Weekend rambles

Weekend and at last it’s time to log off and  relax, meet friends, think about parties and walking through vineyards, sleeping late, brunches  overlooking the dam, talking around the fire  while watching the stars overhead. Early summers out here are  heaven..

Like father, like son. Hemingway’s son Gregory and his tormented life in the shadow of Papa. I bet he could write, too:

There are lengthy though discerning portraits of minor characters in Hendrickson’s book. They are of interest mainly because they are neglected witnesses.  A kind of rosy nostalgia seems to be taking over when suddenly, in the final riveting act, there enters a grotesque, almost demonic figure, tortured, mesmerizing, a doctor with the prodigious wreckage of three wives, seven or eight children, alcohol, drugs, and adultery trailing behind him, a transvestite who finally has a sex change operation and ends up dying in jail: the always troubled, gifted youngest son, Gregory Hemingway.

He is last seen sitting on the curb in Key Biscayne one morning after having been arrested the night before trying to get through a security gate. He’s in a hospital gown but otherwise naked with some clothes and black high heels bunched in one hand. He had streaked, almost whitish hair that morning, painted toenails, and as the police approached was trying to put on a flowered thong. Five days later he died of a heart attack while being held in a Women’s Detention Center. He was listed as Gloria Hemingway. This was in 2001; he was sixty-nine years old.

All of you in the northern hemisphere in autumn, I’m thinking of you. Here’s William Stafford:

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

And out here it is insanely hot and everyone is chopping wood, lighting fires and defrosting lamb chops or steak for  a braai (barbecue). Last week was National Braai Day but in reality every hot summer day here is National Braai Day. I don’t identify much with rugby and braais, but sometimes it is inescapable. Alongside highways there are vendors braaiing goat, there are fires going  on sports fields, there are charcoal grills in backyards and  front gardens and small fires lit illegally on rocky beaches. Here’s the National Braai Day Anthem:

 

 

Another road through the woods

The sage has come into flower, that mealy blue that is unlike any other blue flower in the garden.

My birthday coincided with the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year,  and one of my friends brought along an apple and honey challah all plaited and darkly glossy on top, her grandmother’s recipe. We were all milling around eating, talking, arguing and laughing like mad things, when I noticed my neighbour D looking shyly at the  oversized ginormous dog out of the corner of his eye and realised he is deathly afraid of big dogs. Not that he would ever say so and I should have paid more attention before now.  Great Danes are gentle friendly oafs and  I am more worried about my small  dogs nipping someone in their girly excitement, but certain fears are not altogether rational and need to be respected. I slid my hand under the  big dog’s collar and saw D relax and  feel safe enough to eat a cup cake. The giant black dog just rolled his eyes at me in amazement as if he was playing Groucho Marx in The Three Stooges and yawned. How’s life, schweetie-pie?

Never again shall I use a word like h*y*p*n*o*domme on a public blog. How inexcusably naive I am in the ways of the Internet! Now I have been spammed by dozens of  porn seekers and disappointed fetishists. Serves you right, schweetie-pie.

I’ve been reading all about babies on blogs this last week. Owen had his second birthday and Earthenwitch settled down with her new daughter and her other little  daughter. Any day now Rachel is going to update us on her pregnancy. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and  maternal for a childless/childfree woman. Perhaps because I  brought up my younger sisters and brothers while my mother sat out on the verandah nursing  endless gins and tonics, the idea of having children didn’t appeal to me as an adult. Perhaps I had some idea I was going to follow my poor mother down that  long dismal path and would not make a good mother. So all my enjoyment of children has been from a [safe] distance.

When I was about to have an urgent radical hysterectomy back in 2007 and nurses were wheeling me towards the operating theatre groggy with pre-meds,  a nurse came up  and showed me a newborn baby, holding out the bundle out to me, her face beaming. I was about to lose my unused womb  and the sight of that tiny  crumpled pink face gave me a strange feeling I couldn’t name. Not loss exactly, not regret exactly, but something that made the world hollow for a moment. As if I was in the echo chamber of my own past, looking down a dim tunnel back to the turning point on some sunlit day when I decided I would never have children.

Clarice Lispector on the artist Paul Klee: “Were I to spend too much time looking at Landscape with Yellow Birds, I should never be able to turn back. Courage and cowardice are in constant play. I am terrified by this vision which could be irremediable and perhaps even a vision of freedom. The habit of looking through prison bars, the comfort of holding on to the bars with both hands, while looking.”

Inescapable solitude

And it was a very enjoyable birthday too.

No basil available, so I put in seedlings of  coriander and flat-leaf parsley. As I finished tucking plants into big old terracotta pots and went off to find my watering can, my Giant Dane of a dog clambered up into the pots and trod on the  seedlings. I yelled at him and he wagged his tail at me, looking like an ungainly trapeze artist. Only one pot was cracked and  a few seedlings survived. Dogs will be dogs.

Had a call from my friend Pia. We used to meet for coffee  in the crypt of Hereford cathedral a few years ago. That sounds gothic or a little morbid, but there is a coffee shop or tea room in the crypt and we sat amongst the medieval tombs and  obituary stones talking about books and recipes and travel.  I loved  that cathedral because it had such an unchurchy feel about it, dating back to the 12th century, with a chained library of rare manuscripts including the Mappa Mundi and dazzling stained glass windows in a chapel dedicated to the poet Thomas Traherne. ‘More tea, vicar?’ Pia would say, and we would discuss why female orgasms should always be multiple. Then we would wander around the grassy lawns and steal a handful of ripe black-red mulberries from an ancient bendy tree, sit beside the River Wye and watch joggers running past in the mild summery heat

Pia has  suffered from a baffling chronic fatigue syndrome for the last year that keeps her in bed most days of the week. She announced last night that she has decided to become an online hypnodomme.

Mary: ‘What?’

Pia: ‘Oh it’s the latest thing, everyone on Facebook is joining hypnosis fetish communities. You go online calling yourself Madame Cruella Titibooboo and  hypnotise men who want to be hypnotised and  erotically dominated by women. You call yourself a sensual hypnodomme and sing to submissive men on Skype until they fall into a semi-conscious state and become amenable to acting out their deepest fetish fantasies.’

Mary: ‘Oh, you mean sex worker stuff? What about stalkers?’

Pia: ‘No, it isn’t sex work at all, this is just a cosy little non-judgmental niche on the web. Very moral and proper except for all the dirty talk. And the men don’t remember what happens under hypnosis, but they  send along  little horseriding crops and leather boots anyway, just out of gratitude.’

Mary: ‘Earth calling Pia? You can’t sing, you’re tone deaf. This sounds like those dreary encounters in chat rooms we all stopped doing 15 years ago. Don’t give your address to a stranger who wants to send you high-heeled boots and whips. Are you spending too much time online these days?’

Pia (cunningly) : ‘I have the erotic gifts sent to the Anglican convent bookshop for collection.’

I feel a new steampunk novella coming on: Harriet the Sneaky Hypnodomme. All my courtesan fantasies are coming back as fictional impulses, it must be the spring.

On a more sobering note, pun ha-ha, a quotatiuon from Guy Kettelhack’s Sober & Free: Making Your Recovery Work For You. I get very lonely out here in the mountains when the work isn’t going well and there is no phone reception or the Internet goes down, but the difference now is that when I was drinking I felt not only lonely but unlovable, incapable of befriending others or deserving their love. That gave the loneliness a very bleak edge. I don’t agree with Kettelhack that  recovering alcoholics or addicts have to look on the human condition with more depth and breadth than  others, but self-loathing and shame makes loneliness more of a prison.

“Inescapably, addiction is a disease of isolation, of acute loneliness. . . .
Judging from the intense despair this loneliness can engender in us, the roots
of this feeling of separateness go deep.

. . . in some deep sense, we don’t feel “cared for”. We need only look at our
own individual experience. Whatever the source of the profound disconnection so
many of us feel and have felt (before, during and after drinking and drugging),
few of us haven’t felt disconnected. And for a good reason. In a sense, it IS
true that we’re separate and apart.

. . . one of the bedrock conditions of sobriety is breaking through isolation,
realizing we are not alone. We can’t recover, it seems, without exploring,
celebrating, making rich use of what connects us: we need each other. But also
we ARE alone.

. . . Coming to terms with this inescapable loneness is a challenge to any human
being seeking self-knowledge, but it seems to be especially difficult for
alcoholics and addicts. Addictions often open a kind of window through which
we are forced – in recovery anyway – to look upon the human condition with more
depth and breadth than nonaddicts ever NEED to do. Alcoholics and addicts MUST
examine their pain in order to heal . . . Facing pain isn’t a lot of fun. And
a part of the pain we face in this human condition is the realization of our
essential loneness.

But, as with so much else in recovery, we can enter this dark, cold territory
without destroying ourselves; we can approach it with curiosity and care,
knowing there is more to be found in this dark than we realized. What we find
does not have to cripple us. In fact, what we find can lead us to deeper
healing and serenity than we’ve ever known before.”

Tales of basil and tarragon

Another birthday in  what I sometimes think of as the years of reprieve. Lay in bed this morning thinking how much happier I am now than I was a decade ago.

Hugs and kisses, calls from  friends here and from  a lovely friend in the UK who also sent me a copy of Richard Morais’ The Hundred-Foot Journey, a novel that is really just an excuse to write all about food. Perfect reading  at this time of year when the asparagus, artichokes, mange touts and  tiny broad beans are in season. My neighbour Thinus (not his real name) has painted a watercolour of a  pink hybrid tea rose and framed it for me. My housemate is going to grill lamb cutlets for supper. If the wind dies down I shall go out and plant basil, purple opal basil and  Thai holy basil and another  lush green leafy basil that has the most intoxicating (did I say that?) spicy  fragrance. In summer you cannot have too much basil.

Another neighbour came by to talk to me about recipes for tarragon chicken. I can talk about  tarragon chicken for  hours, just as I can sit messing with  dug earth and basil seedlings for hours. In my 20s I had no idea of the woman I would become and imagined I would spend my  mature years playing Colette’s courtesan Léa in Chéri and seducing unsuitable oversexed young men who would then steal my pearls and break my heart. Bereft, bewitched, bothered and bewildered, a madwoman with withered breasts and frizzled grey hair like a shock of Medusa snakes, I would  then  write erotic  fiction and find myself banned and ostracised by all even though some would call me a genius and I would  live alone in my bare attic room smoking hashish and  toying with absinthe.

No basil leaves or  roast chicken  for that poor woman.

Tarragon chicken. Years and years ago I had a friend I shall call Kalliope (an assumed name) who  married a wealthy proctologist about 40 years older than her. She shrugged when we spoke of love and admitted privately that she had married for money. When I had dinner with them, she would talk about George Clooney’s  indecently cleft chin and the proctologist would talk about the gorier moments of colonic-rectal surgery.

As a marriage it should not have worked, pragmatic to the point of mercenary. But Kalliope turned out to be an excellent cook and within a few years she was fat,  luscious and contented, and he too became rotund and more secure in the relationship. I’m sure there is a great deal more to this story, but married couples guard their secrets. Kalliope would make what she called Poulet a l’Estragon Extraordinaire while I sat in the  kitchen and learned from her. She simplified the recipe from Elizabeth David and  smeared the plump organic  chicken all over with  softened butter and fresh chopped tarragon. Then she put a fistful of butter and tarragon into the cavity and roasted the  chicken in a medium oven for 45 minutes, turning it over halfway through. She didn’t flame the chicken with brandy or add cream to the gravy. She just  tossed a  green salad with a Dijon vinaigrette and set out  crusty sourdough bread.

It tasted extraordinary, so good that I would lie awake  wishing  she would leave the  proctologist and run away with me. Roast chicken with tarragon is erotic heaven.

When my wild hours come

My neighbours had to have their elderly dog humanely destroyed yesterday, a sad day for them, and it was sad too not to hear his cheerful barking when I went out into the garden to fill up the bird bath with water and cut lavender before the bees wake up and resent the intrusion.

Tomorrow has been officially declared World Rabies Day, which  makes me a trifle tetchy because  tomorrow is my birthday, not a soberversary but a birthday-birthday. As a child in East Africa I grew up with rabies scares and support more awareness on the disease but I wish my birthday could have been named as International Ice Cream Day or something more festive. At the weekend I shall celebrate my birthday at the weekend with friends and plenty of homemade ice cream.

It is a week of mourning here because of the death of Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan eco-warrior, from ovarian cancer at the age of 71. A remarkable activist who  encouraged poor women to plant  30-million trees and restore many deforested and arid areas of Kenya, went to prison, was beaten, harassed and  threatened before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

“It is evident that many wars are fought over resources which are now becoming increasingly scarce. If we conserved our resources better, fighting over them would not then occur…so, protecting the global environment is directly related to securing peace…those of us who understand the complex concept of the environment have the burden to act. We must not tire, we must not give up, we must persist.”

Bunches of lavender on the windowsill in the bathroom, more bunches tied and suspended above the kitchen counter, tall airy wands of  French lavender with a sharply astringent  fragrance that fills the house. Outside the tapestry of trees is thickening with intricate deep foliage. A green world, tunneled, canopied and feathered with shadow.

Reading  notes  from a sober friend on  her struggle with melancholy, a weariness and gloom that darkens  each day, makes her reality darker than she knows it to be, sours her interactions with family and obscures what is vital and  promising all around her. My own struggle this last year has been with anxieties, some realistic  (the housemate’s angina,  strained finances, unsafety) and some the wild imaginings that arise after the midnight hour. We share something though: the challenge of  what to do with the feelings surfacing after years of  chemical numbness and suppression. What cannot be changed must be endured, the difficulty of living with ourselves, cultivating patience. Waiting to glimpse light at the end of a tunnel, reminding ourselves there is both light and dark out there even if we are floundering in obscurity.

Lines from John Berryman come to  both of us as consolation:

Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;
achieve in me patience till the thing be done,
a careful view of my achievement come.

Clockwork heart

Monday afternoon and I have zapped my  software with Firefox, a self-induced upgrade on a jaded and dicey computer. Nobody in the known universe uses Internet Explorer any longer, an Internet expertise executive from  some town west of the mountains told me. So there we go. My monitor is clicking away at me like  a Geiger counter, tick, tick, tick, as if its clockwork heart has a spring loose.

Five burly but lazy men have arrived to continue with the fencing after three weeks away. They are sitting on the grass in front telling rugby jokes and cuffing off one another’s baseball caps.

‘We’re just about there,’ shouted one of them happily, waving to me. I don’t know how he can say that. There are deep holes and mangled vegetation and  nothing is in a straight line. This security fencing is going to look ugly, hideous,  an eyesore, and I must brace myself. Or go and stick sharp pins in a wax effigy of the landlord. If I ever sewed on buttons or repaired my clothes, I would have pins around. No wax either.

The dog loves everyone. His new delight is to lie sprawled across doorways and similar liminal spaces between worlds and then get up very quickly when anyone tries to step over him. Hooray for the rough and tumble of domestic life! I am so preoccupied with  the bad dreams of colossal social failure implied in Occupy Wall Street that I keep forgetting to watch out for unsleeping dogs, a metaphor perhaps.

The fencing constructors are going away again. It is too late in the day for them to get much done, they say,  and they all pat the dog and assure me they will be back at the crack of dawn tomorrow or  sometime in the near future.

Letting the sea horses out to play

Monday morning and I am incapable of philosophical thought, a great pity because my mermaid needs to make a decision about her ontological status as a  woman with a  tail. I had a fit of inspiration last night and wrote two new chapters of fiction all about sea horses and the hippocampus, the colour blue in a tidal grotto, a fat-breasted manatee and the Chaldean sea god Oannes. My little mermaid is sitting  all alone on a rock singing to herself and staring down through watery depths to where the bones of drowned sailors lie. I have no idea what she will do next.

The small boy who lives three streets away is going to turn five and his parents are giving him Maurice Sendak’s first book in 30 years, Bumble-Ardy, about a little pig who throws a wild and  wicked birthday party for himself because he has never been allowed to celebrate his birthday. The parents are scared by Maurice Sendak, but their children are not. From an interview with Sendak:

In interviews you’ve spoken disparagingly about what you call “Kiddiebookland,” the kingdom of saccharine, squeaky-clean books that depict children as innocent and guileless. Why do the authors and publishers of these books misjudge children and childhood?

Well, when a kid writes to me–as a kid did write to me–and says: “I hate your book. I hope you die soon. Cordially.” Well, the combination of “I hope you die soon” and “cordially” is wonderful. It shows how bewildering the whole thing was to her–and to me.

She was allowing herself to hate. “I hate your book.” But she’d learned in school that you’re supposed to end your letter with the words “cordially” or “best wishes.” And so they combine both without thinking there’s something goofy in such a thing. But that’s their charm, and that’s what we lose by growing up–lose, lose, lose. And if we’re lucky, it happens again when we’re old. And I’d like to believe that it is happening to me. Things that were so wonderful to me come back now. And I’m so grateful–because I wouldn’t know how to start otherwise. But it’s happening. And I think Bumble-Ardy is in a first, for me, in many ways.

From an email to a friend:

One thing I have always resisted is the idea that we are hard-wired for certain grim destinies or futures — once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, always a loser, always having to settle for less, always somehow wounded or incapable, etc. That kind of doom-and-gloom thinking. The other day I was thinking about the phrase we mentioned a few weeks ago ‘cunning, baffling and powerful’ which makes so much sense in certain contexts, but not in others. It struck me that it is anthropomorphic. As if we were describing a person or a bogeyman, not an addiction. And alcohol or the addiction to alcohol is not in itself cunning or baffling or powerful, that is just how we feel about it and about our need of it. Once we stop drinking, there is nothing to fear. And people get sober every single day. We are capable of change and able to reclaim our lives, work to change our situations and resolve long-standing problems. We are resourceful and creative, all of us. Unlearning ways in which we give away our power is part of that.

Memory hold the door

There are baby horned owls nesting in an old oak tree at the end of the road. I tiptoed down to look at them early this morning, so fierce and fluffy. I wish I could post pics. That disapproving frown from a tiny puffed-up owl is enchantment as rebukes go.

In between proofreading a draft chapter  I wrote last week — bristling with typos, alas –and marinading chicken drumsticks for  grilling later, I have been rereading WG Sebald’s novel Austerlitz.

One of the great writer loves of my life is WG Sebald, best-known for The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. When I found his writing I woke up, although I had not known I was sleeping. In my adult life I had lived through a great social convulsion, the ending of apartheid and  suddenly nobody spoke of the past. It had become fixed and frozen, unmentionable. Although racism had not gone away, the history of racial injustice could not be mentioned. We all wanted to forget, to move on, to pretend it had never happened. I had no way of understanding this shared forgetting or breaking the silence, until I read Austerlitz and woke up from the deep dreaming of complicity.  

In 1965 Sebald was a German professor of literature who left his homeland and emigrated to the UK and grimy postwar Manchester. He did this because ‘in his view, the German university system was still dominated by a culture of silence and forgetfulness about the all-too-recent Nazi past’.

As a matter of fact there is an interesting parallel between the solving of a crime and the way in which memory works.  You try to shed light on something in your mind.  Somewhere, pieces of evidence must be lying around under the carpet or in the loft or in other hidden places that offer explanations for the course of your own life.  That is why writing is also a forensic activity.

In English red-brick universities Sebald avoided teaching the great German or European writers such as Goethe, Thomas Mann or even Kafka, and  instead introduced his puzzled students to  outsider voices such as  the schizophrenic poet Ernst Herbeck and the Austrian-Jewish Holocaust survivor Jean Améry. In a controversial essay, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, he attacked the popular writer Alfred Andersch on moral grounds for divorcing his Jewish wife during the war. Sebald wrote about the German cities bombed by the Allies. He wrote about the silence and forgetting. Again and again in critical essays and  novels, he looked at people’s ability to forget what they do not want to know. It is painful to live with memories. It is dangerous to live without them.

…certainly it is an almost biological fact that forgetting is what keeps us going…So naturally, there is a curious dialectic between forgetting and remembering, and they’re not just two opposed moral categories, one positive and the other negative, but they’re interlaced in an extremely complicated way and in a different fashion in each individual.

In recovery I have battled  at times with memory — what to put aside, forget for the time being, or discard like useless debris. The painful uncertain memories of why I did what I did, what role alcoholism played in my life,  the guilt-stricken terrors and  humiliations, the self-inflicted  chaos and  the problem of memories that make no sense. Why was I sitting in that hotel room on the outskirts of the city on a windy afternoon with no money and what had made me so suicidal? Why  did I decide to walk home from that party all alone and barefoot at 3am? And then there are the memories that  won’t leave, the more haunting questions of  ‘what if’ or persisting sensations of suppressed love. Many of us who are not  in recovery live with this too, old griefs and questions, saying goodbye at an airport, packing up belongings in a house that has ceased to be a home.

Forgetting keeps us going. But I find so often that what I have forgotten I repeat or recreate for myself again and so I must recall what I would rather forget. And forgetting is loss, this too. The unremembered black-outs, the mysterious absence from the self, the disorder of the room hinting at what might have happened the night before. And that self that is now me, running from her past along with so many others in flight, not knowing the past would pursue us through the open door into a future of both possibility and regret.

“…the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.”

Out on a limb

My blog has a bug and wants me to upgrade Internet Explorer. It won’t let me post comments on my blog page right now. Apparently I pose a security threat to my own blog. Story of my damn life. I may have to pretend I am somebody else and sneak in my comments.

The rugby world cup continues. Ireland has beaten Australia. South Africa beat Namibia 85-nil. Rumania is due for a beating from England. Yay! Boo! Beyond that I know nothing. At a neighbour’s house I watched a TV food programme on Greek cooking while everyone else talked rugby.

Did I feel excluded? Yes

Did I mind? No. Rugby does not feature on my personal radar. I don’t get it.

In the Greek foodie programme, the camera panned down to scanty bushes of thyme, origanum and sage  growing on a bare rocky hillside baked by the sun and nibbled incessantly by goats. The programme presenter, a pale-faced and suffering Brit, was amazed by the strength and pepperiness of the dusty small leaves. ‘Good God,’ he said.

This made me so happy. Some time in the summer of 2002 I found myself in a London Tesco’s supermarket  shopping for a Mediterranean  supper I would prepare for my friend Nomphisa who was staying in a smart Georgian townhouse in Chelsea. I picked and tested a few  basil leaves from a bright green,  lushly leaved  bush (fortunately unspotted by a shop detective, that kind of tasting before you buy is seen as grand larceny in the UK). The basil tasted of nothing. Water and juiciness and nothing. It was locally and organically grown in a polytunnel or greenhouse. I made shepherd’s pie instead.

 Herbs thrive on sunlight and ferocious heat. Heat means sugar and the deprivation of water means concentrated flavour. Luscious red tomoatoes in the UK swell to majestic proportions in even a wet summer and taste sweet and watery. Unless you  have eaten a sunbaked Mediterranean or African tomato, a little scarred and misshapen and  intensely tomatoey, you haven’t lived. In the garden my thyme and origanum bushes are thriving  as the days get hotter and longer. The chillies are just starting, fierce little piri piri African chillies from Mozambique and Zanzibar. Piri piri is a savage relative of the Caribbean birds-eye chilli..

In between watching rugby matches next door with the rugby-loving neighbours, the housemate plans to take the new puppy to a Bark for Life fundraiser dog show organised by a group of villagers collecting money for cancer  research. The housemate has no doubt that the dog will win all categories and come home covered in blue rosettes and ribbons. She intends to put his engraved silver cup and rosettes on top of the  armoire in the living room. I doubt the huge disobedient Great Dane pup will win anything because the judges all own small pretty poodle-like dogs themselves, but I can’t go along because I am catching up on  work. We had a power cut the other day and I lost  a whole file of notes.

Myself and the housemate are completely different personalities and (mostly) enjoy the differences. We are both regarded as  left-wing radicals by some of the villagers and sexual deviants by other villagers and as friendly helpful neighbours by other villagers. Some villagers hold all three views at once.

Difference and commonality is one of those topics I keep coming back to. Right now my fictional mermaid  is feeling  very different from those in her underwater world as well as those in her landloving  world. She loves someone who will only love her back if she changes herself to  fit in with his  way of living. Lose the tail! he has commanded. Lose the legs,  why don’t you? she mutters under her breath, flaunting her glittery scales and fishiness 

It isn’t a mystery why we think differently. Some of it has to do with privilege or  deprivation and some of it has to do with the ideologies that are spooned into us with smiles and rewards from when we are little children.

Some of us grow up convinced the world is against us, some of us feel our families and  countries are misunderstood and  betrayed, some of us feel we are better than and some of us feel different from. Some of us  feel it is disloyal to challenge the beliefs held by our parents and grandparents. Some of us came out of the womb screaming our difference. Some of us woke up one fine morning and realised we need to fight against inhumane and evil  policies or wars. Some of us go on thinking that politics spoils art or that we need to be positive and not negative even if the negative  is sitting right there at the kitchen table like Goldilocks eating up all the porridge in the littlest bear’s bowl. Any mention of religion or Higher Powers brings some of us out in hives. Some of us don’t mind gay or lesbian people so long as our children don’t become them. Some of us think of immigrants as human cockroaches. Some of us are ashamed of how we secretly feel about Jews or Muslims and some of us get frightened or enraged when we see angry teenagers looting  shops on television. For some of us the Third World is somebody else’s problem. For others of us  the Third World is just another damn thing intended to make us feel guilty. Some of us are the Third World.

We go on listening to and reading one another on blogs and forums and mailing lists and in meetings. Sometimes we go on disagreeing and sometimes we change our minds. Sometimes  we stop listening. Sometimes  posters get silenced or excluded from the conversation. Sometimes they refuse to  belong. That’s just how it is.

A dream for the spring equinox

The musk roses in the hedge are breaking into flower, baby-faced pink and violet and  white. Vernal equinox here in the southern hemisphere.

Last night I dreamt about Fr Cedric, a kindly elderly Jesuit I knew as a friend when I was a young woman. In the dream he was pointing out a white deer standing under mottled trees, almost invisible in the shadows and light dappling the woodland. I couldn’t see it but knew it was there.

Fr Cedric was born in 1915, ordained in 1947 and when I knew him, he was in his late 70s. He was very formal and  soft-spoken with big surprised brown eyes under a thatch of white hair, only rarely wore a collar or cassock. He tried over and over again to give up smoking and failed.

We talked about books and I shared my more profound (and borrowed) ideas on prayer. I didn’t talk to him about my real life because I was afraid of shocking or offending him. He seemed delicate and vulnerable, always thinking the best of everyone. I thought he was otherworldly and  a bit clueless.

When I told Fr Cedric I was going off on retreat for 30 days ( as an ardent if dubious Catholic convert I was not one to do things by half), he just nodded and gave me a book by William Johnston on mystical prayer, titled The Inner Eye of Love. Then he suggested I plant a tree at the retreat centre, an old farmhouse with rambly woodland gardens.

 Off I went and sat in silence for a month. The spiritual director I had been assigned was not around and I had nobody to talk with. In one way this was a relief. When the bell rang,  I had meals with the nuns in silence. Most of the day I wandered around the grounds and sat in the chapel trying not to fall asleep. I thought about  religion, sexism, misogyny and hatred of the body a great deal and  then I thought about how much I longed for some kind of peacefulness, security and certainty in my life. The writings of Catholic mystic William Johnston were incomprehensible to me. I felt as if I was not doing things right, that I should try harder, that I should fast or stay up all night in a vigil. But instead I ate up the stodgy meals and daydreamed far too much and slept like a log. My seedling tree, a CapeChestnut, outgrew its pot and I transplanted it into the ground and watched it put out tiny reddish-green leaves. Then I grew a tough ivy leaved pelargonium from a cutting, watering the pot  on my bedroom windowsill in the retreat centre. I found another  pot and grew a small crassula with bubbled leaves strung along the stem like rosary beads on a string.

In the second week of my retreat I had a dream in which I was sitting praying in the Lady chapel in front of a statue of the Virgin. As I sat saying  prayers I heard a faint humming or buzzing noise. I approached the statue above the bed of lit candles and  realized that the statue of the Virgin was snoring. My prayers had put the Mother of God to sleep.

 At times I thought those 30 days would never end. I wrote Fr Cedric a letter in which I assured him my prayer life had become quite mystical and said  that William Johnston was food for my hungry soul. I don’t think I was conscious of lying to him, I just thought this was how one spoke to priests. I didn’t talk about  my little tree because I thought gardening was boring and men didn’t garden much.

For a year or so after I finished my month of silence, it seemed the world was too noisy. At some point  on that retreat I had parted ways with the Catholic church. I felt I was not going to make a good Catholic and that the church could not save me from myself. I moved on and went overseas.

 Years later, in 2005, I met a woman who had been on retreat with me in the old farmhouse. She was now with the Maryknoll sisters inNicaragua and  told me that my chestnut tree had grown into a beauty, a shady spreading tree in the grounds of the retreat centre. The trunk was curiously shaped and  the tree was known as  the Sleeping Virgin. 

She also told me that Fr Cedric had died at the age of 85. For the first time I learned that he had been renowned as a mystic, someone  sought after for his wisdom and goodness by  the famous and infamous worldwide. He had been banned by the church from speaking or preaching in public and his books barred from publication because his views were seen as heretical. He had led a very lonely life, ostracized and misunderstood despite his reputation as a thinker and reformer.  ‘Friendless,’ said the Maryknoll sister and I had a moment of intense and bitter regret that I had not spoken to Fr Cedric as a human being, somebody I might have come to trust. A kindred spirit, a friend of the heart.

William Johnston: And if there is mysticism in the Sermon on the Mount. this is the mysticism of the present moment — a moment that is lived without anxiety about the future or fear of the past, without preoccupation about what I shall eat or drink. … Or one could speak about how the inner eyes came to see the glory of love active in the universe.