Distance and intimacy

He sends me a an email saying: ‘I am missing you terribly.’

Well, yes. I can imagine he is missing me. But nothing changes if nothing changes.

So I write back and say: ‘I am missing you too. Take care of yourself.’

It is like waving at one another in the dark, invisible gestures across an ocean or two. Continents meandering adrift and ships passing without signals, all that kind of thing.

‘What is it with men?’ I think, perhaps unfairly. Then I go out and plant basil seeds for the dark moon. There are quarts of freshly squeezed organic lemon juice staning on the counter in huge ungainly jugs, waiting to be made into lemonade. The scrubbed basin is filled with salty water in which I am soaking and cleaning waterblommetjies, the green and cream-coloured buds of a flowering water plant to be made into a silky casserole, a local delicacy using an old Dutch recipe.

The Great Mother has work in plenty for her daughters who want to stay earth-connected. I must get courgettes and butternuts into the patch of turned earth near the washing lines. I need to transplant seedlings of parsley and tomato into a sunnier place against a sheltering wall. I must cut back the rosemary bushes at the far end of the garden.

There is a little cat, loved by his owners but impudently turning feral, who comes into the garden and suns himself with eyes squeezed shut, rolling in the sand under a lavender bush. Animals don’t need us the way we need them. And some of them want their wilder natures back at all costs. I observe him with passionate interest.

There are books piled high on my table in the study, that old dented table with its satiny 18th-century yellowwood patina, piles of novels for review. I am busy rereading all the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, lovingly and in awe of her ability to write from the inside.

Lengthening my morning meditations too, sitting there in the chill and darkness, just feeling the heartache and accepting this is how it must be for now. A bleak wisdom of presence. Thinking of the retreat and planning to cut out daily coffee in readiness. Perhaps thermos jugs of hot water, spiced with grated ginger sweetened with a little honey. Something with kick.

Getting ready to go out for lunch — unexciting food but the pleasure of being with friends. Then some writing in the afternoon and an evening of chatting with my housemate and sorting washing together, watching television. A meditation at the end of the day, reflecting, listening, staying open..

Ordinary common-or-garden witchy stuff. Ordinary human stuff. Just getting on with it. Attunement. Self-acceptance. The messy life work of loving and loss and stirring unrefined sugar into bitter lemon juice and tending a garden and earning a living and doing no harm.

So I say to myself ‘What is it with men anyway?’ and make myself another mug of calming green tea.

New moon in Virgo

Tonight there will probably be no sliver of new moon visible in the skies because it is raining with heavy cloud over. But since I shall have the cottge to myself I can spend some time in greeting and reflecting on the new moon in Virgo.

Drawing down the moon, internalising those lunar energies and strengths, playing with those powerful metaphors, is a core concept in my practice:

‘… they call You Hekate,
Many-named, Mene, cleaving Air just like
Dart-shooter Artemis, Persephone,
Shooter of Deer, night shining, triple-sounding,
Triple-headed, triple-voiced Selene
Triple-pointed, triple-faced, triple-necked,
And Goddess of the Triple Ways, who hold
Untiring Flaming Fire in Triple Baskets,
And You who oft frequent the Triple Way
And rule the Triple Decades… ‘

Virgo is the healer, lover of order and placement, the goddess calling for service and a cleansing of the household. This new moon in Virgo is ruled over by the Hermit in the tarot sequence and I cn identify very much with that hiddeness and solitary withdrawal. Images of the small grey-green hermit crabs scuttling away under cover of seashore rocks appeal to me. I feel the same need of hiddeness and sanctury. To find a safe place for healing and to sweep the house clean, to make a clear inner space all my own.

So I shall pick some flowering purple lavender (the French Lavendula angustifolia) tied together as a symbolic broom and I shall burn a dry clean fragrance, possibly sandalwood. Then sit by the open window if the moon is to be seen, or sit with a dark bowl of water and a single white candle. A liquid mirror for the crescent. A single point of light, to honour the dark.

And, as with all good rituals, there is room for improvisation and the unexpected. I shall wait and see what comes to me.

Spotlight

With many thanks to my beloved and inspiring Aquila ka Hecate http://aquilakahecate.blogspot.com/

 

The day unfolding

The rain is pouring down. Woke up to the steady thud of falling rain and realised I wouldn’t be able to get out and walk in this bleak weather. Trapped indoors, in a draughty study. All the same, after just a week back, I’ve adjusted to the deeply felt notion that rain is always welcome in Africa. The alternative is drought and thirst and dust.

 

So I’m glad of the downpours and to know the garden will be greener tomorrow. I have on thick blue socks patterned with orange tigers and a large woolly overcoat. A large pot of chamomile tea for soothing the frazzled nerves and raw emotions.

 

But I always know I am a little depressed when I find myself reading strictly vegan recipes and wondering about quinoa. There is some puritanical aspect of myself at work, a kind of ‘for your own good you should experience a little deprivation’ dynamic at work.

 

Embrace the brokenness already, I tell myself. There is plenty of exciting vegan stuff around — I love vegetables in season and combined in unusual ways – but I don’t have the exciting ingredients that would help me liven up red lentil dhal or quinoa with broccoli. My fresh spices are depleted and — well, you know, the magic isn’t there.

 

All the same I have some black beans soaking in a jug and I might do something with chilli, cumin and carrots. But it doesn’t flow right now — nothing much flows. It is all a grind, and anyone who is also going through a bad break-up or loss will know what I mean.

 

I want back what I had and that is not possible. I want back my hope and energy and dreams of a new life and all that tenderness and giving and belonging — and that is not going to happen. Right now my life, like my person, feels dismally unloved and the only person who is going to reconnect all those energies and reach out and do some self-nurturing is me. But not with quinoa and boiled grains or lentils. I need a little food magic around this cottage.

 

And it is nearly new moon and I must stay with that lunar phase, listen and trust the seasons, the moon, the landscape in which I am now embedded. Check herbs in the garden, take a long scented bath with candles burning and listen to some deep blue jazz.

 

I have begun planning a retreat, a chance to get away with others into the wide lonely spaces of the Karoo and spend time letting the well fill up, shared sitting practice and focused attention. Watching eagles and goshawks in those light blue skies over the Swartberg.

 

It is all of the same mysterious pattern, the weaving together of strength and brokenness and acceptance and rejection, abandonment and coming home. We are where we are, and that is our truth. If we fail to notice our own lives or pay loving regrd to the hurt and anger, who will notice for us?

And all this rain is doing wonders for the origanum, my two little Greek bushes, so pungently aromatic, and the new rocket, the sage on the stoep. Time for a rain dance under the olive trees…

Freedom in gestures

Each morning now I do some very simple and practical magic. In the same way that meditation, the habit of sitting practice, has expanded to fill my day with heightened awareness, so the quiet but intentional rituals give shape to my life.

 

Back here in Africa it is a pleasure to be able to cut lavender from my own bushes for the bath, crushing the deep blue flowering sprigs to release those volatile oils into steam. To sip at slices of lemon in hot water while I watch small house martins dart onto the front stoep (verandah) for nectar from the clivias. To breathe in gratitude and courage for the day ahead.

 

There is music, Bach or jazz favourites, Soweto drummers, ballads from mali or Senegal,  or sometimes just the wind blowing across the fields as I sit and draft fiction for a couple of hours while the house is quiet. Active listening that moves into passive receptivity. I write to the rhythmns of the body, slow breathing,  the pounding blood and echoing lyrics.

 

Tending herbs and watering pelargoniums, again an active listening and observation. The weeding and deadheading, the anticipation of culinary and healing handfuls of parsley, rocket, sage, mint, thyme, origanum… Small magical attentions that are part of the intimacy every gardener knows.

 

In the kitchen, a creative enjoyment of planning homemade pasta, checking jars of grains and lentils, and black and red beans, sorting bottles of olive oil and vinegars and tamari, tubes of tomato paste, flat tins of anchovies, boxes of cinnamon quills, cassia, dried peri-peri chiles from Mozambique, sealed jars of black peppercorns, cumin seeds, coriander for warmth.

 

A wooden bowl, handturned in teak, for lemons and limes. That sharp little knife, the indispensable athame. Candles and seed pods and hand-embroidered table cloths, napkins, silk scarves, linen dish towels. I lift and turn ripe tomatoes, squeeze the tip of a green-streaked orange papaya, the stem end of Fuertes avocados.

 

The mortar and pestle are speckled black granite and will outlive me by many lifetimes, the most magical objects any seasoned kitchen witch can possess. My small blue-and-white enamel pot, heavy and utterly reliable. Terracotta pots, aerated, for bulbs of garlic and fresh ginger tubers. Flaky Maldon sea salt, always to be used sparingly.

 

Books left open on the scrubbed white pine table — vegan recipes, Claudia Roden’s tribute to Jewish cooking, Elizabeth David on French country daubes (that secret ingredient of a snip of dried orange peel to lift the casserole), Marcella Hazan’s ragu. William Black writing about Sardinian peasant cooking, as slow as possible. Old brass bowls, double-handled, for North Indian butter chicken. A wok or two. Brooms in the pinewood closet, within easy reach. Wooden spoons, ladles, whisks, each telling tales of  stirfries, laksas, turmeric and galangal tossed in hot oil. Steamers for new vegetables and a great pile of teaspoons that vnish mysteriously at a moment’s notice.

 

It ia all magical, all pot pourri, all there in a simmering  black cauldron or china cup of bitter but refreshing herbal tea. Creative magic has no specific goals, no schoolgirl cravings to outwit enemies or show off  or to exercise power over others. The creative impulse is free, yet attentive, a discipline based in love and practical household care. Once all women were midwives and herbalists and cooks and artists and storytellers. You plant a garden and something unimagined overtakes your fantasy, an abundance of olives and lemons and ruby-red pomegranates. Armfuls of scented wild roses and buddleia. You light candles at dusk and the witching hour holds you close in amazed wonder.

We call on the Beloved Great Mother and her singing roars in us like the green surge of ocean.

 

We need to let the magic fill our lives like breath fills the body. Enough of the borrowed artifice of play-play rituals intended to keep our small hearts safe. The circle needs to open to risk and the moreness of life. We have nothing to fear but the chimera of death.

Back in Africa

This is the new blog to replace A Spell in Wales, which I am leaving up for the time being.

 

I have chosen a very subdued and clean design — in part because this has not been an easy return and I am licking wounds while I settle back into some kind of routine in the Overberg. Subued and simple works for me.

It is very cold here in the mountains of the Overberg, some green but not much rain this last winter. Snow on the mountains and a harsh aridity in the open veld that I find beautiful in some moods. Right now I am grieving my Welsh countryside and am filled with the sense of loss that comes from relationships ending and leaving friends.

 

In a week or two I may go away and do a 10-day retreat (the luxury of time although it hangs so heavy on my hands right now) in the bleak spaces of the Karoo.

 

It is hard to feel so lost in my own life but that is the reality. All I can do is to keep paying attention and staying receptive to the inner shifts and changes,  and what comes into my life from all around me. It feels at moments as if the bitter wind of late winter is blowing through me. But I have lived through worse. 

 

In a few weeks time a cold spring will come creeping over the mountains and the blackened fruit trees will come into blossom, the pink and white of almond and apple. Clumps of white-sheathed arum lilies are already appearing in the ditches and all along the West Coast on the semi-desert coastal plains there are wild flowers coming out in a fragile tapestry of red, blue and violet.

 

So I water pots and pick ripe organic lemons from the tree in my back yard. I prepare salads and simmer Mediterranean-style casseroles, exchange greetings with neighbours and listen to the sweet plaintive music of Eva Cassidy singing Fields of Gold. It is a poor kind of magic but it will tide me over. Sometimes life feels thin and diminished and that is the reality. Healing takes time, the raw empty feelings are there to be endured.

 

And as a gesture towards the colour that has ebbed out of my daily life, I place a glass cylinder of orange-and-blue strelitzias in vibrant clash with cherry-red japonicas in front of a mirror on the demi-lune table. The flowers of an African winter setting the living room ablaze.