her experiences, the media, self-help books, religion, her friends, her enemies and the person she wishes she could be.


Together we patiently sift through the building rubble obscuring the truth. Until we find it: A shiny turquoise stone. She holds it in her hand, her eyes are glowing. She presses it against her heart. It grows warm and tickly, she giggles in anticipation. Her eyes grow rounder and rounder, she almost stops breathing.

The stone spreads its wings and starts to sing. Trees are reborn; a small stream starts singing along. A woman steps out from the trees and joins the singing. She folds her cloak around the child who falls asleep warm and happy and dreaming of compassion. Without her cloak the woman is naked but proud. Her eyes are yellow like that of a falcon. She laughs with joy, spreads her wings and flies into the stars.


The child sleeps on, surrounded by trees. Like a snake who does not fear the movement of a stream breaking up the reflection of the moon the child fears neither the snake nor herself.

Writings by Joan Barfoot

These beautiful words are from a novel by Joan Barfoot:

At some point that winter, I began to keep a journal. It seemed in the beginning there was something important about the writing of things, something that might hold onto the reality of events. I guess I thought a journal would give a kind of coherence there hadn’t been before, so that when I read back over it, what it contained might come together in a pattern that I would see and could experience again.


I wrote about the drawings and my body and what I saw; I wrote about breakdowns and becoming sane, and the mysterious awesome moment of knowing; and I wrote about the squirrels and the cardinals and the unbroken snow in the mornings. I wrote that when an act was right, it was preceded by a sense of rightness. The instincts, I wrote, could not be wrong. I learned that words were not adequate for describing what I was understanding that winter; and that it was useless to go back in search of a pattern. I would write what was happening clearly, I thought, and later when I read it again I would find the words flat, for they could never keep up with the changes.


Still understanding that at last, I wrote for the pleasure of it, randomly, no longer trying to keep pace, immersed in the words that would not say what I wanted them to say, and that I would never read again. There was so much that was new during a time that I have thought might be simple or peaceful or dangerous. I tried to put something of that into the journal, tried to explain the joy. I was consumed, so that I saw vividly everything there was, and at the same time noticed nothing around me.


Until one day I realised that the day was longer than others had been, that I was writing more without lighting the coal oil lamps, and for the first time in –how long? – I looked outside. Then I walked outside. There was a difference in the air, a knowledge that winter was coming to an end, and that it was almost spring.

Gaining Ground - Joan Barfoot

Trying to stick to the point

Last night I took the dogs for their evening walk. We drove to the start of a deserted back road. The road runs along a boundary fence, separating our neighbourhood from a large undeveloped area covered in tall yellow grasses. I stopped and invited the dogs to step outside. Fey and Arjun flashed out the car in an instant. Shanti, however, needed a moment to reflect on the merits of walking.


I turned up the Burning Spear and jumped out into the cold. As my ears grew numb the stars glowed brighter. I threw my head back to better admire tree patterns stretching towards the moon. Then I executed a little dance. It was glorious.


Another glorious exercise was the answering of Kirsten’s interview questions. They allowed me to dream as big as an open blue-purple-black sky sprinkled with stars.

1.You've been granted a wish to spend your perfect 48 hours doing whatever you please - money and time are of no object. How will you spend your days?


I book a retreat venue equipped with tall trees, an ocean and a couple of mountains. Then I invite all of my blogging friends, other friends and family members and we spend the first day laying under the trees, lazily strolling up the mountains and playing in the ocean.


When my wolves are not running around excitedly they are dreamingly resting their heads on our knees. We sit up all night next to a huge fire and talk and talk and talk. The next day we fly in a private jet to Marrakech in order to visit Miriam’s guesthouse. Money being no object, her ingenious soul blazes with inspiration. Our senses vibrate with colours and textures, music and dance. We are wandering through an Arabian night dream where wolves and peacocks play.

2.You've won an airline ticket around the world. The only stipulation is that you can't retrace your steps. Where does your journey take you?

First I fly to Capetown to visit my sister. We swim in the sea, have hot chocolate in town, climb Table Mountain and visit antique shops hidden away in sleepy towns.


I fly to the States and Canada to visit my brother, to eat burgers-speared-with-rosemary with NotSoSage, to sit on the back lawn drinking beer with jen , to meet crazymumma and her beautiful girls, to flutter through spring blossoms and moonshine, to eat thai food with thailandchani, to laugh with deb, to go to book readings with acumamakiki, to hang around the streets with bazl, to play on her secret beach with MsLittlePea and Peanut, to take her kids swimming with Mary, to have coffee with Sober Briquette, to visit bookshops with bee, to meet Emily' and her lovely students and her earthworms, to bob to music with Lil, to sit Under the ponderosa, to see the beautiful world of jo(e), to go for a early morning walk with la vie en rose and to meet all the other bloggers I am still getting to know.

I would also love to see the great American plains where wolves still run free. Of course I will need to obtain a map of North America in order to locate you all.


Next I fly to Germany to sing with Susanne and to see Freiburg the town where Florian went to University. We bicycle through the black forest and watch a full autumn moon rising over mushroom filled meadows. I stop over in Paris after which I fly to Belgium to visit a dear friend at MuHKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp.


I stop to see Maryam in Marrakesh to drink Moroccan tea, stare in admiration at her guesthouse in process and all the treasures she has gathered. I finish my journey with a hike down the Great Wall of China and a visit to Auroville an echo city in South India.

"Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity."


I know there are many more things to see but I’ll visit New Zeeland, Brazil, Japan, Thailand and Mexico on my next trip. Otherwise my brain might explode when millions of new impressions start jostling against each other, jumping faster and faster with excitement.

3.You've been given the opportunity to write a description of your perfect job and once completed, this job is yours. What is your new line of work?

In the mornings I do research on community based mental healthcare programs. In the afternoon I assist in implementing explorative mental health programs.


I work with a small group of dedicated professionals who are passionate yet playful. Our therapies are facilitated through the use of gardening, art and creative writing. There are plenty of women in our team. Our work time is structured in cyclic time patterns.

Although she never fills in a timesheet a mother effectively finishes a thousand tasks.


“Women's specialized responsibility for child care suggests that women have a distinctive experience of time, one that is fundamentally different from men's. Historians have drawn our attention to the link between the development of clock time and the industrial organization of labor (Landes 1983; Thompson 1967).


Since men "specialize" in paid employment, it has been argued that their subjective lives are ruled by linear clock time. Feminist social scientists have conceptualized women's time as predominantly cyclical or task oriented (Sowton 1989; Glucksmann 1998; Kristeva 1981; Nowotny 1994).


The working times of women as wives and mothers, it is argued, cannot be captured by perspectives that "separate work from leisure, public from private time, subjective from objective time, and task from clock time" (Adam 1995:95). Research on women's caring and emotional work in particular has shown the limits of a linear conception of time. “

The Rush Hour: The Character of Leisure Time and Gender Equity Michael Bittman; Judy Wajcman Social Forces, Vol. 79, No. 1. (Sep., 2000), pp. 165-189.

Florian says I’m being sexist and that all people are better adapted to cyclic rhytms. What do you think?

And now I need to run:

I have two essays to finish before next week Friday.

Question 4 and 5 to be continued….