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.

I chose...

I chose…

 Sometimes I sit in the room that I rent from a guest house in the middle of one of the most incredibly beautiful islands in the world. (I base this unbiased statement on my vast experience of living or visiting a whole of 6 islands) wondering why I feel depressed. Why I fail to recognise and appreciate the beauty that surround me. Why I feel so alone, wanting more, convincing myself that I need more.

 I could have had a husband, a few kids, a charming home with wooden floors, antique furniture, a herb garden beside the kitchen door and a front garden that housed fairies and smelled like jasmine in the cool twilight of summer evenings.

 I could have had laughter and disagreements and blood-boiling arguments. I could have had Christmases with a big green artificial tree decorated in shiny ornaments that reflects the light of the twinkling lights strung carefully over the branches. I could have had a home smelling of freshly baked bread and cookies and a home cooked meal.

 I could have climbed the corporate ladder. Slowly and laboriously pulled myself up rung by painful rung.

  I could have had the material things that many people see as a necessity… the shiny new car in the garage… the smartphone that would eventually become an extension of myself… the business suits… the designer bags.

 

But then I made a choice…

I chose to answer Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s question whether I can disappoint another to be true to myself, bare the accusation of betrayal to not betray my own soul… I decided to return the ring… to walk away from a man who treated me like a princess. I had caused one of the worst kinds of pain that one person could cause another, to a man who didn’t deserve one second of it.

 I resigned from my corporate job, did a double back summersault off the ladder, literally splashing into a world thousands of miles away from anything I ever knew. I chose to immerse myself without inhibition into a life that is full of richness and colour and experiences that I could never have dreamed of having.

 Yes, Oriah, I betrayed another and here I am, standing at the centre of the fire screaming at the universe: ‘I am not finished yet!” patiently waiting for the person who will be willing to join me in this crazy scary, exhilarating, frustrating, breathtakingly wonderful life that I had chosen.

 

 

 

Starry, starry night, Mister Van Gogh... filled with unadulterated sadness

  There’s a kind of darkness that creeps into the hole in your heart left by a friend who has been called away too soon. With time you think that you heal, that the pain fades and life becomes bearable again. You see the beautiful things in every day, notice the sunshine that playfully caresses the ground, scattered by the leaves of a tree. You promise to live up to the inspiration that they left behind, to live an amazing life and experience everything to the full, to give as much as you can… to try to become even a fraction of the person they were.

    With time the hole gets patched up, pieced together, covered with anything that will numb the pain. You become preoccupied with less and less important things to keep busy, to feel like you are doing something, moving forward… moving on.

  And then it hits you on some idle Tuesday rolling in like lightning on the horizon, a storm building up. The filling you stuffed so tightly into the hole oozes out, fills your chest… fills your throat and your head and slowly leaks from your eyes as big salty streams, running down your cheeks, collecting in a pool on the crisp, clean whiteness of your pillow case.

  The thing is you can never replace a best friend. No one will ever match up. No experience, no matter how great, will ever bring back what you lost. The hurt will always be there, some days it’s just covered up better than others. Some days it is easier to blissfully believe the lies that you create for yourself, that you are whole and healed. That you have no scars. That it has left you untouched. That you can cover the hurt with a layer of paint, leaving your heart as flawless as it once was. Innocent… ignorant of what it could mean to truly love someone… and then losing them.

  In these days you can tell yourself that you fully give of yourself, that you open up to people, that you connect and engage and build meaningful relationships. When all you are doing is whispering from behind the layers of stuff that you carefully wound around your heart to heal… to protect.

  Perhaps this pain… these scars will never let me go…Perhaps it is something I will never let go.

  So I will be walking through life, this amazing, blessed life that I had chosen for myself, with a heart covered in scars… swaddled in anything and everything that will make the days happy… finding peace, and quiet for my soul in the small moments of wonder that fill my days… and my nights. And thanking, endlessly thanking Vincent’s beautiful soul for the moments we spent together. For all he taught me. For the inspiration he gave me. For the strength he lent me. For the love he gave me. For the life he helped me find.

 

Rest forever in peace, Vincent Lemmer.


 

Living on the edge

‘You’re moving very close to the edge’ my dad said to me in a conversation that we had recently. He is among the people who I love and care for who is trying to convince me that it might be time to go home…

 And the thought is extremely tempting. Home is filled with mornings where my mom brings me coffee in bed, a house filled with noisy dogs and (I believe) is currently being ruled by my adorable niece. Home is curling up on the couch watching a movie with my dad and soaking up the sun next to our enormous pool. Home has laughter and craziness and long, quiet conversations. Home is filled with fights over silly things and a big brother who insists on wearing his pants a little too low for everyone else’s comfort.

 Home is full of good food, braais, drinks and green summer grass. It gets covered in lights and sparkly things at Christmas time, is the hiding place for eggs at Easter and the bakery for chocolate cake on birthdays.

 It is a haven to run to with a broken heart, to eat candy laying you your big brother's bed while he tries to explain the history of the Dexter series to you through your tears, and the base where you leap from once your wings have grown enough. Home is safe and I yearn for it often. The comfort and ease that it holds…

 Life on the edge is tough… Life on the edge is scary.

 The long, lonely nights of quiet bungalows, the throbbing of your heart when you think about the grassy hills of home, the food, the beauty, the culture, the people. Your people…

 The stress and uncertainty that you experience on a visa run when they tell you they don’t know whether you will be able to get the visa and thus return to the country where you have left the two bags that contain your life and your world.

 The chasing of silly things and realising that it’s a waste of time. The days spent freezing on a longtail boat in the rain. Scars on your body accumulating like the ones on your heart.

 

Sad good byes to people who you are not ready to let go of…

  Life on the edge sometimes overwhelms you and leaves you struggling to catch your breath, tears streaming down your face. You spend countless moment wondering whether this is all worth it…

 But at some point you need to use your wings… you need to leap into life and savour every experience that it throws at you. The amazing, take-your-breath-away sunset dives, the connections with people who would have remained strangers, the memories that you will never regret making.

 The things you do… the places you go… the people you meet… and the endless inspiration, growth and happiness they bring to your life, and your soul makes every bad day seem like a bad dream, forgotten by the time morning comes around. Living on the edge is not easy but there is no denying that it is worth it!!

The Banana months I

Summer is coming to Koh Lipe, the paradise island that I called home for the past 5 months. There is a certain kind of tree that is shedding its leaves, making the season feel a little more like fall rather than spring.  I guess it’s fitting in a way, fall always seemed to me as the end of a cycle, the end of summer, the end of long days by the pool and braai’s (BBQ’s for my non-South African friends) where a group of friends’ laughter could be heard  ‘till deep into the night. 

Ironically this particular tree’s leaves are shaped like tear drops. The falling leaves echo the mood that I often find myself in lately. As the high season here draws to an end the Island is slowing down… I didn’t completely understand how much more this very laid back island could slow down, but boy, did it!! Businesses are closing and walking street is eerily quiet. The kind of quiet that it usually gets at around 3 in the morning, after another amazing evening at Longtail bar, is now also the case at 3 in the afternoon.

Like the leaves my tears have been falling as I have been saying good bye to people who have inspired me and touched my life. To people who infuriated me, irritated me, loved me and taught me to love. To people who broke my heart, or perhaps only bruised my ego a little bit! To people with whom I fought and with whom I laughed ‘till tears rolled down my cheeks and my stomach muscles cried for mercy.  I have made friends and built bonds with people who I know will be a part of my life for the rest of my days.
 

A day in the life of a scuba dive instructor

I’ve met many tourists, who have become friends, in the two-and-a-half months that I have been working on the beautiful island of Koh Lipe. Most of them express envy over my job and the place I call home. I agree with very little modesty that, yes, my life is perfect!

 The tourists see my office that is situated literally on the beach; they experience the fun on days with bright sunshine, beautiful dives with amazing visibility and a variety of sea life. They see how the staff at our small dive centre have bonded with each other and interact, joke, laugh, fight and play with each other as if they have known each other for years instead of a few months.

 What is it really like to live in paradise, though? It is hard, hard work but yes, the playing is also hard. Days start early, preparing everything for the day. Everyone in the shop work together. We get equipment ready for customers, carry cylinders, prepare water, towels, food and load the boat.

 Once we made sure that everything we need is on the boat and that our customers are comfortable and happy we set off to do some diving. Some days I get to guide fun dives with qualified divers but more often I get to teach. Teaching diving is my passion and I feel fortunate to be able to be a part of the first underwater experience of my students.

 Our open water course is three and a half days long and the growth that I see in people in this time always amazes me! At first there are many self-conscious and unsure actions. Soon enough these individuals do little underwater dances with me as they achieve small victories on their journey to become a scuba diver.

 With dives done for the day we return to the shop where we de-kit, wash and pack away all the gear and supplies. This is followed with de-briefings and then classroom sessions where we try to cram as much information as possible into brains lazy from being on holiday.

 After my students leave for dinner, perhaps a drink, more studying and a good night’s sleep (or perhaps some bar crawling) I assist with the general putting away and locking up of the shop.

 My work day is done and I join some friends, often the ones who customers see me joking around with at work, for some dinner and then perhaps go out to a place where we can listen to some live music – usually a bar where the counter is shaped like the longtail boats that we dive from.

 I have amazing, insightful conversations with close friends and strangers and moments where I feel completely lonely while I am surrounded by people. At times I feel exhausted and cannot wait to crawl into bed at the end of the day other days I cannot wait to jump out of bed and get to work. But the best part of my day is twilight, where our beach gets super quiet, the water turns a pale aqua blue and the sky becomes darker as the day slowly creeps away. The horizon stretches out, curving along with the beach, enclosing me in my little world where traffic is the hermit crabs on the beach and work is life… and life is work, with the two entwining with each other to become a beautiful, colourful, radiant collage.

 

And yes, with all of that… my life is perfect and I would not have it any other way!