Luky
THE REASON WHY I FELT PARTICULARLY CHARITABLE TOWARDS MY YOUNGER SISTER'S HUSBAND WAS THAT HE PRESENTED ME WITH A SET OF POSTERS WHICH I PUT ALL OVER MY OFFICE, TO THE EDIFICATION AND AMUSEMENT OF MY COLLEAGUES.
He also arranged a braaivleis for me, which was not so nice since I had just bet with a colleague that she and I would each lose 5 kg during the three weeks of her absence on holiday.
The loser would pay the other R10 - at a time when that was good money.
I didn't have ten rand to throw around, and so I told my brother-in-law.
"Eat, Luke," he ordered, "I'll pay your bet."
Hound humour
The posters were lovely, balm to my soul.
"It doesn't matter if you win or lose", Snoopy proclaimed above the telex machine. "Until you lose!"
"The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness", exhorted the landscape view above my filing cabinet.
So I'm not the only seeker who feels that life is one long groping amid chaos for orderliness.
The post baskets were topped with another sign, illustrated by a glider floating in a golden evening sky.
It's one I constantly need to remind me not to be lazy. It said:
"You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however."
Over the telephone there was a winter landscape view in a forest with a Camus quotation: "In the midst of winter I finally learnt that there was in me an invincible summer."
How true. It is only when you've tasted the depth of grief, that you become aware of the bubbling well of joy within us which repairs all ravages of the grief we know.
Like the Lourdes well, this is a miraculous one, granted by God for the restoration of hope and the washing away of all despair.
Calm silence
Behind my desk there was the poster of a yacht at sea during sunset: "Each life needs its own quiet place".
Called talkative, loquacious and a chatterbox since I can remember, even I need my own quiet place, though I attain to it all too seldom.
"He leadeth me beside the still waters", said the poster near the window. Isn't it funny how David said it all for us in his time, all the mute words seeking utterance form our hearts?
He put into words for us in his psalms everything we strive vainly to explain to ourselves about the place God has in our lives.
To crown it all, he committed some pretty bad sins. That must be why we find it so easy to identify with him, and with Saint Peter, for that matter.
Above my typewriter there was a William Blake quotation:
We are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
They adorned a picture of wheat in the sunlight, a symbolic picture. The sunlight is the love of God to which we are travelling, the wheat the Body of Christ give up for us so that we may reach this love when we have become mature enough to reciprocate.
At the door, what the cynics in my family would call a touch of sanity prevailed in the picture of a spaniel in a bucket, having a bath.
Surrounded by brushes, towels, soap boxes and covered in suds he mutely proclaimed:
"Was today really necessary?"
I put that picture in that spot because I hoped that if ever I became frustrated enough to write out my resignation from that job, the very different kind of resignation shining forth from the spaniel would tickle my sense of humour and make me tear up my own resignation forthwith.
Catherine Nicolette
A poster I saw many years ago and to which my mind often returns showed a little chick standing, very new and puzzled, in the midst of the shards of eggshell from which he had just hatched.
In large black lettering above his head was his question: "What now?"
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