A complex human thing

Out in the newly planted garden a small feral cat has scratched up seedlings and small herbs. I shall have to start over and spray citronella oil on the soil to discourage the cat without harming him in any way.

One of South Africa’s leading novelists and human rights activists, Nadine Gordimer, has given a thought-provoking speech at the Hay book festival in the UK:

Asked to name her most significant authors, she emphasised Proust, whom she had read in English as a girl, later in French, and recently for a third time. “I realised in anguish there were some books I’d better reread before I die, so I decided to read it again in French,” she said.

When she was a girl, she said, “it showed me what a complex human thing was love; how it is a basic human relation that has nothing to do with the fact that one had to get married and have children. It also gave me an idea of freedom, and the trouble one might get into because of it.”

My favourite dish right now is my harissa, feta , mint and carrot salad, zingy and surprising. Here, adapted from Smitten Kitchen. is the recipe for those who like to live dangerously (when it comes to harissa in any case):

Carrot Salad with Harissa, Feta and Mint

3/4lb carrots, peeled, trimmed and coarsely grated or julienned if you have the patience

4 tablespoons olive oil
1 crushed clove of garlic

1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds or about half as much, ground in a pestle and mortar

3/4 teaspoon cumin seeds or about half as much, ground

1/2 teaspoon paprika — I use sweet smoked papriika
3/4 teaspoon harissa paste (a North African paste, very spicy and hot) 

1/2 teaspoon sugar
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice (I use limes)

2 tablespoons flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
2 tablespoons fresh mint, finely chopped
100 grams good quality feta, crumbled or chopped into bits

In a small sauté pan, fry the garlic, caraway, cumin, paprika, harissa and sugar in the oil until fragrant, about one to two minutes. Remove from heat and add the lemon juice and a pinch of salt. Pour over the carrots and mix. Add the herbs, toss and leave to infuse for an hour and add the feta just before serving.

Oh and there’s book I am determined to buy just for the title alone, mentioned in an email from a botanist friend: Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority

Never pure, never perfect — but progressing in a wobbly hopeful kind of way. The snow on the mountains is melting and ditches are filled with icy clear water, the lemons, guavas and avocados on trees in my kitchen garden are ripening all together all at once and must be picked, a new friend is celebrating six months sober, another  friend has relapsed and may or may not get sober again, As I was thinking about her plight early this morning, I came across this passage in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and reminded myself yet again  of my own story of drinking ad infinitum all the way down to the end of my tether –

“Heaven knows, we have tried hard enough and long enough to drink like other people.  Here are some of the methods we have tried:  Drinking beer only, limiting the number of drinks, never drinking alone, never drinking in the morning, drinking only at home, never having it in the house, never drinking during business hours, drinking only at parties, switching from scotch to brandy, drinking only natural wines, agreeing to resign if ever drunk on the job, taking a trip, not taking a trip, swearing off forever (with and without a solemn oath), taking more physical exercise, reading inspirational books, going to health farms and sanitariums, accepting voluntary commitment to asylums–we could increase the list ad infinitum.”

Reawakening to gratitude

Went out in the darkness with a big white horned moon overhead and made shallow  rills and poked holes in the good black dirt so that I could plant coriander seeds, specks of rocket. dots of garlic chives. As I was working out there in my dressing gown and dog-chewed slippers, shivering with cold and blissfully happy, I realised  again what makes my life  in sobriety so filled with abundance.

Silence.

We all need silence, that deep sweet stillness  found in quiet rooms, a garden at dawn, the depths of the night. And not just external cessation of noise, but silence within, a reprieve from the chattering greedy undecided mind. In active alcoholism, my thoughts were noisy and agitated, busy with justifications and defences and minimalising, noisy with guilt and remorse and what passed for prayers, rattling off pleas and promises and warnings to myself. The restless, irritable and discontented mind on the outs with itself as my life turned to ashes and left a bitter taste within.

Silence is not a luxury but a necessity in our modern lives. When I am able to listen to stillness and calm all around me and let that stillness enter my consciousness, I feel restored and whole again, a woman standing in the Garden of Eden made anew. The intangible benefits of silence fill up my life these days.

And in silence, there is time to reflect  and respond rather than react to external pressures and the trivialization and din of our daily life. So I come back to the work of Marylynne Robinson, one of our most thoughtful and critical of novelists and philosophers:

Whoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind itself.” The more the definition of mind is left to the parascientist – to Dennett and Dawkins and to reductive neurologists such as Steven Pinker and Michael Gazzaniga – the more political, moral and imaginative trouble we are corporately in.

Pushing religion out of the public sphere in the name of rationality, she insists, has had the effect of giving more room to world views that trivialise or demean the “felt life” of the human consciousness – the complexity, the liberty, the innovative capacity (and the self-delusional temptations) of mind as we experience it.

She is not alone in implying that without the transcendent we shall find ourselves unable, sooner or later, to make any sense of the full range of human self-awareness

Romance and mystery and dark undercurrents everywhere

Snow fell on the mountains here yesterday, the first snows of the winter, light blue-white and glittering. From the spare room, I dug out hot-water bottles, thick socks and thermal underwear, made minestrone soup and a butternut risotto to ward off the chill.

Today it is glacial but dazzling, with deep blue skies and sunshine. Off to the local garden centre, a sorry place, in search of herbs — Merwida  (not her real name) who runs the centre is a terrible plantswoman. I am not joking. She is plant-deaf and lets her plants become pot-bound, neglected, dried out. Fortunately, I found new stock in a damp corner: pineapple sage sparking with scarlet flowers, a prostate thyme from Cyprus, old-fashioned curly parsley and a large-leafed origanum. No winter savory, no chervil, no coriander.

As we walked out, Merwida said; ‘You know, I never dreamed I would end up working in a nursery. I meant to go into banking. I’m really a number-cruncher, not a gardening tree-hugging type. ‘

‘No kidding,’ I said drily.

‘It does baffle me that so many of us end up doing things for which we have no aptitude or passion, no vocation. It is more comprehensible in lives derailed by alcoholism, but  so many  just drift into jobs they don’t care about, wake up at 46, 55 or 62 and stare into the mirror wondering why and how and when. This staring into the mirror is often to do with menopause in women, or that nameless malaise which can affect men of a certain age, afraid to face their shaving mirrors and the face behind the image.

An insight I like from Jonathan Coe taking about his latest novel here:

The book is in part an attempt to find “strangeness at the heart of the deeply ordinary”. “If you look hard enough you can find romance and mystery and dark undercurrents everywhere in life – even in the most unprepossessing places, the Park Inn Hotel, Watford, or the cafe at Knutsford services, and I suppose doing that has – to put it rather grandly – become one of my mission statements as a writer.

A sober friend writes to me saying she is undergoing a difficult transition that not coincidentally  began after her Step 4.  She was blissful in early sobriety and began to wear purple, and tinted her hair a slippery ash blonde, then learned to dance the tango. She suddenly descended into the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno and all the reasons why she had drunk like a thirsty savage demon from the age of 32 onwards came up again, beckoning, threatening, cajoling. She rehearses her Step 5 in the shower and wears plaited garlic bulbs around her neck when she sleeps.  I laughed merrily on hearing this, which both startled and reassured her.

Living sober is like learning to breathe underwater for a long time — and then we come up for air.

Gone to graveyards every one

Yesterday I went around parts of the back garden  watering bushes and daylilies, agapanthus, herbs, pots and wooden barrels of plants, giving everything a good soaking in anticipation of a dry weekend. At about 4pm yesterday afternoon the rain began falling in a solid downpour and it rained all night. Sometimes that is how it goes. Last year I managed to plant out spring bulbs just hours before a hard frost struck all the new bulbs stone dead. And each winter the flowers freeze and shrivel as the north wind blows down between the mountains.

Where have all the flowers gone? I find myself wondering, but of course I am thinking about Memorial Day in America and the war-wounded gathering to mourn their dead, the long sad shadows cast by war. Where have all the young men gone? Gone to graveyards everyone… When I think of war and my brother’s death, the deaths of boys with whom I went to school, winter seems to creep into me and settle in my bones. On the anniversaries of wars, when stiff little red crepe poppies are worn, when I hear old military marches and bugle calls and bagpipes keening, I feel as if I have grown old without realising it, that something to do with war and tragedy has aged me. Remembering those who died so young brings only a sense of sadness, even to honour the dead brings only sadness.

Last night I finished my fiction piece and I shall leave it aside for two days and then retype it on Sunday evening, make final corrections and revisions, do a covering letter and send it off. It is a story that has kept coming back to me for two years now and it is all about love and secret gardens and childhood passions, and war, too, there is no escaping that aspect of my life or the reworking of bereavement in the mind. Somewhere Virginia Woolf writes in her diaries that she is creating a necropolis through her novels, a monument to those who died young — and she too would have been thinking of her beloved brother Thoby who died of typhoid diagnosed too late, but also she would have had in mind all the thousands and thousands of young gifted men going out into the trenches of World War I, to return poisoned with mustard gas, maimed and suffering the PTSD then called shell-shock. Or coming back in coffins draped with flags.

But out in the garden, the lavender is blooming and the olive trees shaking themselves free of rain water in a light wind. To be sober is to endure what cannot be pushed aside or overlooked, to mature into honouring grief and loss, to care and resist injustice and question the rationales given, the lies told, the necessity of war in our time.

The Death of a Soldier

Wallace Stevens

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.

Meeting life’s challenges

The day brightening despite looming clouds. I have just had a long conversation over the phone with a friend who was diagnosed this week with macular degeneration, a frightening diagnosis at the best of times.  I have had a long battle with my eyesight owing to detaching retinas and rubeotic glaucoma, but at least I do have some helpful suggestions on living with worsening vision. Living sober, that is. My drinking did nothing to help the liver/eye connection and I am lucky to have any sight at all today.

But it was good to be there for someone in distress and to talk from long experience, a change from sharing my limited experience of sobriety. In early days, a friend in AA told me that AA is not passive entertainment and the point is not to sit around waiting to be affirmed or to only read self-help literature and listen to tapes, but to move towards being able to CONTRIBUTE, to share my experience,strength and hope in meetings even if I felt shy or clueless, to help out with the practicalities at meetings — wash up cups and set out literature, help newcomers to find lifts and give out my phone number, to meet up after meetings with others newer than myself for coffee and to encourage and befriend them – in short, to get into the give-and-take of human relationships again. She pointed out to me that AA is not solipsistic or an end in itself, it is a bridge back to the grittiness of real life and we can take our new-found skills and willingness to be of service with us into the workplace and community involvement. Nothing builds self-esteem more solidly, in my experience, than to be of some use after years of drunken isolation and acting only as a social liability. Even if I am unable to get to meetings very often, I still have opportunities to contribute and make a small difference in my own community.

After we had chatted for a while, my friend said she might go out and give herself a treat. She didn’t mean that she would buy herself clothes, or even a book. She believes in a  concept to me but one which I like, that experiential purchases make us happier than material purchases — she would rather pay for dinner with  friends or a weekend retreat than a new sweater or pair of shoes. Experiences enrich us in a way that possessions don’t. Objects don’t love us back. I still opt for treating myself to books, which are experiential in a way I suppose…

And my friend is ordering through Amazon a book she has had recommended, former law professor Toni Bernhard’s How to be Sick, on living with chronic illness. Living skilfully and hopefully despite chronic illness. Living with the practice of gratitude.

I wrote about Buddhist-inspired practices that I’d devised on my own to help with the many difficulties that my husband and I were encountering – such as coping with the relentlessness of symptoms, weathering fear about the future, coming to terms with a life of relative isolation, facing the misunderstanding of others, and dealing with the health care system. Again, I used my personal experience to show the reader how to work with these practices.

The book was created slowly and with great difficulty. I wrote it lying on my bed, laptop on my stomach, notes strewn about on the blanket, printer within arm’s reach. Some days I would get so involved in a chapter that I’d work too long. The result would be an exacerbation of my symptoms that would leave me unable to write at all for several days or even for weeks.

There were also periods when I was simply too sick to even think of putting a book together. Then the project would be left untouched for months on end. Being so physically sick would sometimes have such a strong affect on my mental state that, during the darkest moments, I considered tossing out all the work I’d done, despairing of ever being able to complete it.

But mental states come and go—and in the end, I pressed on, determined to finish the book in the hope it would point the way for others to live skillfully and with equanimity and joy despite their stressful circumstances

Living at depth

Outside at dawn, watering the new pelargonium cuttings I took from my friend Char’s garden in the Swartland –old-fashioned pelargoniums, one with a pure white flower, the other a fresh lively pink, unhybridised by any garden centre, pelargoniums that would have been planted  120 years ago after being taken from where they grew wild in the bushveld. Here in South Africa we still have 18th-century roses flourishing in our older graveyards, roses long extinct in France or England, but which bloomed during the French Revolution and were possibly admired by Queen Victoria as a young woman.

Anyway, as I was watering the pelargoniums, I looked up and saw an white-faced owl returning from a night’s hunting in the fields and woodlands. Such a remarkable sight, the owl flying east backlit by the rising sun.

Woke from dreams that were not ‘drink dreams’ in that they didn’t involve images of alcohol or memories of drinking, but which were all about feeling lost, disoriented, wandering over swampy ground in a mist, as if I had lost my way in life. That brought back so acutely the way in which alcoholism sets us apart and  out on a limb, drifting and wandering and inwardly homeless. I woke up and looked around the dark bedroom — my books, the bedside table and lamp, pictures on the walls, the curtained window and old creaky door. Relief and gratitude filled me to the brim. These days I am rooted in my life, rooted in the love of friends, finally able to belong.

Year by year I come to understand more of the subtle and terrible ways in which  my alcoholism damaged and disoriented me, how lucky I have been  in recovery. The damage isn’t always  about waking up in gaol or getting into fights or crashing into cars or being evicted — alcoholism is also about the loss of self, that I became unrecognisable to myself, a stranger to all who knew me, somebody  adrift on the seas without a chart  and unable to set course by the stars. Lost.

And now of course the challenge is to live a useful and simple life, to contribute, to live deeply and soulfully, to live in a way that support and builds on gratitude.

From Thomas Merton:

“When we live superficially … we are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions … we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives.”

Principles of anonymity in AA

I have been meaning to put out a clarification on this for some time now, mostly because it is so important to me and I believe it to be one of the key defining characteristics of Alcoholics Anonymous.

When readers ask me if they can read something I have had published, I decline, because it would compromise my anonymity. As somebody who works in media and publishing, the principle of anonymity is something I value because I see what happens when alcoholic celebrities break anonymity to sing the praises of AA , then relapse and subsequently blame AA. Those who break anonymity even with the best intentions can so easily bring discredit on AA or misrepresent the traditions.

The principle of anonymity is there to protect AA as much as the individual. For those of us who owe a great deal to AA, this is  core to our participation and loyal service.

Taken from AA Conference-Approved Literature prepared by the General Service Office of AA:

Traditionally, A.A. members have always taken care to preserve their anonymity at the “public” level: press, radio, television, and films.

In the early days of A.A., when more stigma was attached to the term “alcoholic” than is the case today, this reluctance to be identified – and publicized – was easy to understand.

As the Fellowship of A.A. grew, the positive values of anonymity soon became apparent.

First, we know from experience that many problem drinkers might hesitate to turn to A.A. for help if they thought their problem might be discussed publicly, even inadvertently, by others. Newcomers should be able to seek help with complete assurance that their identities will not be disclosed to anyone outside the Fellowship.

Then, too, we believe that the concept of personal anonymity has a spiritual significance for us – that it discourages the drives for personal recognition, power, prestige, or profit that have caused difficulties in some societies. Much of our relative effectiveness in working with alcoholics might be impaired if we sought or accepted public recognition.

While each member of A.A. is free to make his or her own interpretations of A.A. tradition, no individual is ever recognized as a spokesperson for the Fellowship locally, nationally, or internationally. Each member speaks only for himself or herself.

A.A. is indebted to all media for their assistance in strengthening the Tradition of anonymity over the years. From time to time, the General Service Office contacts all major media in the United States and Canada, describing the Tradition and asking for cooperation in its observance.

An A.A. member may, for various reasons, “break anonymity” deliberately at the public level. Since this is a matter of individual choice and conscience, the Fellowship as a whole obviously has no control over such deviations from tradition. It is clear, however, that such individuals do not have the approval of the overwhelming majority of members.

Cry freedom

Another of those ‘went nowhere, saw nobody, did nothing’ days that go to make up this writer’s life. The ending of my latest fiction has derailed and I am not sure how to fix it.

A former friend of mine, a raging alcoholic ( that was me once: ‘raging’) has done a geographical escape  from a somewhat flat and unlovely farming metropolis in the north-east of South Africa only to find she is still stuck with herself and her bottle,  and now she is sending me a stream of woeful but drunkenly incoherent and melodramatic emails, pleading for sympathy and attention. Her ex-husband is sending me equally incoherent and maudlin emails because he is hopelessly addicted to the melodramas generated by her alcoholism. He wants her back  but without her bottle, her on-and-off lover, her spendthrift ways, her lies, her bills, her flirtatiousness, her sodden rages, her bottle. She wants a new life in which she can go on playing the starring role plus the  on-and-off lover as well as the husband, insists that the bottle is just a temporary necessity while she deals with  the anguished  love triangle. The on-and-off lover is drinking all by himself somewhere in a lonely fisherman’s cottage and at any moment he too will begin emailing me, fortified with Dutch courage.  Each of my correspondents proclaims that this situation is unbearable, intolerable, insufferable, but not one of them is ready to stop the charade. None of them will notice that I am not responding. My life may be a trifle dull, but it is a life that makes sense to me.

 ’I am trapped,’ writes the geographical escapee from the depths of her ever-present bottle, ‘it feels as if there no no way out of this prison. I feel I am condemned to live behind bars.’

We create our own prisons. That was the great insight of Immanuel Kant at the start of what would become known as the Enlightenment: ‘Enlightenment is the emancipation of a human being from a state of self-imposed tutelage.’

To be detained or incarcerated may take away material and physical liberty, but freedom is something else.  I have been thinking recently  about  the free spirit found in the prison literature of Albie Sachs, one of South Africa’s greatest judges of the Constutional Court here.

Justice Sachs gained international attention in 2005  when the Court overthrewSouth Africa’s  statute defining marriage to be between one man and one woman as a violation of the Constitution’s general mandate for equal protection for all and its specific mandate against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Justice Sachs is also recognized for the development of the differentiation between constitutional rights in three different degrees or generations of rights.

Sachs, a young South African barrister, who made a name for himself defending people prosecuted under the apartheid laws, was arrested on 1 October, 1963, under the Ninety Days Law, which permitted the detention of a person without charge for this period. On the 90th day he was freed, but only for a few minutes before being re-arrested and held for another 78 days, at which point he was released without any charge being brought against him.

During the 168 days of his imprisonment (the longest term that any white person had been detained under the Ninety Days Law) Albie Sachs was kept in solitary confinement. No human contact , no news of family.

On his release he went into exile in England and then Mozambique. In Maputo, Mozambique in 1988, he lost his arm and his sight in one eye when a bomb was placed in his car by South African security agents. After the bombing, he devoted himself to the preparations for a new democratic constitution for South Africa. He returned to South Africa and served as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the African National Congress.

In 1991 he won the Alan Paton Award  for his book Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. The book chronicles his response to the 1988 car bombing. He is also the author of Justice in South Africa (1974), The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966), Sexism and the Law (1979), The Free Diary of Albie Sachs (2004), and, most recently, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law (2009).

On 8 July 2008 Sachs was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) degree bythe University of Ulster  in recognition of his contribution to human rights and justice globally.

We create our own prisons and when we step out at last  into the sunlight of the spirit we realise that nobody can deprive us of freedom without our consent, our willingness to remain enslaved.

Travelling through wheatfields

Somebody  zapped by my spam detection filter wants to sell me Pan flutes made from carrots, as though I might be a superior musical donkey. The Internet is a strange marketplace –

As I was bending down to filch red onions from a wire vegetable basket in my kitchen yesterday morning, I twisted  my back clumsily and hurt something. Stood up and felt  dull twinges in unexpected places. Since then I have been moving around gingerly and wishing my life was not so sedentary — I walk, exercise and swim in summer, but I sit writing or editing or rewriting for hours every day and that is Not A Good Thing.

But despite me treading about like a cat on hot bricks, it was a great day, another reminder that sober living is good and gets better as time passes. We  all climbed into the microbus early and went over the fire-scarred mountain pass accompanied by wheezing and clicking noises from overheating brake pads, stopping en route to mollify the overheating  engine and  to buy fresh rolls, free-range farm eggs and bright green  limes in a small country town that was still  sleepyheaded on a hot cloudy Sunday morning. Bikers pulling in on their breakfast run, the smell of grilled boerewors drifting up the street. Then up through another pine-forested mountain pass or two, past Freedom Hill across the road from the prison where Mandela began his walk to freedom in 1994, and on to another sleepy village, grimy on the outskirts, with African Zionist leaders robed in white doing healing rituals and using water from a filthy stream littered with trash and dead dogs. Local municipalities don’t deal with sanitation effectively out in the rural areas and cholera epidemics break out  with fatal regularity each summer. Always this: alongside the beauty and  ordinariness of daily life here, the destitution and reminders of plague.

Coming down from the steep mountain pass with hairpin bends, we found ourselves – despite  squealing brakes  — amidst  the rolling wheat fields and low farmsteads of the Swartland, hawks and cranes black against the golden stubble, wide empty skies above us – and then with a final spurt we reached our destination, parked outside an old Edwardian homestead, shutters partly closed against the heat, dim high-ceilinged rooms, dark varnished wooden floors, wooden  beams above which had been smeared and darkened with whale oil a century ago. All of us crowding into a small Victorian kitchen  with bottle-green tongue-and-groove cupboards. My sweet friend was thrilled to see us and tearfully pointed out her latest error – she had  inexplicably painted the whole exterior an ugly dark pink she thought would come out buff. Like all old country homesteads, the plumbing is eccentric, with a deep growly echo in the toilet cistern, the electrical wiring illegal. The loft is haunted by what sounds like the ghost of an asthmatic owl. 

Char has begun work on the wonderful sprawling  garden –  oh how it will bake in summer, clay soil and bricked paths, too much gravel! But she says she will plant trees for shade and has created a fertile but unsightly compost pile  at the back of the garden, is trimming some runaway kikuyu grass,  reviving old  palm trees, pruned back faltering apricots and peaches, has filled in a koi pond colonised by a greedy kingfisher. Her aloes are already in flower, spikes of raw African colour,  and there is  a fig heavy with fruit in the mild winter. True, there is a blocked well, rainwater tanks that will cost too much, derelict garages and crumbling sheds, a new expensive security gate that does not open as it should.  A ghostly man in a long overcoat  is known to wander about the garden at twilight and his grave bears an indecipherable tombstone mounded under a wiry pittosporum tree.

We banished the ghosts by our noisy curious presence, lit a fire for char-grilling lamb and chicken, set out salads and bread and fruit  on tables standing on  the long verandah shaded by a mauve bougainvillea. The loft was explored via a trapdoor and  the ghostly owl revealed as a cozy family of wood pigeons nesting in a huddle of electrical wires. Plans were made for trenches to be dug in order to mix in sand and mulch to lighten the clay soil, the stove was safely reconnected — two of my women friends have degrees in engineering and ironically intend to begin living Off the Grid in the near future as they await the collapse of civilization as we know it  – the rainwater tanks made more viable on a platform, The microbus was disembowelled and fixed, and a bookcase moved into a back spare room. Paint samples were remixed for a better gentler colour for the outer walls and a deep-dish chicken, ham and leek pie heated in the oven. We can do things together that seem impossible  for the lone individual.

So we sat outside and talked about  political solutions to ecological crisis, why Martin Gardner who has just died at the age of 95 was a more intelligent sceptic than any of the New Atheists, what it means to be living with Peak Oil, good back-stretching exercises for lazy women, why the quest for the historical Jesus is doomed to failure, who will win the soccer World Cup, why Kenya needs to share  water from the Nile with Egypt,  the upcoming Ethiopian elections, how to counter homophobia in Malawi and Nigeria, what is meant by UK ‘multiculturalism’, the ultimate ingrediants needed to make perfect friable compost. We ate and dozed in the sunshine and Char got excited about using the unhaunted loft to store apples and invited all of us over again  to see the unblocking of the old well in a few months’ time. And then we climbed back into the good-as-new microbus and  began playing Annie Lennox CDs as we drove back across the golden wheatfields  and low white farmsteads, following the blue wall of the Langeberg peaks just visible  on the far horizon. The landscape we call home.

The compulsion to tell

The trip to visit Char has turned into an expedition as more and more locals want to come along. We are going to cram ourselves into an old microbus with a leaky sump (can that be right?) and there will be hampers layered with chicken, ham and leek pie, smoked salmon croquettes, antipasti with artichokes and hard-boiled duck eggs, salamis, cheeses, the hamper to be topped with  a large alcohol-free tiramisu. I hope the microbus makes it over the mountain passes. Char is thrilled and may buy a larger house just to make sure we can all stay the night.

More dazzling winter sunshine with the autumn leaves of the liquid ambar tree flame-coloured against blue skies. Two large squirrels have climbed into  the avocado tree and are teasing  the dogs, who are racing around and around yipping wildly.

Deciphering more of the forked labyrinth of Jorge Luis Borges, a long-time inspiration:

“Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”

How blogland shrinks, like a small island in the changeable ocean of the Internet! All the same, I hope Mary Christine  has a restful sabbatical.

Very pleased to see — at last! — that Marlene van Niekerk’s brilliant novel Agaat has been reviewed ion the New York Times.  Not an easy read but unforgettable:

Books like “Agaat,” the second novel by the South African writer Marlene van Niekerk, set in the last five decades of the departed century, are the reason people read novels, and the reason authors write them. It’s a monument to what the narrator calls “the compulsion to tell,” expressing truths that are too heartfelt, revelatory and damaging for proud people to speak aloud — or even to admit to themselves in private.

From an email I wrote this week to a friend tempted to drink:

How could you help yourself to hold steady when you get into an emotional state that makes you feel justified in drinking? You do have a great deal to cope with and it sounds distressing and frustrating but what would help you stay in balance?

All of us can phone others or email them or go to meetings and be with others, can pray in desperation or turn to anonline forum for advice, bring others into the crisis, reach for a Higher Power: but I found that I also needed to be able to find a way to be with myself in tolerating levels of frustration and anxiety or anger. I have found that sitting practice with breathing exercises helps me to sit out the moods and intensity of the urge to drink. Over time I have learned to exercise more patience with passing moods and to bring a degree of curiosity to the process — asking myself ‘How can I think more clearly here?’ ‘How can I stay centred and calm down?’  ‘What is blocking me from staying in one place and just observing what is going on?”

Getting to know oneself becomes unavoidable in sobriety. Sobriety is hard work, even with grace streaming into our lives, that unaccountable change within, the reality of belonging to a new community of others in recovery. Sobriety is not only a gift but a challenge; but only really difficult when we forget what went before.