This and that and some English

I've finding things to do these days....getting a job, studying for my TEFL and just random good things. My good things are crazy to some people...my favourite activities definitely include drinking tea. I look forward to sundowners with tea, reading a book anywhere, chatting with people I haven't seen in a while.  I have been looking and definitely finding. Last week I found that if I don't meditate, I can't super focus. Things like that.  I found myself looking at my poems/words in my phone.

The one I keep looking at:

Shiva loves and dies in ashes

Shiva loves and dies in ashes every time you look at me.
Shiva loves and dies in ashes when we greet.
Shiva loves and dies in ashes when we speak, afraid to address what concerns us the most.
Shiva loves and dies in ashes in our silences and the lines between them.
Shiva loves and dies in ashes of faded henna.  Right between the pumpkin spinach and basmati.  We let the moments go, our moments of touch. Lips. Neck. Back. Breasts. Skin. Toes. We lived the moments before thinking them. They have become a faded memory that we think only happened in each others thoughts.
Only when we see each other do we remember our downfalls.  I have failed love's memory with you.

I haven't forgotten you but you have moved forward.


B.R

The Love House (ラブ ハウス)... 愛をこめて(Ai wo komete)

The Love is spreading...and I have found a home in Pretoria.  I am finding that love is hard to find if you are looking for it.  I have found a love oasis instead..a place I can chill, play scrabble (very important for me) and read books without distracting males with roving eyes.

I have also found that the Love House can host my products there. So my products have a home in Pretoria and Jozi...I'll be with you soon. But these sisters have my back.  It is an amazing space in Pretoria's Sunnyside.  It seems for all those souls that do not fit into Pretoria's uppity crowd or house peeps, a place has been created for them.. If you ask me it is the perfect place for my heart to rest and gain strength before I leap out into the world.


Love is a worthy contender in today's capital driven world. Everywhere I look, love is becoming that thing you know is loosing value now and will be selling high one day. It is often easy for one to choose something either than love, it is just easier.  But love asks us to look within ourselves. It asks us to love ourselves...find ourselves and even love others for the sake of ourselves.  It is hard to give into that feeling honestly without trying to get something out...for most people. The rest of us that give it 100% get left behind on the side of the road like deer during hunting season...or cows in the middle of main roads in villages.  We are left with our tongues out, eyes glazed...helpless till we get back on our feet.


It has occurred to me that after getting up, it may not be easy for me to love when I have intense hate.  I have an intense hate for African men(South African...African specifically). Yeah! I said it. I really hate that I have this hate cause it means it will get in the way of my loving somehow.  I don't think you can love unconditionally with some kind of hate in your heart.  I am walking my way slowly out of it...one foot in front of the other...if only men could be kinder to me as I make the journey....


So if you are looking for Beading Dancer Products...you will find them at The Love House on De Kock street, Sunnyside, Pretoria. My journals, skin products and jewels.

Love. Ai. Lerato

New pics of new tings!!

My new products

I still have these African journals and you can email me to view other designs or specify the design.  The skin products are also available. I have bath salts, scrubs, salves and foot polishes available.

ArtRising Part two....

Again, we are pushing activism. We are doing our annual youth remembrance event in Soweto. This year we have scaled it down because we would like to really focus on the Media center at Thabisang and completing the interior design.  We will be focusing on changing the space when schools close next week.

We invite those who want to see change in our schools to join us in the spirit of the youth of 76'.  We continue to fight for African systems of education. Thus far no such thing exists, we are forced to learn primarily in English and in Western ways.  The Education syllabus in South Africa is disgusting to say the least. The is no intergration of our indegenous cultures and cosmologies(including language).  Yes one can say the youth can choose Zulu at school if they wish...but does that same youth use it till tertiary and in corporate South Africa? i think not. After the youth of 76' fought so hard, education still happens from an outsiders perspective. We, I am speaking as an Afrikan...not South African(whatever that is...cause anyone can be South African these day...except Africans). We are forced to learn other peoples languages from an early age, then we have to adopt their culture, then we have to submit to the Eurocentric-male dominated world of work that looks down on us still.

The Africa that some of us picture will not exist at this rate. The Africa that says you can learn African ways of being and doing things so we can come up with solutions that work for more than 60% of the country and not the minority.

Reflection:

I get up everyday and reject the corporate world because it does not speak to my vision of that Africa.  I design, make and produce items that I believe call for a different interaction with this Africa.  Most people do not get what I do because I am not subscribing to the usual: go to university, get a qualification and work for a white man.  My spirit cannot subscribe to such. I think it is the cowards way out...I do not view myself as a half-way crook.  Bass John can come to buy books from me for all I care...I handmake my journals and everything else, I dont see why people have to go to exclusive books to get expensive-carbon footprint costly items.
It is beyond me why Africans still look to the minority in the country for validation. I am all about loving other people and their culture(love it to bits) but I am for each of our nations standing up by themselves so that we can build life sustaining, life growing and seriously world changing work.  But i dont think it will happen if we all try to be the next person instead of ourselves.

Nuff ranting:

Catch Artrising this weekend...changing our neighbourhoods one project at a time. Come support the indigo market this Sunday and begin different conversations about financial markets and trade as a whole.

Also if you are in the Kagiso(west rand) area, check out the youth March on the 17th from 8am.  Kagiso's youth rising happened on the 17th and the activists in Eternal Beat(emancipation of thoughts) chose to celebrate it on that day.

Re gopola...batsha ba Aforika!