The Sacred Women

The Sacred Women carved out of Casuarina trees still rooted in the ground. Location Clifton Cay, New Providence, Bahamas. On the site of one of the original slave landing places.

My Yellow Brick Road

I wonder if we create our own screen play, write ourselves into the plot in anticipation of completing the story to our personal design and satisfaction?  Do we wilfully mislead ourselves into believing that it is possible to exert complete control over our destiny or do we merely hope that this desire can be met?  Or, perhaps the script simply assumes a life of its own  and starts to write itself; life writes itself.

 In my case it did.  My story grabbed the pen out of my hand before I had begun to write and started scribbling madly – its outpourings resembling a scene from the Disney film ‘Fantasia’ –  buckets of water slopping over in a flood in a mad, choreographed dance – whilst I run around like the demented brooms in the movie trying to stem the flood!

Even when I feel as if I am finally in the right place at the right time, there are still moments when under the pressure of my foot the path  splits open and I fall, tumbling down the rabbit hole like Alice.  Then I discover that sometimes sidestepping convention and stepping on the cracks is important. The most fascinating things can lie in those cracks or in the tear in the wallpaper that you pick at with prying fingers.  They let you peek through to the under-layer, to what went before.

The crack in the sidewalk, should you step on it, hides many a secret.  The notion of not stepping on it, a remnant of  that childhood game is discarded.  So I close my eyes and cross my fingers just to be safe as the game dictated when as children we skipped over the cracks in the pavement. I tread deliberately. Who knows what information lies among the dog-ends of experiences?  Invisible random treasures susceptible to prying fingers and hungry eyes waiting to be discovered – I close my eyes and open my mind.  I slide smoothly into disconnect, discarding thought, I listen carefully until I hear what really matters in my internal conversations. 

Upside down or right way up I find some answers.  One heartbeat to another, soul whisperings, words clinging to words in the silent space and I hear them release an unspoken flood of powerful knowledge.  I inhabit my own exclusive, alternate world.  Disconnected  but in a good way, or at least a way of being in this world.

Life wrote me a part that, at times, I had no wish to play and sometimes played poorly but which at times fitted me to perfection.  A magical mix of thorns and roses – the long road on the way to being me and although I have no idea of the final destination the path is still laying itself down in front of me as I continue to follow the signs.