Getting Out There

Woke during the night in an icy sweat of fear, as if the wolf had come in over the kitchen threshhold and was prowling around the half-stocked grocery cupboards. Una, my loved housemate, in severe pain and needing urgent knee surgery. Will there be enough money?

A strange bird crying hoarsely in the bushes at the side of the house, too dark to see what kind of bird or why it was hiding there in the plectranthus and abelia. Cries that carried me back to my childhood in the forest above the river where otters hunted all night and the fisheagles would call to one another as the sun went down. Lying there sleepless and berating myself.

But woke up clearheaded and with renewed purpose, the gratitude that carries a recovering alcoholic through from day to day. Called three friends and had two project offers, work for February. Some money will be coming in.

Reminding myself on a morning in a quiet dark house without electricity that alcoholism is a disease of loneliness, that drinking exacerbated my tendencies to isolate and withdraw from everyone. To rejoin the real world, I have to get out there. Nothing happens, if nothing happens. Nothing changes, unless I do something to change the pattern and break with the past. Getting out there is reconnecting with myself as well as others.

Snail Spiralling

Kept awake into the small hours by a nuisance of a mosquito buzzing me in the dark. No danger of malaria here in the Cape, but keeping under the sheet so I wouldn’t itch from bites. Dreams of peering at layouts, changing pictures, replacing images and never being satisfied with the results. Trying to find work with PR consultants who had slickly furnished offices in tiny cramped spaces. Gleaming brushed metal desktops and brocaded ottomans in clastophobic broom cupboards with windows opening onto a Matisse sky, pale blue with painted clouds and floating torsos.

But there were sweet fresh white Cape Genoa figs for breakfast. Sitting here in a village where it is too hot to go outdoors, the sky white as sheet-metal. Everyone indoors except the farm labourers out in the fields, sweating and dizzy and suffering. This is the Third World.

Recalling the emblem of the Zapatista movement, a small land snail, white and innocuous and humble, a spiral symbolic of the earth and a slow-moving creature, patient and dependent on the earth. As opposed to the eagle or other rampant predators.

Slow change and patience is the true language of revolution. Landless and bound to the land, hidden and seemingly humble, persistent, understanding what is being done and what needs to be done from within the widom of the spiral.

La luta continua!

Each new day’s promise

Extraordinary summer’s evening up in the mountains, a large troupe of more than 100 Chacma baboons watching us from the crags. As these baboons may be facing extinction in the Western Cape this was an uplifting sight.

Terrific heat as we drove through the Boland yesterday and persisting after sunset, a heat haze of blue and grey over the vines heavy with ripening grapes, the cherry-red and ivory-white flowering gums, the mirage-blurred mountains shifting shape. Watermelons stacked higher than my head at roadsides, crates of sticky over-ripe nectarines and peaches. The tall eucalyptus brittle and unstirring as we climbed into the mountains, smell of dust and veld and animal spoor.

Lying late at night on a quilt and wiping away the dew falling on my face and hair as I looked up and saw the Southern Cross constellating our skies, the familiar galaxies and ancient mythic links we have always read into those galaxies. Cicadas  and the chorus of frogs, the lazy gurgle of the river, the calls of children playing in the bushes. This life the heaven before heaven. 

Driving down in an old kombi, sleepy and itchy with insect bites, a small owl in the middle of a the white dust of the road, staring up at us with amber eyes transfixed by our headlights, sable and coppery-brown feathers ruffled. We slowed and turned of the lights in a small obeisance. The owl flying west, out over the dry and echoing valleys.

Swimming in the mountains

There is a sheltered clearing in a woodland place deep in the mountains above the village with a lazy river running through it. And when the wind blows in the right direction you can smell the sea, a long way off.

At night after the fires have died down, we swim in the river and look up at the stars. Passions banked, the water like silk twisting against our bodies in the dark, and the galaxies white and fiery high above us.

Free to feel, free to begin living.To take a deep breath and plunge into the heart of life, that twist of silk.

Keeping the gains in mind

Grateful for sanity and sobriety in tough times, thinking of all the lost weekends and the weeks before and after, the panic and sense of wasted time and slippage, life on the skids.

It might not be easy but it is better now. Calling friends in the fellowship, organising to get to a meeting, living with the hollow echoing spaces and interrogating those spaces. I don’t have to count the gains in my life these months to know what I would lose. Beginning with self-respect and ending with everything, the friendships, the will to live, the strength to go on.

Last night to the planning group for a farmers’ market, low level of trust, not very much sense of community but paradoxically high-flying expectations. Idealism always seems to outstrip the groundwork. It was drizzling and there were glasses of boxed orange juice and a murky-looking sangria. Much talk of ‘organic’ and the pleasures of feeding people, doing irresistible upmarket platters of delicious cured meats and smoked cheeses and homemade breads, but there we sat on the decking in a foggy drizzle among the pine trees with not a breadstick to nibble on. Slower than slow food. Oddly enough some seemed cheered simply because a meeting had taken place. ‘Look, at least the meeting happened!’ said one thin lanky character as he said his goodbyes. Corporate ruthlessness has ruined me for the slow life.

Walked down to see Art this morning — he was very talkative, while I felt hot and sleepy, struggled to keep up. Like other artists I have interviewed, he invents as he goes along, so conversations are freefall, no continuity. But a good-humoured time and easy warmth. He talked about his action painting as ‘throwing the bones’ which I liked.

Came back in blinding noon heat, sorry to see tall paling fences going up around the old age home. Supposedly to keep the elderly safe but it will only isolate them further, reinforce their otherness and difference, that pathetic vulnerability. Damn this security-mad country. Came into the cool thick-walled dark of the cottage with relief, put on a pot of chickpeas and black-eyed beans with sprigs of rosemary. A Mediterranean supper with grilled courgettes and a tomato salad.

Surrender, not fight — that might be closer to the answer. Admit powerlessness and let the higher power course through me. Sweet paradox.

Hungry Ghost, Hovering

The inner gnawing of discontent, fear, restlessness. Prowling the house. Reading about a cruel murder in the farming village of Graaff-Reinet and locking the back door. But not before the old demons have entered –

Rigorous honesty means talking to the restless and irritable self every morning. You want this, but you need that. I am lonely and frightened and at the same time I need to trust it will all be all right in the end. Stay sane, sober, grateful for just one day.

In Asian mythology they talk about ‘cravings’ as the hungry ghost, never satisfied, never filled up and at peace. The hollow gnawing in me is pain and unassuaged griefs and news of the death by suicide of an old activist friend dying by suicide in Mthatha, the obscurity and forgottenness and dread that seems to roll in like the dark of a cloud of locusts hovering over the veld when I was a child in East Africa. Before the bushveld was blasted with DDT in the 1960s, the thick clouds of locusts over the msasa trees and thornbush, the red earth and the ripening mealies, devouring and destroying and still hungry for more.

That is how the hungry ghost of craving feels in me at times. Fight, I keep telling myself, fight.

Stuck in the middle with you

Feeling at odds with myself, a little on edge. Wondering if the procrastination has to do with unacknowledged anger. Stuckness.

Just before waking in the heat of dawn, a dream about a truck pushing a vehicle charged with dynamite back up a side street so that when the explosion happened, the conflagration would take place out of sight.

That old awareness of inner unmanageability, the restless, irritable and discontented self inhabiting an unfree space. If I can’t think clearly and helpfully, it is because my mind is fettered by aversions and desires, fears and grandiose fantasies.

Got up and stayed away from the evangelical church, not a bad thing in itself but I am not consciously thinking about why I am staying away. Helped with lunch, to make a fresh Greek salad. Tomatoes so good right now. Posted on my recovery forum. Tried to find a meeting nearby and could not.

Emailed a piece of dream-like writing just after I woke up and have been wondering all day if it was not a dissociative episode, very slight, but the description itself not my voice and the language overwrought.

I can’t seem to let myself admit how distressed I am. Could not tell the elderly friend who came for lunch and piled his plate high with roast chicken that I had lost my job.

Clinging to small compensations and satisfactions, something that reminds me very much of how my life felt when I was drinking. Trying to coax myself to keep going. And although there is no craving, no felt need for alcohol, there is a blankness and uncertainty about the future that scares me. I don’t know what to do when I wake up tomorrow.

Inner unmanageability, the deep turbulent self , cross currents and rip tides. Just to keep going and remind myself to do the next right thing, as simple a thing as staying sober. To begin sharing the predicament honestly and to search for answers in community.

The Waiting Game

Rethinking my life. All the old certitudes and cliches falling away. A new beginning each morning.

When I first sobered up I was very grateful. I was grateful for any work that came my way and I took on anything offered to me. It wasn’t a ‘gratitude’ problem as such, but it may have been naive. Overwork and lack of boundaries and trouble asking for payment left me in a bad financial position. And I was not doing what I wanted to do, was not writing what I wanted to write. All the newly sober energy and passion was being thwarted and going to waste.

Now there is that sense of hiatus again, another moment of decision. And again I do not feel ready, am unsure of what I want. But I do know what I do not want. I don’t want corporate media. I don’t want to write things I don’t believe in. That sounds almost simple-minded but it is how I feel, sitting here with a hollow feeling in my stomach, still in shock and feeling I have betrayed myself at  some point this last year. Or perhaps not. Egotism is very fond of taking all the blame and responsibility. I just want to begin again, this time with meaning and purpose.

A friend and neighbour coming to give me a large enamel bowl of ripening pears, cautioing me not to eat them before they take on that golden-green glaze and honey smell. Smiling at me with delight and anticipated pleasure, his eyes crinkled up. He has cancer of the prostate and is 78 years old. My eyes fill with tears of sheer gratitude. There is another way of living beyond all the nonsense, the greed and stupidity. And it is there, right in front of me. The pears ripening on the kitchen table in the morning sunlight.

Blank Morning, Blank Page

Unemployed. I could write copy for gardens and send it through to the workplace, but why bother? They may not use it  or need it, will not pay for it and there is nothing I do any longer that means anything significant in terms of my old workplace.

But glad of a call from Paul Duncan talking about his book proposal and the continued possibility of our working together. And an invitation to go overseas and stay there for a space –

But right now I need time to absorb the shock of it all. Went up to the library and took out a much-loved and elegaic novel by William Maxwell, came back and walked down the hot still road past flowering gums and jacarandas feeling hollow and despondent. Empty, a failure. Not sure what to do next. There is no next right thing, in a simple or straightforward way.

This is a time of unknowing and I am waiting on mystery. Difficult and impractical and fraught with the intangible. But that is how it feels right now. Trying not to be too hard on myself while I wait. Twiddling thumbs, the pricking of thumbs a clue to what might happen next.

Axe Falling

In a way I knew there was confrontation coming, but I had underestimated the force of it.

Very painful and shocking meeting, no chance to give my point of view, no room to speak. I had been reported for speaking badly of the treatment of staff and bringing the company into disrepute. I offered to resign and the offer was accepted.

Cleared my desk and left, not wanting to speak with shocked colleagues. As I was walking up the road, damp, a slight rain falling, the mist blowing over the bay below, I had a call from somebody in the office and paused. Taking a deep breath.

A small rat was running along the gutter, very alert but low to the ground as if chased, a hunted look about it. Something mean and harassed. That is how I feel deep down inside, the unending fear and vigilance. The readiness to cut loose and move on, find another lair, never safe, never able to rest. The way wild animals feel, and who is to say it is not natural? But I felt sick to my stomach standing there.

Nothing to drink over, all the same. And I should know by now that there is no way to take on multinationals at their own game and be heard.