Under the African Sky

  I have been traveling and living in South East Asia for sixteen months when I finally created the opportunity to have a holiday back home. So I left my island early one morning, to take a boat, mini-van, bus and two planes. I traveled a total of 53 hours to wake up under the velvet, star-spotted cover of the African sky early on my father’s 59^th birthday.

  I spent a little over a month soaking up the beautiful Highveld sunshine, shivering in the freezing mornings and evenings, eating ridiculous amounts of steak and biltong and Proneutro and braaivleis and everything else I saw.

  Many nights were spent with friends and family over margerita’s and red wine and hunters dry. We had family breakfasts and evenings relaxing on the couch in the tracksuit pants and hoody that I woke up in that morning.

  I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of time with my gorgeous niece, watching her learn and grow and change every day. We played dress-up with photographic props, painted each other’s toe nails Cherry-red, danced in the back seat of the car, and sprinkled the floor of my father’s studio with sparkling fake jewels and pearls.

  There was a wedding, the couple promising happiness to each other in a beautiful venue tucked away in the Maluti Mountains. I reconnected with old friends and made new ones over steak and home-made beer, while savouring every breath of freezing African air.

  There was a funeral for an inspirational lady. A coming-together of strangers, acquaintances, friends and family over the loss of a loved one.

  What I found most of all is that life had carried on without me. People got engaged, got married, had babies, moved homes. Friends had built empires, others lost theirs. Some friends came to see me again and again while, sadly, others had to do with a quick chat in the reception of their office building.

  I was nestled safely and warmly in my parents’ love. My father trying to wipe the wrinkles off my face the first time he saw me. My mother uncomplainingly driving me around, making me tea and taking care of me.  Here I had the opportunity to replenish my soul, to regroup, to heal and breathe with the ease of a sleeping child content in the knowledge that they are taken care of. I slowly uncurled from the foetal position that I had crumpled into, hiding away from the world and life and the lessons it insists on teaching you with no mercy. I cried and talked and laughed and breathed until my soul was bursting and my wings were mended.

  I had the opportunity to vote in our general elections. Few things have left me feeling so intimidated and powerful at the same time as standing in the voting booth. I felt like I had the power to change things and truly make a difference by making a cross on a page. At the same time I felt immensely intimidated by the weight that that cross carried.  

  I’ve been back on the island for a little over two weeks now and everyone I see asks me where I’ve been because they haven’t seen me in a long time. You see one month is a long time on this island, in this life. In one month your world can change, you can find yourself travelling through three different countries; you can become a different person.

  For a month this island seemed like a distant dream calling me home. Now that I am here, home feels like a distant dream threatening to fade, to continue life without me.

  It seems that the blessing of this life is that you are free to go where ever you want, do whatever you feel like… the curse is always missing the place where you are not.

  “You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place” – girlgi.com

Finding Happiness

  There are moments where you find happiness…  Sometimes gazing out over the turquoise water, or watching the sunset light up the sky in a magnificent display of pinks, blues, oranges and gold with the ocean reflecting every stroke of this masterpiece…

  When you sit with your colleagues at beer o’ clock, making private jokes that no one else understands, that are impossible to explain to someone who hasn't spent 11 hours a day with you for the last few months…

  When you find a piece of home in a life lonely as a vast desert.  A little piece of blue sky sometimes struggling to be seen through a thick blanket of clouds, other times it stretches as far as the eye can see, to the boarders of your world, and your life, dazzlingly bright.  You find happiness in conversations with good friends who infuriates you and makes your soul sigh with ecstasy, who tears your heart open and then helps you to wipe away the tears you find spilling from the ragged edges.   Who unashamedly and mercilessly mirrors your faults and insecurities to you and forces you to stare them in the eye. Without flinching or backing away. Without covering the imperfections with make-up or shiny things. Forces you to stare at them long and hard. Until they blink and slowly fade into long forgotten things.

  Happiness is in the smile of a chubby-face baby catching a ride down the beach in his mothers arms…

  In rock music played much too loud while you walk home on a cement road where the traffic is tourists calling out to each other in a cacophony of different languages…

  Happiness resides in surprise visits home. In the tender caresses and the smiles beaming from faces streaked with joyful tears. It sits comfortably on the couch doing ‘ordinary things’. Things that are sacred and special in its ordinariness. It plays touchers and dress-up with a niece who holds my heart firmly in her tiny toddler hands.

It is wrapped up in the cultures and beauty of the country where I was born. The vast stretches of rolling valleys that give way to immense mountain ranges. The warmth, friendliness and laughter that surround you and welcome you back…

  Happiness screams when you realize that you don’t need to be dizzy with ecstatic, it-feels-like-my-heart-is-going-to-burst, my-cheeks-hurt-from-smiling, life-can-not-get-any-more-amazing, happiness. It rumbles like a summer thunder storm when you realize that sometimes it is OK to not be OK. That sometimes it is OK to simply just be full of fear and doubt and hurt and longing. To have to gather all your courage and strength to get up, dress up, and show up… yes, without make-up or shiny things.

  Happiness sighs contently when you realize that sometimes it is OK to simply just be.