Words

I grew up in a family of readers and writers, thinkers, dreamers and part-time philosophical chroniclers. We were all veritable word collectors faced with the spectre of lives lived largely, while simultaneously challenged to describe it with any sense of psychedelic clarity.

We all haunted flea markets and second-hand bookshops crammed with mysterious, dusty volumes.
Mismatched bookshelves leaned against one another heavily, weighed down like Atlas, groaning and creaking with the weight of books in various states of disrepair. We stepped into them stealthily, with the air of explorers or treasure hunters.

Other customers felt similarly mercenary too, because as we inched closer, they would huddle up territorially to the books they were closest to. The books themselves invited us to wiggle them out from their tightly packed resting places. They wanted to be opened, examined, read, experienced.

Cardboard boxes were shoved under tables stacked with still more books. Those half-concealed boxes were slightly illicit, since they had not been unpacked yet, but they might hold 'the one', the book of all books, it could be anything, it changed minute to minute. It was the book we picked up and instantly felt the warmth in our hands, the sentences transcending themselves as they showed the story, the words, mere symbols for the perfomance in an ampitheatre, that was being played out between the lines of the book. Those books were hugged to our chests, paid for and they never left our hands until completion.

Inside them, we found the treasures we sought, works of great gravity, non-fiction tomes on any conceivable subject, classics, pulp books with absolutely no literary value and stolid happy-endings, lurid bodice-ripping softcovers to be chewed through like junk food, sobering academic studies on hypnosis or war crimes, poetry and prose, all were found and purchased. Tolkein, Frankl, Hemingway, James Herriot, Agatha Christie, Erich Segal, Mark Twain, Poe, to name but a few, would all find out way into our reused, crumpled plastic shopping bags to be brought home, examined, pored over, read, studied, examined, consumed, even....

Like cats with a serious hairball problem, the words would thread their way into us, as we consumed vast shelves of books, tracts on every conceivable topic, we would then reformulate what we had assimilated, and suddenly regurgitate what we had picked up, oftentimes less then delicately.
We used to collect words from books, from each other, from strangers, and try them out, taste them on our tongue and used them experimentally, like a sip or scent of foreign beer. We then gauged effectiveness with a critical eye. Some wordage was discarded immediately, some were implemented into routine daily vocabulary.
Other words were sticky, stubborn. They were picked up like a bad case of poison ivy, spreading across our general conversations, overused, tainting our every communication, then cleared up after a time, with relief.

Other words were so unusual, so eclectic, so rarely appropriate, they grew indistinct and forgotten, only to be plucked out again out of memories darkest ochre recesses without forethought, shaped on lips, formed with tongue, brought to life on the flow of voice, like an ancient butterfly.

We, as a family truly believed in free speech. In South-African's apartheid era, that was slightly risky. We felt compelled to discuss everything at our dinner table. No matter how red our guests ears got, we conversed easily and freely. The only speech that was not truly perfectly free, was the illustrious set of expletives, garnered from Grandpa's driving vocabulary, and its effect on the 'establishment. Saying those cost a lecture in the very least.

Having a family who used words like weapons, like tools, like spices on exotic cuisine was wonderful.
My Mom actually published novels, my father published a bit of poetry and some psychiatric articles. I have no doubt my sister will publish as soon as she truly believes it herself, and I... am writing because I need to.
Like the hairball, the words tend to clump together, then threaten to overflow and spill. I hope to publish one day, share one of the many projects which draw words from me, but the writing itself will decide.

Discovering a new writer who seems to speak to my soul, is a heady occasion. A writer, with the right kind of penship, drawn from inside their own heart. They draw it out, like macabre tattoo artists, using their own blood ink, to bleed images directly into my spirit. Their words run totally through me, permeate in layers to reach me, teach me. Those vivid lines recalled from my favorite books, have burnt through so deeply, they scar me by their very starkness. Then there are my favourite writers, whose words melt directly into my skin, they feel so right, so purely written, so comfortable to me, they slide right through my flesh and blood and sink into my bones gently.They might be sad, intense, hurt, loving, beautiful, exquisitely simple, but they just have substance and soul.

As for others in this world who deal in the currency of words, I endlessly gravitate towards them, exchanging knowing kinship, just because we understand the same language.
I have never stopped loving bookstores. They have the feel of a sparkling dragon's cavern to me, the ambience of a soft treasure trove, brimming with the scent of blood-ink and sentient words on pages, freshly printed.
In bookstores, I have found all I am looking for.

My garden glows.

The one thing I have difficulty saying goodbye to, is my former back garden. Years ago, I actually bought the house based on this garden. I dug up an old tree stump myself and took out the spiny bushes that first summer, getting scratched up and sweaty, but my little girls needed a safe space, and I immersed in that garden, made it mine, made it ours.

It has a peace to it, a sense of serenity in suburbia, bordered by a haphazardly painted wooden fence. Its trees have sheltered me, soothed me, provided a backdrop to my thoughts and ideas. My children have played here in stages. They have been horrified by the idea of sitting on -something as foreign as- grass as babies. They have learnt to walk on the ground, eaten mud when they thought I was not looking, and build little deformed snowmen with little dark peering eyes and wide-gap smiles made of pebbles. They have unfurled, much like the trees and flowers and grass. The garden has been a space of lush, unfettered grass-stained growing.

During these last few weeks, I have stolen moments to sit on a chair in the yard, eyes closed. The sunlight a flickering red-haze, sensed through eyelids shut in spirit.
I am surrounded by the bright souls of my children sparkling in their element.

The gold light projects streaks of afternoon amber on the grass blades, sheared embers like the reflection of a bottle of cognac on a sunlit wall.
My trees lean in, draped casually in scarves of whispering, waving leaves, slurring slightly as the breeze licks through them tenderly.
Dirt, the soiled dust powder glows cleanly. Dovi's halfway down a hole he has dug, luxuriates in the earth coating his hands.
The wind blusters by, in wide open spirals like skywriting dreams, in gusts, remembered in fragments as they whirl away.
The white wooly whorls of smoky islands drifting endlessly, shedding and regenerating, the wise gray matter of the heavens neverland.
Rocks, stolidly squat, absorbing the warmth with slow sentience. They have always been there and always will, long after we are gone.

I sink into my chair, both more and less then what's sitting here. Something inside me, reaches out into the sunlight, and abstractly soul-kisses the source of it, and I can't help uncreasing like a flower, loosening, breaking the burning knots and aches, and becoming.
So much still to be determined, even for someone as determined as I. So much to do, but the stillness, the natural noise is healing, soothing. Everybody says it will all fall into place, and in these moments, I can see it keenly, tinted in gold leaf.

Candles

Candles, I love candles. I love the wick, the smokiness curling from them, the scented ones- the natural ones- not the harsh artificial flowers which are somewhat like plastic funeral flowers, but the ones that evoke pine needles, home baked goods, pumpkins or leafy sun- warmed trees drooping under the weight of luscious plums, blood oranges or passion fruit.
It is the basic candle though, that truly draws me in, its very perfectly imperfect waxen whiteness, not transparent, but a whisper of it implied in layers.

When we were children, Selwyn Segal hospital, in South-Africa, used to have sheltered employment for their mentally and physically disabled patients. They used to make candles which arrived in a blue cardboard box with the prayer for candle lighting on the side.
I would look at the slim, smooth wax candles, lined up in the box, like a box of cigar ghosts, and imagine those determined adults, who struggled to do things most people found simple, just carefully pouring candle after candle.
Religious families would light these candles on shabbat and holidays, one for every member of the family. So there would be a family of flames flickering on the sideboard while we had our shabbat meal. My Parents would invite many guests they collected like strays from all over the place. It was eclectic and warm and slightly, madly wonderful.

But candles truly gave meaning and comfort for me when my father died of brain cancer, it was just days before my tenth birthday, and he had fought bravely for every day he could remain with us, but in the end, the Angel of Death had gathered him up, right out of that hospital bed and held him, scooping up all that pain and suffering he had endured, setting it aside with his earthly body, and had taken him home.

There is a jewish tradition of lighting a candle in memory of the soul for an entire year after the death, and then each year on the anniversary of the death.
He was gone. The fight had gone on so long, there were scars of it everywhere. The house felt so strange, it was muffled in swathes of grief. Everything looked the same of course, his large bottles of stomach medicine its chalky sediment caked on the bottle, was still on the countertop. His well worn-in plaid couch, lay right by the window, with the yellow afternoon sun alighted through the fractured old fashioned windowpanes. The bereaved cat Panther sadly drooped on it.

One thing was not the same.... the lit candle on the sideboard flickered incessantly. Changes were to come, we were to move to an apartment, but the candles had already been lit, from the moment of death, and I approached it...warily, after all, playing with fire was somewhat frowned upon... But after a few days, I could sit up close, watch the flickering through the glass.. and would sit and wonder about the flame, how it was at once, not solid, nor liquid, nor air but its own element, and I could understand the concept of soul, and life without a body. We had to exist like flames elsewhere.
With time, I could cup the glass between my hands, warm them up, have them glow eerily, warmly, cupping the flame between them. There I stayed, for hours.

As the candles burnt down, day after day, week after week, month after month, another would be lit before the other went out. I took that as licence to experiment on the one still burning. I would pour hot wax onto my fingers, marvelling as the shape of my fingers took form in wax and solidified. It was brittle, white, slightly greasy and rarely lasted more then a few minutes, but it was changing form, and it was warm.

After awhile I could pour some hot wax and shape something beautiful, create a sculpture as it cooled in my hands. I had to do it quickly. I saved some of those for days, but most often relegated them back into the flames to be melted back into potential. I think Abba would have liked that, he loved a bit of mischievous creativity.

The other day I did it again, at a restaraunt, they left a candle on the table and as it melted down, and wax pooled into a tempting, clear, viscous puddle around the flame, I poured some out into my hands and without thinking too much about it, quickly molded a heart for someone I care about greatly.
I was instantly transported back into a quiet room, dark except for the dancing flickering candle through the glass and the feel and scent of hot wax on my skin, and the calm and comfort of knowing the soul was afire in some other realm, his soul was afire in some other space, we are but wax on fire.