This past weekend I was at the Shared Histories “The Wellbeing Experience” festival at Zoo Lake.

The Shared Histories festival is a cultural event that brings India to South Africa and as the name implies, is a reminder that the countries share history. It’s quite funny because when I was in India I found they were very unaware of this cultural connection- even of the fact that part of Mahatma Gandhi’s lifetime, and arguably inspiration was laid on these shores.  Maybe we should have our version of this festival in India. Anyway, I digress.

This was the first time the Wellbeing Experience was introduced to the larger festival. It essentially was a way of presenting the healing modalities from India, focussing primarily on Yoga and Ayurveda. These are two practices that were formalised into systems by the sage, Patanjali, along with his work on Sanskrit grammar. There was a nod to South Africa here in that there was also a stand for traditional healers run by the Traditional Healers Organisation.

I of course represented the Iyengar yoga community. I’m not sure whether the event could be termed an absolute success. The information about the event was confusing to some, implying that one had to book at CompuTicket for tickets. I am not very well read in the mainstream media so I cannot be sure of how much publicity the event attracted but the showing was poor.

The show was situated in a large tent with various  adjoining tents leading off from this main one. In the main tent were all the stands and the  side tents was were the various classes and talks were situated. Unfortunately I missed all the Ayurvedic talks that I was attracted to because I was assisting the Iyengar yoga classes. I was also very disappointed with the food. There were very few food stalls but it has to be said, the food I did try was very delicious.

On a positive note it was great to go around and chat to other yogis from different schools in Johannesburg. I even joined a Jivumukti class which was quite a workout. There was even music by Susheela Raman and Sam Mills accompanied by two Indian artists that I did not get the names of as well as a musical interlude by the traditional healers. Hopefully this part of the festival will be back next year, with more people and more Ayurvedic talks and stalls. It really is a great way for people to be exposed to the various styles of Yoga and hopefully to find the one that suits them.

I have returned from my sabbatical.

After my diatribe against the hollowness, the abyss at the bottom of the shopping bag, I stepped off my soap box, preened my feathers and left. I don’t think anyone heard me, the “Sales” are on you see. As destination I chose a little-known retreat in the heart of my suburb. Bliss.

Before

It’s called a silent retreat. That means that for 2 hrs in the morning you are allowed to speak and the rest of the day is bathed in silence. If such a restriction is too terribly frightening to imagine, I have to admit it was even more so to do. I’m so used to walking around the garden, singing my favourite song, chasing after Hope, chatting to the girls and all manner of sociable activity.

At first you forget and find yourself about to open your mouth, sometimes the first words even dribble out before you catch yourself and stuff them back. They clamour in your head, with nowhere to go. What do you do with yourself all this time? Well, the centre specialises in pranayama and meditation. It’s the only other time when there is speech. That comes from the facilitator, they don’t seem to like the term monks. In the softest, glowing voice, spiced with mirthfulness they guide us for an hour in the morning, afternoon and the evening. The only condition is that you must remain for the first 15 minutes of every session and you must not use them to catch a nap. If then, the agitation becomes too much to bare, you can quietly leave the hall or even lie down.

After

The rest of the time you are free to read, roam the grounds and help around the centre. There is a library with mainly spiritually minded literature but there is nothing to stop you from bringing your own thriller if you so please. My duties were based in the garden. I weed, water, dig… you know, the general vegetable gardening stuff. My efforts go into the kitchen where those more adept concoct culinary marvels without the slaughtering of animals.

Over the course of the 2 and a bit weeks I was surprised to find that I slotted into the routine and my full head of thoughts became quieter as the importance of have-to-do’s fell into perspective. I missed the girls and my home routine but to be able to immerse myself in simpleness of thought, of nature and brea(d)th is a priceless cleansing. As spring comes into being, the natural beginning of the year, I hope to be able to call on this well of stillness and to make it my refuge.

The Ballerina and Hope, the early days

There is a popular magazine that The Ballerina loves to read. In it, there are home improvement tips, decor trends, make-overs, international holiday destinations,  and all manner of aspirational additions to a modern home. They seem to have looked up all the words that evoke chic, luxury and exorbitant consumption in the name of glamour and ’style’. I’m sure there are many who live in this rarefied atmosphere of privilege but really. Should a fridge really cost 25k? Do you need those Swarovski crystals on the fridge ? I know, I’ve got it all wrong, need is not what we are talking about here.

My favourite section is the home of the month or the home renovation ideas. If you have ever had some minimum of renovation you will understand what it means when there are architects involved. You will appreciate the hidden meaning in “knock down some walls”. You will marvel at uncluttered homes with happy, smiling children that look like there must be a maid cleaning up after everything they do, make that two. It is like watching a magician. The trick is in not revealing the underlying process even as you make all efforts to appear to be doing so. The Ballerina as you know is much moved by all that glam. Her eyes light up, I think it’s called reverie. Ultimately when reality magnifies our standing, that look is replaced by a sort of wistfulness.

I think the idea is supposed to inspire me. Turn me into a “serious corporate go-getter with a clear idea of what luxury means”. That by the way is a quote from a profile of an individual who affirms that the thing she loves about SA is “… the fact that we’ve managed to become a part of the branded, consumer-driven global village in less than a decade without losing our soul.” Hello?? You just showed me that maybe we have.

Anyway, enough soap-box gnashing of teeth. Even in this economic recession there are many who are not affected. It’s a fact. I should not begrudge them their hard earned spoils. I will turn to a positive PR spin by our Minister of Human Settlements, Tokyo Sexwale. Last night, the former business mogul, one of the richest men in the country, spent the night in Diepsloot, home of the recent violent service delivery protests. I will banish my cynicism at this gesture. Maybe we haven’t lost our soul, maybe…

Night Daisy by Simon Verrall

Puleng has just been complaining. “It’s so cold! What kind of chicken are you?” All because I have been doing a spot of night time gardening.

I love to experience the garden at all different times of the day. Night time is cool with the slightest echo of the humming day. The eyes are forced to take a step back into colourless shadows and the nose steps forward. The angles, textures and shapes of plants are more pronounced. Even now when winter has decimated or forced to sleep the abundance that roots itself to my backyard, the night air is scented with buddleja and jasmine.

In summer after the torment of a hot day, watering into the cool evening not only is a very good way to save water but releases all the glory of garden aromas. It’s like those scratch-and-sniff stickers. Do they still exist? The smell of damp earth, mingled with minty pelagronium, spicy sage leaves and the sweet nectar of all manner of flowers. The wisps of an evening breeze are as if the garden heaves a sigh of relief as it drinks in the cool, moist drops.

To compensate for the lack of colour, night plants should be textured and/or brightly coloured in whites, greys and yellows. I have seen there is a trend to light up the garden with solar powered lights but I would suggest that you resist this trend. If a garden must be lit, make that in areas near the house such as the outside porch but leave some areas to their natural night lighting. Restricting artificial lighting will encourage all those night creatures that are otherwise confused by artificial lighting. They are the modest worker bees of the night.

In Johannesburg there is enough light pollution as it is, casting a perpetual hazy orange into the sky. When there is a full moon, step into those dark areas and absorb the still beauty that light reflects. Call it an exercise in negative-space appreciation. Contemplate the emptiness. Night shadows are so much more dramatic!

The Imposter by Damon Galgut

Reading is one of my favourite pastimes but this year I just don’t seem to find the time to read. Google “finding time to read” and you’ll find this is a pretty common modern dilemna. That elusive time issue.

In between teaching twice a week, going to class myself once a week, writing this blog whenever I can, cooking, washing, meditating at the end of the night and spending time with the girls I really don’t know how to make more time for reading. It makes me respect our President Zuma even more, he has to run a country and manage a polygamous relationship. Not that I don’t read. When I’m not roaming the backyard, I spend the day immersed in some sort of information processing activity on the flickering screen.

Reading books of course is a whole different world. You may have noticed that my “What I’m listening to” section changes a lot more regularly then the “What I’m reading”. This state of affairs was and still so afflicts me that I almost dropped out of the book club. Were it not for the wonderful company of the other members I might have very well have. It’s funny because last year at this time I was lamenting my lack of meditation practice and how I’d let my writing skills down. Reading for me is a way of being immersed in an artwork. Unlike my beautiful Clementina which I savour as I walk in the door, a book lasts the length of the time you read it. Everything else is an echo. In that time I can often feel my expression being moulded to the style of the writer and my awareness heightened by their subtle observations. A book literally gets under the skin!

What has recently replaced all this is going to book readings. I’ve only been to two so far. This week I was at Boekehuis for a reading and discussion by Damon Galgut of his book The Imposter. This is the best of both worlds, a little excerpt read by the writer, followed by an insight into their process. It’s wonderful. Blackie always insists that audio books are made wonderful by the beautiful reading of theatre hardened drama persona’s, but I disagree. They do play a hugely important role as storyteller but it’s the story for me. Perhaps it is because I can leap into my imagination from spoken word, not so much in poetry but in prose. So you can imagine a drama-trained author reading his work and responding to some pretty probing intellectual questioning. I don’t even know if I want to read the book, it may taint the echo of his words drawing pictures into himself.

'Tree with Birds' by Kevin © Some rights reserved. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license

It’s early morning, the air is crisp, dew rests on dry dishevelled blades of grass. Even before I take a deep breath and welcome the day I hear them, in the trees, on the koppies, on the rooftops- the sound of early birds rising. From a little chattering sound to a full fledged morning cacophony, this is the sound of the beginning of spring. You may not have noticed this sitting in your car in the traffic, rushing from home to car, to school, to office, to shopping mall. Ensconced in a cocoon of human controlled climate. Out here in the back garden, the signs are clear- the slight warming of the air, the first little heads of clivia flowers hidden amongst the leaves , the drooping of aloe flowers with the last drops of nectar and of course the sound of all my returning avian cousins.

In order to make myself heard above this din, I have taken to raising my voice, crowing a little louder, a little more often.  I was lying in my favourite spot, rolling in the dust, catching some early morning sun when it dawned on me that this is all very much like the sound of social media. I have recently started following some prolific Twitterers. It has left me feeling much the same way as I do on my morning strolls. These people seem to be able to release a constant stream of tweets at pretty remarkable intervals. On top of that they seem to be able to release meaningful or interesting tweets and not just updates of their breakfast. If you are a Twitter-cynic, spare me the derision, it is possible to tweet ‘meaningful’ things in 140 characters. It’s enough to leave you feeling a tad envious and overwhelmed.

But it does make you question if the trick is to post as much as possible. To relate your thinkings as if on stage giving the endless monologue. This speed of dissemination has already undone old media, yeah, those stuffy newspapers. They are struggling to compete with the blog arena where accuracy and objectivity, the mainstay of  the reputation of traditional news titles are being replaced by the first-to-post culture that is the blogosphere. Then in steps microblogging platforms like Twitter and the culture seems to have accelerated. The imagery of birds sitting on a tree, tweeting is so very apt. But unlike my avian friends in the back garden who tire and eventually fly away, posts are ever more frequent, tweets are more relentless, information is more piecemeal and all in an ever accelerating spiral to be heard. I know, “YOU are the filter” but that’s not the point.

Today in class I gave the instruction “… and keep the flesh of the inner leg pressing against the bone.” I’m sure any experienced Iyengar yogi has heard similar instructions from their teacher. I’ve heard it argued that one of the reasons that the physical practice of hatha yoga came into being was in order to keep the body youthful for longer so that those aiming for the greater goal of enlightenment would have more time to achieve that ultimate state of liberation.

Some of the signs of ageing are the falling away of the flesh from the bones, the loss of muscle tone and the degeneration of bone density. This  simple instruction is aimed at reversing that process by lengthening the muscle in alignment with the bone. This not only nourishes the bone but allows the student to safely practice weight-bearing standing poses that have been shown to reverse the loss of bone density, improve posture and develop muscle strength.

As fortune would have it I came home and found this video of the very cutest yoga teacher. Youthfulness is not just flexibility of the body, but in true yogic fashion, of the mind  as well. So let us all keep that flame of youth burning with wonder and delight from within.

Gardening is my great past time.

I often tell people that if growing a garden was like buying furniture I wouldn’t be sitting on a bean bag but a sofa that I grew from a little seed. I am terror-stricken by the sight of bare ground, it looks forlorn and lacking the embrace of a good firm root or two… or three.

If you think of words as the seeds of your thoughts and the blog as the garden it becomes obvious that the qualities required to maintain a luscious garden are not far removed from those of a vibrant blog. Duh, it may have been obvious to most, but it came as a surprise to me.

So here are some similarities that jumped to greet this thought:

• Young things need more care. When starting a blog it needs your care and attention more than at any other time. I read a tweet from a colleague that he hadn’t posted in almost a year and only now was beginning to lose readers. This was of course, as he hastened to add,  due to his 200,000 archived words.
• Things sometimes crop up in your garden that you didn’t plan to plant. It may be tempting to pull them out as weeds but given time you may find that they grow into the focal point of your garden. I often find that my posts morph into something other than what my initial intention was. Their spontaneity makes for a more fluid style of writing that I yearn for in my more considered pieces.
• Weeds are bad. Remove them quick or they will sap valuable nutrients from your more deserving plants. This is a yogic contradiction, “One man’s weed is another man’s high”. The easiest translation to this conundrum is that ideas can get stale after a while. If you get stuck in a rut, don’t be afraid to uproot and start again.
• A healthy indigenous garden will encourage an ecosystem all of it’s own. By being aware of your local audience (in the blogosphere this is not necessarily a geographical local but a mindspace one) you can create an arena where like minded people converge and feed you and themselves with new and even more varied slants of thought. The thing to remember is that this sort of growth is organic in all senses of the word, be patient and enjoy the ride.
• Variety will create a more harmonious environment than a mono-cultural monotony. Keep your ideas varied, and exciting… most exciting of all for yourself the gardener. I’m not sure how well this last bit of advice pans out. I’m still new to this game and I notice that most people specialise a lot more than I do.

Just like you will often hear somebody bemoan their lack of green fingers, the lack of nurture or focus on one’s blog leads to the abrupt end of many a potential narrative. Full of the enthusiasm, surge of ideas and promise of a spirit killed before it’s time, abondoned blogs roam the interwebs like ghosts in a haunted house.

One of the legacies of Apartheid is the decay of the African family.

The separation of men from their families seems to have created a culture of imbalance between the sexes that is only exacerbated by its patriachial heritage. It is a shocking reality of the country that women and children are in danger from the male figures most often in their immediate environment, the home. In such a context it is reassuring that the constitution is a very progressive one that enshrines the rights of all irrespective of race, religion or sex. Arguably the implementation of the constitution is still very lacking but the principles are aspirational and hopefully with the necessary promotion of those rights society can begin to assimilate those grand ideas into a way of life.

Maya Angelou. Source Getty Images

In the meantime we are confronted with the present social dynamics. One facet of these is the absentee father. It is not surprising to go to a party and end up in a group conversation that turns to the lack of father-figures or male role models. Many children grow up in female dominated households where men are absent or ineffectual presences. I have often heard as a result the great fallacy that men are not required at all in a family! The fact that many women are increasingly economically independent coupled with advances in science such as artificial insemination or even the progressive adoption policies in the country, lead many to speak of creating families without the requirement of men.

I can completely understand the scenarios that lead to such thinking but when I read an article in a mainstream newspaper the other day saying just such a thing I was terribly disappointed. My first impression was that this writer must be a very young person, probably without a child of her own. Upon reflection I realise that she may not be, haven’t I heard my own girlfriends saying such things?

In the chicken family there is usually one male and several wives/children. It has been noted that in families without a male, one of the females will often take on the characteristics of a rooster such as crowing or even sometimes actually manifesting physical characteristics such as a crown. Why have I gone off on such a tangent you may be wondering? Well it is because I believe that the problems in South Africa are not going to be remedied by the perpetuation of the absent father model, but by the greater role of positive male role models. There is an inherent need for a balance of male and female energies in society and to believe that one can totally provide for the lack of the other is absolutely delusional.

It may be idyllic to always have a husband-and-wife based family, or not even possible in gay couples but I believe the only way to remedy this tradition of separation is by reintroducing the male role model. This problem by the way is also found in the African-American population and was recently addressed in a Father’s Day speech by President Obama. I would hazard a guess that it’s not just a “black” problem but shared by all people who have had the same generation of artificial separation. To all who disagree, I leave you with a quote from a favourite author of mine, Maya Angelou, who says “We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders”.

Hope is a boy!! It is now beyond any doubt, Hope is a boy!!

That means he has to go. There is no room for two males in the world that is my backyard. I knew it all along. The way he forages for himself, the way he ate eats voraciously, the way he prances around like he owns the place. I never for one second believed his play-meekness was anything more than an act. He is turning out to be quite handsome though, but then of course, getting his genes from you-know-who, what else could be expected?

It is one of the conundrums of being a rooster, the love of one’s male offspring, with the knowledge that they are a threat.  He is still young, but I dread the day he announces he is of age with a hearty morning “Cockadoodledoo!!”. As is tradition, he will attempt to do this before and louder than I do. This will show his youthful ability to awake before me and his call to the girls of a stronger protector.

Next will begin the challenges to my authority by attempting to draw them to tasty morsels that are not of my finding and trying to copulate with them behind my back. It’s sad what a son will do to his own father but there is a saying amongst chickens of this period in a cockerel’’s life that goes, “Desire is thicker than the egg shell of an old hen”.

Finally he will begin to provoke me directly and attempt to depose me in a physical confrontation. This I do not fear, because in a physical duel, he is sure to lose – my size and ferocity are not to be undone by a young upstart. Unfortunately even if I manage to re-create a semblance of our previous equilibrium, he will forever be a source of tension. Gone is my Eden.

Hopefully for the good of all, the human will pick this up and take him away.

Below is a poll I have created so that the human can get an idea of what to do with Hope.