29/09/2016
LAWYER BY DAY AND ARTIST BY NIGHT: THE CONNECTIONS CREATED BY TEAPOTS, A TAXI DRIVER, ANIMAL RIGHTS AND A DREAM COME TRUE AT THE V&A
(Because we are all connected, this story is going to grow somewhat organically. You may want to read this first chapter through once first before viewing the various foot notes – if you have the time to do so - as each is a separate little vignette of a person or idea I want to write about in my next few postings.)
It was Khalil Gibran, one of my favourite poets, who wrote that “Pain is the breaking of the shell which encloses your understanding”. I think of my heart as a living African Suzani, a garden where the seeds of my understanding which flower most brightly are planted by the people I love and admire and are watered by my most profound experiences. At the centre of this garden, next to my own Tree of Life, stands my husband, Brandon Golding .
However, at the edges of my garden, looking in, lurk some others. And it is they which cause much of the pain. One of these is a deputy director at the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions in Cape Town who recently told me bluntly that I am a “bleeding-heart liberal”. “What absolute rubbish!” said my long-time friend and colleague, Linda Borcherds-Steele, when I told her the story, quite aghast. “Anyone who knows the smallest bit about you knows that you are a Warrior for Social Justice – and Wagner’s soaring Flight of the Valkyries is one of your songs”.
I have been working very long hours at both my practice and on my shop - “Burning the candle at both ends” as my grandmother used to say. We recently launched our online shop too and this has been a very, very steep learning curve and one which has taken a great deal of extra time and energy. Late on Saturday past, Heritage Day here in South Africa, things came to a head when I received a traumatic call from a client active in the field of animal rights. As she described the killing fields, the genocide they had just witnessed, I felt a sharp stabbing in my heart as it, quite literally, begin to break.
Hot tears pouring down my cheeks, I knew that this Valkyrie needed to get away. Either that or something was going to give – quite possibly, and permanently, my heart. So I packed my bags and, early on Sunday morning, headed quietly out to my other home - to my cousins, Michael and Louisa, in the Karoo.
To read more, please see our blog at www.teapots.co.za
