Samhain in Africa

Well, of course none of the symbolism works here in mid-summer with the pumpkins still ripening in the fields. Here in Africa we are big on pumpkins and squashes and gourds. Great golden and red and stripy delectables.

 

But tonight we will have a great fire and I have cut branches of rosemary and lavender and smoky sage. We will sit out under the stars and listen to cobras nesting beneath the plumbago, lizards scuttling under the brown restio grasses, the owls flying high over the house and barns. Wish by the stars burning like lonely white fires.

 

Wishing and hoping and praying…

Not so random: ways of talking self

Tagged again for six not-so-random facts by Aquila ka Hecate. I on’t want to tag anyone else, but I thought I’d look at a few curious aspects of my own faith journey.

You know how this goes: feel free to meme yourself or others.

1 I was never baptised, but brought up Presbyterian in a small town in what is now Zimbabwe. The settler congregation was completely white and ferociously anti-Catholic. I do wonder about the lurking Calvinist within. And I have revisioned this time of my life in many ways after reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

2 At the age of 22 I converted to Roman Catholicism. One big factor was literature: reading The Habit of Being: Collected Letters of Flannery O’Connor. As well as Antonia White’s Frost in May. And Evelyn Waugh’s snotty Brideshead Revisited.

3 On a visit to Lesotho, the sixth poorest country in the world, I was introduced to liberation theology. I had not thought of religion as inherently ambiguous or having a liberative political dimension. That’s when I began reading Gutierrez on ‘the power of the poor in history’.

4 I had been feminist and intermittently lesbian for a long time. Now I began reading not just women theologians deconstructing Catholicism but Starhawk, and Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon.

5 In my late 30s I discovered the pleasures of growing plants and creating gardens and observing plants in the veld. I began dreaming about plants, about jungles, about the elusive Blue Flower. I started to use herbs medicinally and study the wild plants used by sangomas and medieval herbalists like Hildegard von Bingen.

6 In Wales I encountered the hidden pagan practices and Craft in a way i had not experienced before. On the hillsides and in the rowan forests of the Welsh Borders, I found the ‘thin plces’, those liminal threshholds of passage between thhis world and the Other country.  I also fell in and out of love and learned a great deal about the heartless economics and persisting class obsessions of the English in the 21st century.

 

It’s all about the journey, and the journey is not a linear progression but a great big looping figure of eight or a circle. Or something else.

Listening to the deep

I’m thinking about therapy. In between ensuring my rare white fig tree gets enough water, finding more recipes for my glut of speckled sugar beans and planning to get two new dogs.

Therapy is about relationship. It is all about finding a wise woman (or man) with great listening skills and a richly lived understanding of life skills.

I have studied various approaches to psychotherapy, academically and in counselling networks. And I’ve had plenty of insightful therapy myself. But I’ve also wasted time with the flakier practitioners and I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to come away feeling diminished and pathologised and forever dependent on the professional.

Good therapy is like a very piercing and powerful ritual. It is painful and a little disturbing and it works. I learned how to change and stop sabotaging myself or running away from intimacy. I understood the darker motivations that underlay some of my preoccupations. I learned to pay attention to what I was doing and what I was not doing. I learned to listen to what I was telling myself and to believe the script could be changed.

What is broken doesn’t always need to be fixed. Living with ‘broken’ enriches us in that we discover compassion and patience and connect with the deeper places of loss and failure.

Each of us will undertake the journey of the Sumerian goddess Inanna to the underworld, stripping ourselve down unwillingly as we step down into that void.

“From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below.”

This is the story of my life as a woman coming into being through confusion and denial and terrible mistakes. It is the myth I lived from my late 20s until my late 40s. It is the myth that cost me everything, but paradoxically it is the myth that gave me my power and ‘knowing’, my strength as well as my woundedness.

Those friends who know me closely know I am not sentimental. I am not one for easy consolations or the answers thrown up in popular culture. I like the questions. I like the paradoxes. I like to live very close to the unknowable. Inanna’s descent to the underworld gave me a taste for the abyss.

This is one version of the story, emphasising the elements that mean something to me:

Inanna’s reason for visiting the underworld is unclear. She is the great Sumeriann high priestess and goddess turning her back on the business of being a goddess above ground, in the world. The reason she gives to the gatekeeper of the underworld is that she wants to attend her brother-in-law Gud-gal-ana’s funeral rites. However, this may be a ruse; Inanna may have been intending to conquer the underworld. Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld and Inanna’s sister, may have suspected this, which could explain her treatment of Inanna.

Erishkegal is my inner self, the smiling but shadowy figure whom I least appreciate. She is cruel and wilful and likely to make the others aspects of me suffer. I can feel her presence more strongly as I age, the dark death-loving Kali of Hindu myth, the cold and malicious Crone of the old Celts. I respect Erishkegal. She is the woman we do not want to become, the Other woman in each of us.

Before she left, Inanna instructed her priestess Ninscurba to plead with the gods Enlil, Nanna and Enki to save her if anything went wrong.

Inanna dresses elaborately for the visit, with a turban, a wig, a lapis lazuli necklace, beads upon her breast, the ‘pala dress’ (the ladyship garment), mascara, pectoral, a golden ring on her hand, and she held a lapis lazuli measuring rod. Perhaps Inanna’s garments, unsuitable for a funeral, along with Inanna’s haughty behaviour make Ereshkigal suspicious.

Following Ereshkigal’s instructions, the gatekeeper tells Inanna she may enter the first gate of the underworld, but she must hand over her lapis lazuli measuring rod. She asks why and is told ‘It is the way of the Underworld’. She obliges and passes through.

Inanna passes through a total of seven gates, at each removing a piece of clothing or jewelry she had been wearing at the start of her journey. She has to be stripped naked, little by little and lose each illusion she holds about herself and her power and the things she holds dear. She has to understand loss and relinquish all the gifts that create her self-esteem. Her clothing and jewels could also be used as an amulet or protective device, so stripping Inanna of each item would leave her more vulnerable to any type of attack.

When she arrives in front of her sister she is naked.

“After she had crouched down and had her clothes removed, they were carried away. Then she made her sister Erishkegal rise from her throne, and instead she sat on her throne. But then the Anna, the seven judges, rendered their decision against her. They looked at her — it was the look of death. They spoke to her — it was the speech of anger. They shouted at her — it was the shout of heavy guilt. The afflicted woman Inanna was turned into a corpse by her own sister. And the corpse was hung on a hook.”

Ereškigal’s hatred for Inanna could be referenced in a few other myths. Ereškigal is seen as an accidental ‘black sheep’ of sorts. She can not leave her kingdom of the Underworld to join the other ‘living’ Gods and they can not visit her in the Underworld or else they can never return. Inanna symbolized love (in the sense of eros) and fertility, and was the polar opposite of Ereškigal. She disowned the Erishkegal within, we might say in Jungian terms.

The sister who personifies love is hung on a meathook to rot and turn green by the sister who hates her and who is an outcast, bitter and vengeful.

Inanna is killed and dies, after being stripped naked, despised and tortured. This is what she has descended to the underworld to undergo. It is an initiation into her own death.

Three days and three nights passed and Nincurba, following instructions, went to Enlil, Nanna, and Enki’s temples and demanded they save the Goddess of Love. The first two gods refused, but Enki was deeply troubled and agreed to help. He created two sexless figures (neither male nor female) named gala-tura and the kur-jara. He instructed they were to appease Ereškigal and when asked what they wanted they were to ask for Inanna’s corpse and sprinkle it with the food and water of life.

Things went as Enki said and the androgynous gala-tura and the kur-jara were able to revive Inanna. Demons of Ereškigal’s followed Inanna out of the underworld and she wasn’t free to go until someone took her place. They first came upon Nincurba and asked to take her. Inanna refused, saying the priestess had helped her as she had asked. They next came upon Cara, Inanna’s beautician, still in mourning. The demons said they would take them but Inanna refused for he had been there for her. They next came upon Lulal also in mourning. The demons offered to take him but Inanna refused.

They next came upon Dumuzi, Inanna’s husband. He was sitting in nice clothing and enjoying himself despite his wife supposedly still being missing in the underworld. Inanna was angry and said they could take him.

Dumuzi tried to escape his fate but a fly told Inanna and the demons where he was hiding. It was then decreed that Dumuzi spent half the year in the underworld and Inanna take the other half.

This is code for the love-hate relationship between a man and a woman beyond the romantic fictions. What it costs us to stay together through betrayal and disappointment and indifference. What is there in a marriage once the daydreams stop. To share the hell.

Inanna does not fully emerge from the underworld of death and humiliation. She must keep returning, she must remember always what the Underworld is like. She cannot return to the life she so longed for, except partially. She has to stay very close to the place of death.

This was my journey. It is called alcoholism.

Other women undergo the same journey and it may be called cancer. It may be called divorce. It may be called the loss of a child. It may be called murder. It may be called psychosis or schizophrenia. It may be called writers’ block. It may be called war.

We go to a place we would rather not go and we die there. Even when we recover and rejoin humanity, we are not the same. Part of us stays in that place of suffering and because of that we are able to help others who hang rotting on the meathooks, who are sliding down into madness and losing homes, family, self-respect.

The only healer who can truly help us is one who has undergone her own descent and come back a sadder and wiser person. And these healers will often speak a dark and uncompromising truth we are not eager to hear. They can see what lies ahead and they know there is no way to escape the descent. That is our destiny, and only when we are desperate and have lost everything and lie there green and rotting, only then can the wise ones, the friends and counsellors and healers, help us to make the journey back into the sunlight.

Falling in love with love

‘Hullo!’ shouted the housemate. ‘I’ve brought home some lamb chops I want to grill on the coals. Isn’t it a lovely calm evening? D you still eat meat or are your food politics all vegan?’

“I’m a flexitarian locavore,’ I answered smoothly without a pause. ‘Whose lambs were these before they became chops?’

I have a whole new baffling vocabulary, a witchy discourse of green living, eating local and suffering nightmares about genetically modified maize or dubious biofuels.

‘Oh goddess spare me,’ said Una in a very ungreen tone of voice. ‘This reminds me of your passion for the dead writer Roberto Bolano. That lasted for eight months or more. All you thought about was Bolano.’

‘Bolano mi amor,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I still think he was the greatest writer of the new century, but there isn’t much of his work in print. Love is hard to sustain without print. I can’t believe I just said that. Dead-tree reading is so passe.’

Green witches are the new black. No more babbling and Twittering about the dark moon and raising cones of power. It is all about frugal meals with hand-harvested beans and chuckng away the imported Maldon salt. I sat and read a long and rather bloody article about a Jewish food activist who has decided to ritually slaughter his own chickens to make sure the meat is kosher and that he stays in touch with the messier aspects of the food chain.

How I admire that. I should maybe think about silencing a few lambs myself, but we’re not eco-purist enough for that yet.

My brilliant meta-spiritual insight from this morning’s meditation, breathing in and out and noticing the touch of breath on the upper lip (yes, boring as all hell, but I am gettng better at it, I am, I am) was that I should plant a large half-barrel of Swiss chard. This is amazingly economical and very ‘cut and come again’. I had Swiss chard from the back garden for months last year, to use with tomatoes in pasta sauces and with mushrooms and brown rice and with beans, well you know all about the bean fetish by now. The stalks of Swiss chard are very tasty when sauteed with garlic in a little olive oil and are called ‘blettes‘ by the French.

I am making endless notes on the spirituality of food politicsand talking foodie revolution to everyone who will listen. Una ignores me and goes on eating what she likes to eat, which includes fried eggs and bacon and grilled lamb chops. How I love her and how lucky I am to live with somebody who does not mind my sense of humour.

Especially as I am wondering if a long passionate letter on the primacy of food politics and my near hero worship of Michael Pollan will just make the ex-lover more ex-?

Love in an imperfect world.

Six random things about me

Tagged by my beloved Seshat, so I am going to play the game of randomly obscure things about me you would never have guessed.

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself. (See below)
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. (See further below…)
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

I’m not going to tag anyone, so wah. I think rules are meant to be broken. Playing tag reminds me a little of sending chain letters.

1 While on a trip to Cambodia in 2003, I ate a piece of chewy bark and asked what it was, expecting to hear the name of a tree. The translator explained unhappily to me that I was eating dried monkey.

2 After five years of creating an organic garden I have managed to attract the rare dwarf chameleon to come and live in a clump of restio grasses

3 The great literary love of my life is the American poet Elizabeth Bishop who spent many years living in Brazil with her lesbian partner Lota Macedo de Soares

4 One of my favourite singers is the husky barefoot contralto Cesario Evora from the cape Verde islands. She sings a local form of the Portuguese fado.

5 The great companion of my 40s has been a little grey cat named Axel Rose who died last year at the age of 19. A witch’s familiar without peer.

6 My secret plant passion is for aloes and succulents from the hot dry semi-arid deserts of the Karoo and Kalahari. I searched for three days in the foothills of the Swartberg mountains to find a small grey-green spiky haworthia.

A cat in hiding

My neighbour Heather came over to cut herself some fresh mint and stayed to chat with me in the kitchen. She looked at the couscous grains sprinkled with rosewater, the little pyramid of julienned carrots, the golden sultanas plumping up in orange juice, the rinsed baby spinach, the strips of courgette (zucchini) marinading in lemon and oil, the glass bowls and tagine set out on the kitchen table. Saucers of sliced red onion, shards of pink grapefruit, chopped cashew nuts. Pounded cumin and cardamom and cloves in the mortar. An opened jar of preserved limes.

‘Oh you are entertaining!’ she said. ‘How nice”

‘Um, no,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying out a new dish.’

Which sounded better than saying, ‘Oh no this is all for me, my little lunchikins.’

Most people don’t bother to cook for themselves, they associate good food with entertaining, having company, being spoiled or petted with treats, cooking for lovers before bedtime.

I have always cooked complex and lavish dishes with only myself in mind. It is a kind of selfish magic for the greedy soul. This morning I am concocting a very subtle and demanding North Africa vegetarian tagine, layered like a Mughal-style breyani, studded with cardamom and slivers of cashew nut and sultanas, but with savoury undertones, a golden cornucopia of a dish. Small careful quantities so it doesn’t get wasted.

When I was very poor while doing post-graduate studies in hermeneutics, I used to borrow cookbooks from the library and read about wonderful food while I ate a lentil mash on brown bread. I made a promise to myself. Whenever I got money I would try out one of the recipes in the book. It was an unthreatening way to learn how to cook because I didn’t have to worry about someone not liking my food. I didn’t have to fuss with techniques that bored or defeated me, producing souffles or desserts with meringue or puff pastry.

I read up on French country cooking, casseroles, pot-au-feu, Egyptian and Syrian or Ethiopian stews with fiery harissa and peanuts. I stuffed bell peppers and cabbage leaves with rice and pine nuts and lemony melissa. I tried to make Japanese soups with aduki beans and bowls of strong dashi stock.

And then I began inviting friends over for meals. I shared a flat with a difficult Lebanese woman and learned from her how to do Beirut chicken with cinnamon and vermicelli, surprisingly delicious. It amused my friends that I could not make toasted sandwiches or fry an egg but would turn out earthenware terrines of pate and moussaka and happily create variations on Spaghetti puttanesca.

I began writing about food back in my student days, sending recipes with comments to friends and describing my visits to restaurants. The writing and the cooking seemed to coalesce, the same way that growing plants and writing about gardens and orchids and hybrid tomatoes and eggplants or the torrid politics of organic food all flowed together.

So I helped to write cookbooks. I edited cookbooks and wrote reviews of cookbooks. I went on cooking for myself, had a store cupboard of the ingredients nobody in the house understood, small tightly sealed jars of za’tar, anchovies, nam pla, chilli paste, dried porcini, tubes of vervet-green wasabi paste.

I began to dry my own herbs or freeze chopped basil at the end of summer. I made tomato purees from my own ripe small Rosa plum tomatoes. Diced and preserved peppers and piri-piri chillies. And I wrote about it, made notes and tasted and wrote some more. I wrote about kitchen gardens in Provence and the Napa Valley and out in the African veld. I travelled and preferred to eat out alone, in cellars off alleys in Rome or Parisian cafes or Algerian food stalls. I tried to recreate what I had eaten in Cambodia or Laos, tried to describe the taste of lotus pods or snake beans and wrote travel pieces that were really all about food and growing food and making the best of what is in the back garden or the field down the road. I talked with farmers and rice harvesters and chefs and hungry travellers with food allergies.

The pleasure lies in the fact that this is a hobby, an occasional way to earn a living in between doing other kinds of writing. I don’t think I could become a professional restaurant reviewer and go out to eat rich food every night and then come back and write reviews. I need homecooking, I need my own food, I need time to watch the lemons ripen on the trees in a sunny corner of the backyard. A friend of mine goes to every restaurant opening in the Cape and I can hear the jaded dyspeptic tones in his reviews.

This is my secret world of creative cooking and mulling over the meaning of life when I have a day to myself and an empty sunlit kitchen.

When my neighbour had gone, her truant cat, the calico Captain Jim, came out from his hiding place in the spare room. He knows that if his mother sees him, she will tuck him under her arm and take him back next door. He likes to visit and hang around me in the kitchen and go home when he feels like it.

Us solitaries understand one another.

The issues of our lives

I’m reading United Nations reports and sorting through data in my head. I get my analytic skills from my father and I am good at problem-solving. I even managed to solve most of the problems my poor crazy father created for his family.

For lunch I am eating beans and salad. I’m thinking about a young woman trapped in the Berlin blockade at the end of the Second World War, receiving food parcels and never learning to feed anyone. Women living through war and smoking cigarettes, tightening belts on serge jackets, and living just for the day.

I think about a photograph of my own mother at the age of 14 standing posing wth a new Dunlop bicycle on a dirt road in Southern Rhodesia in the 1930s. She has long red-brown plaits and a closed hard expression. In the background there are msasa trees and tall elephant grass. She looks small and thin and defiant. Now we would call it a ‘fuck you’ expression but then it would have been considered unfeminine. Being thought feminine mattered to my mother all her life.

I’m thinking about women growing up hating our own bodies and starving our bodies or self-mutilating to let out the pain. I’m thinking about single mothers who can’t explain why having children changes women so utterly forever. I’m thinking about destinies and power and choice. All those wild and crazy possibilities that narrowed down into a difficult choice for many of us by the age of 29.

Mothers and daughters. Crazy angry mothers, feckless mothers, drifting and hopeless mothers who would not grow up. My own mother was an alcoholic suicide. The goddess is for me a very hard-headed and far-seeing figure without much sentimentality. She doesn’t waft about much or give me honey from the rock. I get granite.

I don’t know what kind of mother I might have become. I chose not to have children.

Well, that is not true. When I began living with Mike at the age of 19 I went onto the Pill (as we said then, ‘the Pill’ like a monolithic icon) and thought myself safe. As it happened, I had amoebic dysentery, contracted in Kenya, and I fell pregnant despite the Pill and then miscarried at four months, all alone in an attic room in winter. I was afraid of going to prison for procuring an abortion. I didn’t know why I was having a miscarriage. This was a student house in a ramshackle suburb of Cape Town. I sat next to the bed and bled into a pottie. Occasionlly I fainted. The cramps were agony. Blood and shit and urine went all over the floorboard and seeped into the cracks.

It didn’t occur to me to tell my boyfriend I had lost our child when he came back the following week. I had just lain in bed and bled, had fainting fits and was too weak to keep food down. But I got up and smiled and wore make-up and sat there like a zombie. He watched me very nervously and did not know what to do.

Now I look back and see that I was my mother’s daughter in so many respects. My mother always thought that most things that happen in life are Our Own Fault. She believed in being a Private Person. She liked women who Kept Themselves to Themselves.

I never forgave the boyfriend for what I never told him had happened to me. He was bewildered. I agreed I might be a little neurotic. We were big on self-pathologising in those days. He thought I might be anorexic because I could not eat rare steak, charred crusty and with blood in the middle. Rare steak, slabs of meat with leaky blood. I would eat salad, Iceberg lettuce with a vinegary dressing, and try not to think about anything at all.

I had a badly damaged uterus but would not talk about that. I had lost a foetus on the wooden floor of a cold room in the middle of winter. I remember buying myself a pale pinky-brown lipstick at the local chemist, a trinket for a child who could not deal with a woman’s loss. I could not think about blood or wet liver or rawness or slime or death. If I did I would faint.

Sometimes I wonder how we do survive to become human beings. I wonder how we overcome that maternal legacy and get to be human. And we do not grow up to become our mothers. Sometimes we grow up to love and understand our mothers, those helpless and angry young women putting on stockings with crooked seams and brushing on mascara like a fatal irritant. Anointing their naive mouths with bright scarlet, blood-red lipstick that smells of grease and perfume and a hard brutal kiss.

The skies lit by wandering stars

It hasn’t been an easy time and I have written as if it was a chore at times. I would wake up and feel fine, warm, centred, myself. By early afternoon I would feel lost and dazed, the long hot afternoon frighteneing and still. Antsy and fearful and lost, caught between continents, lives, lovers.

In some ways I have written for those who need to ground rather than those of us in Otherliness. We know who we are. I wake up and know which plants have wilted slightly overnight, despite my botanical knowledge. The leaves whisper to me late at night. the shouts of the pistol bush. Then there are are phrases of poetry, snatches of Mahler, whiskery men in denim jackets chatting to me, women showing me bowls of gruel or shaking corn onto rounded beds of granite, although I have no idea who they might be, or why these images float in and out, the music recurring. It is all about the attuned life and learning how to work with fluid boundaries.

Not everone has this and not everyone would know how to live with it. It is nothing to wish for, anymore than being able to add numbers in your head without a calculator, sing in tune or memorize poetry. It is a gift that comes and goes. As I get older, it gets stronger and that is not always comfortable.

These nights the skies blaze with stars, white as fire. I draw the curtains when I feel my mind is too alight for comfort.

Today I am cooking with butternut, Ndende beans — little speckled beauties, butter beans from the West Coast near Saldanha Bay, deep orange carrots and brown-skinned onions, a spice paste with piri-piri chillies from Mozambique, tossing in fresh soft celery and chard, listening to jazz. Listening to recordings of a band from Mali, singing a capella like throaty angels. Local food, local music.

Grounded here in the old mountain valleys of the Cape, where the stars still go on shining after the sun is up and raw as a skinned tomato. Stars that do not vanish easily.

How to be Celtic in Africa, I think. Some days it is almost doable.

When nothing happens next

This week i’ve had a few emails from friends exploring spiritual traditions and asking me about meditation. Because so much nonsense is written about meditation, I thought I’d try to put down a few things that have become more obvious to me over the years.

Meditation was a very disconcerting experience for me,especialy at the beginning. I would getin to a cross-legged position, light a candle or burn incense, sit with my eyes closed or lowered and slow my breathing.

Then nothing happened.

Well, a great deal happened, but trivial and irritating stuff.. My knees or calve muscles would start to ache, my nose would itch and within a few moments I would be planning lunch or thinking about a cold glass of wine or rehearsing anargument with someone who had annoyed me. I would start again. Then I would feel bored, claustrophobic, fed up. The sense of emptiness and nothing happening bothered me. I would find myself daydreaming and again thinking about wine or chocolate or upset by an unpleasant memory of failure and missing the deadline on a project.

I would start again. Breathing in and out and feeling more and more bored. It felt such a waste of time. No insights, no mental calm, certainly no felt presence of the divine. I would force myself to sit out the 45 minutes and avoid mediatating again for as long as I could.

It took me a while to discover that I was in fact learning something about the nature of how the mind works when left to its own devices. I have a clever and lazy mind that thrives on variety and likes to produce wishful fantasies most of the time. I avoid thinking about unpleasant things: humiliating incidents in the past or failure or rejection. There are many realities about myself I would very much rather not think about and it is always a shock to be reminded of them. In meditation, these difficult and unpleasant reminders would pop up, often.

I wanted to feel good about myself. I anted to feel I was tuning in to positive and loving and inspiring thoughts. But most of the time I felt irritable and distracted and bored to tears. Instead of calming down, my mind chattered away like a cage full of monkeys.

In meditation I have learned a great deal about facing up to my need to feel in control of my inner life. I want to choose the kind of inner experience that pleases me. I don’t tolerate boredom well. I don’t like having to live with that chattering emptiness inside my mind. It is very uncomfortable sitting and enduring my own frustration, the vanity and noticing the endless flattering daydreams churned out by the bored ego. the underlying anxieties crowding each other out. Mediation felt at the beginning as if I was starting from scratch every 30 seconds or so.

When I realised I couldn’t meditate and just sat and acknowledged that this inner babble was who I was at that time, the nature of my meditating began to change. Acceptance changes us. Humility begin when we simply acknowledge our insufficiency. All those lvely inspiring thoughts we read about in books on meditation, all the techniques to master, all the elevated attitudes and positive fuzzy feelings are those belonging to somebody else who has had them pulbished for readers to enjoy vicariously. The real thing is what we experience for ourselves when we sit down and face up to who we are inside our minds and what is going on inside our idle little heads. The French writer Pascal noted that most of us cannot live without distractions. We have to distract ourselves from our own insufficiency every minute of the day. We can drown ourselves out by chanting or repeting mantras but the awkward truths keep coming back. Our ideas about God and the divine are just our ideas about God and the divine, mostly borrowed.

Thomas Merton has written much on what he calls ‘false mysticism’, our ability to delude ourselves about ourselves and create agreeable gods in our own image, just as we produce images of ourself and indulge the constant cravings of the imagination. It is not alcohol or chcolate in themselves we crave but the sensation produced by alcohol or sugar or caffeine or nicotine, the way getting drunk helps us escape from the self and unpleasant realities of life. Meditation can become just another kind of escape or it can become a way of getting real and facing up to ourselves.

Appreciating boundaries

Last night I came into the living room just in time to catch the last few minutes of some psychic thriller in which the good guy was mindreading the intentions of the bad guys, so he could save the world. Or at least the blue-eyed blonde woman shivering helplessly at his side.

It reminded me why I don’t like so much of the popularised nonsense around wicca or magic or playing at having supernatural powers that manifest on command and always at the right moment in the crisis.

Colonising the minds of others, pretending or believing that we can ‘read’ their private thoughts or detect things they don’t want known, is morally a very unhealthy activity. Just as the skin on our bodies sets bodies apart from one another — we don’t spill into one another, we don’t leak into one another’s pores or veins — so we need an understanding of boundaries and privacy.

When we claim we can ’see’ a broken or dark aura around somebody or feel ’strange emanations’ coming from them, we need to look very hard at our own motivations. We need to understand why we are trying to frighten ourselves or others by imputing invisible power to others, what may be vengeful in our claims, what it may say about our fear of strangers or difference.

Many of my intuitions have been mistaken. I always note those mistakes with interest because very often the error has to do with negativity or fear on my part. Many of my first impressions about others have been wrong. I have projected old fears or ignorant prejudices onto quite innocuous and well-meaning people.

Once most of Europe was dominated by suspicion and prejudices, the dislike and distrust of people who had a certain skin colour or hooked noses or one eye green and the other brown, or a disfiguring birthmark. Even today, certain people with deformities are seen as ‘cursed’ or ‘unlucky’ and the sign of the cross is made or passersby spit on the ground as they move away from them. There are still witch hunts in Africa where widows or pubescent girls are blamed for natural disasters like drought or landslides and put to death.

The thoughts of others are none of my business. That is one way to set a boundary. To pry into the private life or ’secrets’ of a another person is wrong. Even if you feel that person to be an ex-lover who has harmed you or the woman who ’stole’ your lover or someone who may be harming your children. To study the layout of tarot cards in an attempt to ‘discern’ the intentions of another is wrong. To read zodiac horoscopes in the hope of predicting what will happen to somebody else tomorrow so that you can scare or impress that person with your psychic prowess is morally wrong. It may also be an idiotic waste of time and quite literally wrong, in that your guesses are likely to be way off beam. Intention, why we place emphasis on some dynamics and not others, counts for a great deal in what we give attention to and learn from as we move through daily life.

Imagine if you had others doing this kind of second-guessing around you all the time. It would feel as if you were being stalked, an abusive invasion of your privacy, and yet that is what passes for much of Hollywood’s depictions of psychic mediums. Psychic freaks who exercise power over others because they ‘know’ things that these unfortunates do not even know about themselves.

The gifts of intuition are rarely ‘psychic’ in the crude sense. Most of them come from long and careful observation of, say, plants. That is why I can glance at red spidermite on the underside of a begonia’s leaves and know what is wrong with it immediately, and how I should put it right. To somebody who is not a gardener, that looks like magic. The way a small child thinks his mother has second sight because she knows he stole biscuits from the pantry and that is why he has no appetite for supper. Mothering is a kind of magic, but it is also rational loving attention. I can tell by the shift in register in a close friend’s voice that she has fallen out of love. That comes from years of listening.

Watching a fellow passenger on a plane twist her hands in restless anguish, I might wonder if she has a phobia about flying or is travelling home for a family funaral. I can feel sympathy but I do not know what the trouble is unless she chooses to confide in me and. And it is none of my business.

There are many secrets I wish I had not been told. The telling may have brought relief to the one sharing guilt or remorse, but I do not enjoy having to keep such secrets and know what I have learned about the cruelty and selfishness of human nature. I would not set out to discover those secrets by telepathy even if I could do so. Telepathy is rare and oddly random or insignificant to the person picking up unsought phrases or numbers or images. And it comforts me to know that my own modest but embarrassing secrets stay with me and are not readily available to strangers on flights or in crowded shopping malls.

Boundaries. Most of us who are not teenage witches enamoured by Charmed or Medium already know most of this stuff. But the temptation is always there, to regress to the world of magic we first believed in as small children, full of ogres and giants and fairy godmothers waving wands. Stories of revenge and good versus evil and rewards of golden apples or silver slippers and living happily ever after.

We all have to grow out of fundamentalism at some point, to appreciate myth as symbol and not reality. And that otherness remains Otherness for a reason.