Waiting for Goddess

Very slowly I feel I am emerging.

Able to pay attention without being sucked into a vortex of self and cravings.

The mermaids singing each to each are singing to me. There’s the courage to embrace a wilderness without fear or taint or chaos. Little by little, going gently.

My Higher Power is beyond my wildest dreams. Dreams open up like fairytales and love letters. My relationships as a lesbian woman, friend, sister, lover, are richer and deeper and more far-seeing than ever before.

There is the knife-edge of vulnerability. I flounder in the shallows at times. Not sure how to prioritize work. Success seems harder than failure. The old knack of avoidance comes too easily.

But the fear has gone. I am not driven but dread and running on empty any longer. When my homegroup members in the rooms read the promises, I hear Her voice. Calling each of us into new life and a boldness, a celebration of the unknown, of risk taking and elmental loving. Letting go.

This is the week that one of my favourite writers and activists, Grace Paley died. Here’s something she said in an interview a few years ago:

But if your health is good, and you have a habit of looking at each day as a whole day–unless you drop dead at noon or something–then every day you live something interesting. It’s interesting because you either meet a new tree or if you’re in the city, you meet a new person. Or something happens. The sun shifts on the mountain — very beautiful things happen

A small landmark

A small landmark. On Friday it was five months since I last had a drink. Feelings of gratitude and a great sweeping calm. It was never really about the alcohol. It had to do with the pain of not knowing how to live with myself or others, and how to deal with, face/embrace/escape the hungry ghost within. That is the place of growth.

 A tree on the street bursting with purple-maroon horse magnolias, that raw energy of spring. Not a sweet daffodils and scented freesias prettiness with bloom on the fields, but a raucous sexual riot looming, the rainy damp and the scorching heat of the African summer coming up too fast for any kind of spring. We really only have two seasons on this continent and a multitude of oscillating climates and intemperate challenging and magnificent moods. Drives me crazy sometimes.

 When I first came down to the Cape from the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe 30 years ago, I missed the electric thunderstorms and smell of the bush twisting and feverish, twigs and leaves rattling just before rain. The dank dark winters were unfamiliar and the colours weren’t fierce enough, fynbos seemed an impoverished kind of magic after savannah or rainforest. I wanted flamelilies and Sabi stars, not the confetti bush or a dried-up woody protea or brown restios. Slowly I came to understand that the fynbos was a phoenix and as the Cape mountains burned after runaway fires or arson, I watched the renewal and the beauty return each season, saw how the low grey-green bushes and grasses thrived on the inhospitable rocky slopes in drought. Now I understand what I am seeing and feel for it.

  And I’m rereading a novel on the Kenyatta years and the old Kenya just post-Uhuru, Marjorie Oludhe MacGoye’s Coming to Birth. Despite everything I’ve written in the above paragraph and the fact that Cape Town has been my home for three decades, I have a homesickness for Nairobi, Mombasa and Harare that never quite lets up. Like Dakar or Cairo, there are cities that creep right under your skin and you feel restless until you get back there again. Smelly chaotic noisy amazing cities where human nature is in upheaval and nothing can be taken for granted. Yet oddly there is time to do everything important, African time swelling and loosening and expanding all about you in the sunshine like a vivid printed cloth rippling from a defunct telegraph wire over the market stalls.

From Coming to Birth

‘Paulina had spent years enough alone not to be worried by silence. She hugged her thoughts to herself. She was at home now. And at home, though news comes to you of meetings and proclamations, of trials and conflict and achievement, home does not change for that, Nairobi does not change for that, whisper, whisper, whisper, the hum of traffic and the undertones of bargaining, the quick breath of pushing carts and the slow breath of sleep, the unbroken round of terms, of seasons, of fashions, of celebrations. There is always something to do, always something to talk about, if you gave yourself time to learn, always something to depend on too and to live by.’

Strike the women, strike the rock

Women’s Day on Thursday . The office busy although it is a public holiday and there are banners up everywhere for Women’s Day and a celebratory cake in the shape of the African continent. A small liberated woman-in the- making named Katlego has spilled a spoonful of instant oats on my keyboard.

On August 9, 1956 20 000 mostly black women sold their furniture and
mortgaged their homes and travelled from all over South Africa by train
up to stage a march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest against
the the apartheid pass laws of 1950 that would not allow black people to
live or move freely outside of township areas. They left bundles of
petitions containing more than 100 000 of signatures at prime minister
J.G. Strijdom’s office door.

Outside they stood silently for 30 minutes, many with their children on
their backs. Those who were working for white people as nannies were
carrying their (white) charges with them. The women sang a protest song
that was composed in honour of the occasion: Wathint’Abafazi
Wathint’imbokodo! (Now you have touched the women, you have struck a
rock.). In the more than 50 years since, the phrase: “you strike a woman,
you strike a rock”) has come to represent women’s courage and strength
in South Africa.

All the apple and peach trees are bursting into blossom and Capetonians
are heading to the beach, there is kwaito music drifting up from Long
Street.This crazy wonderful country and continent.

Nigerian writer Ben Okri:  “Africa’s pain, invisibility, misconception. One’s living it all the time. Not just the media perception of it, but in terms of individual lives – the stuff you see in people’s eyes. How Africa’s perceived; how we perceive, and fail to perceive, one another.”

The hungry ghost

It must have been the spicy North African lamb but I had my first semi- ‘drink dream’ last night. (Very short I promise.)

I was visiting a foreign city, perhaps in Latin America for the first time. Lots of brightly coloured birds and people talking a strange language, walking in the streets eating ice cream, a park with a band playing.Trees with purple flowers, open boulevardes. I was on my way to meet new friends. Then I went around a corner and there was a homeless baglady. She has bottles all around her: some full, others empty. She was dirty and neglected and old, but with the face of a child. She offered me a drink from an empty bottle. In the alleyway behind her I could see she had stockpiled bottles, full and empty, hundreds and hundreds of them. I felt angry and despairing, just wanted to get away from her, To my dismay, she pulled out some airline tickets and I realised she would be travelling with me. I couldn’t leave her behind.

Well, I woke up feeling a little shocked by that one. It doesn’t take a Freudian to work it out, and for me it links very much to the Fourth Step inventory I am working on..

Getting worked over

Unwrapping myself from duvets and comforters on a cold spring morning, having just reread page 87 of the Big Book for the fifth time on ‘living on an intuitive plane’ attuned to a Higher Power and not self-will. Hoping that one day I get there – moments when I am there, moments I’m not.
Alcoholism remains for me the tragedy/farce of the divided heart. Looking back. I wanted to get sober but I also wanted to keep doing the same old-same old things. I wanted to change but I wanted to stay the same. I wanted a new life but I wanted it on my terms. I felt guilty and a failure but also angry and contemptuous. I wanted help but hated taking advice. I knew I was my own worst enemy but I blamed everyone else. Split right down the middle and the alcoholic self won every time. And for decades I kept thinking, there is still time to change. Then I went out into the garden one evening and thought: ‘I should come and sit out here when I am sober’. The thought occurred to me: I AM NEVER SOBER IN THE EVENINGS. Just like that. Simple as that. I saw for the first time that there had never been a contest, I had lost the battle years ago; and right then I began to want to really change. Mary Christine wrote about something similar in her blog Anonymous Alcoholic a few posts ago (see blogroll).

The real point is to let the Steps work me, transform me. To stop keeping God at arm’s length and let the Divine into my life. So scary and astonishing a notion.. To let my life be lived through me. The point being of course, that I have tried to live life on my own terms and failed dismally, so I would much rather live in and for a Higher Power of love.
This afternoon I am slowly cooking a North African lamb tagine on a wood-burning stove. In a black cast-iron pot, not a glazed tagine, which latter might crack. Even in the bright sunshine it is very, very cold and the old black Dover stove warms the whole cottage. The kitchen smells of cumin, mint, warm ground coriander, cloves, cinnamon, chopped onion and garlic, diced tomatoes, roasting lamb shanks. I have splashed pomegranate juice and a strange but delicious pickled lime syrup on the counter. Karin, newly arrived from a cattle farm in the Free State, is coming to supper and I hope the dish does not frighten her. When I was adding ingredients it seemed to me tat I was layering them very successfully, but it may be that I have just put too many things in the same pot.

The rings of Saturn as mysterious as ever

The rings of Saturn remain as mysterious as ever.The more we understand of the universe, the more eludes us. How that delights me.

 The G ring is one of Saturn’s outermost rings: it is more than 168 000km from the centre of the planet and more than 15 000km from the nearest moon. Its dust particles should ebb away because there are no nearby moons to hold them in place or replenish them. But the Cassini probe has shed new light on the faint, narrow ring; showing that it interacts with a much more distant Saturnian satellite.

The moon Enceladus directly supplies new material to the nearby E ring. While for the F ring, satellites Prometheus and Pandora may help to keep the particles within this narrow region. “But the G ring is not near a moon, and that’s the thing that makes it odd,” explained Dr Hedman.

In addition to the tiny grains of dust spread evenly around the ring, there was also a bright arc across one sixth of the band, that contained larger icy solids. These ranged in size from a few centimetres to a few metres.

Dr Hedman explained: “You would expect this material to shear out, but it was clumped together. So the question was ‘how did that work?’” The team discovered that the ring’s orbit was linked to that of the major moon Mimas. For every seven times the arc orbited Saturn, Mimas, which is about 15 000km away, completed six orbits.

“When you get this kind of whole number ratio, there can be some strange things called resonances that occur. These can have interesting influences and can actually confine material within the ring,” said Dr Hedman.

The scientists believe the bright arc of material is being held in place through an interaction with Mimas. Micrometeorites, which litter space, are constantly colliding into the bodies within the arc, generating dust that subsequently spreads out to populate the rest of the G the ring. “The entire G ring could be derived from an arc of debris held in resonance with Mimas,” the scientists write in the journal Science.

Who is Dr Hedman and when did he leave the planet Krypton? The twins Prometheus and Pandora gliding in their icy waltz after so many trillions of years … And the loops of shining debris, that valuable detritus, garbage redeemed!