Step out

It's a weird time of the year.
Idealised memories of Christmas spent with cousins cluster like grapes around the realities of the non-season here. In one we are all at my grandmother's first house, the one with the patio above the garage (above some other room?) where one had a startling view of the sea. My aunt asked someone to play Santa Claus and to a pack of preschoolers the man in the red suit arriving at our doorstep was everything.

In another memory we are again at the beach, always at the beach, and my grandmother has tossed the traditional idea of a Christmas tree by using the long branch-bloom that extends from the middle of some type of succulent. She has made little packets for each grandchild containing a host of tiny 'onbenullighede', things she has picked up at farm stalls and convenience stores during the past year in her pursuit to be fair to us all. The families are all there, the aunts and uncles and my mother and sister.

A different year sees my grandmother, always my grandmother, with us in 2000, the first one without my father. I remember him gifting me a Celine Dion CD, a sign that he had not noticed I had moved away from 'My Heart Will Go On' to falling for my sister's Backstreet Boys collection.

Then there was the one year my sister and I spent Christmas alone. The sad year, the bad year, the one where we fought and ended up in our separate rooms.

But it is the Christmases of my 20s that I yearn for now. I miss planning how to get my grandmother to wherever the celebration will be; coordinating a menu with everyone doing different dishes; thinking up cool presents; bickering and fighting and the feeling of needing distance from the overdose of family; having everyone unpack each present individually, stretching the time spent with one another; hanging out with cousins that are so very different from me and still so relatable; sitting outside in the sun with whomever is there at the moment, sipping on a glass of wine and catching up; and lastly, more than the event that is Christmas I miss the sense that blood is thicker than water.

This Christmas will surely be its own shrewd kind of miracle, and I look forward to spending it with people close to my heart. And last year was experiencing Christmas as an observer more than as a participant, by no fault of the kind family that hosted me. It was still a lot of fun and I enjoyed getting to know the little rituals of a family quite different from mine.

Nevertheless, none of this is Christmas. Forget about the religious aspect of the season, dismiss the name and the particular date all together, and center on what it is that makes the time spent together on those few days so memorable: the people. Sometimes, it is as simple as this - I long for my people.

Believe (in) me

Yesterday we went to my cousin's farewell because he is moving to Cape Town ( lucky him :). So over the course of the evening everyone was enjoying themselves, drinking, conversing, and having a good time. But at some point some already-over-the-limit guy thinks that it is a good idea to start discussing religion and belief right there and then. I think belief is a very personal thing, and cannot be discussed sensibly in all situations and with all people.

I don't know this guy, but after stating that I was more inclined to an existentialist philosophy, he launched an attack on my morality and was in complete disbelief that I was not a believer of the Christian faith. Does morality automatically link to your religious beliefs? Do the 10 commandments make for the only moral guidelines one needs?

My parents took me to church and Sunday school and I even spent a year in Grade 9 learning about the bible and Christ. But I only went because it was what was expected of me. I have never felt an intimate connection with the Christian God, simply because the way the faith is twisted by each follower and by each parish disturbs me greatly. Everyone has a personal take, which they deem to be right.  What is even worse is the idea that a forgiving God will forgive anything, so it is o.k. if you do something against the moral code, you just have to say "Sorry" afterwards.

Listen, I think everyone has the right to believe in whatever they want, and I think my choice to not believe should be respected. Perhaps it changes, perhaps I will later accept a different faith into my life, but perhaps I will continue to believe in the here and now, in the resistance to a life not lived out of fear, in multiple perspectives, and in the inherent goodness of humanity. Morality is not exclusive to religion.

My friend K and I had this same discussion earlier, and she made a valid point: it is easier to believe than to question it. Again, I am not saying you should stop believing if that is the route you chose, but be aware of what you are going to church or to the mosque or whatever for. Know why you believe, why you chose this, why you need this in your life. Do not simply accept what you were raised with, what your environment expects of you.

Religious freedom is enshrined in our constitution, so please accept non-belief, just as I accept and respect yours.

Bites of Happiness

Paris, August 2010. Indian Ganesh festival. *

I wonder if the purpose of life is not very simple: happiness. But perhaps we get lost in pursuit of constant pleasures, we get lost in hedonism, and miss the daily bites of happiness that we could experience. It seems that we are only happy retrospectively, we are only happy when we are reminiscing about past events and parties.

So now, I am trying to find the momentary happiness when faced with a situation to remember. Like today, my friend I. accompanied me to the Pretoria Stadstap Fotoklap, where people get together and walk around a specific part of the city taking photographs. The walk concluded on the top floor of the Hotel 224, which has a 360° view of the city. Everyone else was taking in the sunset through their lenses, and admittedly, I also captured some frames. But the best moment was when we distanced ourselves from the tripods and shutter noises and just looked at the city.

It is a sense of calm serenity. It is a sense of enormity and luck and preciousness of the moment that surrounds you. It is simply standing and seeing and appreciating the view and the company. Simply put, it is a bite of happiness.

The same embracing sentiment was experienced when we were in Wilderness. The others were doing Yoga, so I headed to the stairs that lead to the beach. Because of recent storms, these stairs were dangerous and one could only walk down to a certain bench in the middle of the dune, and not completely down to the beach.

I did not take my camera along, but it was the most marvellous sunset. Dolphin's peak and Victoria Bay disappeared into a mist. The sky was awash with berries, from the ripest gooseberries over to strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and Youngberries, it seemed as though a basket had spilled and Van Gogh had spread out the fruits' lifeblood to form a perfect sunset.

Gerard Manley Hopkins would have killed for such splendour, for "God's Grandeur" in this daily rotation of the world. The canvas of sea and mountain and mist and colour and waves and breezes was merging into one, was forming into a unity of all elements. It was a moment evoking transcendence. I wondered then if this was what Romantics like C.D. Friedrich were trying to paint in their works. If here was where God is to be found. If this is why people believe in more than earthly pleasures.

Perhaps it is not necessarily God. Perhaps there exists a deeper spirituality in nature which we, through years of city living and the stresses of a fast paced life, have lost track of. I do not feel part of these beautiful land/cityscapes, and maybe this adds to the disconnection from happiness. If one cannot sense a symbiosis with the moment of pure joy, there is no way one can appreciate it.

But this moment, this sitting on the stairs and admiring of berry-stained skies was what the being-in-awe of awesome describes, and it was perfect happiness.





* if you are wondering about the image, it is another moment of perfect happiness, when I randomly went to the Ganesh festival in the Indian "quartier" of Paris. Ganesh is known as the remover of obstacles and the Lord of new beginnings and also associated with wisdom. At the festival, devotees break great amounts of coconuts and then people just pick up the pieces off of the street and eat them.