the eloquence of elephants

Living in a country where wild animals can still be experienced up close in their natural habitat allows them to enter our psyches and imaginations in a way very different from just seeing reproduced images of them.  This is the first of three poems:

Photo: Cian Small

Her trunk is an eye
a feeling intelligence
a far-seeing limb
of elegant eloquence
that somehow translates
into mysteriousness

For I can no more
think of her trunk’s curling grace
without feeling my
own phantom limb reaching
into my life its
unfolding – strange –  from my face.

One sees things anew
from an elephant’s trunk point of view.

The Mirror

Every now and then I come across a piece which just makes me go YES. This is one of them. Insightful, wise with such a keen-edged application of self-reflection (pun intended) this deserves spreading far and wide. Thanks to Shaun Paul for permission to reblog.  Nina

Stone of Destiny

She crouched in the middle of the gallery floor and we stood outside, watching her. She clung to that spot, naked, neither posed nor at rest, her face turned away from us in base humiliation.

And yet she was looking right at us, her green eyes meeting our own, challenging and defiant.

She looked so alone in that barren space, separated from the rest of us by the windows and the locked glass door.

I wondered how it must feel for her as we crowded around her in the confined space of the gallery floor, looking down on her in mingled loathing, and confusion, and lust.

We had talked about her plan a few days before. At the appointed hour, she would lock herself inside the student gallery (having reserved it for the week) and then disrobe. Lined up in a semicircle around her perch, a row of…

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he’s not dying, only living more truly

Photo: Mike Visagie © http://www.mikevisagie.com

There is a well-known Sufi saying which goes ” die before you die.”

How to make sense of this? I believe when we die, we leave behind only what we no longer need. We let go of this narrow earthly reality and go on to live in the wider truth of the spiritual world.  So too in life, if we can die to all that keeps us small and caged, die to our clever distractions keeping us from living purposefully, we might live the broader life our hearts and souls most long for.

I write this in tribute to my courageous 26 year old nephew who left us 3 days ago after a 5 year long struggle with  bone cancer, surviving numerous operations, gruelling chemotherapy and radiation treatment, an amputation of his shoulder and arm earlier this year, as well as a lifetime of profound deafness.

Despite tremendous discomfort, pain and ultimately a ravaged body, he met his life and what it brought him without flinching or self-pity, only open-eyed acceptance and steadfast clarity.  He was an extraordinary beautiful young man who was able to discern and set aside immediately all that was irrelevant and be guided only by where love took him, squeezing every drop of joyous juice he could out of his life to its fullest until his very last moment.

And then he flew.

When someone close is gravely ill or dying, something inside us softens and we’re able to say and do things we might shy away from otherwise.  How much more inclined we are to be gentle with one another, to say thank you,  I’m sorry, forgive me and I love you when we have a dying loved one in our midst.  We can more easily admit: I’m in pain. I’m in a difficult place. This is not easy. Please help me.  even as the dying have no other option but to be undeniably honest about what is happening in their lives.

As we draw together, our hearts rise to the surface of our lives instead of being walled away and armoured and for a short time we can tell the truth about ourselves.   Suddenly certain things no longer matter as much, things we felt strongly about before – our dignity perhaps, our pride, being right or nursing our grievances.  Our priorities change and everything unimportant falls away.  Being there and present for the dying person becomes paramount and we value above all else what we can now be least certain of: the life of the beloved person who is leaving us.

This is the gift of death and dying.  It strips us bare and brings us to our truth in a way little else can. Grief makes us honest.

Some weeks ago I wrote my nephew a letter which I am grateful he was able to receive in full consciousness. It may give a brief glimpse into the man he was and always will be as he lives on in my memory.

Dearest Keagan, I can’t imagine what you’re going through, facing what your life is now.  Nor do I have any idea if you’re about to leave this world or not. 

Miracles are always possibilities we haven’t yet believed in until they happen. 

What I do know is that when you go, you will do so whole. When I think of you, it’s as if your physical body fades and I see the essence of you. It is one of the many qualities I have always noticed  and been drawn to in you, the way your spirit shines through, never more so than lately. 

I guess it’s usual to think of your deafness as a handicap, a barrier to communications in the normal world.  But I think deafness can also remove a barrier between you and others.  You aren’t distracted  by how people present themselves through the words they wear.  Instead you see people as they are being.  I believe this is the gift you give to people around you – you see them truly. You aren’t deflected by the stories they tell about themselves, you just see them in a very pure way. That’s a powerfully attractive quality to have and why you are loved by so many.  While others get caught up in each other’s speeches,  you touch people with a generosity of feeling in a way not possible with words. That’s been my experience of you. 

I’m not wanting to diminish the tremendous difficulties you struggle with.     I know these are real too. 

When you were with us some years ago, I wrote a short poem about you and your mother.  Actually, it’s not so much a poem as a direct quote of your words which you sent her via text.  It’s called WHAT MATTERS, because it seemed to me then already that you had caught on to what’s important about life, both in the large awe-inspiring seriousness of it as well as the small wonder of it.  Here it is:   

WHAT MATTERS 

Finally she had to leave him for the night. 

She left him in the hospital with 

her love
the cancer
some fruit 

And he sent back a message 

thank you
the pear
so delicious

You see, in choosing to savour  that one small precious moment in the face of so much else, you showed yourself able to live fully in the vast and splendid mystery of life.    I love that about you. The truth is we’re all on the same journey you’re on Keagan.  You bring our awareness to it so that we might learn to live as truly as you do now, to find out what matters.

It is the work of heartbreak to soften our edges, break us open. We need only allow our hearts to be broken. There is true purpose in that.

a romantic man

There’s no such thing as a romantic man.

However hard we try to conjure him up. We’ll write him into novels, films and our darkest noir erotic fantasies. We want him alright.  God we want him. But the most romantic part is that we can’t have him. He’ll always be the one on the horizon, never stacking the dishwasher after dinner.

To the man reading this, I know you are the exception; you couldn’t live without romance and I so like that about you. But on the whole, we women are blind to the true romance of men’s nature, it’s invisible to us.  Although sometimes we’re able to catch a glimpse of it in our romantic encounters.

Caught in a sudden torrential downpour she runs into the tiny Izakaya under a Tokyo bridge and orders a sake mojito. The place is set in grey concrete. The lantern outside is dingy, a faded red.  He arrives only minutes after her, softens inside as he sees her still dishevelled from the rain, flustered. He doesn’t know she’s lost the precious moments she was looking forward to, the pleasurable agony of waiting for him. Their eyes meet and everything slows and at the same time bursts brilliantly into life. They can’t breathe. Out of the corner of her eye she is miraculously able to track the progress of a single glistening raindrop as it splashes into a puddle.  Eyes locked, her heart expands with inexplicable happiness, blossoming wide open to let in the radiance of his energy. Outside, time ceases.  For the man in the dark overcoat hunched over his drink, it’s a dreary night;  the storm’s held him up, he’ll be home late and his querulous wife won’t give him any peace.  But for them, the lantern outside glows crimson, charging the rainy night alive with sorcery.

While they are talking, an entirely other conversation is happening between their hands.  Words blur and hum in their ears, their real attention is focussed on the tips and lengths of his fingers as they stroke her hand, he’s breathless at the touch of her exquisitely attentive fingertips exploring the soft naked places between his fingers. They can hold hands like this all evening and never grow tired of it – that’s romantic.

There’s the first kiss, fiercely sexual, hungry, searing and bone-melting, maybe. But if it’s romantic it will barely be there, yet still feel like a momentous meeting of souls through the soft tender agency of lips.

All these words. Romance is love in the language of symbols.  Which is of course the poet’s arena – we have our favourite lines the best of which pierce our defences with heart-excavating exactitude. Unable to bear the intensity of our own encounters, we spy through poetry’s keyhole instead hoping for perspective.  But there’s no relief to be found here.  If anything, it strips your eyes naked with its over-dazzling images of new-found love, love lost and perhaps most painful of all, love in limbo with no place to go. Now you have to see what you pretend you don’t already know to be true.  And it’s delivered with more kick and a whole lot more burn than if you’d been left to your own inarticulate bumbling about.  How else to explain the uprooting jolt of melancholy in such lines as:

The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have.

(Pablo Neruda – Here I love you)

And what can signal romance more soulfully than music?  Our lives are studded with soundtracks announcing the arrivals and departures of those we once loved. Who has not been taken elsewhere by a song, an aching refrain, a haunting of the past that reverberates in the body long after the last note has sounded. We can’t help but resonate with our own memories when music plays them back to us.   I hear an orchestra tuning up and she appears instantly; the girl I used to be in another time, another place.  And there is an even greater romance in making music with another. For then each shared note becomes a touch,  harmonies weave and breathe together, sound becomes sensation we melt into as something greater than we know how to properly hold is being made between us. Love.

Romance inhabits the memory of times and places. “the first time we ever…” and “where we once…”  It lives in the symbols of time spent together. I know of a man who left a brand new dish-washing brush in a tree outside his girlfriend’s house.  A romantic gesture?  She happens to be particular about her dishwashing tools – liking them to be clean and fresh and not grungy-looking.  It’s the queen in her.  Leaving that brush for her was paying homage to her queenliness yes, but even more deeply it said “I know you. I know you in your greatness, but I also know you in your small ways. And I love and appreciate it all.”  It made her smile. It made her feel seen and known in an unmistakeably romantic way.  A dish washing brush as romantic artefact! Who would have thought it?

So often the romantic gestures of men go unnoticed by the very women they are aimed at.  I love men, their passionate can-do-ness, their inspired testosterone drive that longs to create something special for their beloved no other can.  I’ve seen men build fires and furniture, write love songs, verses and paint pictures,  grow gardens, trees and families, make cups of tea and hot water bottles all all all for their beloveds. To impress them, cherish, move them.   And we women?  How often we find fault.  The new table wobbles, the cup of tea grows cold, the poetry is dismissed as sentimental twaddle and we refuse to be impressed. I’m as guilty as any.

My mother acknowledges romance exists, but says it has no endurance.  Romance in a man, she declares, is A Limited Edition. In other words a hard-to-find rarity and short lived.  It‘s why we say “the romance has gone” when a relationship goes stale, when life with the other person becomes predictable. I can’t agree it’s impossible to keep a space always open for romance, but there’s something real she points to nonetheless – its fleeting evanescent nature.  Romance isn’t meant to be sustainable. It’s necessarily of the moment – anything else and it would become an institution. Like marriage.

A man whose thoughts I value says romance is being able to see the other in their highest state, see the star of their best selves shining through the cracks of their flaws and foibles. It’s how we’re able to worship and adore someone when others see only their ordinary humdrumness.  But more than anything, he says, romance lives in the mystery of the other. For with mystery, there is the unknown and within the unknown winks the glint of danger. It could be a blade, but also a jewel. It’s the thrill of risk that is so arousing, the smell of something hidden and alluring that propels us trembling into desires we haven’t yet met.  And here is the erotic dilemma. For paradoxically, as another man who is a friend tells me,  there is the magical romance of true deep intimacy, the willingness to be vulnerable and open as one shares one soul, heart and body with another –so becoming known.  Love, says Esther Perel in Mating in Captivity wants closeness.  Eros and romance thrive on distance. I can’t yet see a way to live in the tension of that paradox except through believing we can never fully discover another’s essential mystery.

What I know now is we’re looking for the wrong thing when we seek a romantic man. We’re hooked on the artificial version, the one that lives in the MSG-clogged sensory-overload of the shopping mall culture like a snack bar; always available at a price, always leaving us dissatisfied and wanting more.  Make no mistake, romance is nourishment, it’s soul-food and we shouldn’t live without it.  But we’ve been raised on a junk diet concocted in a consumer-culture lab;  we no longer recognise romance unless it comes wrapped in American Swiss advertorial and the soft-focus lens of the corner candle-lit table for two.

Now I’m not knocking candle-lit dinners for two. I’m a sucker for them – which just goes to show.   But real romance is found in the most ordinary of moments if your eyes have the heart to see it.  For then what appears mundane becomes exalted:  a piano spilling out a swelling river of emotion as you walk past an open window, an unexpected glance of appreciation from a stranger as you step off the bus at dusk,  a recklessly tender kiss on an escalator.  No, it’s not just in the tickets for two to Paris. Nor in the arrival of 48 red velvet roses hiding a diamond bracelet.  That’s commonplace, not just in its execution but in its currency as the romantic ideal. There is more romance to be found in the everyday than you know.  It’s not what you look at which matters so much as how you see it.

I know the archetype of the lover slips readily enough into the hearts of men, but men fear the scorn of women. The romantic man we expect them to live up to does not exist. But there are men who know how to speak the romantic tongue of symbol and mystery with genuine sincerity, giving their unpredictable gifts in ways that need only our recognition.  I love a man who can do that.

Finally though, while the glow of romance is unmistakable when you step into its tingling aura, it’s impossible to put your finger on it. I just tried; it dissolves and vanishes under scrutiny. And I’m glad of it.  How it holds its own mystery intact.

 

song: water under the bridge

Photo: with kind permission Cheri Lucas Rowlands at http://writingthroughthefog.com/about/

Told me you don’t want this life no more, living so alone
so heavy with trouble, leaves you weary and cold to the bone
Too much of nothing, and nothing don’t want to live
Want to make it all go away like water under the bridge

You said how your crystal girl, she calls you with her troubles again
But this time you left her standing, crying wild in the rain
you told me you got nothing more, nothing left to give
it’s all been washed away like water under the bridge

I see you falling down so far
as you throw yourself into the river of lights and the moon and the stars
your life goes dancing by in pictures
Disappearing into somewhere who knows where
only God knows all you wanted while you slid
was someone to catch you baby, before you’re water under the bridge

Oh everyone who knows you, thinks you’re a pretty fine man
But your back is up against the wall, you got your own blood on your hands
It’s all of that pretending, and everything you hid
will come falling out your pockets as you go tumbling like water under the bridge

for no one really knows you, you keep yourself apart
No one sees your purity, sees into your heart
You hide away the secret love you can’t receive or give
rather let it float away like water under the bridge

I see you falling down so far
as you throw yourself into the river of lights and the moon and stars
your life goes dancing by in pictures
disappearing into somewhere who knows God knows no matter what you said or did
Someone’s gonna catch you falling so you don’t slip away like water
Please don’t slip away like water
Don’t want you to slip away like water…

Resistence is fertile

I wanted to read this book when Angela Deutschman  wrote in a recent newsletter: “For a long time I’ve been wondering about a strange phenomenon that I regularly spot in myself and clients: that of being especially resistant to the very activity that will bring about our highest state of joy / purpose / service. And I’m not talking about just being mildly resistant but magnificently – impressively – able to concoct clever and justifiable reasons not to ever do it, or ever do it seriously anyway.  If this sounds like you, then I encourage you to read the two books that are turning this around for me: The War of Art and Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield. If you are getting tired of your own procrastination and excuses about why not to paint / write / start an NGO / create a new app / adopt a baby / start exercising then this will frame your resistance in a dramatic, though very useful, context.”

Mindful of my own quirks of resistance – endless procrastination is one – I ordered the War of Art immediately and when it arrived, collected it promptly. Knowing we were about to go away for a week’s holiday where all that would be required of me was to laze about, I planned to take it with me and was very much looking forward to reading it.  When it came time to pack however, the book was nowhere to be found. I searched everywhere. And I mean everywhere.   Eventually, after searching in all the obvious places,  I looked in the laundry basket, the rubbish bin and feeling incredibly irritated and foolish, even the fridge. In vain. I left without it in the end. Now if that isn’t a “magnificently impressive”  act of resistance, I don’t know what is. All week I secretly fretted over this book, knowing I had brought it into the house only for it to mysteriously vanish.

On returning home, I found it quite quickly. It was – predictably – in the linen cupboard. The memory of picking up the book at the same time as picking up some towels to put away en route came back to me with perfect clarity.  Once it was in my hands again, I read it in one sitting, lest I manage to lose it again.

Resistance, as Pressfield says so eloquently in highly readable short shots of distilled wisdom – is invisible, insidious, infallible and never sleeps. “Most of us” he writes  “have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance…You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you. You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At 18, he took his inheritance and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.”

The truth of Pressfield’s insights hits you like a punch in the guts you didn’t see coming – it hurts and you aren’t able to dodge it. But it only hurts because you’ve let yourself go soft in the middle, molly-coddling yourself by not facing a far greater pain – that of not showing up in your own life.  It is exactly as Pressfield points out;  of the 11 potential activities he lists which elicit greatest resistance one of them is  “any activity whose aim is tighter abdominals.”

Perhaps most liberating was how the book got me to see things differently.   I’ve always seen Self-Doubt as an enemy, that nagging herald of self-sabotage who sidles in at your lowest point softly jeering “Are you really an artist? Do you really think you can pull off this new business venture?”   Instead, Pressfield reframes Self-doubt completely, calling it an ally.  Self-doubt, he says “ can serve as an indicator of aspiration.  It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

I’ve found my own resistance is strongest when it comes to doing anything compelled by the heart.  I know immediately when my heart is at work because it is then my mind steps in with its most powerful weapon: Irrefutable Logic. Logic as an opponent to the way of the heart is so cunning because you’re duped into trying to outwit it using the laws of its own language. But you can’t argue for the heart with language of the mind.  There is only one way out; through “senseless and true action”.  Logic has no power here.  So I sit here strumming my guitar working on a song even though logic tells me in step-by-step detail the pointlessness of my efforts. I allow love to find its way through, in circumstances that logic tells me are beyond redemption. I let go the thing that logic says is the best I’ll ever have and ask for more.

Pressfield is funny, pithy and annoyingly impervious to any rationalised exceptions you might try to apply to your own situation.  Rationalisation being of course, Resistance’s “right hand man and spin doctor”. Resistance is always coming up with new and ingenious ways to block your creative path, it’s abundantly fertile in its ability to change the scenery  daily so you’re always having to master a new landscape.  But it’s also at the point of greatest uncertainty that creativity thrives – out of the unknown comes something new.

I thought I was well on my way to digging myself out from under Resistance through my own efforts;  but this book reminds me I need help and have been receiving it all along in so many different ways.  We all need regular bursts of encouragement especially in our macho culture of being oh so swiss-army-knife self-sufficient.  The War of Art  has the warm bracing presence of someone offering you a steady hand whilst at the same time handing you the shovel to do the work for yourself.  In other words, a true friend.

That Justin Bieber Moment

WARNING: If you’re a Justin Bieber fan this may not be what you’re looking for. 

My daughter told me this: “Mum, Justin Bieber walked onto stage and the audience went mad. They clapped, screamed jumped up and down and just loved him for a whole 5 minutes. He just stood there…. and then he moved his hand to his heart and the crowd went completely wild.”

I thought about this man standing there absorbing these waves of love and adoration coming his way from thousands of people. What it must feel like to get such a huge response from so many at once. The instant gratification of it.  Of course I have no way of ever knowing what he really feels, but I figured it must be very strange, overwhelming, wonderful, surely humbling. And not at all easy.

Which pretty much sums up how I felt when I got freshly pressed. For one thing, I’ve been blogging for exactly 6 weeks. I’m brand new at this and I’m still working my way around the technology. I had just 10 followers, 7 of whom were good friends. My very first one was before I had even written a thing – to feel that person’s belief in me was a powerful and heartwarming thing and still is.

Then I have to confess that when I received the very nice email telling me about being freshly pressed, I had to google it. I didn’t even know what that meant. Now I do.

It felt like I’d gotten up out of bed, stumbled out of the bedroom still befuddled with sleep and walked right onto a stage into the glare of very bright lights with a whole bunch of people cheering me as I appeared. I wasn’t dressed for this.  My inbox bulged with likes, comments and follows. I hardly knew what to do with it all. But that’s life, hey.  It comes to get you ready or not.

Which brings me to you.

I’ve been blown away by your sheer generosity of spirit. For taking the time to read and comment. For the feelings and thoughts you have shared even though we don’t know each other.   For your acknowledgement, congratulations and your recognition.  What moves me  is the growing web of inter-connectedness between kindred souls. I have absolutely no idea where this blog is going, but it feels good to have you alongside on the journey. When you consider there are over 68 million wordpress sites out there, with over 361 million people viewing 48,5 million new posts a month, it’s a wonder we connected. Then again, it’s not surprising that we did.

So this has been an interesting moment for me. But I’m also mindful that it was only a moment, and it has passed. As one lovely new connection put it, one can be in this blogging world in a way that’s not always possible IRL (In Real Life). And it works the other way round too.   As I was busy being completely absorbed in responding to comments and reading other blogs, nothing could have illustrated that point more succinctly than these words:

“Mum, what’s for dinner?”

It’s way late, I haven’t prepared a thing and oh my god but it’s hard to live in two worlds.

Dark Summoning Beast vs Malevolent Nuzzler

The Battle You Won’t Win

 Yu-gi-oh! is a trading card game based on a Japanese TV series in which two players duel with each other according to a hugely complex set of elaborate rules. Children also swap cards or do  brisk business after school selling and buying individual cards.

When my son was 11, he fell in love with Yugioh. After school, I’d find him in a group with other small boys huddled over a table like eager gamblers, shuffling cards and muttering furtively about the right leg and arm of Exodia The Forbidden One.  Words like Ritual Monsters, Graveyards, Tribute Dolls and Trap cards were also part of this new schoolboy vocabulary: it all had a rather sinister ring to it.  Glancing at the cards, I saw the surface flash of glamour but didn’t find any of it appealing.  Grotesque and gothic, the images seemed unholy fusions of myth, machinery and monstrosities with a good bit of the occult thrown in.  What else to make of cards called Premature Burial ,  Dark Magician of Chaos,  Call of the Haunted and Tribe-infecting Virus?   And when you discover that the whole point of the game is to annihilate each other’s “life points” it seems obvious. These kids are trucking with the devil, right?

In my efforts to slow down my son’s ardour, I would casually dismiss Yugioh as a phase he would grow out of. I took to calling it  Yuckioh and Uglioh  – which only made Yugioh’s voodoo more potent.  Months passed. My son’s persistent devotion did not. He chipped away at me until my resistance caved in to that oldest and most mundane of ploys: the torture of relentless repetition.

I gave in; but not without a last token attempt to retrieve my credibility as a parental force to be reckoned with. There would be one condition.  And then I found myself in Wizards Book store, spending a whole heap of money (with a goodly contribution from my son’s carefully saved pocket money) on a Dragon Structure Pack.  Did I say a heap of money?  Make that two heaps.  The girl-child was with us and quite reasonably expected to get something out of this spree too.

Her choice was a magical crystal-encrusted fairy book all written in difficult-to-read old fashioned handwriting in brown ink. Full of mystery and sparkly bits, it was a treasure trove of tiny folded letters, secret pockets, teeny envelopes, one even containing a substance called  Invisible Fairy Lust.  I choked inwardly as an unexpected vision of uncensored Fairy Lust on the wing appeared without warning in my head. Good Grief! Is nothing sacred anymore?  On closer inspection it resolved itself into Invisible Fairy Dust (hence my fractious whinge about the handwriting). But by now you will have gotten the point. These entertaining toys for children nowadays are complex, elaborate beyond belief, expensive.

Sure, there were crazes when I was at school. We had yo-yo’s. Dingbats. Knockers.  But they went up and down, to and fro, backwards and forwards and made satisfyingly disruptive loud  noises that annoyed adults. You got the hang of it after trying it out once or twice. It was obvious. They did not turn your brain inside out trying to understand them.

You see, the condition I made was a foolish promise. I  would buy my son Yugioh cards on condition that I would figure out how this game works and play it with him because on the face of it, the whole thing was incomprehensible to me.  I wanted to understand what my boy was going to be spending his energy and attention on. I was totally confident that once I had a pack of cards and rule-book in my hands, my superior intellect and years of problem-solving abilities honed in corporate management would be sufficient to work it all out. Little – how easily we are tripped up by our own ignorant vanity  – did I know.

Googling Yugioh sites for help that night, I came across smug pronouncements like “Even if you are a rocket scientist or brain surgeon, you will still need the help of a 10 year old to explain the rules to you.” Hah! No kidding, people!  As another exasperated parent vented; the rules are designed to be totally impenetrable to grown-ups. Adult-proof.

Which is why I’m now asking you for help. So please – tell me what this means:

When this card is successfully Normal Summoned, Flip Summoned or Special Summoned, put one spell counter on a face-up card on the field that you can put a spell counter on. If this card is destroyed in battle, you can select 1 level 2 or lower spellcaster-type monster from your deck and special summon it to the field in face-down defense position.

Got it? Right.

You see.

And don’t even get me started on the addictively acquisitive nature of these games. This was a big deal for my son. He was truly thrilled and thankful to get these cards after lobbying for them for so long. This did not, however prevent him from settling down to examine his treasures once home and immediately announcing with urgent disappointment: “Ah no, mum, I’m missing a Mutant Mindmaster and a Polymerization card!”

Hellloooo? Gratitude? This was beyond built-in obsolescence. This was built-in dissatisfaction and a perpetual craving for more.

In the car afterwards driving home from this momentous purchase, my daughter caught my eye from the back in the rear view mirror.  She was looking at me sceptically. “You know mommy, you don’t actually look like a person who suits buying Yugioh cards for her child.”

Well there’s her first lesson in how appearances can be deceptive. I mean, could she ever be more wrong?

And what have I started?

 

song: the way to lindisfarne

Uncertain of the future we make our way to Lindisfarne
Where the sea conceals the road and the way becomes a mystery
pilgrims on a journey we have come to find our history
in our dereliction, in the ruins of all our wrongs
paying homage to our losses, the reason we have come

Will you meet me on the island, the island Lindisfarne
You will find me in the ruins where the arches frame the sky
laying bare the naked skeleton  of what could not survive
It’s there among the fallen, we‘ll undress what we’ve become
retrieving all we should’ve saved, and all we left undone

If you meet me on the island, the island Lindisfarne
We could start at the beginning as if we still had time
as if we could recover what was never yours or mine
You’ll undo all your longing and I’ll empty myself of you
Then we’ll return to lives unshadowed by the love we chose to lose

And once we’ve left the island, when we’re far from Lindisfarne
we’ll pretend this was a dream and that we always knew
you’ll never have me in this lifetime and I must burn each thought of you
it’s just the last thing I remember, where the sea draws over stone
There were still two travellers waiting for the sea to free the road

They are the ghosts of our surrender to another history
and they will take the road not taken, the road we couldn’t see.

acknowledgements:  Robert Frost & dear friends MG and CG who took me there

Venus in Japan

There is nothing quite like getting naked with a stranger.

Which is what I’m about to do in Sky Town, the heart of Nagoya Centrair Airport although I don’t know it yet.  I’ve arrived in Japan to join a small group travelling round rural Japan and we are meeting for the first time.  Our group leader, Andy has decided that our first introduction to Japanese culture will be the Miya-No-Yu Sento (Japanese public baths) overlooking the airport runway. The baths are segregated and the two men in our group have already disappeared through the blue noren whilst we three woman are to enter through the red noren. We have no idea what to expect.

Our instructions are uncompromising: having removed our shoes at the entrance of the baths,  we are told to undress fully and place our clothing in the lockers provided. We are then each given an extremely small towel,  what it is to be used for is not clear (it’s certainly not modesty; you can either cover your breasts or choose some other body part but not both at once) and told to proceed through to the bathing areas. There we are to wash ourselves thoroughly with the soap and shampoo provided at the seated shower stalls and only then are we permitted to submerge ourselves in the steaming hot waters.

In the locker room are several Japanese women of varying ages from teens to their seventies, walking around completely nude and I am impressed with the open artlessness with which they carry themselves. We three new companions eye each other reluctantly.

“Well come on girls, there’s nothing we haven’t seen before.” mutters the young American woman Anne as she begins to strip energetically.  These words turn out to be not quite true.

Feeling bold, I undress quickly too. The third woman in our group just can’t quite bring herself to join in and pleading a sudden migraine brought on by culture shock disappears to wait for us outside. I try to emulate the composure of the Japanese women around me.  Walking the distance from the locker room through to the bathing area is an exercise in faking a dignity I do not feel.   And washing myself in full view of the 50 or so other naked strangers – normally a relatively private ritual for me (let’s not count lovers or the kids) – takes even more of an effort in maintaining an air of cosmopolitan poise. I’m aware that unlike my very close Japanese neighbours who are vigorously scrubbing their backs, brushing teeth, shaving their legs and washing their every bodily crevice with meticulous care, I’m hardly doing a thorough job and hope there is no watching Sento wardress waiting to chastise me for inadequate hygiene practices. Finally I enter the bathing pools.

There are a variety of options to choose from; invigorating icy-cold baths, pools with jacuzzi spa-jets to loosen travel-tense muscles, even a pool zapping out electrical currents adding a mildly shocking zing to the heated water. The scenic bath is large and overlooks the airport runways where we can watch planes soar into the sky and disappear into the horizon.

Once our bodies are safely submerged under water, our initial shyness floats away and Anne and I discover how much easier it seems to share your life story with a stranger when you’re both stark naked in a hot water bath pretending not to study the other person’s body from the corner of your eye.  Scrutiny is slanted sideways.  Skinship is the apt term given to the cameraderie of communal bathing where the Japanese can shed the professional facades of hierachy which normally divides management from workers for a few hours.  In the warm fog of the spa-bath  there’s so much less to separate us from each other.

Anne is in her mid-30’s, pretty and fresh-faced and had been conventionally dressed in t-shirt and jeans. Now naked, it’s hard not to be surprised by the unsuspected nipple-ring and two tattoos – one an ominous looking skull on her shoulder, the other a Japanese kanji motif on her ankle.  And it isn’t long either, before we are noticed by the fully clothed Sento attendant who descends upon us with discreet haste bearing an official looking waterproofed notice.

“Please. You read.”  She says to us in halting English.

The notice informs us that tattoos are strictly forbidden in the public baths. Embarrassed,  we begin to make ready to leave. However, to save us the indignity of being evicted from the baths, the attendant now offers Anne thick plasters which bemuse us until we realise through her gestures, that she means her to cover over the offending tattoos. Later we find out that the ban against tattoos is due to the strong association with the Japanese Yakuza – the underworld gangs who declare their allegiances through heavy tattoos.

We’ve observed that it’s expected to keep the small white towels we’ve been given on our person. Literally. They are used for mopping one’s face and neck in the heat and later for drying oneself, but in the meantime, leaving them on the side of whichever pool one happens to be in is hazardous – for of course they are all identical.  We watch with covert amusement as a pair of Japanese matrons conduct a conversation whilst lolling decorously in the hot water, towels neatly folded and carefully balanced on their heads.  Until we notice that every woman is bearing a white folded square of towel on her head.  A simple and ingenious way to avoid misplacing your towel.  We follow suit and after a time somehow manage to stop looking ridiculous to each other;  but not before  we both have to submerge ourselves, snorting with laughter underwater as we clutch our towels above our heads.

I am struck by the lack of inhibition in the baths.  As much as the Japanese value privacy and seem so formal and reserved when meeting them in everyday life, here they display a carefree ease with nakedness I don’t see in the eye-averting  self-consciousness of South African changing rooms.

No matter what their age or shape, these women are completely at home in the aesthetic of their bodies in a way Western women are not. This is not the flaunting pride of believing yourself to have a perfectly shaped body.   This is something altogether different – a natural self-acceptance not bought by comparing yourself favourably with some magazine model.

In the hazy mist I see so many curves and forms, some solidly sensual, others elegant and angular, some voluptuously rounded and smooth, others delicately boned and fragile.  And all beautiful.  A woman sinks slowly down deeper into liquid warmth, eyes closing with contentment, another surfaces, then bends gracefully to scoop up cool water over her body.   So many Venuses rising from the steamy waters.