Sepia

I was always a lonely child. I have vivid memories, like permanent story boards in my head, of being the girl on the outside of everything looking in. The world, tinged in a bright happy yellow with little sepia colored children playing together, unified in their non-questioning joy and automatic acceptance of what it is to be.

Later on an older girl stood with me, her tall shoulder slightly above mine quietly propped me as I surveyed nursery school life with a sense of uninformed disorientation. The rules were never explained; I had little understanding of what was expected from me.

One grey, big day I stood small in the playground, staring down helplessly at the thick orange cup balanced in my hand, the smell of the cow’s souring milk wafting up with every tight little breath. ‘Don’t come in until you’ve drunk it’ were her instructions. Her - the teacher, the leader, the one who knew best. In the classroom darts of colour moved around as the children busied themselves with new tasks for the day, unaware of the invisible little girl lost outside.

Another time, admonished and therefore ashamed I moved away from the others. ‘You stand back there if you aren’t going to take part!' The words smacked my ears as the boys and girls unclothed and began gyrating eagerly in a pool of mud on the dirty, grassy ground, her hand waving an encouraging pipe of water on their careless, bare, bouncing bodies.

Children’s distant laughs, screams, conversations and giggles formed the air in a world in which I didn't know how to breathe. And so, unconsciously as a child I learnt how to live in suffocation.

Rombouts

ant study i

At a loss

28.07.2011

The sound was calmer last night, still there but not as disruptive. Only audible in complete silence and in the silence has the ability to become quite loud.

Yesterday afternoon there was a bit of a pop in my right ear.

On some level I wonder if the problems with my ears are partially manifested by hearing and not being heard, not wanting to hear, not wanting to hear what I am hearing.

A resistance to what I am being forced to hear.

I am in the world and I am terrified. Terrified of living, terrified of dying, terrified of being so negative and depressed, terrified of loss, terrified of doing it wrong, terrified of having done so much wrong.

I can’t move beyond this negativity and now I fear that it is manifesting in a blockage in my head, loud white noise, resulting in constant panic, anxiety and fear.

I try to be with the feelings and not resist them, but this takes practice and I wonder if I have the time to hold it all before I land up really sick.

The creative door has certainly opened, but growth here is slow and is constantly up against my ruthless and consistent judgment of me.

If anything I’d love to be able to channel this mass of negativity into creativity on paper, in form, in words, in lines that describe the poetry of what it is to be on this planet.

sankofa

Sankofa can mean  "go back and take" (Sanko- go back, fa- take) or the Asante Adinkra symbols of a a bird with its head turned backwards taking an egg off its back, or of a stylised heart shape. It is often associated with the proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi," which translates "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten."
It symbolizes one taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress through the benevolent use of knowledge. Adinkra symbols are used by the Akan people to express proverbs and other philosophical ideas. Taken from Wikipedia.

hiding from me

learning to fly ii