Patience and tenacity

Crawled out of bed coughing and spluttering, scarcely human but  warmed by the messages of support and concern. Thank you so very much. Last night I couldn’t  even manage  chicken soup and  had some steamed broccoli, plain, which tasted like ambrosia. Lay propped up on pillows reading a  Jonathan Kellerman thriller. All night I tossed and turned between giant  stalks of  broccoli and  grimly smiling detectives of the Los Angeles  Police Department.

The housemate slept better, we are waiting for test results.

I squirted droplets of water onto tiny seedlings with an old syringe. Don’t knock it  until you’ve tried it, the seedlings flourish and  sprout  in abundance. Had a wild impulsive urge to make  towering mounds of  biodynamic compost, with  ground-up egg shells, coffee grounds,  mystical yarrow, pungent chicken droppings and chopped-up nettles, all bagged and concocted by the light of the silvery moon. Realised almost in the same thought that such magnificent broody smouldering heaps of compost would attract far too many insects and rodents in the fierce summer heat. Perhaps a  small smelly bucket kept at the far end of the garage? Maybe not.

Sat for 15 minutes of meditation, just to keep up the discipline. Where does the  determination to keep up a  habit or  practice come  from? Something that shapes each day,  helps when Pandora’s box flies open and all the winged horrors descend.

Tenacity again, the will to see justice done. Had an email this morning from my friend Y in Buenos Aires where she has flown over from Cape Town to  follow the Argentinian Dirty War trial. The trial, documenting 789 abuse cases, is the largest in the South American nation since 2003. Y’s father, a political journalist working out of Argentina, was drugged and  dropped alive  from a plane into the Rio del Plata — his killers in the military junta have never been brought to trial. Y still  wants to know what  happened to him; she was a small girl when he disappeared in the 1970s.  She writes letters each  month, signs petitions and protests, keeps searching and  pushing for more to be done. She keeps on hoping against hope for answers,  confessions and closure. It is estimated that more than 30 000 people  were tortured and killed between 1976 and 1983 in Argentina and their families fight on to know what happened and  to  bring those responsible to justice.

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