Ruth's Real Life

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!)...

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...