Ruth's Real Life

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...

Go Gentle I have always loved teaching ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ by Dylan Thomas. In his poem, Thomas exhorts his father to fight against death, to ‘rage against the dying of the light’ and not to ‘go gentle into that good night’. I have used this poem in countless lessons to encourage my students to live a life that pushes the boundaries. Being part of my own father’s journey to the heights has given me a new perspective. Unlike Thomas, as I sat with my father in his last days, I was able to undertake a gentler journey with him. My father was a complicated man, I have described him in poems as the ‘thundering god of my childhood’, as an enigmatic ‘question mark man’. I was afraid that the end of his journey would leave me with too many unspoken conversations, too many regrets. But Dad, who was always a fixer of things, was able to fix one last thing. He left me with a deeper understanding of what it means to be able to let go well. There are many things in life that I have ...