let it be...

One of the most powerful scenes I have seen in a long time.
This remains one of my favourite songs of all time. It has such a transcendent quality that is even more so illuminated in this video with the use of the gospel choir.

I love the words: Let it Be.



It's so important to remember, isn't it ? We can so easily forget that: things go on.

And it's so interesting that in our times of trouble, we are not told to fight it, let it consume us, let ourselves become controlled by it, try to control it ourselves.
We are told to let it be.

I have decided that, if anything, I am going to let God work in and through my life as He sees fit.
And yes, perhaps I have let myself taken control of the steering wheel for a while, and perhaps I have lost sight of where I need to go, and somewhere along the line I have forgotten who is in charge of my life.
Stupidly, I thought it was me.

But, the events of the last couple of days have taught me this: Just let him take over. He's been doing it for thousands of years. He's got a lot more experience than you do.
And no, I still won't call myself religious, I won't even call myself 'spiritual'. I want to go as far as to say: I have such a special relationship with Him that it can't be put into a box. It can't be defined because attempting to define it will diminish it's prominence.

I had a conversation with a dear friend of mine, the other day in which she asked me whether I believe in God. I hesitated to answer, not because I was ashamed of what I believe in, but because so many things were running through my head.
She then said: "Well I don't believe in God. But, if you can prove to me that He exists, I will believe you - I am agnostic."
To which I replied, "I most definitely believe there is a God, but I think everyone on Earth is in for a big surprise one day. Because He is so different from everything you have read, everything you have heard and everything you've seen. I think a lot of people have tried to put God into a box and therefore His magnificence has been diluted and diminished. I don't know about you, but I can't wait to be surprised."

But in the meantime, maybe we should let it be, let it go, let the river run, let the wind blow, let the loose, let it wander.

<3

the shark and the boy

I am tired.
And I know I have said this before, but it applies again, and therefore I am most definitely going to say it again.

These past couple of days have been spent on improving my blog, it's user-friendliness and it's appearance. I have added some functions as some of you will have probably noticed. Not that I am at all convinced that many people read this. But after posting this, I have decided that this is going to be like my private online diary in which I can say absolutely anything. And if anyone should stumble upon it by accident, then that would be a bonus.
But I am going to tirelessly write what I think, what I feel, what I experience and how these experiences have touched me.

As I am typing this I am so very tired that the very action of my writing this blog is mainly to stay awake.
It's so interesting to me sometimes, when I think back on all the times when, as a child, I used to imagine how marvelous it would be to have a fast-paced busy life, chasing dreams, reaching goals, climbing to the top, no matter what. And while I still want these things, and while I still have enough ambition in me to want to climb that ladder, I have now started to realize that, occasionally, it is important to take one step back instead of rushing forward.
Then I read a quote on Pinterest, that basically read: Don't be so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.
That kind of stuck with me. I started thinking exactly how much of my day is 'living' and how much of my day attempts to 'make a living'. The ratios were extremely disproportionate. I got tired just thinking of the amount of time I spend working.
And just when the home stretch seemed too far, just when I thought I couldn't possibly get through another week without collapsing, I did.

André P Brink once wrote in his novel 'A Dry White Season': "We have yet to understand the subtleties of God's infinite grace." After I realized what this week is bringing, I was reminded of this powerful quote. Every time something happens to me that is in no way significant in the grand scheme of my life, I am reminded that it is often in the subtleties that the true grace lies. The phone call from a dear friend after a particularly lonely day, a cup of coffee with someone who doesn't need to ask to know how you are feeling, all-green traffic lights on the way home from work, promotional prices on essentials, especially when you are broke.
These subtleties, these little moments of grace in our day-to-day struggles, are often overlooked, but are important, to keep the pillars of our lives from crashing like the proverbial Samson's temple.
I started thinking after a while, exactly how many of us have a 'step-back' plan, as mentioned two paragraphs up. I compiled a mental list of all the business people I met, all the really successful ones, and I started to imagine what they consider to be their daily dose 'living'. It didn't take me very long to realize that a smart businessman is one who knows when to rest as well. Even God rested after six days of work. I started thinking of all the CEO's I know, the business owners, successful artists, performers and I realized that the most accomplished of these people were those who found time for 'making a life' as well as 'making a living'.

I am too busy making a living.
Merely, because I have neither the means nor the motive to take some time for myself. Always rushing to and fro, always somewhere else to go.
And occasionally, when I am bored, when I have exhausted all opportunities that the television can bring, I will surf the internet and read up on some interesting stories filled with bizarre people doing incredible things. I suppose, in a way, the internet has become the adventure book to my young boy.
That was when I stumbled across this story. Enal, a six-year old Indonesian boy, is swimming with his pet shark, and not because he has to, but because he wants to. I am going to quote from Cracked.com, who also ran a story on this boy:

"This is Enal. He swims with sharks. If you need more information than that, perhaps you should take a step back from the computer and contemplate how spoiled modern-day media has made you - that a boy gleefully riding a shark like a little Thai Aquaman is somehow not "enough" for you. But okay, fine, details: This image was not taken out of context, and it was not a once in a lifetime thing. Enal begins every single day by slapping on a pair of goggles, slipping into the penned area beneath the Indonesian fishing community he's a part of, grabbing the nearest shark by the tail, and then steering it around like a murderous jet-ski. There is no further purpose for this action - it's not training for anything, it's not a show for tourists - the only benefits that daily shark-wrangling provides Enal are a quick and energizing way to wake up, and presumably an unflappable sense of invulnerability that borders on madness."

"No further purpose for this action."
Wow.
How many of us can say that we do things like this all the time? How many of us can say that somewhere at some stage in the day we take 5 minutes to 'swim with sharks'? How many of us can say we take 10 minutes a month, to wake-up and 'swim with sharks', even though it has no purpose?
I know I can't.
Well, I couldn't.
Until this happened:
This week marks the beginning of another exciting journey for me in the form of a drama trip that we will be taking to a little town, named Nieu-Bethesda in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. I had completely forgotten about this trip in between my never-ending lifestyle. And boy, was I relieved when I remembered.
This will be my second visit there and for those who have never experienced the Karoo, Nieu-Bethesda is the place to do it. It's peace and tranquility is really only outweighed by the hospitality of its handful of inhabitants. No ATM's, no cellphone coverage, no credit card machines, very few cars. This is cultural, rural Karoo at its very best. Below are some pictures to generate some curiosity. These are pictures I took last year when we took the same drama trip.

Above: The Ganora Farm we stayed on for the duration of the trip.

Above: One of the many beautiful buildings to see in the picturesque town of Nieu-Bethesda

Above: The majestic rocks that form a part of this natural wonderland
All of the above pictures were taken with my very ordinary FujiFilm camera, so yes, the colours really are that vibrant.

My official 'step-back' is going to be this trip to the Karoo. Every morning I will climb rocks, lie in hammocks, eat too much, drink too much, sleep too much without any 'further purposes for these actions'. Because sometimes taking one step back is more important than rushing 2 steps forward. And yes, financially it is a burden for me since I will need to pay for the trip and miss out on valuable work-time, but you know what? Screw it.
This week I'm swimming with friggin' sharks .
Well, metaphorically, at least.

How do you plan on taking a step back this week ? Start by doing one thing.
And perhaps we can remember how it feels like to be Enal. To feel so much joy and happiness at doing something we love doing, that we can't help but show it on our faces.
Perhaps then, we will discover, not only the youthful exuberance that 'doing nothing' brings, but also the resulting endless energy to 'do something'.

It goes on...

God knows, it's been a strange couple of weeks.

Its been a roller-coaster of emotions, pensive thoughts, fears, loathing, loving, pretending, sincerity, lies and truth.
So basically, just another week in my life. Not much new.

I miss blogging though. But I still have that principle that I will only ever blog/write if I have something to say. This is also partly a reason why I will probably only ever release one poetry collection, since I will never write a poem if I'm not completely feeling it. I did, however, start an Afrikaans poetry website, Gegrif, which will feature some of my stuff. But, if it's not rolling off my tongue and onto the page, it's not being written.
I feel the same way about blogging.
I did get a little sad this week when I logged on after a long hiatus of blogging and realized I still only had 10 followers. It's very demotivating to realize that the thoughts I have, some of which can be very profound (well I think, at least), is only being read by a maximum of 10 people.
But alas, I suppose blogging, like most forms of social media is very much a self-indulgent, personal, therapeutic journey and I shouldn't feel discouraged by my lack of avid readers.

But sometimes, I like to dedicate blogs, as I have done before, and often these for me can be a lot more therapeutic. Perhaps it's the knowledge that at least person will read this and think: 'It's like it was written for me'.

"Acting is probably the greatest therapy in the world. You can get a lot stuff out of you on the set so you don't have to take it home with you at night. It's the stuff between the lines, the empty space between those lines which is interesting."
These are the words of Robert Carlyle, a Scottish film actor, and after reading this I must say that I definitely agree.
Well, for me, at least.
Acting is my therapy. It's the way I have learnt to deal with life and everything it throws at me. Whenever I find myself down in the docks, I read a really dramatic scene, sing a power ballad or I write a piece of poetry.
It's also very interesting to watch how different people allow themselves to be immersed in their pieces. Natasha, whom I have mentioned before, once did a piece from "Mamma Medea" translated by Antjie Krog from the Greek play Medea by Euripides. She asked me to stand opposite her in the one rehearsal as Medea's husband "Justin", who has just told Medea that he is leaving her and her children destitute. The monologue she did drove her to tears, as it did me, and I distinctly remember Natasha coming to me afterwards uttering, rather dramatically: "Die monoloog fok met my kop." (loosely translated as "This monologue is messing with my head"). I have never forgotten it, because this is one of those things that I aspire to one day - to have a piece of text 'mess' with my head.
But as any actor will tell you, the clarity, the euphoria, the triumph of performing a piece like that outweighs any amount of therapy you can buy.
For me, those moments, as Robert Carlyle said, between the lines are the golden ones. These are the moments where your acting becomes so much more than just reciting someone else line's. It's in these silent moments that we often bring our own insecurities, our own vulnerabilities, our own fears, our own personalities into the mix and it's often these moments and how they are 'played' that can define a great actor. Playwright Harold Pinter even had a "dramatic pause" named after his love of dramatic pauses in theatre and acting.

This brings me to the role of theatre and film and storytelling in therapy and in healing and restoration.
It's a well-known fact that millions of people have watched a film or a play and have left the theatre feeling emotionally stirred, touched or moved. This is because in these stories we often, (very often sub-consciously) see aspects of our own broken lives that we can relate to or that we can empathize with.
These are the essential roles of actors in society, to tell the stories. And some actors, will go to extreme lengths to put themselves in the exact position as the character they are playing. This is called method-acting. They believe that this is the only real way they can feel what that character is feeling and thinking. And I suppose that there is some truth in that, but I prefer the Stanislavski method. This is a method where an actor draws on the text to see what the story is saying and they use personal experiences from their own lives to re-tell the story.

What I am trying to get at, in this long-winded dialogue about the founding of 20th century drama, is that we often forget how powerful our story can be to someone else. Today, after a long interval, I started chatting to a dear friend of mine who has been through hell and back these past couple of months.
It was so great to hear from her again and she told me about her thoughts, her feelings and her situation. Although I couldn't relate to the situation she had found herself in, there was so much of what I read in her texts that made me want to burst out in tears. Because, I suddenly realized that so much of what she was experiencing, I had been through. In fact, I had even blogged about it. I immediately sent her the link to the blog post and after reading it for a second time (the first time she read it was when it was first published), she said she saw it in a completely different light. And I felt such a sense of fulfillment in knowing that my 'self-indulgent, personal, therapeutic journey' had meant something to someone.

To my dear friend, whom I am dedicating this blog to, I cannot fathom what it is that you must be going through, but I do know what it feels like to go through it.
Remember the best thing about 'going through the valley of the shadow of death' is that it contains the word 'through'. Eventually we have to go through it, we can't stay there. Robert Frost once said: "If I had to sum up everything I have learnt about life in 3 words it would be: it goes on."
But I know that you don't want to hear this now, so here are some helpers of mine that got me through that stage in my life.

1. Read this (again)
2. Listen to this
3. Listen to this
4. Watch a lot of this
5. Cry it all out.

In 1990, Oprah Winfrey interviewed Truddi Chase, a woman with 92 personalities due to a disorder known as dissociative identity disorder. This was obviously a very hard interview for this woman, with 92 distinctive personalities, to sit through, but years later her story about sexual abuse by her stepfather has sparked hundreds of people to step forward and tell their story. And in doing so, continue the healing.
You know that saying: "To the world, you are just one person, but to one person you can mean the world." ?
It might be a cliche, I know, one of those typical soppy Facebook status updates that love-struck teenagers use because they read it on the back of a cereal box or the bumper sticker of a car.
But sometimes, this is true. Sometimes, our own life experiences can mean so much to someone in their time of need, we don't need to know what they are feeling, we just need to know what we did when we felt like that to make ourselves feel better.

As a closing note, I would like to share with you all her exact words to me on a message she sent me:
"I think after being to so many psychologists and councillors, I have come to the conclusion that the world isn't lacking people who have the right qualifications to help others, but it is lacking people who are willing to live and help others with that experience. The tangible human, tough shit, get down and dirty life experience. You help me like that."

So next time, I am complaining about my measly 10 followers, please will the person closest to me give me a slap in the face? Because I might not mean something to billions of others, but in that one moment, I meant something to one person.

And that is enough.

'It goes on.' - remember that.

<3