100 Day Project - Day Fifty Nine

Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

Sylvia Plath

Inspired by a writer’s residency last week to resurrect some ideas for a book that I put into a mental lockbox about 12 years ago, I find I’m actually looking forward to writing again - even in my journal - in a way I haven’t for ages.

Of course, it’s a long way from here to there, but... it’s created this tingle under my skin and a buzz in my head. I’m quite enjoying that feeling.

100 Day Project - Day Thirty Five

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart... live in the question.

Rainer Maria Rilke

You can't lie to your soul.

Irvine Welsh

100 Day Project - Day Thirty Three

Trust your heart if the seas catch fire,

live by love though the stars walk backward.

e. e. cummings

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

Ted Hughes

Your heart is not wrong. Your heart is your strength. You don't have to be ashamed.

Laini Taylor, Days of Blood & Starlight

Her heart is smashed glass. Peer into her jagged edges to see what refracts from the light of her past. Kaleidoscopic beauty.

Curtis Tyrone Jones

I have matters of the heart on my mind today. Reminding myself that being heart-driven, even when heart-weary or even-heart-broken, is really the only way for me and that’s okay. I find I am not alone in this:

100 Day Project - Day Thirty One

"Butterflies are not insects," Captain John Sterling said soberly. "They are self-propelled flowers."

Robert A. Heinlein

Remember to look up. Even in a stairwell. You never know when you might find yourself swept up in a cloud of giant moths and butterflies.

100 Day Project - Day Twenty Nine

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.

Rollo May, The Courage to Create

So, I'm now eleventytwo days behind. The schedule shot to smithereens. But here I am, today. Here we are. The world keeps turning. Days come and go. Sometimes in a blur of busyness and sometimes in a drag of ennui. They come and go regardless.

I’m torn between finding that reassuring and desperately wanting to hit the universal pause button so that I can catch up with myself. Of course, that’s not an option and most of the maelstrom I experience is internal. My life is no more this than anyone else’s, despite what it sometimes feels like, so it’s about finding the space to pause neck-deep in the river of my life and take a deep breath. Catch my breath. When I remember to look up and out, or wade out to the bank, even for a moment, I’m better able to do that. Even better if I take a moment to snap where I am in that moment. Ground myself, literally. Now if I could just remember to do that more often.

Anyway, here I am, today. Here we are.

100 Day Project - Day Twenty Six

Some days.

100 Day Project - Day Twenty Three

Meditating and musing today on shadow, and wholeness, and magic in the everyday. And these guys sum it up so much more elegantly than I...

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere.” - Haruki Murakami

“We wait, starving for moments of high magic to inspire us, but life is full of common enchantment waiting for our alchemist’s eyes to notice.” - Jacob Nordby

“And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.”
- Pablo Neruda

100 Day Project - Day Twenty One

The magic in new beginnings is truly the most powerful of them all.

Josiyah Martin

I relate to this. Intellectually and pragmatically I understand the need for all the phases (and dare say I can do them) but energetically, I do love me a beginning! This includes the quiet embryonic time before something tangible emerges; the germination, the incubation... love it. My life’s work is about potential and helping others to unlock theirs. For me, that’s where the magic lives first… in the acorn, in the chrysalis, in the egg. No good if it just stays there forever of course, but it always amazes me how the whole incredible thing, whatever it ends up becoming, is locked up in an often non-descript wrapping.

And suddenly you know: It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.

Meister Eckhart

Once the thing actually starts to emerge, I like to create a sense of ongoing “beginning” by taking an organic approach to how it grows and develops and allow for some surprises.

With ideas, if I don’t attach myself too much to an outcome, a specific plan, or a need to know exactly what’s coming, when and how, then I can sense and respond as the thing unfolds. It’s how I get through it. If things are too clearly mapped out and it leaves no room for the unexpected, I find it hard to stay as interested or focused. I love the idea that just around the corner there might be something I haven’t anticipated. Not something in the form of a monster that’s going to gobble down the thing and me and spit out our bones, of course, but something that adds to it in a way I’d not imagined.

I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it.

Rosalie de Castro

Having said that it’s also true that like any other freshly hatched thing, something new is vulnerable and can be easily squashed and can be easily squashed if it’s left exposed and unprotected. I’ve suffered the effects in the past of sharing too soon or letting an idea loose into the world without due care and having the life stamped out of it by criticism and negativity from others. It’s a tricky dance. And a beautiful cycle.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Anaïs Nin

100 Day Project - Day Twenty

I'd say this is true for anyone, not only women. For me, it's the only way to be and also sometimes a difficult state to inhabit in the world.

100 Day Project - Day Nineteen

A living drollery: now I will believe

That there are unicorns...

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

And if believing in unicorns was good enough for Shakespeare, who am I to question their existence?!

100 Day Project - Day Eighteen

And I just felt absolutely at one and it was a sense of awe and wonder. […] everything is interconnected and each little species, even though it may seem insignificant, has a role to play in this tapestry of life. […] Every single individual matters. Every single individual makes some impact on the planet every single day and we have a choice about what kind of difference we’re going to make.

Jane Goodall (also known as Dr Jane Goodall)

Connecting to the 10-year-old in myself today. She was so full of dreams. Saw few boundaries. Loved the world intensely and felt connected to it all – especially animals and the ocean. She wanted to be Jacques Cousteau or Jane Goodall or David Attenborough when she grew up. She was going to make a difference.

I’m not sure I’ve really done her proud.

I try to do my bit and I believe in individual agency through choice, but I’m not always convinced of the impact I have in the face of the destruction we’ve already caused and are continuing to wreak en masse. Today, on Earth Day, I especially reflect on that and am saddened by the fact that we even have a need for a day that reminds us to care for our planet and the creatures on it. In my heart of hearts, I feel every day should be Earth day.

Perhaps if I think of it as a day to celebrate Earth, and all those who did fulfil their 10-year-old dreams to celebrate and conserve it (and there are so many), that would be better. And, in support of all the 10-year-olds out there now who are also looking to their future horizons with hope and excitement as I was then, as well as the younger me who lives in me still, I have a duty not to give up.

Five of the many things I still dream of doing on behalf of my 10-year-old heart:

~ living close enough to nature again that I feel connected, every day
~ spending more time in the wilder places of the planet – jungles and oceans particularly – because they make my heart sing
~ seeing a turtle mass hatching and making sure as many of those little creatures make it to the sea as possible
~ supporting initiatives to reduce the negative impact I have on the world – recycling plastics, reducing my use of plastics, raising awareness and helping others in their endeavours to do the same
~ eating more consciously in support of the above and my general wellbeing

100 Day Project - Day Seventeen

Have you ever looked at the bud of a magnolia flower? It’s a tight little pod that stays closed up for a long time on the end of its branch until one day, out of nowhere, it finally bursts open into this gigantic, gorgeous, fragrant flower that’s ten times bigger than the bud itself. It’s impossible to imagine that such a big beautiful thing could pop out of that tiny little bud. But it does.

Joanna Gaines, The Magnolia Story

Magnoliametaphor: change = perpetual, cyclical & often profound.

Numbers 1-5, Monday. Add sunshine and time. Number 6, Friday.

100 Day Project - Day Fifteen

Day Fifteen: And the restored version incorporates and integrates the art, philosophy or psychology and so is a different whole to the one that was before… a new gestalt. Obvious perhaps but, to me, it remains profound nonetheless.

100 Day Project - Day Ten

Ten days in and I think I feel a tiny shift. Or maybe it's wishful thinking?

100 Day Project - Day Nine

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.

Lin Yutang

If you can attain repose and calm, believe that you have seized happiness.

Julie-Jeanne-Eleonore de Lespinasse

There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Feet up after a long day provides a moment of pure relief – physical and emotional. Some days it’s the best thing I achieve all day.

100 Day Project - Day Eight

“Just living is not enough," said the butterfly, "one must have sunshine, freedom, and 

a little flower.”

Hans Christian Andersen

And in the (ongoing and interminable) absence of the real thing, one must go to where there’s an illusion of it. After all, they tell me illusion is perception is reality. Ha. I’m buying it. Time to take a journey to where one can experience flowers and a bit of city-style freedom under a canopy of pretend-sunshine! Kew Gardens here I come…

100 Day Project - Day Seven

Three things I read today that gave me pause:

“I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.” - Jean Rhys

“The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and dance and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked, that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.” - Neil Gaiman

“Grief-work. It sounds like such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic.” - Julian Barnes

100 Day Project - Day Five

I’ve been preparing some hexagonals for a mixed-media collage piece I have in mind. I was inspired by an idea my aunt had for this 100-day project of making a quilt, merged with a notion I’ve been playing with for a while of creating some personal maps.

It also reminded me of this quotation, collected a few months back…

“In your life, the people become like a patchwork quilt. Some leave with you a piece that is bigger than you wanted and others smaller than you thought you needed. Some are that annoying itchy square in the corner, and others that piece of worn flannel. You leave pieces with some and they leave their pieces with you. All the while each and every square makes up a part of what is you. Be okay with the squares people leave you. For life is too short to expect from people what they do not have to give, or were not called to give you.” ~ Anna M. Aquino

I’m not entirely sure how it’s all going to come together yet but I’m enjoying the process and experimenting with a couple of ideas.

100 Day Project - Day Four

Maya Angelou would have been 90 this week. It was remarkable to see the out-pouring of respect and admiration for her on that anniversary. Not surprising but deeply moving and for me, still incredibly significant. In this time, when navigating being a person of integrity, a woman of integrity, is throwing up challenges both ongoing and new at every turn, strong role-models feel especially important. Maya Angelou embodied integrity. Heart driven but with a good head; compassionate and wise, she forged a path that is still leaving a wake. In my life and in the world.

I first discovered her writing when I was at university. She was not on the curriculum. Even on the most liberal campuses, early 80s South Africa did not actively encourage the study of women writers, unless it was Austen or Brontë, and certainly Black women were not even officially acknowledged as existing. In those days studying André Brink, under the tutelage of André Brink, was considered radical. But, there were plenty of works (many banned) doing the rounds unofficially. Along with discovering the music of Miriam Makeba and the joys of eating ice-cream for breakfast, reading Maya Angelou felt both incredibly subversive and like a home-coming to me. She’d not long since published The Heart of a Woman and I remember devouring a copy and being deeply moved by her story.

I remember sitting around at the home of one of my professors, for the first time in a racially mixed group of my peers, being served ‘special’ brownies that he’d made himself and discussing everything from the role of law and journalism in a state of emergency, the lyrics of Rodrigues, if wearing braids as a white-freckled-redheaded South African was appropriate, where to buy the cheapest red wine by the gallon (literally), and the role of Black women in the civil rights movement. Maya Angelou was with us in that moment and she is with us now.

Her life story was so different to mine and yet I did and still do hear my own heart in so much of her writing. She had the gift of expressing some universal experiences through the telling of her very individual story. That is just one of the ways she modelled, for me, how to be in the world. We all have a story to tell. They may not all land on a world stage or be told quite so eloquently but they’re all significant. Together, they add to and add up to the story of the world. I always think about what I’d like my bit of that mosaic to look like. Still working on it.

2018's word

dare:

: to be sufficiently courageous
: to challenge to perform an action especially as a proof of courage
: to confront boldly; defy
: to have the courage to contend against or for, venture, or try

I have to be honest, 2017's word did not play out as hoped, although who knows how much lighter it was than it might have been without it? I have high hopes for this one though. It feels like the right intention, the right guide, the right time.

With courage, you will dare to take risks,

have the strength to be compassionate,

and the wisdom to be humble.

Courage is the foundation of integrity.

Keshavan Nair

My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring, still.
Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

Dare to Explore. Dare to Dream. Dare to Discover. Dare to break the rules. Dear to Leave. Dare to Begin. Dare to Live. Dear to Love. Dare to be You.
Oksana Rus