Belly-button birthday

This has been a difficult week. The moon rounding to fullness and a lower backache and belly ache contradicting the quiet dryness of menopause. Conflict at work, handled honestly enough but when i listen I can hear the roaring of wounded ego.

My father, that dimly recalled, tyrannous and scarcely forgiven presence on the margins of my conscious life, ill with a heart condition in Zimbabwe. Alone and refusing to leave the country despite his Brit passport, living with his cook up in the pine forests and waterfalls of the Eastern Highlands of the Pungwe. Elderly, frail, embattled. The anguish within me.

Impatience and tiredness, moods going helter-skelter. Centred in the Fellowship and the habit of surrender, that grudging but grateful handing over anew each day. I can’t do this alone. To let myself be held and to hold steady. I have numbers to call, there are friends, there is trust in the darker times and the Power moving  within, the body that perhaps needs more attention. My body is the physical life of soul.

Later I shall go out to the lovely Hemel ‘n Aarde valley near Hermanus, driving along country lanes  past green vines and olive groves and have lunchat Moggs Country Kitchen: asparagus, baby beetroot, waterblommetjies, wild mushrooms. Then to Walker Bay to watch the Southern Right whales that come into the bay to calve. My somewhat crushed spirits lifting at the prospect.

The heart of life, the suffering, the joy of it — the life beyond but including mere self. Opening my eyes this morning to a new lemon zester and nutmeg grater, very designer-chic. Hugs, kisses and flowers. Friends coming round to see me, a call from Shauna in Cape Town. Damn this mood, this tricky painful menopause — just for today I am there for others, all those who wish me well. And grateful for another glorious day of sobriety.

Six months and grateful

Rain splashing down on apricot-red clivias, muddy storm-water drains, trailing jasmine. There are baby owls nesting further down our road in a delapidated oak next to the kiggelia. Cloudlight breaking mauve and opal across the mountains.

Day by day, I surrender the shame and controlling self, the old fears and accidie and accrustation. There is life beyond me. The circus within of rehearsed performances and posters and no-shows has quietened down. Life is about others. That is the secret, as simple as that.

The ‘bare bones of AA’ are all I need for the journey. Everything else is gravy.

The roadside leading down to the river is a dense tunnel of fragrant wisteria. Old clay jars our bodies, the earth upturned and raw, the river rushing and then falling silent, the bees thrumming and spinning in the lilac wisteria, the clouds breaking apart over the mountains. Entering into life, the spaciousness within, the beauty and wonder that it should be so simple.

When you reach out, what is there reaches back.

Lively up yourself

Woke up feeling much more lively and like myself, that grim gut-churning feeling eased. Dreamt I was staring down into a well filled with white and golden arum lilies and noticed a meerkat (how do I explain that? Something like an African ground squirrel) tunneling into the side of the well, creating a new entrance or exit for itself under the arum leaves.

Woke up and sat up in bed, looking at the copy of Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like on my bedside table. It is 30 years this week since Biko, the Black Consciousness leader, was murdered by apartheid police. South Africa’s Frantz Fanon. Young, gifted, black and a victim of the most vicious race hatred known in the West, a system of dehumanization. What a waste.

There are large tractors smoothing out the school playing fields for cricket. Villagers walking their dogs, gardeners, tying up roses and washing cars in their drives. Farm labourers walking around the dorp looking for weekend jobs. Children racing past on bicycles, cats stalking lizards. Nearly summer, although spring has just begun. We don’t get four seasons here, only two. And our true season is drought.

 

Time off

A week of working from home and poring over drafts of fiction, knowing that there will be so much waiting for me to do back in the office. Switching back into editor mode, letting go of the dreamy scribbler within.

The elder tree waving its white umbels at me in a chilly breeze. Faintly sweet fragrance. Should I make elderflower cordial? I don’t have time. But perhaps I should make it anyway.

Reading, writing, thinking

Rainy morning in the Overberg. The cistus bushes are covered in large white flowers and the front garden wafts heliotrope and the honey-scented alyssum, even in in the rain. Spring in a very wet Cape. May the rain fall.

I’m rereading Marlene van Niekerk’s re-invention of the farm novel, Agaat. So rich and inventive, I can lose myself in the sadness and the deeply felt political histories, the word games, the beloved and magically recalled landscapes. She is writing about the Overberg where I live but she knows it in a way I do not, from within, as a poet.

Much of my imaginative landscape remains lodged in a vanished Zimbabwe and I need to deal with this, begin to look at what brings the practical art of my fiction writing to a standstill. It isn’t that I need to achieve anything exceptional, it is just that I would like to complete one of the fictions going on in my head and lurking in my subconscious so much of the time. Crafting takes time and I am too impatient. Blogs and emails and letters take most of my free time.

Maybe a little creative time management is called for.

Stealing time

Tuesday. Up early with coffee and slices of papaya with lime juice. It is the sixth anniversary of 9/11 and I am thinking of all my friends worldwide for whom this is a day charged with very intense memories and emotions. The world is a very small place.

 It is so difficult that if I want to write I have to steal time from other work projects and I hate the feeling that I am procrastinating in order to write fiction, rather as if I were secretly daydreaming. Right now there is website copy to be finished, a feature to be written and all the time I m daydreaming about a young man sitting in a taxi driving through summer rain, very conscious that this story won’t get bills paid and that the story will takes years to gel if it is to really turn into the kind of story that would merit serious attention.

 But I am also very aware that if I don’t write the months and years fly past and the niggling ache intensifies, that I need to write fiction, find a voice for the stories within. All my stories, no matter where I start or what plots I follow tend to come back to certain preoccupations and images. That is what interests me as a writer. How to explore these in a way that will interest others is the challenge.

Wednesday. I’m thinking of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, of the historical intense hidden histories of gay men and lesbian women by Sarah Waters, of the way Alice Munro makes you breath stop at moments. Nobody does it the way they do. But I’m also recalling the matatu taxis of Nairobi, the Luo women with baskets on their laps, the crowdedness and warmth, the crazy fast driving. The young man is in the taxi with five other people. It is steamy and humid and the sidewalks are slick with summer rain, the streaming rain of the monsoon.   He is going to tell everyone in his family he is not going to marry and give his parents a son. They will be disappointed. How can he tell them this is a joyful thing for him, to love a man?

Weekend blogging

Weekend blogging. I’ve had a great morning – worked in the garden and heard the local spring cuckoo, the piet-my-vrou calling.  Played with a baby boxer puppy from down the road. Entire streets of the village smell of jasmine and orange blossom, like some crazy secret wedding celebration. Talked with a group of friends and neighbours about setting up a safe house for women in the village. Had a call from my sponsor, wanting to tell me a funny story. Called someone from the fellowship who is having a tough time and heard that she is having a brilliant day. She gave me a recipe for preserved lemons, using a fortune’s worth of Maldon salt. Cut back a big lavender bush, so there are bunches of lavender all over the house and some over to give to friends. In the afternoon wrote a short story, tentatively, but the flow was there – posted it for comment with my online writers’ group.

 Freedom from the mental quibbling over taking that first drink is the gift of time and an unimaginable quality of life. It is also freedom from the bondage of self.

 Gratitude.

 My beloved partner telling me I don’t snore loudly any longer. “I suppose that is not drinking alcohol these days,’ I say innocently. She wrinkles her nose. ‘Yes I suppose that could be you not drinking alcohol these days. Such a deafening snore it was too. Now you just give these endearing little hiccups and talk to the moon in your sleep.’

 Not saying to people ‘I’m a very private person’ when what I meant was “I drink like a fish and am terrified you might notice.’

 Able to talk honestly to the God of my understanding and then shut up and listen

 How much my daily life interests me – all of it, the people in it, the animals, the sights and sounds and routines and surprises, the adventure of living to the full

 The longing to be able to give back some of what has been poured out into my life in these last months, the abundance and generosity

 A stray memory of moonlight streaming over the plains of Madikwe at dawn, the brown hills and white thorn trees, the dark river like a knife edge,  wash of moonlight from the cold mother’s hand, chilling but sweet. Something piercing and unforgettable. Africa reminding me where I have come from.

 In Johannesburg the coral tree, Erythrina, scarlet flowers on the gnarled bare branches, a velvet flame. Such a sensuous sight at the end of  a dry winter.

The whole truth and doing without the glamour

The whole truth and doing without the glamour.

 For Beat literature lovers who want more than romanticizing. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac’s best-known work, On the Road.

 In October 1969, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times knocked on Kerouac’s door. His wife said he wasn’t home, but then “a face came peering over Stella’s shoulder. A face with grizzled jowls and red-rimmed eyes and spiky, dark tousled hair.”

 Kerouac talked about writing, about the Beats, music, politics. He told the reporter, “I’m glad to see you ’cause I’m very lonesome here.”

 The story was published Oct. 12, 1969. A week later, while watching The Galloping Gourmet on television, Kerouac began vomiting blood. He was taken to St. Anthony’s Hospital with a massive internal hemorrhage, caused by years of alcoholism. Surgery and 30 pints of blood couldn’t save him. He died on Oct. 21.

 Jack Kerouac was 47.

Spring fever

Got up early and went out for a walk to look at orchards or peach, almond and apricot blossom, a riot of spring. Sneezed from one end of the valley to the other. Hayfever. I would happily cut off my nose to spite my face right now, otherwise loving the change of season and the sobriety to make the most of the floaty silliness and pink and white froth and impermanence of this fleeting spring (a blink of the eye in Africa). Later I am going to buy fresh asparagus and what are known here as waterblommetjies, a local delicacy or pondflower that is delicious cooked slowly with lemon juice. Well, you’d have to try it. Nutty silky shoot-like flavour.

 At my home group meeting on Tuesday evening I sat next to a woman, two months sober, who had just started a new job. She talked to me about how hard it was to concentrate, how nervous she was about the expectations of her new employers, how afraid she was of repeating the mistakes of her last job. I talked to her about how I battled to concentrate and stay focused at two months, how anxious I was, how my moods seesawed hourly. She was surprised and very relieved when I said the attention span got better week after week. We talked about eating right and getting enough sleep and better time management. After the meeting she came up and hugged me.

 It is such a lift to be able to offer something so simple to another person in recovery. If I had not gone through that time day after day, I would not have been there for her last night. Afterwards I felt so strengthened by having had something solid (relatively solid you understand!) to offer out of my fraction of learning to live sober. Many of those around me have many more years of sobriety and I have felt like a novice most of the time. I have only had ideas and quotations to share because there has not been as yet enough experience. To be able to offer sober experience is about much more than not drinking, it feels like an elixir of hope itself. That is what others have given me and I have not realized I would be able in turn to pass it on.

 The speaker that evening was a loquacious Scot from Glasgow, I’ll call him Stuart, who spoke very well on Step 9, that making amends is about the other person not oneself, although one is often set free as a result of making those amends. He talked about the cold loveless marriage with his ex-wife, how he made amends to her after the divorce but stayed resentful that she never rang him or warmed towards him as a friend. He said this to his adult daughter. She turned to him and said: “Well, Dad, what do you expect? Mum loved three alcoholics in her life, the three people closest to her were alcoholic, and two of them are dead. Her mother, her brother and you. No wonder she is afraid to trust or let you close.’ Stuart paused and said he only then recalled that his ex-wife’s drunken mother had been found dead in a Glasgow street with her head caved in when his wife was 21. Her brother had died in agony of a ruptured liver. He, Stuart, had very nearly died, and had left his wife as soon as he got sober. I sat there and the chill of a certain anguish seeped into my bones.

 Later. Cured my hayfever by reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: Rise of Disaster Capitalism. ‘the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering’. Fortunately I am wrapped in a pink cloud of early recovery bliss so don’t take it very seriously. But I have to review the book, so my sinuses re on mental alert.

Travels in a dessicated landscape

Up from the cold and rainy Cape to a bleached and scoured Highveld. The incongruity of peach and almond trees with their fragile blossom against the kopjes and blackened thorn trees, the hard granite and corrugated iron. Talking the politics of the Gautrain project, the rescue of indigenous healing herbs, looking at art at David Krut – 

Then up in a small plane to Madikwe, below me that distinctive cartography that always reminds me of arid astral traveling, the symbolic geometrics of the highways and power lines of the industrial-militry complex that is modern South Africa; the dams, fields, farmlands, fallow lands, over-cropped lands, silos, drainage ditches of agriculture, the glint of water and rooftops like metal shields; the kraals and winding contours roads, dirt roads, paths, burial sites, rivers and dried-up river beds; the trees like scattered peppercorns, the grey and brown stretched of sandy scrub, unpopulated, empty, uninhabitable. Made uninhabitable. Mapmaking from the twin desires of desire and regret, belonging and exile. Reading the lnd from the air, the element of Hermes the winged messenger, the go-away bird, the passenger in flight – from where? To where?

Bumping down into the clearing. Into Madikwe, the landscape that is now renamed and repackaged as a luxury game reserve but remains for me the poverty of Mrabastad, the refugees of Gaberone and stories of Bessie Head, strangest and most tormented of writers, the misappropriated wealth of the platinum mines of Bophutatstswana ‘homeland’, the old farmlands of the Groot Marico described in the literature of Herman Charles Bosman.

‘The Marico was an unhealthy place to be in, he reflected. The sun and the stones and the thorn-trees. It was maddening. Nothing but thorn-trees and stones and the sun. It was a good country to come to once in a while. But you hadn’t to stay long. And you must have company.’