Old year burning away

Peaceful happy-enough days, the  green oaks darkening, the summer filled with birdsong. And yet waking  with a darkness like grief, filled with panic and dread. Unremembered  nightmares?

Tending two new herbs given to  me as a gift, a pot of French tarragon, a pot of  silver thyme. Bright silver shining leaves, that totem power of healing and  turning  food to ambrosia. Some shadow leaning over my  shoulder as I  water and  call to  the dogs. In a while I shall make what I optimistically  call a ‘rustic plum tart’ , using aromatic small blue Normandy plums known as Quetsches, not too sweet. There are friends to  email and call, neighbours to see. Those I love and  who give this life meaning in love reciprocated. Doing all the right things, simple good things, and hoping something steadies me,  stops the inexorable  fall into  an old  black well of despondency.

This year ending, going into the unknown,  holding in my heart this deeply loved broken battered old  world, the crushed dreams, the horrors and and all that  improbably beauty and good will. Those I have lost this past year, who have  gone ahead into death and  whatever lies beyond.Those spared. Those struggling and failing and  stumbling  along a  stony path, those of us who have lost our way, those of  us waiting for  morning,  for a new beginning, another chance. Moving here in this quiet garden between  trust and  cold terror,  uncertainty, flickering hope.  Asking for courage, to open up the heart and  welcome the stranger at the door. To go forward, step by step into  whatever  must come. Each time the sea  retreats.

The poems of  Louise Gluck echo in me

Saints

In our family, there were two saints,
my aunt and my grandmother.
But their lives were different.

My grandmother’s was tranquil, even at the end.
She was like a person walking in calm water;
for some reason
the sea couldn’t bring itself to hurt her.
When my aunt took the same path,
the waves broke over her, they attacked her,
which is how the Fates respond
to a true spiritual nature.

My grandmother was cautious, conservative:
that’s why she escaped suffering.
My aunt’s escaped nothing;
each time the sea retreats, someone she loves is taken away.

Still she won’t experience
the sea as evil. To her, it is what it is:
where it touches land, it must turn to violence

A midnight clear

Another golden-eyed morning in the countryside, rinsing the sticky bloom off an armful of ripe plums. Last night  I was woken at midnight by  my dogs wanting to go out and  play in the  moonlight. Garden brighter than  day, ablaze with blue-white light.

News headlines tell me that more than 1 000 people were killed on South African roads in December. Drunken driving, speeding, reckless driving, drunken driving.

A friend aged 62 stricken by the death of her elderly mother at 89. She says she feels again  like a small girl reaching out instinctively for the clasp of her mother’s hand, unsure what to do without that  hand squeezing back. Orphaned.  From Sandra Cisneros in Guernica:

I think one of the great primordial fears we have once we become conscious of our aloneness as children is the fear of losing our mother. We have that from the moment we realize we can lose her just in the supermarket. As a child, it was more terrifying than arithmetic. When I lost my father, I thought I learned about grief and transition. However, nobody tells you what it’s like to lose your mother. They don’t tell you that you’re going to feel like an orphan at whatever age you are as an adult. We tend to think of orphans as being the protagonists of stories we read as kids, and yet here you are: you’re an adult, you’re supposed to manage, you’re supposed to go on with your life, and you feel like a lost child.

All through December I have been gritting my teeth listening to bouncy jungles and Christmas carols followed by advertisements. Hating tunes I once loved. But now all the fuss is over, I  feel able to share one of the most haunting  versions of this old beauty:

Shreds of hope

The prickly still-green pods of the liquidambar tree are thudding down onto the corrugated  roof of the stoep.  A luscious  silver and  gravid full moon swells between the black  shapes of mountain each  night. Without warning, the season has  turned towards autumn. Grasses bleach along the  verges of the roads, the oaks are darkening, the air is clotted with red dust. The hottest months are still to come and yet autumn is hovering, the wheel edging over.

The  former art teacher wants a peppermint tart for  her birthday supper (oh the bitterness of those born just after  Christmas) and I would rather do  something fresh and delishioso with  peaches and raspberry puree, but, no, she is 82 (she says 79) and she wants her commercially degraded lookalike peppermint tart and that means I shall have to do something involving Orly Whip. Give me strength.

The small white dog known as Khlobie-wa-Kenobie  is undergoing canine hormonal surges and  dances outside on the grass like a fluffy white belly-dancer, twirling and jiggling under the avocado tree.  The other dogs find her embarrassing.

Today I sit and think about  endangered children every where because it is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the  babies slaughtered by Herod. Hurt or endangered children should be the reason we stop wars and check domestic violence in its tracks.

The year just past is much on my mind, as is the year to come. Rebecca Solnit on climate change:

The Earth we evolved to inhabit is turning into something more turbulent and unreliable at a pace too fast for most living things to adapt to. This means we are losing crucial aspects of our most irreplaceable, sublime gift, and some of us are suffering the loss now — from sea snails whose shells are dissolving  in acidified oceans to Hurricane Sandy survivors facing black mold and bad bureaucracy to horses starving nationwide because a devastating drought has pushed the cost of hay so high, to Bolivian farmers failing because the glaciers that watered their valleys have largely melted.

 

Sober community, and Anne Lamott who both drives me crazy and  enlightens me, on the promise of Advent that is  really a promise for all year round, including what my friend J calls the’ lost week of the year’:

“So three men from the recovery house next door help him to his feet,walk him to the halfway house and put him in the shower. They wash his clothes and shoes and give him their things to wear while he waits. They give him coffee and dinner, and they give him respect. I talked to these other men later, and even though they had very little sobriety, they did not cast this other guy off for not being well enough to be there. Somehow this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them. No one was pretending he wasn’t covered with shit, but there was a real sense of kinship. And that is what we mean when we talk about grace.

“Back at the meeting at the Episcopal Cathedral, I was just totally amazed by what I had seen. And I had a little shred of hope. I couldn’t have put it into words, but until that meeting, I had thought that I would recover with men and women like myself; which is to say, overeducated, fun to be with and housebroken. And that this would happen quickly and efficiently. But I was wrong. So I’ll tell you what the promise of Advent is: It is that God has set up a tent among us and will help us work together on our stuff. And this will only happen over time.”

 

 

A year turning over. Time to  pause and reflect, stand silent for a moment in gratitude, amazement, pain. The poet W S Merwin:

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

 

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

Embattled Queen of the World

The other day I put up an image of the  black Madonna and Child in stained  glass found in Regina Mundi Church in Soweto and thought I should write something about that church, so  dear to my heart and  like  nowhere else I know. To stand in that vast dimly lit space is  to encounter  brokenness and power in a new way, and this is not mere rhetoric.

But it isn’t easy to express. When I talk about  Christianity in Africa, I’m trying to write about something very different from the  declining  commodified churches of the West. Christianity in Africa is  problematic in many ways but also  alive, vibrant and challenging. The eloquent and  well-informed  social  critic Juan Cole has a piece on  the growth and  challenges of  Christianity in the  Middle east and parts of Africa:

There are more Middle Eastern Christians than ever before, and they are poised between emergence as a new political force in a democratizing region and the dangers to them of fundamentalism and political repression. The arguments you see for Christian decline in the region are mostly wrong. If we count the Christians in the Arab world and along the northern Red Sea littoral (Egypt, the Levant, Iraq and the Horn of Africa to the borders of Ethiopia) they come to some 21 million, nearly the size of Australia and bigger than the Netherlands. (This figure does not count the large Christian expatriate populations in the Gulf emirates or Christians in Iran and Pakistan). They are important in their absolute numbers, which have grown dramatically in the past 60 years along with the populations of the countries in which they live. If the region moves to parliamentary forms of government, they may well be coveted swing voters, gaining a larger political role and louder voice than ever before.

 

Regina Mundi (meaning  Queen of the World and dedicated to the Virgin Mary) Catholic Church in Gauteng is the largest church in southern Africa, seating more than 7  000 people and it is  nearly always packed to capacity. It is located in one of the most  sprawling and  impoverished  black townships, Soweto, and the church building was consecrated in 1962 by Cardinal  Montini from Milan, who would  shortly become  Pope Paul VI. The stained-glass  image of the  black Madonna and Child was  created by artist Larry Scully as part of an initiative to raise  money for  black education.

 

On 16 June, 1976,  armed police and  army forces opened  fire on school pupils protesting apartheid  in Orlando West township and chased the pupils (many not older than 15 years  old and as young as  nine years old) through the streets. Bleeding and seriously wounded youngsters fled to Regina Mundi Catholic Church and the doors were kept open for them by order of Archbishop Patrick Fitzgerald of Johannesburg. Police  pursued them into the church, firing on them with live ammunition. The corner of the altar was  smashed with a rifle butt and the  crucifix was used for  target practice. The statue of Christ still stands with no hands and there are bullet holes in the ceiling and  walls. But this broken and  damaged church was a refuge of sorts and through the years of the struggle against apartheid,  people came to the church to  mourn, to protest, to  affirm their commitment to freedom. Thousands  (thousands, not hundreds) of anti-apartheid activists and  others killed by police  or assassination squads were buried from that  church. Archbishop Desmond Tutu preached there and Nelson  Mandela spoke of Regina Mundi as a ‘beacon of hope, a worldwide symbol’. In 1996 South Africa’s Truth  & Reconciliation Commission investigating the  atrocities  of the apartheid years held opening meetings at Regina Mundi. Right across Africa, Regina Mundi is known as the ‘people’s church’.

What keeps  people believing in a faith that has long faded from much of the West? It’s simple enough perhaps, and at the core of  who we are as human beings: to know that when you are running for your life, somebody will be holding the doors  of a sanctuary open for you.

 

Snapshots from Christmas Day

 

Sunny, peaceful, uneventful, highly  enjoyable.

Favourite festive drink: tall glasses of iced coffee at 3pm on a boiling hot summer afternoon

Favourite dish: Caramelised tomato tarte tatin  made with ripe and juicy,  misshapen, scarred organic tomatoes and flaky buttery puff pastry, a  scattering of opal basil leaves from the garden

Standing talking at H’s garden gate with Buddleia davidii  ‘Black Knight’ in  purple glory,  the fragrance of blackberries and chocolate and  honey. Unforgettable.

Sharing  our favourite  Jorge Luis Borges stories and  quotations by the light of a  hurricane  lamp under green stars and watched over  by a  conference of owls. We went on to old ghost stories (Turn of the Screw anyone?) and then to scurrilous gossip. We all gossip, we all find it pleasurable, we usually curb the tendency within ourselves and others to gossip because speculating about others reveals us at our mendacious spiteful worst.

Spurned offerings. To be greeted at the front door by the host’s visiting daughter who announced she  had  just made a huge jug of tequila, gin and lemon milkshake. ‘You must try this, it will blow your mind!’ Maybe not.

Wondering if it is possible to fast-track enlightenment via a Buddhist ‘stream of entry’? Doubtful. Fascinating read though.

“Stream entry,” is a Buddhist term for initial enlightenment — a shift in perspective where the practitioners’ mind flips inside-out and for a split-second recognizes its own inseparability from the rest of the natural world. Everything is different after this; there has been, in Ingram’s language, a “breach in continuity.” Meditators reported dramatic reductions in personal suffering, although more mature commentators also discussed a commensurate increase in heartbreak and vulnerability. For better or for worse, they have now entered the undulating stream of true spiritual practice.

My  small dogs up on their hind legs doing a hysterical dervish dance of welcome to see me coming in through the front  door. To love and know ourselves loved/ on this green earth.

More Borges:

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”

The day before

The Great Dane has patiently undone and shredded the  artistic flower arrangements and is now crunching up a dead snail on the tiled floor of the bathroom. At 2am this morning a thunderstorm cracked open over the valley between the mountains and the rain pelted down. We are  now enduring  humid heat rather than scorching dry heat, which is not an improvement. My cut  hydrangeas are wilting and  must be  replaced. I have been making litres of  Jamie Oliver’s  chicken wings gravy and the kitchen smells like a  chip fryer.

It’s all good.

The relentlessly convivial housemate has begun issuing last minute  invitations to people who have nowhere to go for Christmas or who need to escape family for a while. I am  making my  Tomato Tarte Tatin (from Heidi’s recipe here) and might make make two or three if numbers increase.

It’s all good.

This isn’t an easy time of year for many of us and for those who are AA members or who just  want to  hang out with sober company, there will be an online AA Alkathon at AAOnline:

**CHRISTMAS ALKATHON – DECEMBER 25TH AT AAONLINE.org**
                    12 GREAT MEETINGS
                 FROM MIDNIGHT CHRISTMAS EVE
                 TIL MIDNIGHT CHRISTMAS NIGHT
                      HOPE TO SEE YOU HERE !!!

Alkathon Meeting Times (EST)
8.00pm
9.30pm
midnight
2.00am
5.00am
7.00am
8.30am
1.30pm
3.30pm
6.30pm
9.30pm
midnight

This is where you go to log in and access the  chatroom

This is where you  will find details of the holiday schedule

Take care everyone and  stay safe. Wishing you all a happy,  peaceful and sober Christmas. The image of the black Madonna and child  above is from a stained-glass window at Regina  Mundi Catholic Church in Soweto.

Holding my breath

Hot, hot, hot. Tiny jewelled geckos fall from the  high beamed ceilings onto bookcases and  tables, scurry out of sight. Cattle are lowing in a nearby  field and a bored teenage boy is riding a tractor up and down the  dirt roads on the outskirts of the village. Otherwise, all you can hear  is the  low hum of cicadas and  the wind blowing  through between the mountains, a hot dusty wind. It’s beautiful though, this  dusty golden furnace of a day; the mountains tumble down like velvet and  the sky is piercingly blue.

I have a persisting bronchitis that won’t  clear up, sit in the shade of the verandah reading Peter Ackroyd’s semi-historical novel The Lambs of  London, clever, a little harrowing in places. I’m wearing dust-streaked  denim capri pants, a  big loose shirt,  sandals in case I step on a scorpion. The dogs lie panting around me and lizards dart along cracks in the  path brickwork between salvia and lavender bushes. The bliss of not having to be sociable when one is unwell,  luxury to curl up with a book and a jug of icy homemade  ginger beer or pomegranate  cordial, no lunch parties or  suppers for now. On the edge of the field across the road, a small  grey cat is hunting for field mice, pouncing, feinting and creeping  along on her belly. Fortunately, so far she has caught nothing.

Indoors, in a sink of  cold water,  there  is a tangle of grapevine leaves and  white-grey wands of  artemisia or wormwood, bunches of  French lavender I want to  tie up around old mirrors and  terracotta jugs. Will they last until the end of the week?

Oh this season, so ordinary and  yet somehow on the brink of miraculous.

The Oxen

Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

Remembering the homeless

 

Who could so easily be you or I.

 

A friend of mine was telling us about the Florida Keys Outreach Coalition and their  annual National Homeless Person’s Memorial  Day service held on the longest night of the year to remember those who died homeless as  paupers. By “remembering those who have died on the streets, the cause of ending homelessness is kept urgent; as is the community’s collective commitment to preventing such deaths in the future.” More on commemorating the homeless and  what happens when they die, here.

 

And have you seen the old man
Outside the seaman’s mission
Memory fading with
The medal ribbons that he wears.
In our winter city,
The rain cries a little pity
For one more forgotten hero
And a world that doesn’t care

 

 

 

Peachy bliss in the solstice

Ripe peaches  on sale at every  farm stall along  the country roads. Peaches larger than  oranges, fragrant, golden and fuzzy. And bunches of table grapes clustering and silvered with bloom in tissue paper, ripe purplish figs with a  drop of dark syrup at the tip. I feel giddy with pleasure and  plan to carry out a mid-summer annual ritual:  run a  bath and sit there eating a delectable dripping peach as juices run down my chin.

The countryside out here is a furnace, temperatures soaring,  the veld bristling with heat. But in the orchards and  vineyards, the  sun and  intense heat means sweetness in the fruit.

We walk up to the local library and  pause for a moment’s shade under  pin oaks and a  red-flowering coral tree. Time slows and  eddies out  at this time of year, there is time for everything. Moving between book shelves, I choose Peter Ackroyd on the  literary Lamb family,  there are old cookbooks from the 1940s, detective thrillers,  travel writing, biographies. Neighbours stagewhispering in corners, potted maiden fern and begonias, the clunk of  air-conditioning. Coming out into the heat again, tarmac almost a river under our feet. Mountains  shuttered in  a heat haze.

 

Elsewhere it is the winter solstice, icy and dark. The earth cold and frozen, Demeter/Ceres searching for her stolen daughter, grieving mothers standing bereft in the snow. A beloved old poem comes  back to me  as I watch tiny red fruits fatten on my pomegranate tree.

 

The Pomegranate
Eavan Boland

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

 

 

Focus and staying grounded in a reactive time

Some tragedies, the outrage and unspeakable nature of them, leave us feeling unsettled and emotionally at sea. The ground under our feet has turned to quicksand.

One response suggested in AA circles is to exercise ‘restraint of tongue or pen’ when we are distressed or thrown off-balance and I’ve been thinking about this. The key for me as regards ‘restraint of tongue or pen’ is understanding what is appropriate communication in a particular context. Many of us come into recovery with all the cognitive distortions of alcoholism and need to unlearn habits of never speaking up or using passive-aggressive communication that pushes others away. Silence and  withdrawal or disengaging is not always the  best or most useful  response. There needs to be limits to self-protection as an habitual and  ingrained attitude.

And when it comes to looking at appropriate communication, I have found it helps to understand that certain times or events are very reactive — in the aftermath of a tragedy like Newtown or during December when many people are ambivalent about family reunions or financially stressed. We all tend to react rather than respond.

My first sober Christmas was outwardly calm and carefully planned but I was haunted by memories of past Christmas disasters and really wanted to run away and hide all the time. Everyone expected me to be lighthearted and sociable and I could hardly get more than a few words out of my mouth without feeling tearful or just lost. I remember that when I’m with newly sober people in December, how shaky they might feel and more in need of a hug than bracing conversation.

In AA meetings as well as in  social situations right now, I’m noticing so much passive-aggressive  behaviour and that gives me pause for thought. Social media at this time is rattled and volatile and sometimes downright abusive., but there I can click away,   unlog and  go elsewhere, pick up a book,  go out into the garden. Social situations are harder.

People who are being passive-aggressive are sending an indirect message that they are angry while denying that they are doing this. Their body language is defiant or hostile, they don’t answer questions honestly, insist they are not upset while sniping or glaring at you. (Think of a sulky teenager shrugging and saying ‘Whatever…’ all the time.) Passive-aggressors come at you sideways and have an excuse for everything. This behaviour is very common in active alcoholics.

I’ve been there myself. As my drinking worsened, I pretended there was nothing wrong and would get angry or defiant with anyone who tried to talk about the problem. Secretly I was trying and failing to control the drinking. I felt helpless when day after day I drank despite all my promises and efforts, but at the same time it was important to show I was in control and a large part of me did not want to stop drinking. And I didn’t want anyone else to control or interfere with my drinking so I would lie or deny the obvious in order to protect my addiction, avoid any attempts at open and honest conversation.  Defendedness and defensiveness felt more natural than to approach others with  hands open and unclenched, with a receptive heart, risking intimacy. I was always on guard, always vigilant and  keen to outwit others, negative and  judgmental behind others’ backs,  a mocking and  withering outlook — and predictably always  angry and  determined not to  let anyone know what was going on. This is where alcoholism leads us, this is  how the dead end or cul de sac feels.

When I stopped drinking, the need to protect the drinking stopped. I had no need to keep secrets or hide or lie. But those long-established habits of being fearful of others’ opinions, distrusting others and not daring to expressing myself openly took a while to unlearn. And practice. I had to take risks and make mistakes and  deal with sarcasm, misunderstandings,  hostility, correction. Like many others I had a kneejerk distrust of what  others would say if I  spoke my  own  vulnerable truth: I assumed they would not hear me, I assumed  I would be rejected or  laughed at, that I would be  patronised and  criticised. It was easier to  just  creep back into  my  old rigid  shell and say nothing, pretend I was above the need to  get involved or tell myself that my speaking  up would make no difference. Cowardice and avoidance had  long become a way of being physically present without really being there with others.

If we are afraid to speak up in a difficult or conflicted situation, we are not practising restraint of tongue. We are just acting out of fear or a pattern of avoidance. When we freely choose not to speak up because we want to communicate respect or self-control in a volatile situation, we are exercising non-verbal diplomacy.  And at a time like this, as at any other time, we need both silence and   speaking up.