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.
The land where the stars and sun shine together. It really does sound like a paradise at the end of the world!
I do so love your cooking descriptions. Gustatory pleasure on the page. I’m hungry and I’ve just eaten. The meal was unsatisfactory compared to the feast you describe. I am greedy for food cooked that way; with soul and knowledge and balance, foresight and love.
[...] speak about monetary poverty, the poverty of things; but, inspired by the delicious prose poetry of African Alchemy, I want to talk about the poverty of food, here, today in the United [...]