Calling long-distance

When Una called from Johannesburg International Airport, the rain was crashing down so loudly I could hardly hear her.

Her plane arrived half-an-hour early and she found a big Sotho airport official in a blue uniform and asked where she could get a decent cup of coffe and a light breakfast.

‘I don’t know Cape Town very well, you see,’ she said to him, flustered.

‘Yo mama,’ he said and roared with laughter. ‘This is not Cape Town any longer, this is Egoli (the city of gold) and you must hit the Spur restaurant running. Fried eggs and tomatoes and a good steak!’

Johannesburg, Egoli, the city of gold. For years I would look out of plane windows and see the yellow mine dumps rising up all around the skyscrapers, looking down on the wealthiest city in white South Africa, built on the blood and sweat of exploited miners and those elusive seams of gold running underground to the deepest shafts in the world. Every now and again there are sudden sinkages and streets, bungalows, suburbs fall down into seemingly bottomless pits. The miners die in the rockfalls and mistimed blasts and still the search for gold goes on, deeper and deeper, even though the seams and ribbed veins of gold are mined out for the most part.

Enjoy the city! Lap it all up, I say to Una and she hesitates. The last time she went up to Johannesburg was 40 years ago during her nursing training and she stayed in a racially segregated nurses’ residence with other young white Afrikaner meisies and cried each night to come home to her mother in the Cape.

If only you were here, she says wistfully. I privately thank God I’m not there. She needs a break from me. Many of you, my blog readers, may feel the same way. That last post was seriously depressing. I hate to sound negative. I hate throwing curved balls at the desktop screen.

But sometimes just telling the truth changes something about that bitter truth, makes it somehow more palatable. And less of a secret. Thanks to all of you who emailed — I am fine, really.

The weather a wilderness

Squalls of rain and galeforce winds — driving through the veld we saw Brahmin cattle standing with bowed heads in a field of low grey scrub. Farm dams rocked with choppy waves, black and indigo. The Breede River had burst its banks and the  dark waves were rising and falling through tree branches and shrubs. Roads closed, birds flung like black paper wrappers across the skyline. The mountains coming and going like chimeras on the horizon, eerie sentinels obscured by cloud and rain.

 

I had forgotten this wildness, this feeling of being out alone on the edge of the known world. When we reached the restaurant and dashed indoors for cover, the valley below us was black and only just visible through the rain and fog. Grey trees with leafless branches cracking and tearing away. Ditches swimming with half-drowned white arum lilies. Pink blosson scattered like celebratory confetti from the orchards of almond trees.

 

It was exhilarating, and my sadness took a back seat. Springbok carpaccio and hot baked breads, lamb and bobotie: country food, unimaginative but warming. Tomatoes that taste of tomato. A large fire in the hearth at my back, well-lit tables by the window. Grape juice and bitter coffee.

 

Driving back, we stopped to buy a small bag of waterblommetjies, a Cape delicacy of bredieor stew made from the flower buds of a water plant that grows in icy dams and ponds, only flowering in spring. The vendor had his stained woollen cap pulled down low over his ears and his hands were shaking with cold. He had been standing there  by the roadside without rainjacket or shelter, in wet clothes, since dawn and he will wait hopefully until the sun goes down tonight. Drenched and frozen and choiceless.

 

South Africa drives me a little crazy. I feel helpless in the face of the destitution and desperation, and racked with that helplessness so much of the time.

 

And at last we were through the mountains, hail bouncing off the bonnet of the car. Low slopes of blackened vines in rows, dull yellow reeds thick by the rivers and streams. A few oaks just coming into leaf. A mongoose darting across the road. Both of us laughing and talking together quite easily, the semblance of an old friendship observed. Unpacking vegetables and groceries together in the kitchen, missing the dogs who used to greet  our arrival with such excitement.

 

Something in me that is not resigned to this return. And something in me broken. But I will find  a way to go on, finding a place for myself in this wild impossible country.

Storming Saturday

Well, it is the new moon in Virgo, but I shall not catch a glimpse of that until the black thunderclouds and storms have passed through the mountains.  The village rainwashed and windswept, gales blowing and dead branches littering the side streets.

 

Received confirmation of my meditation retreat booking and looked doubtfully at the requirement to get up at 4am and sit on a small cushion in a draughty hall with only a shawl or cape for warmth, as well as being reminded that the last meal of the day will be at noon (oh, that simple vegan bowl of brown rice, tra-la) and 10 hours a day in silent sitting practice.

 

Is that an exhilarating challenge or a daunting invitation to masochism? Well, it will clear the sticky emotional cobwebs away if nothing else. I can foresee my bad temper reasserting itself in no uncertain terms. More scowling than satori.

 

This morning I am going through to the small town of Worcester at the head of the Breede River valley to get some basic supplies. Then a light lunch up at a wine estate restaurant overlooking the amphitheatre of  vineyeards below the mountains. Soup and a slice of bread and we can’t really afford it, but it will be a chance for Una and myself to reconnect as friends and housemates.

The Greek root of the word ‘nostalgia’ is noster algos, meaning ‘to look homeward with longing’. I am missing Wales as if somebody has stolen that countryside and the chance to experience autumn from me. I feel cheated of seeing another season there, of revelling in that beauty.  This is not a rational feeling, but it goes deep. And with the longing and missing and feeling cheated, there is a bitter grief that things could not have been different between S and myself, that the love did not take root and grow. That too seems unfair and there is nothing to be done about that unreasonable feeling either.

And it is also true that I am grateful to be here and sober and having a chance to be present to this actual reality around me today. To be there for others, to notice new opportunities, to live this one life fully. Taking a deep breath and letting go of the daydreams. Not pointless longings, but a distraction from my life as it really is. Let the rain come down.

Day of Departure

Lay awake last night and spent some time looking at how I go about experiencing the thouight flitting back and forth in my mind, the fleeting emotional storms and body sensations. Hot, cold, anxious, feverish, tense, angry, sad.

I could have sat up in meditation position and do some breathwork but I wanted to get back to sleep. Today is going to be a very long day with the trip to Heathrow and a flight back to South Africa leaving at 9pm.

Because I worked for several years with a Theravada practitioner, there are many ways of paying attention in Buddhist practice that make sense to me. While drinking I could not implement even the simplest technique because the excess drinking inflamed my mind and prevented detachment. Now it is possible (sometimes) for me to recognise the patterns of thinking and the difficulty of staying in the present.

There is as little point regretting the past as speculating about the future. Conditioned responses are just that. Anger, ignorance and greed. The fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz wrote: “The mind is ever a tourist wanting to touch and buy new things, then toss them into an already-filled closet.”

Just paying bare attention changes the feelings. This is my restless mind at 2am. This is the ‘self’ suffering, being distracted, feeling fear and regret and loss. This is the mind circling the same preoccupations and trying to avoid the feelings. This is the mind being impatient. The feelings come up and fall away. What stays is the intention to observe quietly and just be with the thoughts, letting them come and go.

When I can’t pray, can’t sleep, feel at the mercy of my own moods I can at least pay attention. And at last there is inner quiet and the chance of renewed sleep. No great insights, no transfornations. Just the tiredness and drifting back to sleep.

It is a cloudy and cold morning. All I have to do is pack and get ready for the airport. Nothing to do and nothing left undone. The pain is there but it is fine. It is not unbearable.

Tomorrow morning I will be landing in Cape Town. A friend there to meet me. There will be a long drive back through the mountains, a cold spring just beginning in the Cape, and when I get home I shall be able to sleep in my own bed. Then I shall begin piecing my life together again. One day at a time.

Wrinkles in narrative time

Counting down to return, my life suspended and in a sad limbo right now. The effort of holding a difficult position gracefully and letting in the light.

I took the bus out to Brecon and sat reading a book on Welsh folklore by the canal. Thinking of all the French prisoners held out here in this small medieval town in Wales during the Napoleonic wars. A garrison town at the confluence of the Usk and Honddu Rivers entered by steep roads, tall houses lining the roads with windows that reflect the valley light. Waterfowl lively and splashing in the clear depths of the canal, the sun warm if intermittent. Reading the curious and perverse myths of medieval times while the winds of loneliness blew through me unhindered.

Sometimes it is like this, a loneliness to be endured.

There is the Welsh legend of a young man who courts a lady of the lake. She will rise out of the water and live with him, but if there are ‘three causeless blows’ (tri ergyd di-achos) given to her over the years, she warns him she will leave. And as time goes on he strikes her three times: playfully, thoughtlessly, not aware even of striking her, as if in play, as if joking. Punching, tapping, smacking. A parable of unintentional force.

So she takes her cattle and walks back into the lake. The cattle drag a heavy plough behind them and the track of furrowed rock, a raw scar, can be seen to this day. She appears only once again, to instruct her son in the healing arts so that the physicians of Myddfai would become renowned.

The vanishing woman, obliged to leave and go away into fey mystery, an old Otherness. The cold green waters of the lake, the silence except for wild birds flying overhead. A battered woman’s watery death become myth?

Going back on the bus through the hills, the late afternoon sunshine delicate and bright, I looked at the faces of other women on the bus, stolid faces and faraway expressions and wondered about the transformations of their lives and how they became who they are now, the swift changes wrought by tragedy or betrayal or even good fortune. As happens so often I felt I was sitting there in the midst of untold secret narratives, conditioned by time and place, but archetypal and passionate. The grey-haired woman with black eyes and nicotine stains on her long fingers might well be someone who had once eloped with a Romany lover.

‘What care I for a goose-feather bed?
With the sheet turned down so bravely, O!
For to-night I shall sleep in a cold open field
Along with the raggle taggle gypsies, O!’

And there was a gipsy caravan half-hidden near a tall green hedge of ripe bramble berries, just visible from the road as we passed. Those travelling through this life who know only the journey and not the dreams of stability or permanence. Holding only to the nomadic imperative once so deep in our human nature.

So I sat there, lost in dreaming and storymaking, knowing that in time my own story will take on shape and even power. This is just a wrinkle in the narrative. And all the consolations of imagination and fantasy in the world ebb thin as against the force of reality, inevitability, necessity, the fact that life is what it is and suffering inevitable. Illusions coming and going like dancing soap bubbles blown by children, vanishing in the bright afternoon light, the bus winding on its prescribed route, the mellow summer turning to autumn.

Simone Weil:

‘A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.’

Little by little I will come through this and it will pass, the agony and loss and disillusionment. There will be other days, other relationships, books to be written, other and happier journeys. More lasting joys, truths the hand can hold.

Lively up yo’self

Tedious start to the blogging day — nine vaguely vile comments from Patrick, aka Micky. All zapped as spam. It is curious that the persistent efforts of a troll have united the recovery blogging community so firmly in our decision to ignore him and keep blogging regardless.

 

Up early, tea in bed and a shared newspaper, the sun streaming into the room, the happy noise of children laughing as they play in a neighbouring garden. After breakfast i went off to St Mary’s and heard Fr Richard, unkempt and very soft of voice, preach with great sincerity on the Oxford Movement of Keble and Newman. We sang Anima Christi from the 7th-century Latin and I kept thinking about the dark and strange church at Clodock that I explored yesterday, the high pale windows and cold light on the flagstones, the closed panelled pews and high wooden gallery. Outside row on row of old tombstones, engravings from earlier than the 1780s obscured, yews and a swift river rushing past behind the church. A weight of buried but unforgotten history evident in these olf pre-Reformation churches. Going up for communion and chewing a very stale wafer with some distaste. Then out again into the sunshine and coming home to lively conversation,  him about to go off climbing. Laughter, and the house sweet with the fragrance of stargazer lilies in a vase in the entrance hall.

 

Such an enjoyable day yesterday, driving down along obscure half-hidden lanes past old Methodist chapels and country inns, over streams and stone bridges, through green and dappled woodland, down to Abergavenny. Stopping to look at Longtown castle, the round keep, so dark and mysterious, looking for something I could not name, the sense that this is a place used for rituals, for ceremonial there in the shadowy womblike space. Then up to Raglan and beyond, up the mountainside to have a walk  and supper with Jim and Ann. More laughter, an easy rapport there, all of us talking about travels and education and family anecdotes (mine all ruthlessly suppressed, alas), looking down hill on Raglan castle  and the landscape once ravaged by Cromwell. Supper and more conversation. A white and ginger cat, Bonnie, dopey from phenobarbitone, given to treat feline epilepsy. From the conservatory we watched buzzards circling over the steep fields below. In the garden I stepped into the shade of curving branches from a weeping birch and heard a muffled sound like women singing. Black bees flying out of a grassed-over hole near the hedge, buzzing like small fiddles all played at once.

 

Back along dark lanes, oncoming headlights a shock, the moon a chip of ice in the starless sky, driving on and on in loops and bends,  swooping over hills, talking sleepily in the dark. But alive to the warmth and happiness of the day, the pleasure of homecoming.