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Showing posts from 2015

Walking

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Have you ever been lost? It was a long time ago that a dear friend told me of her experience of losing her way while walking with her dog in the Drakensberg. Her story stayed with me: firstly, because she was so affected by the experience and secondly, because it speaks to the larger metaphor of life journey. I am directionally challenged. I have a strange penchant for turning left (never right) for no apparent reason at all. I hate reading maps. If I’m given verbal instructions they bounce off my eardrums and I don’t trust my GPS, hence, I often get lost. I’m sure most of us know that fine mix of fear and frustration as we search desperately for a familiar landmark. Billie, my mad rescue dog who always makes me laugh. There are many times too, that I have lost my heart path. There are times when my heart has turned left when it should have taken a different direction. There are times when I have felt lost in a wilderness of pain, where the only way out seemed to be t
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Go! Set sail! My image, Zanzibar 2014 Do you feel stuck? What happens when you wake up one morning and the voice that has been silenced for so long is shouting in your head? Life is journey but we often find ourselves on the wrong path. The choice to stay on the path that fate seems to have decided for us, or to take our destinies into our own hands, is one of the hardest tasks we will ever undertake. I wrote this poem thinking of my own life and the moments when the steps towards change were taken. Some came at a great cost to myself and others. In my heart, are so many of my friends who are caught in their own flux. Some are hesitating on the edge of that leap of faith, others have jumped and are striding ahead, dealing with the complexity that hard change brings with it. What does it take, to make that decision to go back to the paths not taken, to find the courage to live an authentic life? The price is different for each us. I don't know what the price would be

The Song of the Dolphins

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The Unexpected Beauty of Scars It might seem strange to start the year writing about scars but we all have them. We can all show the physical scars and we alone know the shape of our emotional scars. Physically, it’s been a difficult year for me. In 2007, I fell and snapped a tendon in my foot. A casual phone call to ask to be ‘popped past casualty’ turned into three major surgeries, the last of which was a triple fusion of the ankle in July. My foot is an interesting mix of bolts and scars. I’m waiting for Stephen King to write a book about a demonic foot. I think it’ll be a thriller. At the start of December, we went to Zanzibar. We were looking forward to an island retreat and swimming in azure seas. The week before we left, I went for a check-up on what I like to call The Foul Head (TFH). TFH has a lovely basal cell carcinoma, a gift from many years of tanning myself to a cinder. (Are you wearing a hat as you read this? I don’t care if you’re inside, put one on at once!)