The rising floodwaters

The Cape mountain ranges a pure desolate white with snow, flooding on the Cape flats, more than 15 000 homeless. Another cold front will be heading in from the Atlantic later this week.
Came back to a frenzy of overwork, very conscious I am not managing my time well.
Accusations and triumphant vindictiveness from the wife of the retired Presbyterian minister. Myself dumbstruck on the phone. I would have apologised, but she wouldn’t let me speak. Apparently I made him ill, my editing was a disaster, I am to blame for everything, she nursed him through an absolute crisis brought on by my heartless cruelty, they are deeply wounded, Satan is on the loose. Nothing to be done. Very Dickens in the music hall.
Drove up to Elandskloof and looked at the snow, the bare gnarled apple trees, the eagles above the still waters of the dam. Sheila was with us, tense and garrulous with unresolved problems. Living with her sister is not working out well, she feels she is in the way, misses having a place of her own, even misses her tyrannical ex-husband.
It is so green and rainwashed, such a clean peninsula readying itself for spring. Arums in the ditches, fuzz of green on trees, wet fields like blue watery lakes. Lovely to be back.

Breaking silence

Scorched winds across Mpumalanga, runaway fires, blackened veld. The skyline an ominous heat haze. But tiny fronds of fresh growth  on the combretum trees, the leadwoods. Thinking about the AA belief in a Higher Power of one’s own understanding and wishing that tolerance could be extended to others – especially in this province of Mpumalnga where the Suppression of Witchcraft Bill needs to be resisted. Such measures have traditionally been directed against women, outsiders, lesbians, troublesome adolescents, women perceived as sexual threats, those with healing energies, uncontained and unpredictable individuals, those defined as emotionally ill.

And on one of my forums a debate about a paedophile who molested  mentally challenged  children while a member of AA. Posters indignant. Took a deep breath and decided to address the issue politically and directly.  

“I’ve been reading the posts here and wondering about ‘breaking the silence’. This is always a very difficult moment but I do know there will be many posters and lurkers who will be in the same position as myself. I grew up with an active padophile in my family. Until a great deal more is understood about the nature of the compulsion and the psycopathy involved, the focus will stay on therapising/treating the ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’ and nothing will change to in fact prevent the cycle of abuse. In my experience, paedophiles abuse in repetitive and ritualistic ways, mostly voyeuristic,  triggered by the sight of pigtails or a child crying or the smell of urine. Being drunk or sober is irrelevant. The mental health status or age or distress of the child is irrelevant to them. Castration incidentally has to do with the genitalia and is inappropriate for sexual obsessions that take place in the mind. In my experience, the paedophile as father or uncle is deeply horrified and ashamed and revolted by his own bahaviour and makes desperate attempts to stay away from children between episodes of molestation; has very little insight into his own triggers and is terrified of asking for help because of the demoniization and criminal charges that will follow. Moral outrage changes nothing. Incest survivors need more than empathy or outrage expressed on our behalf, we want the cycle stopped.”

Snapshots from two-million hectares

Snapshots from two-million hectares.

The Kruger National Park, running across two-million hectares, four times the size of Belgium. Expanded from the original area bordered by the Crocodile River in the south, the Sabi River in the north, the Lebombo Mountains in the east and the Drakensberg in the west.

Veld fires smouldering like an inflamed red and black scar to the north as we fly over in a small plane. Herds of  wildebeest below, the elephant moving single file in crushed grass. Anthills dotted on the plains like salt and pepper mills.

Everyone else wants to video the occasion, take photographs; I want to remember. This is the landscape of my childhood, the hot raw bushveld, the punishing heat, the bleached grasses and spindly thorn trees, the dongas (gulleys) and sandy river beds, the boulders the colour of elephant hide. Every trip to the north, across the Tropic of Capricorn, is a return.

In reality I can’t go home to Zimbabwe. I am no longer a Zimbabwean citizen, a difficult loss. I would not be allowed into the country with ‘media’ or ‘editor’ as occupation on my passport. Only my father remains in Zimbabwe now, all the rest of my surviving family are in exile, in Hawaii, in New Zealand, in London.

But this is the territory of my childhood, the Lowveld, the wilderness of Africa. I fear and respect it. This is where I belong. All the wilderness trails, forests, reserves, farms, river camps, run together in my memory, each unique, all connected: Gorongoza, Hwange, Tsavo, Serengeti, Vumba, Nyangombi, Hluhluwe, Phinde, Mala Mala, Lundi, Pungwe, Zambesi, Limpopo, Waterberg, Nyanga.

Loss and celebration, new beginnings, letting go. At night in an open landrover with the moon nearly full and the stars fiercely bright, the ranger switches off the headlights and cuts the engine. We coast downhill in the gentle embracing dark across the wide African savanna. The night winds are sweet and aromatic.

Mayibuyebuye Africa, I think. Bring back my homeland.

Travelling north

Travelling north.
Mpumalanga. Meaning ‘place of the rising sun’ in SiSwati. Sabi Sands. The Kruger National Park, two-million hectares, right up to the blue Lebombo mountains on the border of Mozambique.
Noting as I flew out on a chilly bright Cape morning, the mountain ranges below me powdered with snow, that at four-plus months sober I feel the tension in my body, the knot of neck muscles, stomach cramping, stiff back. Once all this was numbed with alcohol, all I suffered were hangovers.
It seems so sad to think we once believed we could nurture ourselves with toxins, over-dosing on alcohol as a crude muscle relaxant and then taking analgesics to help with the headaches and hangovers the next morning. On the flight I sat sipping peach juice, praying and trying, not altogether successfully, to embrace the fear. Looking down at the brown plains and blue bowl of sky all around. Breathing in.
When we landed at Nelspruit, there were veld fires burning, the wind acrid and hot. Thatched boma of an airport, international flights coming in fast and furious for the luxury safaris. There was David, my guide, a cleft-chin he-man (the alpha males in the bushveld aren’t the lions these days) in khaki with that practised grin. Which sycophancy vanished when he heard I was local, with no flashy American credit card, and he chatted away to me about the politics of the lodges I would be visiting as we drove out past bougainvillea and the rich scarlet double-headed poinsettia. Ripening bananas, litchi trees, macadamia nut trees, avocado trees, tall royal palms. Glorious sub-tropical humidity.
The poverty of the communities living in proximity to these luxury lodges, the women in colourful prints carrying buckets of water, small children going to mud-walled schools without electricity. Community empowerment needs to be more than hndouts from the First World. The talents and ingenuity are all here. So is the devatation of floods, Aids, refugees, the lingering havoc of apartheid.

Bateleur eagles hovering like acrobats on thermals over the leafless marula trees and rough tawny grass.
The poet Antje Krog from Country of Grief & Grace:
‘the price of this country of death
is the size of a heart

grief comes so lonely
as the voices of the anguished drown on the wind

you do not lie down
you open up a pathway with slow sad steps
you cut me loose

into light – lovelier, lighter and braver than song
may I hold you my sister
in this warm fragile unfolding of the word humane’

This wonderful unmanageable life

This wonderful unmanageable life.

‘Listen,’ said beloved partner at about 3am. The house was silent. I thought perhaps the owl was hunting over the fields, that she was listning out for that haunting little cry. A Mary Oliver nature-appreciation moment. But all I could hear was the dogs snoring in the kitchen and a tap dripping. I went back to sleep.

She got out of bed and stood there in the darkness. ‘Hist!’ she said. I listened and wondered if I might not be going deaf. Just that sunk-in-the-heartof-the-country silence and a faint dripping mutter. Intruders? Ghosts? Mice in the spare room? A cobra on the stoep? But it was far worse in a more mundane sense. The geyser was leaking and flooding the kitchen; water was pouring out of light fittings and running down the walls.

My night blindness is a non-negotiable factor at times like this. She went out with the torch and a curious dog, climbed the steps to the loft, managed to turn off the water flow and wrenched her back. The dog, an ungainly elderly ridgeback, began whimpering for his breakfast. Neither of us slept well. I lay awake thinking about the two young black lesbian women murdered in Soweto and homophobic violence in South Africa and elsewhere.

Sleepy and disgruntled, I was ill-prepared for another irrational argument with the elderly Presbyterian minister. He feels I am ruining his mental health because I am not at his beck and call for thesis discussions as often as I might be. He knows he is being unreasonble. He just feels I should be nicer to him in his unreasonableness and ‘make allowances’. We agreed to disagree.

Out in the garden my wild unhybridized gladioli are flowering, a deep cherry-red streaked with white. The sight of them fills me with a breathless joy I can’t describe. The garden is dry and cold, brown with frost, but there are the signs of the season turning. My GOMU, God of My Understanding, sweet, compassionate, powerful. Raingiver, life-restorer. Goddess within, above and beyond my understanding, perhaps.

Went around the corner of the thorny hedge on impulse to get down on my knees and say a praise-prayer – I’m very literal about hitting my knees – hiding behind the hedge so as not to embarrass partner unduly, watched by large puzzled dog who lifted his leg on a clump of plectranthus next to me. Transcendent moment punctured.

Went indoors and read 10 pages of BB, emailed friends. A busy week ahead, one day at a time. One day at a time.These wisdom mantras help me to keep this time of early recovery in perspective. From the outside they might sound like cliches, but at times I murmur them like prayers, like beads running through my fingers, holding my life together from one resolve to the next.

Lazy afternoon

Blogging as procrastination, a happy and feckless way to spend a chilly Saturday afternoon when I should be writing up more travel reviews and feature captions. Thumping grunge beat circa 1990 Nirvana-style from the sports fields across the road where youngsters are playing sport and gathering for an evening of fun and partying.

Gratitude highlights:

the BB is full of Aha! moments leaping off the page to grab my attention when I am ready to pay attention

changed the template on this very private recovery blog which now looks much less klutzy

had an argument with elderly retired Presbyterian minister but wasn’t rude and called him back when he put the phone down on me. I can only do so much work on his thesis and no more.

delicious homebaked bread with strong cheese and slices of ripe tomato

the blessings of health, so that I could tease Una when she pulled something in her back, knowing she doesn’t need to see a doctor at the moment.

helpful suggestions on finding a new sponsor from RB

courage from the Spirit to carry on with my own harrowing inventory in Step 4

synchronicity of thought and likemindedness and inspiration in other blogs, notably Scott W’s Attitude of Gratitude

Talked with Annemarie W who is beginning her new Bible study next week, both of us pleased her gentle persistence has paid off.  She was afraid her partner Roy, who has heart problems, would be distraught if she withdrew from the church. But there appears to be no opposition to the study. And Jim S, the somewhat rigid evangelical elder and former insurance salesman who more or less owns the church doesn’t seem to mind. Well, perhaps he does but can’t stop her.

Now I shall go back to Hiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss, a way of expanding my cultural and imaginative horizons.  Cold fingers on the keyboard, hotwater bottle wrapped in a mohair rug on my lap.

Not jay walking

Woke to an icy brilliant morning in the mountains and the smell of homebaked bread rising in the oven. Una has put out her back, so I don’t know if we will be going for a walk.

Sat up in bed sleepily with my scored and annotated copy of the BB and read carefully through some of the pages in the chapter headed More about Alcoholism. The other night, a new phone and cyber friend RB, made a comment about being ‘ a real alcoholic’ and I found the phrase repugnant, so supposed I must have missed something. It reminded me of the ‘real reborn’ phenomenon, or being so bad you knew it was for real.

The chapter was scary but not as a drunkalogue. The anecdotal analogy given in that slightly quaint 1940s American Mid-West tone is of a character who keeps jaywalking and being hit by fast-moving vehicles. He knows it is crazy and high-risk behaviour but keeps doing it. Keeps promising he won’t . Fully intends to keep his promises. Fractured skull, broken back, hospitals, surgery — but all to no avail. He keeps going out and geting knocked down. One little jay-walk can’t hurt him. The odds on the horrendous consequences just don’t seem to penetrate.

It is such an quaint analogy but behind it lies the simple and uncomfortable reality I need to accept anew every day. Self-knowledge and willpower are no use when it comes to not picking up that first drink. 

I’m leading a charmed life right now, surrounded by daily prayer, supportive new AA friends, a loving partner, routines that hold me in place. I’m trying to work the Steps. But one of these days I’ll find myself in an airport wondering if I should have a quick G&T. I’ll be offered a drink when I’m hungry, angry, lonely or tired. I’ll want to drink because I am frustrated with somebody, or in physical pain, or in sudden grief. Or just because it is there, and I am an alcoholic and have found reasons to drink to excess for most of my adult life. If I haven’t fully surrendered to some kind of HP or GOMU (I love that acronym, see a small wrinkled wise woman drying herbs in the Kalahari and peering up at me shrewdly), then my spiritual emptiness and pride will leave me vulnerable to not just one drink but a living hell.

Four months on

This was the week that Madiba turned 89, launching his Elders for Peace initiative with Jimmy Carter, Irish president Mary Robinson and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. Mandela has been officially in retirement since 2004, but just keeps going… 

In the workplace hyacinths potted in glass coming up from a tangle of spidery white roots all green and promising. I still prefer my succulents.

  

The meeting  at Hope Street, faces that are now familiar. The electrifying quality of truth spoken from  certain place – immediate recognition, everyone paying attention, listening hard.

  

Remembering. In my first few weeks sober I roller-coasted between rage and suspicion, elation, major new resolutions, terror and recurring phobias, fits of nervousness and what was to me a weird unsettling calm. To help myself hold steady, I would imagine I was a small sick child being held by the hand and led forward, taking sips of juice, eating invalid food and explaining my symptoms to new friends, asking for help and doing what I was told while waiting to feel stronger. The experience was very similar to having bouts of malaria, with high fevers and bed wetting and hallucinations, which I had had in central Africa when I was little, so that analogy helped me. I have read something on this site that reminds me of that (sorry if I am misquoting): ‘We are not bad people trying to get good, we are sick people trying to get well.’ The trick is to let yourself be helped. All the self-loathing and mood-swings and outbursts and doubt and fear are part of an illness. As you recover, they will go away.

  

For some reason I’ve been revisiting some of my favourite writers this past week. The best short story writer of all time (IMHO) on alcoholism is Raymond Carver, who captures that menace and chaos of a life in free-fall so well. He wrote his best work after he finally sobered up, having been hospitalized for acute alcoholism several times, and died tragically of brain cancer in the late 1980s. I’ve always loved his poem Late Fragment, which includes the lines:

  

‘And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.’

 

  

I discovered Carver in the ’80s when my own drinking was very heavy and frightening. His short stories were like a soft punch in the solar plexus. They scared me because I identified so intensely with the mess and the unspoken tension, that one great secret behind every story, the self-will run riot of alcoholism. It seems ironic now that I couldn’t face reading him sober, could only read him drunk and flat despairing lines would terrify me, but not enough to stop me drinking.

 

Spirit of the Eland

The week in retrospect.
 
Wednesday I went up to the Klein Karoo to look at rock art done by Khoi hunter-gatherers of the Late Stone Age who called themselves !Kam. The location of such sites is kept secret to prevent vandalism. By torchlight we could see magnificent ghostly eland painted on the cave walls, shamanistic art done in trance and ritual to connect with the spirit of the eland. Afterwards we sat outside on rocks in the sun warming ourselves in the sunshine and looking over the landscape which has probably not changed much in the last thousand years. There were eland grazing on a nearby slope and we could hear their hooves clicking as they moved back and forth. 
None of us spoke much and it felt like a gentle meditation and as if much of the inner tug-of-war that goes on in me had fallen quiet. Putting self aside is not easy. 

“Loving-kindness (maitri) toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Loving-kindness means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away or become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.”
- Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty 
Sunday morning, reflecting  on a hard-working week. Charged by buffalo on the game reserve –­ that fierce whirling motion of the beast, feral stink of an angry animal, the driver accelerating the jeep. No time to be scared. The empty blue bowl of the sky, immediately above us the serrated kopjes and ancient mountains further away, the reeds and silver water, low-flying Egyptian geese.  
Thought about drinking but little desire to do so – wanting to live in a different way, praying for a calmer, more grounded way of being in this extraordinary new life. Once home again I began editing David C’s thesis and organizing copy for the website. Working steadily and carefully, paying attention. David and his wife Jan very subdued, a little afraid of me. I go into the study and slog away for hours.  
The thesis interests me more and more despite the clumsy writing. Lowland Cameronians out on the Scottish moors, persecuted and indefiance of the Jacobite monarch and Episcopalian curates. No authority but Christ. Self-described ‘Puritan divines’ who were willing to die rather than compromise but not killjoys as they are often described, just fugitives determined to stay Protestant in accordance with their beliefs, in tune with the new lively freedom of conscience that had arisen with the Reformation. So much of what resonates with us in our ‘faith journeys’ or practices, the language and the symbolic touchstones, has to do with specificity of context – oppression, lonely wild moors, suffering made meaningful, a written text memorized and taken as an enlightening guide, the shared experience of a faith community, of a cultural shift, liberation as glimpsed through the hermeneutic lens of Exodus or the goddess invocations ‘Burning Times’ or Thich Nhat Hanh reflecting on the Vietnam war.  
To church this morning – pale coppery leucadendrons and bright soft pink proteas in glass vases at the front. The new kitchen, deplored by some, blessed and officially ‘opened’. AM came to me in her dark-green woolen coat and said she is thinking of withdrawing her membership. She wants to begin her Bible study and feels she cannot face opposition from this church leadership again. Tears in her eyes and I felt ashamed of my flippancy. I have rejoined this small troubled community church to be confronted with brokenness – leadership conflict and my own brokenness. AM has a poorly repaired harelip, low self-esteem, great humility and gentleness of spirit and is in her late 60s, trusts me to pray with her and guide her. I feel at a loss. She needs somebody much wiser and more discerning than me, but I realize the minister and elders are too busy squabbling to be of much use. They don’t want a woman running a Bible study but will not say so openly. AM will either have to start the Bible study surreptitiously or leave the church and then start a group. Will she be lonely if she is without a local church? 
in lukewarm sunshine – magnolias flowering in purple-brown and stella-white on bare branches. Now to toss pak choi in a quick stir-fry. Then to work at David’s place for the afternoon

Looking back at 115 days

In March this year I underwent a serious eye operation and after that I stopped drinking. I did not expect to stay sober. I prayed that I would stop drinking, but I knew myself as a secret drinker who undermined all my own resolutions and could not stop, whatever the resolutions of the morning. I was physically tired and very sick, run down and emotionally at the end of my tether. I didn’t think AA could help me. I didn’t think anyone could help me. I felt that I was going to drink myself to death.

The desire to drink was taken away from me. So was a certain darkness and horror relating to my childhood that had haunted me for years and had become an excuse for drinking. The resistance to telling anyone fell away. I called AA and began speaking to people. What had seemed impossible – the sickness of secrecy – just didn’t matter at all. When I opened the BB for the first time, the phrase I read, quite out of context of course, was ‘the sunlight of the Spirit’.

The hardest moment was not admitting that I was powerless over alcohol. I knew that so utterly there was no hesitation in me. What I wanted to do however was to run away from my Higher Power. It seemed to me that I was coming back to the Beloved from whom I had been running all my life. There is a poem by Francis Thompson called The Hound of Heaven which some of you may know:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

I do feel my HP has been waiting patiently for me to simply ask for help and stop running, stop undermining and sabotaging everything and admit I am ill and need help. Whether I call my HP Maybelline, George or Beloved is beside the point. It is all about letting the power of that greater love into my life and making space for that love any way I can. The poem ends

All which thy child’s mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: Rise, clasp My hand, and come.

Gratitude. There’s no other word for it.