INA BRINK

Tonight, I feel compelled to write about love. I was born as a very sensitive human. A human who picked up on, not only my own need for love, but because of my circumstance, wanting to, needing to share love, spread love. All in order to make those in my vicinity feel worthy, validated, seen and more than anything feel appreciated. Especially if someone was kind and gentle to those in their surroundings, even if those people did not deserve it, that was absolutely beautiful t

With life and all its challenges, motivation is one of the most difficult things to acquire. Here lies the crux, you need to be challenged. Challenged by life, by adversities, by copycats, by people who want to see you fail, due to their own insecurities. But you know what? You always have the choice to see life for what it is; your journey, your trials that you have to conquer. The one thing that has challenged me the most through life was exactly those souls who wanted me t

Well, tonight after my twenty-two-year-old daughter came into my room and declared: “Goosebumps mommy… Goosebumps!” and I mistakenly thought she was talking about the butter chicken curry dish she had made for dinner, I felt inspired to write this blog post. For context, I was lazily drifting between reality and sleep on my bed, after a long day of sorting out problems at work. I thought she was referring to the dish she had made and how delicious it had turned out. Since I w

Tonight, I drank a glass of wine… it’s a blessing and a curse. The beautiful soothing notes in the flavors entice one into a relaxed state of blissful forgetfulness and yet, if taken too often, it can become a sinful delicacy of escape from reality. As with all things in life, everything can enhance your experience her on this planet or disturb your peace. This made me think and re-evaluate my life… the life that made me write my stories. I began telling stories to deflect te

Since I can remember I was fascinated with orchids and as luck would have it, from time to time, over time I received these plants with the most beautiful flowers on. But no matter how hard I tried, when the flowers wilted, they never returned. If I was lucky, I could keep these fragile plants alive for a year or two, but they would always end up dying a silent death. I researched them, gave special ice blocks containing plant food, looked for the perfect sunspot, but without

Between work, family, life and those blissful rest days, I at times get a chance to be silent and let my thoughts roam free. As I am navigating the influx of information our world is bombarding us with, from politics, mindless content creations, wisdoms presented as new, over and over and over again. It struck me; we as a society has bought into this “divide and conquer ideology.” We, even when we think we are immune to it, are all bought into it on different levels. From war

Over the years I have seen people close to me struggle with depression, anxiety, hopelessness and rejection. We all ride these waves at some point in our life and let me tell you, all of these people were dealt a dirty hand. They did not ask for it, they were caught off guard by the remaining chaos that followed after a life altering or traumatic event, the devastation of a loved one’s betrayal, constant rejection and brutality spoken over them. I have lost people to the utte

It seems surreal to finally hold a copy of my first published novel in my hands, to run my fingers through the pages, to smell the intoxicating smell of invitation, to read the mysteries that are printed on the pages and the sheer weight of the book. I have to keep reminding myself that I did this, I spent hours on it, I had to make sacrifices to find the time to invest in this dream of publishing my work and the acknowledgement that my work was worthy of publication. So toda

Today, while I was busy with my normal work duties, I needed to fill in a PDF document quite urgently. Now, seeing that I work on a computer daily, like most of our office mice do, I am quite efficient on a keyboard as well as steering through the maze of commands and directions needed to complete such a task. Normally I would dust off such a task in a few minutes, but for some reason my day was just not running as smoothly as I am used to. Firstly, my computer froze, and I h

Since I am working in the food industry, the following analogy came to mind as I sat opposite the table from the one person, I have spent 30 years with. He has thus been my confidant, lover, partner, creator of humans and the building partner of our children’s environment and the most important part of my life up to this point. We have created a union; most will call it a marriage; we now call it a partnership. We had to build our institution from scratch, without the help of

Diversity is needed in life. Without it there would be no balance. Taking in account that we are human; we should firstly understand that our human right is choice. Our uniqueness accounts for a multitude of different influences and stimuli, which makes us react and experience life to the abilities of our understanding. Now it gets quite complicated when you study the human condition. No person on earth is one hundred percent the same by physical design, nor by mental ability