At the first turning of the second stair

At the first turning of the second stair

I saw you on that evening long ago

And Hope and Love awoke and rose and grew –

Now in this uncertain hour before the rising dawn

I mourn your loss.

Alive in the scented gardens of the mind

Your memory will remain

Moonlight in the darkest night

Sunlight on a cold and misty day.

Russian Wedding Rings and the meaning of Love

This is a story that my mother told me when I was a very little boy, a story that mothers weave for their children. The symbolism of the 3 gold bands resonates across the years. At the end are some links you might find handy.

My father used to manage small hotels in the Free State when I was a little boy.
It was not common for people to stay there for any length of time, people just passed through going from one place to another: overnighting for at most a night or two.
Mostly they were travelling salesman, or people migrating from the big city to the coast, or vice versa.

I remember one couple very clearly, though. They were foreigners, and spoke in a rather strange tongue. And although she was a remarkably beautiful woman (I could see that, even though I was a very young boy) it was the strange ring that she had on her wedding finger that struck me the most.
It was actually 3 interlocking rings, a sort of a puzzle ring, and each ring a different colour of gold.
I asked my mother what it was. She told me it was a Russian wedding ring. "Oh", I said. "What's that?"
Well, in those far-off days, mothers never had the Internet to go to, and trekking off to the library to look things up in the Encyclopaedia was not going to answer the question for a persistent little boy!

So she did the next best thing, which was to tell me a story.
Years later, I looked up Russian wedding rings on the Internet. I learnt that the Russian wedding ring is a Christian symbol, representing the holy Trinity. And while that is true, I still prefer my mother's story. Here it is, maybe you will enjoy it too.

My mother's story

She told me that marriage was about two people who loved each other.
She told me that the ring was a symbol of this love, as all wedding rings are.
But, she told me, this ring brought together the three most important things of a loving relationship.

The white gold ring, she told me, is softer than the other golds. Being softer, it will take the shape of the finger. "Love is like that", she said. "In the journey through life, two people in love have to change their shape. They have to give some things up, and take other things on. To become a family each one has to move towards the other". So that's what the white gold represents: bending towards each other.

Yellow gold, on the other hand, is very hard. You can bump it and knock it, and afterwards, all you had to do is to give it a hard rub, and there it would be: all bright and shining again. "Life is like that" she said. "It's not easy. Sometimes things are really difficult. Then you have to support each other. Sometimes love has to be hard". So this is what the Yellow Gold represents: the strength to get through life, and then come out on the other side all bright and shiny and new.

Then she was silent for a time. So I asked her "what about the red gold mommy?"

It took her a moment before she answered.
"Have you ever seen red gold before?" she asked softly.
"No", I replied.
"Well," she said, "Red Gold is rare". "And love", she said "is just as rare. When you find it, when you finally have it, you must look after it. You have to protect it. If you lose it it might never come back to you again". And that is what the Red Gold represents: that Love must be cherished, because life is short and every moment spent without love is a moment lost forever.

Related links

Origins of the wedding ring	This site was built to search out and explain the history of the wedding ring. You will find information on the evolution of the wedding ring and its history through the Christian faith.
Professionally researched answer from the AnswerBag	Reviews the various kinds of three-ring wedding bands
A brief history of the wedding ring	An article from the blog "Sex, Love, and Marriage"
Russian Wedding Customs	From Wikipedia
Symbolism Of Wedding Rings	A nice little article on the symbolism of wedding rings in general-ignore the Russian cyber brides!
Russian Weddings	The full paraphernalia, courtesy Wikipedia
Traditional Wedding Rings	A history of some of the most popular traditional wedding rings, courtesy the Wedding Channel
Wedding Ring Traditions Around the World	From Ancient Egyptian Culture to Modern Irish Claddagh Rings, courtesy Suite101
On Russian Wedding Traditions of the Past	Some background on wedding traditions and rituals in old Russia

...

Freedom and the Ties that Bind

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

Nothing, aint worth nothing, but its free (*)

Today, a Hyacinth sits on the window sill of my bedroom window, and its soft scent drifts from there to permeate the house. It carries its own memories, and they intertwine with mine.

Of all the prisons of the mind, those borne out of obligation and loving kindness bind the deepest.

What gifts do you have left, when all your gifts have been given?

What gifts do you have left to give, when every gift chains tighter?

Dying is the only way

For you to float free (**)

Freedom is the only gift that remains.

but Freedom cannot stand the sight of its walls, 

cannot bear the sound of its chains, 

shivers at the feel of its bars.

If the gift of Freedom is to forever release the receiver,

Then it must send the giver to exile, that curious form of dying-in-life.

It is a gift that cannot be explained.

It demands a cold, clean cut and does not permit regret.

This lonely gift that causes pain for both the giver and the receiver is soon overcome by the former, is a permanent loss for the latter.

So.

Having given everything else I finally came to understand that the time for the final gift had come.

Today, I remember that gift, and hope that its outcome has blossomed, even if the vacuum will never be filled.

Yet memories delight, and unlike the fragrance of the hyacinth, which must pass forever:  her fragrance is ever near, and every day's little pleasure.

* Kris Kristofferson - Me and Bobby McGee
** Haruki Murakami - The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Lazy Autumn days in the Cape

I came down to the Cape last Friday, and spent the weekend looking after the kidz' dog and the farmhouse while they went hiking and climbing.

Down here in this rather less sunny part of Sunny South Africa, Autumn is everywhere, and the cold Atlantic sends us fog in the early morning and icy breezes during the day. They interrupt the warm sun with a tart reminder that Winter is on it's way. So unlike the balmy autumn days of the joburg highveld!

What's better on Sunday than time spent on the beach? Don't answer: this is not about you, its about me :) It's a short trip from the farm to Muizenburg and its beach, where the surfers were taking in a last chance to get on their boards. Here its a family thing, with parents surfing with their children, couples making out in the waves, and the odd serious surfer dude/dudette looking on it all in disdain.

There is a slightly run down Cafe - the Gaslight cafe - close to the beachfront. Not that it is unhygienic, just not modern and spiffy. But it makes a wonderful breakfast, and you can have breakfast at any time of the day and night. If you are prepared to tolerate the bare walls and the broken view of the sea (through the car park!) then you are rewarded by a fine breakfast at a reasonable price and a view of the passing parade through the floor to ceiling windows.

So that was me on Sunday:

A long lazy stroll along the beachfront, following the railway line from Muizenburg to St James, wet feet as the returning tide caught up with me on the way back to the Gaslight cafe's simple and satisfying breakfast. Sometimes Sundays can be nearly perfect, can't they?

A River of Tears

We stood at the graveside
Her mother wept.
Her father looked dazed: the comfortless can not comfort.
She was 3 years old, dressed in her favorite frock, a bright pink bow in her hair, her arms crossed to hold her cherished Garfield; the coffin so very, very small.

And still her mother weeps.
For some mothers its like this: you have one shot at motherhood, and one only.
Its 25 years on and she goes to the cemetery and places the flowers every Saturday morning. Love is an obsession: its loss assuaged by a lifetime of tears.

As for us, on that bright Summer's day in the heat of the Highveldt, we, the voyeurs of pain, we went home, and put up gates, and fences, covers and nets, and watched our children: it had only taken 2 minutes: a steady count to 120, to learn that swimming pools are no place to be complacent.

Londolozi Coffee and Tea

in these days of de-naturalised nature
the Bush, 
it seems, 
waits on Nescafe & Five Roses, Brown Sugar & Canderel
(photo snapped, snipped, & snitched by & from Risa Korris)

Stirrings of manhood

I grew up in the Free State, in dusty little towns under high blue skies rising above the long flatlands of mielie fields. That would be corn, if you're an American or Canadian.

A common sight in those days were the black labourers digging trenches and ditches along the roads connecting the towns and along the pavements of villages.
It takes strength to swing a pick. It's backbreaking work, raising it high in the air, pausing, and in bringing down the strength into the hard earth. A motion forwards: the land gives way and crumbles, and the pickax soon rises again for the next blow.
You would see a line of these men, stripped to the waist, sweat runneling down their backs and across their chests. Often these would be prisoners serving time for a trivial offense: sometimes they were employed by the municipality to do the backbreaking work.

To truly do the job properly requires timing. Each man lifts high his pickax in the air, they pause as one, swing down, break and lift.

At the head of the line one man holds the time. He calls out in Zulu, or Sotho, or one of the myriad other tongues: in a singsong voice as one the pickax gang returns the chant. Every breath a pause, every pause connected to the pickax, the deep voices calling to the power, and then down! The earth shudders, breaks, crumbles.

Here were the first stirrings of my manhood. I sensed my power to come, I knew one day my muscles too would fill out, ripple, I too would gather my strength. I understood I was a man in waiting. The irony of the small white boy sensing his own strength and manhood in the song sung by the black labourers, the song of the pickax: this I would only realise many many years later.

The song of the pickax is celebrated by Gerard Sekoto, on a painting on canvas that he did many years ago. I came across it in a book in a shop in Rosebank, Johannesburg this evening. It stirred my memory and sent me back to a time when Labour was honourable, even though it was disrespected.

In praise of Ambiguity and the Tender Trap

may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she


I love ambiguity.
I think that's what attracted me to Business Analysis in the first instance.
I love it most when it's deliberate.
So many contradictions are only understood when the ambiguity is laid plain, the trap is revealed, the victim impaled. Sweeter still when the victim is caught in his own hubris, the end of the play, as it were.

Poetry.
Poetry and ambiguity go together.
Which brings me to e.e. cummings and his delicious little poem on the seducer and the seduced.

Oh my! This is a wonderfully ambiguous poem.
A married man seduces.
There is a warning, but he misses it: thinking this, he does not hear her say that.
Expecting passion, he surrenders his power: he forgets that the angel carries a flaming sword.

He pursues, she gives way.
He goes deeper, she draws him in.
She raises one last barrier, he breaks it down.
He enters, she unfolds:

(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)

The trap has slammed shut: the hunter is caught, too late.
He will discover his fate, but not tonight.

"i'll squeal said she" and there was the threat, wrapped in ambiguity.
There are two kinds of squeals, you see: the kind giggly girls do, and the kind that the Mafia does not like.

(you are Mine said she) in all of the poem, "Mine" is the only word that is capitalised. He is Hers: he is no longer the wife's. She has only to squeal, and all will be revealed, everything laid bare. She is ready for the scandal. He is not. And when his wife finds out, there will only be one pair of arms waiting for him.

And all of this bound by that single, ambiguous, delicious "squeal".

You can find the whole poem here.
It may not be one of his most well-known, but oh, it should be!
Perfect for bachelorette parties :-)

The image is from Rodin's sculpture "The Kiss"

In the name of those who have died for causes not of their own choosing

A man’s destination is his own village,
His own fire, and his wife’s cooking;
To sit in front of his own door at sunset
And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson
Playing in the dust together.


I have been spending some time with TS Eliot, just recently.

I came to him by way of Yukio Mishima: I had been engrossed in his tetralogy "The Sea of Fertility"; Mishima's great exploration of reincarnation and the mind of the Japanese person up to the mid 20th century.

Elliott was an admirer of the Bhagavad-Gita: so I looked for some poetry there to make some connections.

I don't know why I chose Mishima to close off our first steps into the 21st century, maybe because it has been such a violent decade, when we had been expecting (maybe wishfully hopeful) a saner world.

And this is the poem that spoke most strongly to me. So many soldiers have died, and continue to die in causes far removed from their childhoods, and in defence against ideas that are driven by emotion rather than reason

A man’s destination is not his destiny,
Every country is home to one man
And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely
At one with his destiny, that soil is his.
Let his village remember.

---
The Military cemetery is in the neighborhood of Dundee: at Talana Hill, it is one of many scattered throughout the Natal Midlands. It is the final resting place for British troops who died during the Anglo Boer war.
Click the link to read "To the Indians who died in Africa".

The couch, the airport, the long wait

Redecorating should be approached with caution.

I know this: repaint the walls, and you will find that the curtains look tatty.
You can end up with a new bedroom suite just by changing the carpet in the living room.

Sophie (the couch) has been in dire need of a new wardrobe for quite some time now.
Not only has her covering becomes faded and stained (there are stains on the stains!), and the odd cigarette hole (now strategically hidden by cushions) blemished her modesty, but her holiday covers just don't fit into the space that she finds herself in these days.

She becomes understandably nervous every time I tell anyone who'll listen that she's about to be re-covered. After all, my fashion design and colour coordination are the subject of happy amusement amongst my so-called friends. My fashion sense extends to knowing that I have bought the wrong thing after I have arrived home. Well, at least I know my mistakes! It has cost me money in the past, not to mention the hoots of derision from all and sundry.

Last July Duncan and Gosia took the matter in hand while I was down in Cape Town and chose the New Material. The Birthday Present: all that was left for me to do was to bring it back to Joburg, find an upholsterer, and all would be good.

The wheels came off at Joburg International -ORT. For some reason there weren't enough trolleys for everybody. So I thought "it's not far, I'll just carry this lot to the car". Four suitcases, one under each arm, and the heavy curtain suitcase gripped in the left-hand.

Next morning I woke up with a compressed spine, a dislocated arm, and pulled muscles in my back and neck. Somehow in recovering from all of that, Sophie has been forgotten, as well as her new wardrobe.

Looking at her today, stained and worn, I decided.
This month, Sophie: the long wait is over.
Just you wait and see, and don't be surprised if the carpet in the spare room suddenly changes colour too!