Geboren in het Teken van de Ram

Als ik op straat loop kijken ze
als ik ze aankijk lijken ze op schapen die de slager tegenkomen
ze hebben geen verweer, geen wil, geen spoor van moed
en vluchten voor mijn driftig bloed
dat hun vervolgt tot in hun bange dromen

Maar soms zal ik een nacht
warm zijn als de zon
lief zijn als een bloem
verrukt zijn als een kind
zacht zijn als een lam...
Ik ben geboren in het teken van de Ram

Wanneer de knoppen springen dan
de eerste vogels zingen dan
begint mijn ogengrijs naar groen te glijden
en soms dwaal ik alleen
door stormen langs het strand
en zoek de warme sterke hand,
die mij zal dwingen en zal leiden
Maar soms ben ik alleen
en eenzaam met mezelf
onhandig met m'n kracht
en bang voor m'n geluk
grillig als een lam...
Ik ben geboren in het teken van de Ram

Ik zoek totdat ik vinden zal
op alle vier de winden zal ik gaan
tot ik van iemand zal gaan houden
misschien wil ik teveel
misschien blijf ik alleen
voorgoed alleen niet een die ik bemin
en die ook van mij zal gaan houden...
Ik zou zo graag een nacht
branden als het vuur
wild zijn als de storm
blind zijn voor mezelf
onschuldig als een lam...
Ik ben geboren in het teken van de Ram.
- Lennart Nijgh

So much is happening and so little is being written down.

‘Start with words’ – I do that, and my list of words, or combinations of words, gets longer and more diffuse. Pages and pages of nothing but words.
A friend once remarked that the words I write down are scattered all over a page. I start somewhere at the top, or right in the centre, and, as if to imitate the random nature of my thoughts, I will add another at a slight slant towards the top right corner. The next time I am compelled to pick up the pen and jot something down for my own recollection, it will likely find a home at a 90 degree angle from the last word, but then in the bottom right corner. And so on.
My friend looked down at her own writings and found complete sentences, in perfect linear form and sequence, and looked up at me with a somewhat worried look, as if my topsy turvy mono-syllabic mental grunts might be expressions of a more creative mind. I on the other hand longed for full sentences to emerge from my mind – complete statements, well rounded thoughts, to inform myself and others of my position in my head and in this world. Without need for embellishment, not requiring any acrobatic handling of the notebook in order to take in what had popped out.
In light of Umberto Eco’s musing on the ‘Holy War’ between Mac and MS DOS environments and the minds of their corresponding ideal users, perhaps I should leave the Calvinism of MS-DOS (or the Anglicanism of the later MS Windows), fess up to my more Catholic tendencies of linguistic revelling and buy a Mac. Not that I have ever been much good at using that environment intuitively, as my truly creative film-maker/graphic designer friends will surely let you know.

Yoni said everyone should have a little seed garden of inspirations. The only thing you have to do is strew the seeds into the earth. In my mind I saw the words on my pages sometimes burst into colourful flower, or at times fail to surface at all. Sometimes two or more seeds thrown into the top soil close to each other and since forgotten, come out entangled and entwined, and create something that makes sense as I watch them grow into each other, an innocent bystander often not even recognising the seeds as having come out of my hands, or mind.
Marvel at Creation daily. It’s all around us.
I am sure it could work with words. Yoni has a special software application for it. I have a big green book. Which some people mistake for a Bible when they see it on my hotel room bedside table. creation, not Creation. Or is it the same - just a different writer, a different time. Welcome to the Gospel according to Saskia; welcome to SkiSays.

Scratching the scabs of my battle wounds - proof of all the partying we put our bodies, minds and hearts through during those magical days - I am again and again pulled back in time and place, from the red soils of West Africa to the desert landscapes of the Middle East. My current surroundings fade out of focus and recent memories crowd in front of my mind’s eye, showing me the kaleidoscope of colours, faces, and events in which I was utterly immersed not even a week and a half ago. None of those experiences have been written down in full and elaborate sentence form, as they so deserve, and I am afraid that if I don’t take the time now, and force it out, some detail, some discovery, and many lessons might be lost. I stare at my pages of words, and add one here, another there, at an angle to the previous one.

Like standing under the trickle of cold water pumped from a well yesterday, and recalling the luxury of powerful hot showers of the otherwise Spartan hostel in Yaffo. I had thought it Spartan, but in the last two days recalled its luxury in comparison to bareness of the guest house that was my home for two nights in Salaga. In the communal shower room in Yaffo a sign was hung, something like ‘Be careful with using the water, remember you are in a desert environment’. That’s not what it said though, it was a combination of words, full of simplicity and clarity. You see, I need a notebook with me at all time. Even when I am naked in hostel bathing facilities. The sign struck me, I am not exactly sure why. I remember staring at it for a while, and stopping to gaze at it again every time I entered or left the shower room.
I imagined myself standing naked, the surrounding buildings and cityscape stripped away, encircled on all sides by endless dunes and hills of desert sand. Dry, scorched, waterless – as I knew it was, there beyond the reach of the city. It is so very easy to move from town to town, with its roads, skylines and faucets with water-always-on-call, and to forget the environment in which the city arose out of small beginnings, building after building, settler after settler. Transported by that sign into recognising and appreciating where I was, I was forced to recognise how much comfort I had at my disposal in that tourist facility for well-endowed ever-youthful wanderers, more than many an indigenous nomad had at her disposal living in Bedouin tents just a few miles further south out of town.
Standing under the trickling cold tap in the one out of only two guesthouses in the remote African district town in which I found myself two days ago, I was brought back to that Middle Eastern part of my world that I carry with me, that different world that seemed so many worlds away again by now.
Its rainy season here now, this current ‘here and now’, and the rains have been coming on well. Shafiu and I had lifted the cover off the well at the guest house, marvelling at the water level of captured rainwater in this otherwise equally scorched land. Not a desert landscape exactly, not yet at least, what with global warming and the climates changing and becoming more extreme so quickly. But a landscape where growing crops that are thirsty for water is ever more difficult, where the traditional Fulani cattle are thin and bony for lack of luscious grazing ground, and where the Fulani cattle herders are increasingly ignoring the arbitrary European-imposed borders separating the two Nation-States of Ghana and Burkina Faso, in search of true greener pastures.
But the rains have come - the roads are beginning to look like red-tiled corrugated roofs again; the debate among Lelewu and Imoro, whether the wells dug by the Missions using machines are deeper than the wells dug by the people of Salaga without the added hand of technology, had a light, non-urgent air. The debate went on for the majority of the car ride back to the provincial town, with Lelewu’s assertion, that the Missionary wells found in Kpandae could not be equalled by Salaga dwellers, touching a sensitive nerve in Imoro, causing him to raise his voice, turn his head towards our backseat frequently while driving, vehemently accounting of his fellow townsman’s well digging skills, and causing our Isuzu truck to hit potholes created by the previous nights’ showers.

Having come back now from the district to the provincial town, I stood under the hot shower, en-suite to my room, in this Indian-owned hotel, indulgingly for well over half an hour – using my Ahava soap with beneficial minerals from the Dead Sea - washing off the red dirt clinging to my body from the travelling, recollecting the activities, lessons and laughter from the last two days, and moving away again in my mind to the Dead Sea, where I had been soaking these very minerals into my skin by doing nothing but floating, watching ilana’s friends and little brother, my travel companions for that day around the Holy Land, float ahead of me while the sun began to set over the cliffs that house the ancient and history-laden rock fortress of Masada, turning the sky soft shades of purple and pink and yellow…. Where I started singing and chuckling to myself, da da dé da dé, da da dé da dé, little fluffy clouds, little fluffy clouds.. dee duu doo…
’hey mikki, did ilana ever play you that song, where the girl says ‘…I’ve never seen such beautiful skies, they were full of little fluffy clouds and the skies, they were all pink and yellow and red…’ or something like that.. it used to be one of our favourites..’
Mikki looks back bemusedly, not knowing what I am on about, but commenting that it quite seamlessly fits his mental picture of his sister and me in those days, mumbling something about hallucinating, laughing, shaking his head and floating off again. My following uttered-aloud thought about what would come out if you cross-bred a billy goat with a sheep didn’t do much good in improving his image of my sanity either, I would guess.
When the moon started coming up over the sandy cliffs across on the other shore that is Jordan, beautiful and full, coming ever brighter out of the sky which in its turn was falling slowly into night, our little trooper group, that had been light-hearted and überchatty all day, grew quieter and more thoughtful, retreating into our own individual little worlds, that had had little in common but Ilana, but that had been full of love and spirit from the start. Driving back around Jerusalem to the urban and metropolitan coastal strip, past real or imaginary fences separating the Israeli nation state from the Palestinian homelands, the music coming out of Ohad’s iPod via the rental car’s stereo, was bringing me again into different times and places, back to long ago childhood car rides, from one European country we were temporarily calling home to the country where I was born, all the way down the Telegraph Road… That song somehow had felt like another unspoken connection between me and Ohad, unacknowledged apart from a gentle stroke of his hand on my leg behind his driver’s seat while we sang the song’s refrain’s in unison, verse after verse, gazing out over his shoulder at the Israeli highway with its typical traffic of macho drivers, sirens, flashing lights and road blocks, but likely both miles away together in thought. With the bright almost entirely full moon above us. That was the night before the wedding.

I don’t know how I will ever capture all the memories, the thoughts, the emotions, the questions, the fleeting epiphanies, the impressions, the new friends, the moments of withdrawing, the surges of pulling close, all those moments, all those mine, how I will ever capture them all. The full sentences are helping, they are recreating what comes up and what comes out. They are giving shape to the words, giving them body and substance, planting them with meaning in my heart. Descriptions of events and moments leading up to events alone already take me on such journeys, I don’t want to cut corners, I want to follow their lead. But then before I even get to what I want to put down, what I want to put out there, I feel the need to break, to breath and to rest. To pick it up again a little later, with freshness and vigour, to delve into subsequent episodes and emerge with the weeds and jewels found on the sea beds from those deep and mysterious waters.
And then I find myself with a book full of intro’s – winding, truthful, exploratory intro’s, valuable pieces of work within themselves, for this is work for me, that leave so many of their follow-ups untold, and unexplored. My Book of Intros. Sas’ Almost-Loves. Somehow I’m always skirting around the edges. My Lives on the Edges of My Lives.
That reminds me of a few words written down in my GreenSeedGardenBible book, picked out of the cacophony in the ether surrounding my life, noted down for their resonance; unfortunately not really translatable, so here it is in pura forma: Alles wat je half doet, ga je je half van voelen.
I do so much, my life is organised out of doing things, going places, doing things while being in places, yet I feel so half. I don’t do them fully, I don’t do them truly, I am never fully there, or here, there and then. Here and now. Not even in writing. I flutter from one thought to the next, from one place to the next, and back, or onward, or back but just next to the previous moment and place in time, following no real pattern, just following. Not directing. When I first met Arwen and she looked at me and listened to me briefly, she remarked that I might not be very grounded, might I possibly recognise something in that? I float, here there and everywhere, and am afraid of coming down into my body, down onto earth. A fallen angel. Fallen down onto earth, not landed. Still floating between heaven and earth.
Coming down into actions, and consequences, and investments, and losses. Earthing. Rooting. Bringing the ship into the harbour. Building a house out of cement, and opening the door to what follows. No more standing on toilet-cubicles. I am Saskia. In my Slavic root, I am. Protector of Humanity.