Ruth's Real Life

There’s something about reaching the birthdays that mark decades that shifts the space in our heads. Next year, in November, I’ll turn sixty. I teach teenagers – most of them see sixty as being close to death. How could anyone be of use once they’re past thirty? Grandma Moses Perhaps I measure myself against this youthful barometer. Perhaps I shouldn’t. Hilary Clinton is eight years older than me and she’s set to be the most powerful woman in the world. I love Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson). She was an American folk artist who only really started painting at the age of seventy eight. She continued producing work until she died aged one hundred and one. One of her paintings sold for over $1.2 million. She’s also proof that you don’t have to look like Kim Kardashian to be on the cover of a magazine. Go Grandma! Go Grandma indeed! I wonder how she felt as she neared her centenary. Probably the same as many of us do now. The world is too busy; there are too many new-fan

When I moved into my current home there was no garden. There was a grove of trees up in the corner and a few leggy, pink petunias pretending to be a flowerbed. There was scrubby grass and hard dirt in abundance. In other words, there was nothing. Over the years, I have broken my back and my bank balance in an attempt to transform my garden. I love the birds. There’s not a morning that I don’t listen for them. They are my morning alarm. I love the tall trees that shut me off from neighbours, making this a little sanctuary away from the noise of the world. I love my tall African sky. I love the pool, paid for, ironically, by TV scripts written for Ethiopia. But I have been unfaithful to my love. My garden has had to bear the brunt of my emotional landscape. After a particularly hard time a few years back, I abandoned my garden. The grass was mowed, the plants were watered, but I didn't kneel and dig my fingers into the earth. The worms were found by the hadedas, not by m

I couple of Saturdays ago; I came home to find Julia with tears in her eyes. She told me that she had been given the most amazing gift. To give this context, you need to understand that Julia is used to receiving gifts. At the end of a school year, she receives so many gifts that it takes more than one trip from school to bring them all home. Many of these gifts are extravagant. Julia teaches at the St Stithians Thandulwazi School on a Saturday morning. The purpose of the school is to empower underprivileged learners and to help teachers who want to improve their skills. Julia teaches English to the teachers. One of the women was so touched by Julia’s passion and desire to make a difference, that she had brought a gift. I was intrigued to find out what kind of gift had caused this depth of emotion. On the table was a crumpled plastic packet. Tears streaming down her cheeks, Julia opened the packet. There was nothing shiny in it, no layers of gold paper, no ribbons or bows to

Look closely, you may find pearls in the grass. Every day, when I drive onto the beautiful campus where I teach, I see guinea fowl running through the grass. Their tiny heads are a startling flash of colour; their bodies are pearl spotted, feathered plumpness. I love their silliness but had not given them much thought until a friend made a comment about them. She told me, that in captivity, guinea fowl lose their distinctive blue markings. The metaphor caught my attention at once. In captivity, we lose the brightness of our soul. We are held captive by the needs of others, by our own self-limiting beliefs and often by circumstance. I facilitate a course called ‘Investment in Excellence’. The first module deals with this question: Do you ever feel stuck? I know very few people who don’t feel stuck somewhere in their lives. What ‘unsticks’ us?  I think it’s pain. When the pain or dissonance caused by the situation we're in gets too intense, we must move or die. Bac

Path to Beauty One more step. The path is steep and steeper still, You could stop here. Here, amongst the broken rocks, Fit the sand of self into the cracks, Sift down, down into darkness. One more step- The path lifts to nothing and nothing still, You could stop here. Here, fear will hold you still, Hope will push you on. You, must, move – the path will not. One more step, Under a sky stretched blue and bluer still You must stop to look, Amongst the sand and sun-jagged rocks, Roots, push, down, lifting leaves to green, Impossibly, alive, on a path to beauty. Ruth Everson Life is a bitch. There are times when one more step, one more morning, one more week, seems impossible. I have sat at the bottom of the dark hole of depression. I have, it seems, spent a lifetime fighting with my own particular demons. Recently, I have thought a lot about a little story that I read a couple of years ago. I don’t remember its author, so I can’t

At a lunch recently, our hostess asked us to tell a childhood story of Christmas.. I was caught unawares by the sudden prickle of tears brought by the deep memory that came unbidden. It was Christmas Eve. The boys were off doing whatever it is boys do at the seaside: searching for crabs in rock pools; swimming out beyond the waves; coming home salt and sun bleached. The girl, even at seven, didn’t mind being alone. The garden that encircled the holiday cottage was a tropical tangle of banana trees, Frangipani and Hibiscus. Shadowed wings flitted through the trees. Lizards, faster than her reaching fingers, slid into cracks and crevices as she approached, but it wasn’t the lizards that she wanted. Her hair, free for once of the tight, white bow that her grandmother insisted on, swung over her eyes as she bent to look for her treasure. It had to be a certain size, small enough to fit into the packet hidden under her pillow. The narrow, silver packet was covered in green and re