Tuesday 16 June 2015

Crocodiles; floods and ...



I am not only drawing blind; now I am writing blind.  The middle of the night has my eyes seeing everything a little more blurry than in the day.

I drew this picture a long while back from a newspaper... there was a township fire.  Accidental.  The gathering of men and women in the wake of the fire ~ the wake ... we say things, don't we, without thinking about the meanings of the words.

I am up. A crone doesn't need that much replenishing. Frequent dozing is good enough - mid sentence in the book, mid pencil stroke underling the passage and it goes without saying, mid television program.  However, every stories seem, feel, are ... a kind of sci-fi horror. I am too old for these tales.

As I draw closer to the Creator, seeking His Light, my soul grows more sensitive,: it is restored or reset (as they say in the cell phone manual) to the original setting and I become afraid of the future.

I am often reminded that men have said this about the state of things for centuries, but it certainly feels like we are facing the season of calamities head on.  The age of lawlessness...

Some years back I was caught in a flood in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, in Africa, and it can be scary to be all that at the same time.  I thought I was going to die a few seconds before a good man directed me onto a bit of road that was not covered in rushing waters.  I was the first car.  He was a lone man taking the time to keep the oncoming drivers safe, regardless of who they were.  I wondered where he has going in the pouring rain that night without a rain coat.  Perhaps he was an angel sent to save us all.

The next vehicle was loaded with black youths and as the door opened and they all pealed out with wide smiles, one of the young men said, with a fair amount of glee and a good deal of certainty,

"God is coming soon!"

Within no time the taxi was playing music.  The rain kept coming down in sheets of wetness.  I was trading cigarettes for beer with a German couple who were teachers and had a boot full of books they intended marking that weekend away.

We all got out of our cars.  No one but me thought about crocodiles.   We were near the crocodile farm and just a few weeks before this I had attended a lectures on the beautiful beasts.  The guide said," when it floods they can go for miles..."  They end up in swimming pools, mostly all get found and brought back, but what if they were lurking in the waters swirling around our little island?

The weather which woke me at some silly hour beginning with a three reminds me of that night.  The wind reminds me of the judgments of the Lord and the book I am reading reminds me that God is coming soon.

My picture reminds me that my country is a praying nation and that more souls emerge and gather together in parks, under trees, sensing the time we are in.

Shall I make a big sign that reads, THE END IS NIGH?

I think not.  Even the atheist senses it.   It comes.  On a horse.  And it is time to make right the things of the soul and the connection with the Light of the Creator must be restored.

"I have decided to follow Jesus.... No turning back, No turning back...."  A song from nursery school.


Jesus save you and bless you.

Thursday 11 June 2015

Mothers, poetry, pictures and ...



My Mom.

I draw her at least once a year.  I improve. My eye sight doesn't.

All her pictures are smiling ones.
Can't get the glasses the same on both sides - but I think I finally found that smile enough for this year.  The picture is unfinished.  I need to work on the glasses - they are not that white and I need to finish the background.

The less I see more I realise who my mother was.

She was a softy.  She laughed easily.  She told lovely remember when stories. We loved watching movies together. If we didn't cry, it wasn't that much of a movie.  Love stories were big in my youth. On some level we didn't get on very well. At least that is what I thought.

I only realized this week how my dramatic life affected her.

Here is a letter I found today ...

Dear Mrs ...Your sketch of .... nearly out poems your poetry in its intensity - in its focused effect.
Your paintings have enchantment of colour and love.
I felt your poems on Violence (tears my threaded tapestry of words ~~~~ Silence)and "Dead Roses" more clearly than your anguished poems that I'm too guilty to want to read too much.
Retrospectively, "The Clown after the circus has closed" is perhaps too you, and the irony of "Warrior Wonderful" is quite crushing.  "What happened to the dreams we had?" is a poignant lament - I felt shivers there along my own rememberings.
Your poems are inciteful and often captivating and yours is a mind not content with a quiet sea. You are for turbulence - troughs and crests - perhaps a few more crests!
Perhaps your introductory piece reflects best your talent.
It is personalized and abstract together.
It is tantalizingly diffuse.
I disagree about you not counting. 
You tangibly touched somewhere me.
If you're in "The Shadow-lands" come out into "The Sunshine" (if you can, if you dare).It's dangerously bright and you might get burnt.  But you'll live unjamed up ~ densely focused, deeply imaged, sparkling (although it is true that shade and shadow need expression too.)

Ends

My children had an "elderly" English teacher. A real British gentleman. A famous enough one at that and so I won't give his name.  I met him at a child's concert practice.

""What do you do Mrs ...?" He asked.

Not wanting to appear a total fool, being as I was unemployed at the time, and for the sake of the children, I said, without a moment's thought, not entirely a lie really, but still ...

"Oh, I draw and write a bit of poetry..."

Trusted that would suffice, looked away and smiled at the children

"May I read some of your work?  And, I'd like to see some of your drawings..." he said.

My innards went haywire.

"Um... well ... alright.  I'm not really all that good... I don't think my stuff counts for much," I said.

"Still, if you will..." he said.

"Okay ..."

I went home and wrote about twenty poems in a few days, drew a few pictures, collected from my stash a couple of the better ones and presented them at our next encounter.

He liked my children, being as they are delightful girls and then, pure pretty with innocence. He made them fall in love with words; English was their most favourite class and I suppose he wanted to know who their mother was.

I still have the poems and the picture he remarked on.   I haven't looked at them in ages.  I will have to do that now.  

But, as you can see from the titles, my life was full of the stuff that affects the soul, makes it uncomfortable, causes a raucousness in the mind and, and, and  ...  

If I were my child I would have been frightened for me.  I was fine, of course, strong and able, took most of it on the chin at the time.  It is only now that my soul has traveled through those valleys and up those mountains that I feel tender and bruised ~ soul wise.

Mommy Dearest ~ if you can hear me ... I am sorry.  

And, to the gentleman in question - you may be with Mom now or just charming somewhere in England.  When I found your notes on my work and a few other letters today I was so cheered.

To quote from something you wrote about our friendship ...

"Perhaps we will swim in fields of flowers, on waves of breeze tossed grasses, in deep symphonic rememberings and recall low-hummed landscaped murmurings pulsed in visions, dream-lived, and feel warm candle-lighted languid ecstasies echoing beneath time's slender embrace, ...  "

Perhaps ...

We were both in love with words.  I think that letter was composed thinking mostly of the next life or the after-life because I had long left town and he had left the country.  The other children complained about his teaching methods and missed out on the most gratifying class, but he did demand a love for the language, I suppose.  He longed for a world in which he could swim in fields of flowers and listen to the beat of earth's heart in forests and next to lakes where he often walked alone in search of time's slender embrace.

Jesus save you and bless you.




Monday 8 June 2015

Motor Bikes and Life lessons.

A memory doodle

What do I know about motor bikes? Nothing.

The only thing I can remember is that I am a hazard on the back of one.

I tend to lean the wrong way, as if I am on a sail boat, not a bike.  I was a more successful sailor on a small sail boat (on the town dam) than a bike passenger.  I discovered that a boat on the sea is not as much fun. Once it stops and bobs I am done for.

Sometimes leaning the wrong way feels absolutely right.  

It's a life lesson if you are paying attention.  Pity one has to fall off "the bike" a few times before one gets that the bike needs you to lean into the corner.

Jesus save you and bless you.



 

Friday 5 June 2015

Cows are my favourite beings.


Okay... My first Nguni, copied from another artist's picture, not perfectly I might add, and I don't know the artist.  The picture was given to me. 

I thought it would be impossible for me.  There is so much white in the painting I had to copy, but this is yesterday's work.  

To Lord be the glory.

I don't know how else I could have managed it. 

It is so very different from my usual drawings.

Supernal help. 

My eye sight is poor after an operation. My glasses are not correct... So, evidence for the existence of God - for those of you who haven't had the experience yet. 

I read an article in Dutch - um... here and there - and the author said that he discovered that his asthma was traced to his use of milk.

I'm no scientist, but it might be expedient to stop pumping animals full of whatever it is we pump into them and give them more time to roam the fields in peace before we ...

It's not the cows or the milk.  It's what farmers, struggling to keep up with demand, think they need to do to keep providing.  

We can do with less than we think.  Let's help the farmers and send love and light to them and the wonderful beings in their care that keep most of us alive. 

Jesus save you and bless you.

Thursday 4 June 2015

Seeds for Future Seasons



I am fond of this little picture.  I call it The Seed Collector.

The crones in my family knew the importance of harvesting and keeping seed for the future seasons. 

Having grown up in the age of supermarkets we are so far removed from the source of our food that we don't even think about cows when we buy milk, or hens when we buy eggs.

All the skills my grandmother, mother and aunties learned as a matter of course, since being a wife and a mother was a certainty, such skills were not optional extras.

My one surviving aunty recently gave a man a few bean seeds because he complained that he couldn't get any beans to grow from the seeds he bought.  He called to say that he was harvesting enough beans to supply the neighbours with his crop.

The men in my family could build, make furniture, plant fruitful gardens, knew when and how to prune the many fruit trees they planted and maintain their homes until the day they died. I can't remember ever getting in a plumber or a painter or a roof repair man.  My father was in his eighties, up the ladder, painting the roof again for the year to keep it leak proof.

We grew up with supermarkets. My children grew up with malls.  We might do well to remember that nothing actually grows in there.

Although the malls are huge and high, they are not pyramids. They won't be seen on postcards or attracting sightseers on coach tours 1000 years from now.

Perhaps it's a good time to rethink how we use our free time. If you must sit on the computer, Google how to ...   Teach the new babies ...  Give television a miss.  Knit while someone else reads from a book.

Jesus save you and bless you.

 




Wednesday 3 June 2015

Trees


This is a bit of a daft picture, but I do like the size of it, and the lines, and the colours.  It was a clear day. 

I do like trees.

That's all I have to say about that.

Jesus save you and bless you.

Cats



Cats.  I have two; neither belong to me. This is a drawing of the latest visitor. He my sister's cat. He's taken to coming upstairs to sleep and eat here as well.  Monkey Cattle we call him.  I prefer to spell it, Monkey Cat 'till - because he's only a cat until he's ...   We think he's a healer.  He's hanging about, we think, because I have had this big operation and need healing.   

He's big and heavy and likes to sleep on my chest when he chooses to sleep on me.  Most times he's on a chair somewhere in the house.

Madonika came with the house, as it were, because she has been here since I moved in.  She has issues with Monkey and  there are a few difficulties at night when one or the other gets to the bed first.  Ideally they should both sleep on the bed, if the choose to, but there seems to be a rule about that, between cats.  At least at the moment.  Perhaps this will change.

Cats can't be ruled.  They find their zones. There isn't much we can do about that.

Wilkie was the first and only cat I ever chose and owned.  She was charcoal black and could catch flies on the windowsill when she was a kitten.  Never needed much from me.  She ate cheese and stole raw meat if I forgot it out for a minute on the counter.  She came and went and commanded a couple of dogs much bigger than herself.

When I was single she slept on my feet.  When my children arrived she slept on one of their beds.  She lived long.  I never thought I would get another cat.  She was one of a kind.  These two have come to me.  I am grateful for the company and the love.  And the healing. 

I don't suppose it is given to us to understand how animals think and feel, but we do know that we are better for their love.

Jesus save you and bless you.

Monday 1 June 2015

A Tent




I found this picture that I drew a while back. I can't remember drawing it, but there were a few from that same time.  I can see by the pencil strokes and the calm colours that it was a good time.   My drawing ability comes and goes.  It has something to do with my state of mind. It's not happiness, particularly, or sadness even, that removes it.  I've produced enough dark pictures to know that much. 

This is a memory picture of a camping weekend beside a dam with brown waters and a forest of pine and other trees randomly surrounding it.  A few cows came by that weekend and my boyfriend fished for bass, which he cooked and we ate, with our fingers. 


Jesus save you and bless you.