Ruth's Real Life

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!)...

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...