Anticipation

A Strange Afternoon

Holy

 A Poem About Holiness

What you think is the sky,

Is the layer between the universe(god) and you

And sometimes,

In a momemt or two,

but very seldom though

It(he)allows you to see through. 

Then you understand how holy each and every particle

of its entire creation is.

Bone White

If You Like, You Can Repair My Pantihose

When asked, it is often difficult to say for people why they collect certain things. They just have to have them. I collect a wide variety of things. And I can say, the common denominator amongst most of them is that they come from a time or an era that has become extinct now and that they were used in activities that people do not do anymore. This links directky to the fact that I am absolutely fascinated by handmade things and traditional crafting techniques. When art was daily bread!

Stranded Darning, specially prepared for your fine silk hose! Found in East London in a second hand shop.

I remember hearing my grandmother say, that she was taught as a child by her mother how to mend a pantihose or silk stockings..

That must have been around 1920.

On A Thin Thread

The Old And The Middle Aged, East London Scenes On A Sunday Morning

The best time to look undisturbed at the weird and eclectic mix of East London's architecture is on a Sunday morning between 9 and 12 o'clock. There is absolutely no traffic and the streets have a tired and empty feel, except for the occasional suffering soul, who has not survived Satruday night to well and is staggering home. The others, the well behaved citizens are in church.

During that time - if I am in the mood - I walk and drive the streets of this small coastal town, that is fast asleep. I understand that some of you don't see much sense in this and think that I rather should be sitting on the church bank too for my onw sake and be preached to throroughly, but my vision of paradise can not be delayed - I have to find it here on earth - and my hall of prayer is under the blue sky. And no, I don't like singing and praying in fellowship.

When I arrived in East London a couple of years ago, somebody said to me: 

"There is suburbia (the predominantly white living areas), there is Mdantsane (the second biggest township in South Africa) and there is downtown (Oxford and Buffalostreet) ". In a way that intrigued me and today I find that this is really true. Downtown is where we are now. And during the week there is a whole lot of life.

And what do people do, the ones who are awake and sober, on a Sunday morning, when they are not in church? Traveling to and from East London.

And helping each other to travel.

Victorian old buildings stand next to the middle aged ones in this part of town. The old ones have not lost their grace and elegance.

While the middle aged ones are a testimony of the 1970's when the countries of the Socialist and Communist Eastern block left their architectural traces all over Africa by constructing Erich Honeker style buidlings. Their ideal of beauty stands in sharp contradiction to the one of the old ones.

One of the Walter Sisulu Univesity Campuses

unfortunately closed.

Curtain Crawler

Crawling my curtain since roughly 72 hours with no intention whatsoever to stop!

Portrait Of Two Wildcoast Fishermen

Coastal Impressions On A Grey Day

Grey, love making between black and white 

On a day, when the color grey reigns everything else is absorbed.

A Special Creation

Yesterday, in my garden.

PINDILE - In Memoriam

Some stories are happy ones and some are sad. This is one of the very sad ones.
These boots have worked hard all their life.
They belonged to Pindile. 
Pindile was a Xhosa man born in the Transkei a former homeland under the Apartheid regime - a rural area in the region were I live.

For 15 years Pindile did the hardest work a man can do on earth - working in the gold mines up north underground. He lost two fingers while working in the deep and dark. One day he stood in front of my gate.
He said he could do everything gazing over my green, wild and neglected jungle that was once a beautiful garden and surrounds the house.

So true. 

He could do everything.
He told me, the moment he lost his job he decided to become a gardener because he needed the color green, he said.

A TRUE GREEN. 
In this moment I knew I needed him and he needed a true green of which I had a lot. 

I got scared watching him how he worked. Hard.
But he said: " It's nothing ", rolling his tobacco in newspaper.

He stayed for three years. 

Then died of a huge tumor in the spine - aged somewhere between 40 and 50.

His boots stayed with me and I have hung them up on my wall in memoriam of a very decent and great man.