Ruth's Real Life

  Every Dream Has Its Brown Kitchen ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ These words from my partner, on an ordinary weekday afternoon in January, started the journey towards a dream. Jules decided to take early retirement and suddenly our house was on the market, and we were looking for property in Plettenberg Bay. We had often thought about where we would like to be once we had both retired and had visited places along the Garden Route, finally settling on Plettenberg Bay as our destination. One day. Perhaps. It was nice to think about but seemed not much more than a dream. The ‘For Sale’ sign went up on the pavement. We had to find somewhere to live. My eldest brother has lived in Plett for 20 years and started the search for us. Eventually, he found a place that seemed ideal. We bought it   before our Johannesburg house had been sold. And before we had seen the property on which we had made an offer. One thing you should never trust are estate agent’s photographs. As...

  Parakeets, Rats and Budgies When you feed the birds, you feed the rats. My desk looks out onto a bird feeding station. Every morning, I put out a range of seed, rice, sunflower seeds, apples and sometimes, grapes. Within minutes, the tree is a feathered wonderland. Johannesburg is classified as an urban forest and the birds make the most of the trees in our garden. Frequent visitors to the feeders are the rose-ringed parakeets. Their bright green plumage and sassy character make them entertaining visitors. But they are also alien and feral. They dominate the food and chase the smaller birds away. Every now and again, a blue budgie flutters in to defy the bully birds, on the run/fly from his cage and looking for a meal.   I open my curtains to the noise and movement and the birds are my symphony as I work. He comes over the top of the wall. Down the tree, along a branch, fat and sleek and looking for apples and seeds. He is a brown abomination of fur with a tail as ...

Horatio - Stone of Heart & Hope “’Hope is the thing with feathers” Before lockdown, all dressed up and ready to go. I taught English for 39 years. For most of those years, I had a faithful classroom companion. My pet rock, Horatio. He became a legend. If you ask him for his story, he will maintain a stony silence, but I feel compelled to speak on his behalf and on the behalf of all unrecognized treasures that give us hope. I love stones and rocks; I have always had a passion for them. I can remember as a little girl of seven or eight, spending a Christmas holiday searching a lush Uvongo tropical garden searching for the perfect stone. There were banana trees, frangipani and hibiscus hiding ants and geckos. I adventured like a little Durrell amongst them until I found my stone, it was beautiful. The smooth surface was cool in my hand, solid and telling me stories. I washed and wrapped it. I can still see the paper, green with tiny silver stars. On Christmas morning...

I am the Captain of My Ship …of My Small Ship Snacking on a peanut butter ball and drinking coffee while cruising on a little flat-bottomed boat, the world was a distant reality. The lake was still, a new sun painted the landscape into a live Pierneef. In front of me, clouds skimmed the Waterberg Mountains, catching their slow reflections in the water. On the skeleton arm of a tree, long stranded in the lake, a cormorant curved a sharp beak to preen its feathers. As we puttered past a reed bed, a hippo, alarmed by our presence, surged to the surface. It was there and then gone in a moment, leaving us startled and laughing in delight. I imagined it, invisible beneath the surface, gliding on pointe across the muddy bottom of the lake and away from our intrusion.  I try to capture moments like these. Not just on camera but in the fabric of my soul. There was, however, a picture of me, standing at the front of the boat and laughing at the camera. I posted it on Fac...

Life is Urgent Finding Solid Ground  I’ve seen the world From upside-down And heaven is on The ground. The view, from flat on the tar in the middle of a busy intersection, is terrifying. Pinned under my red and white scooter after an encounter with a delivery van, time changed shape. I watched as taxis, cars and trucks rushed through the intersection and all I could think in that strange moment was: Life is urgent. Life is unexpectedly urgent. At 64 and being knocked off your bike, life is urgent. When you’re confronted by an irritable elephant, bearing down on you, life becomes urgent. Life is urgent as you read this.  I feel like I have been knocked down again. This time, it’s not a van carrying dog food that’s flattened me, or a trumpeting elephant, but the silent and stealthy COVID-19. Recently, I was asked to give a definition of resilience and for me, the best way to think about resilience is not how we’ve been knocked down, but how quickly we g...

  This strange season Two things I can’t get used to – the different smells and the sky. I brace myself as I walk out of my door every morning. The air smells like hot, sweet petrol. Breathing is like biting off chunks of air. I asked XinXin this evening if the sky ever cleared. “Oh, yes, one day last year the sky was blue and there were even clouds in the sky.” The sun is a hazy patch in the smog as it rises in the morning and then is not seen again. I watch from the window in my room as the orange smudge marks another day in China. Behind is me the ironing board bed, already made. On the dresser, a green flask of tepid water and a pear that looks like a Harvest moon. On a good day, the tops of the buildings are visible. My eyes are constantly gritty, and my nose runs non-stop from the irritation. When I get home, I’m going to lie on the grass and feel the space under my tall African sky. The low, grey sky makes this a strangely closed, colourless place. There are...

A new year beckons. Before you know it we will be challenged by another 1st of January.  It's time to effect the change for which we yearn. Along come all the hopeful resolutions that briefly see the light of day before dying their usual death. Don't make resolutions - again I spoke to a group of people recently and asked them if they had made resolutions for 2020, many of them had. Most were horrified when I told them to ditch their grand plans as they would cause more stress than they were worth. The 1 st of January is like some magical line in the sand – there is a vague hope that we can step across the line and suddenly be all the things that we haven’t been for the last X number of years. The right inspirational moment Things that need to get done, get done. If you amputate a finger while cunningly carving a radish to decorate a salad, you don’t sit on the couch waiting for the right inspirational moment to go to the closest casualty room. You put your...

I've seen the world from upside-down Productivity is important. We need to work, most of us, in order to live. There is, however, a threshold where productivity must be curtailed, ironically, in order to survive. On the other side of too much work is stress, burnout, heart attacks and strokes. I have a handle on what it means to be productive and to work hard. A holiday or something to which we can look forward is a light at the end of the tunnel of work. We can draw a line and step away when a task is complete. I also know that there is no such line when it comes to personal development. We can leave work behind, but not ourselves. I facilitate workshops, for adults and teens, on creativity and the power of searching not for The Truth, but for a better truth. As a life coach, my role is to be radically present as I help my client to find a way forward. My poetry is an investigation into purpose and meaning. A single new thought, a moment of clarity, can change the ...

Under an enchanted tree When was the last time you climbed a tree? There’s something lovely about leaving the ground behind and ascending through the branches to an entirely different view of the world. I remember as a child loving the Enid Blyton tales of The Enchanted Forest . In our back garden was a huge willow tree and despite being told not to climb the tree, the quiet, green sea of the willow proved irresistible and I would climb skywards as often as I could. The tree didn’t survive - its roots were declared a threat to the foundations of the house and so it was felled. I was grounded. Up the tree, sky above Still, I have always looked for trees to climb. Perhaps, for context, you need to have a better idea of this climber of trees. You are probably imagining a lithe, athletic body, scaling the branches with ease. Hmm, that would be nice, but reality finds a 63-year-old, accident prone, fuller figure adventurer. It’s not surprising then, that last year w...

A single sentence can change the shape of the world. This one changed mine.  It was an ordinary day on an ordinary afternoon, and I was sitting on an ordinary couch. A late winter sun was lengthening the shadows in the garden. It felt like winter and there were certainly shadows, but it may well have been summer. When you’re at the bottom of the black pit of depression, most days seem wintery. Oprah was doing one of her usual TV interviews and her voice was a soothing antidote to the loneliness of the day. She was talking to a young woman who had been through years of abuse and fought the dragons of her darkness. I was mostly lost in my own space but there was one sentence spoken by her that pierced my heart: ‘You should never have to fight to be loved.’ That one sentence was a turning point for me. It was a moment of clarity that allowed me to take a step forward and that is often the most difficult thing – the one step forward – the step that will take us away f...

I goal set to die at 63. Dogs look like their owners - sorry, Pablo. That may seem like a ridiculous goal, but at the time I set it, life was bleak.   To fix a goal and then to see it vividly is a sure way to turn possibility into reality. Life changed, as it mostly does. I stopped working on this particular goal and when I turned 63 in November, I didn’t die. Well, not that day anyway and not in the traditional sort of way. I died on a Friday evening in February, sitting on the toilet and weeping. If this conjures an image of Elvis, it was nothing as epic as that. The tears ran down my cheeks and dripped into my underpants – no dignity in this death. I now have a new method by which to measure stress, it’s on a scale ranging from one to crying into my underpants. (Should you need to use this scale, it also goes up a level to crying acid tears.) I’ve had to muster a fair amount of resilience in my 63 years; I know the weight of stress. I’m not sure why this point ...

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...

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 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!)...