Getting together for an afternoon chat.
Categories
Pandas doing lunch
Getting together for an afternoon chat. Getting together for an afternoon chat.
Categories
Dream Life/Real Life
We cheerfully assume that in some mystic way,
love conquers all,
that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe,
And at the 11th hour,
something gloriously triumphant will
prevent the worst before it happens.
Justin Brooks Atkinson
Years ago, during a drive through Pretoria, as it was, I watched, fascinated, as throngs of people braved inclement weather to file into the nearest corner store, to buy lottery tickets for what was at the time, a record jackpot. Inside the car, meanwhile, my uncle and aunt speculated merrily on what they would do with such a loot. I listened, intently, not contributing, until my uncle noticed my silence, and mistaking me for being disapproving, said, ‘It’s dreams that keep people sane, it’s what keeps us all going’.
His words have stayed with me, perhaps mainly, as I later realised, for it being an insight into who I am.
Dream life and Real life, the title of an Olive Schreiner short story, that I studied in high school, resonates with me. I sometimes feel that my dreams amount to a second life, almost, but I know as well, that it is the dream life that makes this grind mill of a real life easier to negotiate.
More than the light at the end of the tunnel, it is the hope for the light, the sheer want for it, that forces us to trudge through the dark.
.
>I’ve been digging through my old journals looking for some material for my research proposal. While some of the poetry I found there, left me wondering how the paper it was written on didn’t curl up in embarrassment for having to shelter such drivel, this poem I quite like,
Traitorous Tears
With only my own
arms expending
to encompass me,
I curl up,
cornered,
into recoiling cold,
dwarfed by dirty-pink detachment
A pink towel
muffles
my draining gasps
my insurmountable fear
my infinitesimal voice.
‘A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out expression; an effort to find fulfilment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.’ Robert Frost
Categories
Words to live by
“Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.”
Ben Okri (Nigeria)