Pastel Dreams Khakhalethu Gxiya

pastel dreams is
An existential mediation,
With paint as the conduit
Of thought, emotion, perception,
And experience.

A quiet lesson
In seeing,
In witnessing.
A testimony to
The obscurity of reality,
Caught in between
the material and spiritual.
With that which we cannot see and touch
Nestling in the mundane.

Where familiar things,
Places, and people
Begin to elude us.
Where form,
mirrored by the paint,
Begins to dissolve.
Troubling our certainty.
Challenging our humility:

Do we really know what we think we know?

Opening up an invitation
To imagine beyond.
Not far,
But a beyond in the everyday.
A potential for transformation,
In the rupture of identity
in my mother’s face.

An invitation to
Hold onto traces
In the impermanence of time,
The fluctuation of identity,
And the transcension of reality.

The paint stains
as a metaphor for memory.
Leaving impressions,
residue of what was,
Seeping through the present moment
And actively shaping it.
While the looming moments of abstraction,
Give way to distant realities.
Slowly happening,

pastel dreams is
about living in time.
Where nothing is ever fully realised.
It is a painterly reflection
Of a constant process.