Life is a roller coaster. Everything is happening with tremendous speed, anticipation and apprehension. The shifts and turns, up and down, moving so quickly it hurts. A few weeks ago, I was drowning, lost at sea, drifting, treading water. Now, I’m slowly relearning how to swim, am hanging on to the raft I found and am trying to find my way back to solid ground.
Yet, even in the midst of the storm, there have been moments when the wind gracefully stopped blowing for a few hours; when my mind could let go and I could just enjoy.
Last Saturday night, during scouting, we made cheese from milk and butter milk. Put a litre of both in a pan, add some lemon juice and heat it up until it separates. Scoop up the white curd, sieve it to remove the whey, add some salt and spices and put it in a can wrapped in cheese cloth. Add some weights on top and leave it to rest for 12 hours. This produced the following:
Which tasted quite nice, if a bit bland. Lesson learned: don’t be too shy to spice it up!
On Thursday night the dance company Alias performed
Sideways Rain and I was fortunate enough to watch them dance. For one hour, fifteen dancers moved from one side of the stage to the other in a seemingly endless, tireless stream of movement. Soft light and perpetual movement within these lights marked the scene initially. Moving from darkness to light; from crawling, to rolling, to walking, to running, to falling; from running tirelessly to stopping abruptly; from running on blindly to stopping to pause, the dancers’ movement remains intriguing and ever-changing.
In the space of an hour, Sideways Rain portrays the endless evolution of mankind in a performance that draws all eyes to the stage and is utterly effective, impressive and compelling. It is beautiful in its simplicity and I’m glad to have been there.
