Cumulus lowering

There are clouds massing over the mountain ranges and formations tumbling together in the blue skies high above the valley. Mauve and lilac and white.

 

I cut back my Greek origanum that I plan to dry in the oven, and cut it back hard so that the new rocket leaves will get more sun. The garden needs work and I don’t know where to start — overgrown salvias and mint springing up in unwanted places and leaves bunching thick under the olive trees. I worry about my rummaging puppies coming on scorpions  in the mouldy debris. This is the times of the year for thirsty cobras and scorpions, and much as I love the snakes of the hot dry places, I care for my small puppies. A friend’s little dog died yesterday after being bitten by a brown widow spider hiding in dead leaves.

 

As I work in the garden I make up scenes for the novel and avoid the lovely greeny-blue rue that causes my skin to blister. I think about risk and danger and putting my hand into nettles in a faraway Welsh garden, the weals and burning pain.

 

For once in my life I am not sure what is going to happen next. Nothing stirs in me for the season  turning to autumn, the astrological constellations do not resonate, my dreams are muffled and cryptic. I am atypically marooned in the present moment.

 

There may be rain this evening and the New Year’s Eve party with crowds of y much-loved friends and neighbours milling together in mutual bafflement on the lawn ( the renegade Catholic priest talking at odds with the bipolar sculptor, the herbwitch sidling away from the librarian, the solitary bachelor alarmed by all the small children, the cats  hissing at the puppies, o social eclectic how I do love thee!) , may become a kitchen table affair as the rain pelts down outdoors and everyone grabs chairs and sofa ends.

 

This then is an hour of suspended intuitions, and I aim just to stay with the mild uncertainty and watch for signs of change.While rain clouds bloom like great purple irises overhead, foaming and  pillowy. And the garden smells peppery and electric in the heat.

 

My body at home in the smouldering landscape, just breathing in the crackling ions and hints of storm. Unsure what comes next and prepared for anything. Sometimes it goes like this too –

The lovely dark

During a thunderstorm yesterday evening, pylons were struck and we had no electricity for seven hours. I am opposed to light pollution after living overseas at various times, but out here in the wilderness of the Overberg, there is very little street light and I do most of my walking by starlight in any case.

So I enjoyed the darkness. I took two small Van Gogh-tinted yellowy-green tree frogs down to the river becaue I don’t want my puppies to bite or frighten them.

 

On my way back I waved to a couple of artist friends who were having a row in the fading light outside his studio. I never get involved in the quarrels of friends, my boundaries stay intact and unviolated. He is a commercially unsuccessful artist. She suspects his art is not very good but supports him and assures him she believes in him. He takes the money and philanders. She sighs, and quietly builds tree houses all around her woodland garden, magical little treetop palaces and rustic hideaways and bird viewing platforms. She is practical and resourceful and brimming with creativity.  He is a moody and sadly sterile Branwell Bronte, but looks like a bohemian and darkly handsome artist. What goes on between them is an open secret but none of my business, so I wave and pass by.

In the last glimmer of light  and with the help of a tremulous candle flame, I made a pissaladiere with creamy onions and a few anchovies and fresh thyme. Went out in the growing dark to admire my new corner of the herb garden, with its flowering sage and dill and a new chilli bush covered in little red and moony yellow chillies, tiny but deadly. Such bliss.

 

The garden dim with starlight, and the entire village and valley sunk in darkness, the way it must have looked in the 18th century when Dutch colonist soldiers rode out on horseback from the Cape Colony to trade with the Hawequa tribespeople.

 

The lovely timeless embrace of the dark. I had a bath by the light of  a small hurricane lamp and listened to our house martins chirping in the eaves. sat and chatted to my housemate and ate supper. Then went to bed and to my surprise fell into a deep sleep populated with crones drumming in a cave and gazing into wells. The obvious unconscious!

This is how generations lived, dwelling in twilight and dusk and shadowy dawns, sleeping through the dark and dreaming their fill. And joyful to wake and see the dazzle of sunlight come again.

Dark moon in December

It was very dark outside in the back garden at 2am this morning when I let out my small nervous puppies. The fragrance of frangipani drifting  across from a neighbouring garden along with the scent of my luscious “Black Knight’ buddleia, a velvety dark purple.

 

The dark moon nights have a crone energy for me, something ancient and knowing and sometimes harsh. Hecate hours, some might call it. I have no rituals at the moment, it is a dormant period for me in which I watch and wait. Tending the garden with its ripening tomatoes and red-hot chillies and cutting back bushes or origanum and sage and lavender. The rosemary is dry and spiky, no tender tips there. White moths flutter about between the silver and grey olive trees. Lizards and small rodents rustle around like dead leaves on the gravel.

 

The hot night breezes are dusty but aromatic and the cries of the owl faint but pure. I stand out  in th garden and breathe in, open myself to mystery, moving beyond fear and the trivial annoyances and distractions of the festive season. Something much older and deeper is at work in me, something life-affirming.

 

The skies are crushed glass and glittering with stars, but there is only a sliver of moon. The rim of a scythe for the harvest to come.

Incalculable Mistress Moon loitering over the African mountains and deep riverine valleys, watching us from the shadow of your cloak. All that is brooding and intense within my spirit comes out to linger with you.

Desert heart

As we were driving through the green Cape valleys yesterday, shaded by oak trees and with vineyards stretching away on either side of the road, I suddenly thought how much I would love to be in the Great Karoo again.

 

It wasn’t a logical desire because the Great Karoo at this time of year is a furnace, scorching and dusty and arid. The word ‘Karoo’ means ‘great thirst’ in Khoi-San and the landscape of the Great Karoo is semi-desert, with the expanses of the harsh plains (deeply striated glacial pavements) broken only by flat-topped mesas and conical kopjes.

 

There are kopjes and mesas and the occasional windmill. Or a black rhino.

 

But what looks like low impoverished scrub from the car window is a wilderness of aromatic bushes, bulbs, aloes and succulents. Populated by reptiles, riverine rabbits and ostriches. Eagles and the lovely chanting goshawk hang overhead on thermals. It is an ancient and complex landscape with shimmering light, flash floods and freezing nights.

 

This is dinosaur territory, a landscape that dates back 270-million years with fossils embedded in rock strata.

 

Another name for the Karoo is the “place of great dryness’. There are mirages of  green and blue lakes that you glimpse as you drive north in the hot afternoons, dazed and thirsty, your eyes weary of the glare and aridity.

 

The Swedish botanist and naturalist Dr Carl Peter Thunberg made three journeys into the interior of the Cape between 1772 and 1774. He found the “Carrow” had “a burning hot climate where not a drop of rain falls for the space of eight months at least’.

It was so hot that “the eye is affected by a tremulous motion in the air, just as though one were looking at a flame”.

 

Years ago I stayed in a small Karoo town where no rain had fallen for six years. I was sick from the kiln-heat but enthralled by the clarity of the harsh light, the proximity of stars at night. Walking across the arid veld at dawn was magical, the glowing succulents and anthills, the gnarled acacia thorn trees. The scorched  and blasted landscape brought up something dessicated and empty and yet alive in me, a kind of Otherness. My relationship with the sun took on a beseeching quality. I longed for the sound of running ater all the time, i craved deep pools of shade. But each morning I would be thrilled to watch that molten red sun come up over the kopjes and horizontal plains once again.

 

The hunter-gatherer tribes of the KhoiSan hunted by the scents carried to them on the wind and dug up juicy bulbs and roots for smoisture when there was no water and the streams had dried up in summer. They tracked game following scarcely perceptible spoor traces.

 

Much of their own spirituality was lived through dance and music, as well as a gifted sense of impermanence. They lived in awe of the moon, the Old Wild Mother.

 

The desert teaches me something about impermanence, the way animal tracks and ruins and railways and roads disappear without trace, the erasure by wind and sand of all we create.

 

There is an old song sung by the Khoi of the Kalahari that expresses the heart of desert existence, the fragility and lightness of a footprint darting across the sand.

 

“The day we die

a soft breeze will wipe out our footprints in the sand.

When the wind dies down,

who will tell the timelessness

that once we walked this way

in the dawn of time?”

Solstice storm

It was too hot to go outdoors last night, cloudy and humid. I was sick with mild heat stroke after working in an informal settlement with people possibly stricken with cholera. Bringing in clean water and getting children hooked up to tetracycline drips. We touched elbows in greeting because handshakes were too hazardous in terms of contamination. Love in a time of cholera.

 

Lay awake shaking and sweating with a bad headache for several hours, woke to more heat and blazing sunlight. A mid-summer that seemed as if it is here to stay.

 

Then suddenly the sky was black with tumultuous clouds and rain pelting down. I ran to get washing off the line, my face smacked with hard drops of cold water. The smell of dust and rain mingling.

 

And now the season will topple away from growth to decline, will turn towards autumn and another kind of fruitfulness bound up with decay. The year ripening and dying. Elsewhere my fellow solstice observers will be watching for the sun’s return, the promise of warmer days and green life coming with the spring. Here we will move towards cooler weather and harvest.

 

Pencilled in grey of rain concealing the fields, the rainy wind shaking trees and rattling window panes. So good for the garden, for the crops. Privately I hope it will not spread more water-borne cholera.

 

Blessings to all of you this solstice. Hopes for a year of peace, justice and healing.

Authentic kitchen witchery

When I browse through pagan, neo-pagan, wiccan etc blogs online and have a surfeit of too many people who think the universe is a cosmic lucky dip and whose spells lack magic or earthing practice, I go back to Claudia Roden.

 

I have read Clauia Roden on Middle Eastern and Jewish (Sephardic and Asheknazi) food tradions for 25 years now. Cookbooks are my pragmatic grimoires.

 

What Claudia Roden understands about cooking is that it less important to love food than to love people. She knows how to cook for family and friends.

Roden: ‘”When I started, there was very little written about Middle Eastern cooking. When I asked some relations to send me an Egyptian cookery book, the only one they could find was an Egyptian translation of a naafi cookbook left over from the war. Cooking was a kind of oral tradition, with recipes passed down from mother to daughter.

I had to go back to 13th-century manuscripts in the British Museum to find anything written about this type of cooking.”

Writing A Book of Middle Eastern Food became a way of recreating the culture she had lost, just as later the monumental Book of Jewish Food was a homage to her own Jewish roots. She remembers clearly how the Sephardic Diaspora provided her with relatives in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and how each family branch made its own distinctive contribution to the collective culinary culture.

 

Eating is about comfort and inspiration and loss. Immigrant cultures bring ingredients that carry with them the magic of the vanishing diaspora. While in London, I find my eyes filling with tears if I pass by the stalls of West African or Nigerian sellers, the ground pipipiri chillies and palm oil and bananas, the heat and fragrance so rare on a cold island.

 

And I have a kitchen that is not unlike Claudia Roden’s, my own magickal den. Anyone is welcome, and that is the secret.

 

Cladia Roden comments, ‘I have a lot of spices, unfortunately I have too many and in a sense they lose their power over time. I always have saffron, aromatic spices, orange blossom, rose water, pomegranate syrup and Nyora peppers. I like bringing back spices from the countries I visit, but then I also buy them here in the supermarkets, because I want to see what the dishes will taste like when other people make them. There is a great freshness in spices when you buy them in the markets in Spain and things like rose water and orange blossom are much more powerful. I have stocks of bulgur, couscous, basmati rice and paella. I like having dried beans, chickpeas and lentils in the house so that if I suddenly decide to cook a dish I can do it.’

 

Creativity takes heart and imagination.

 

And generosity. My kitchen is a nexus of spice routes and numerous food histories and traditions. There are drawers and cookbooks stuffed with recipes from friends. Sketches and maps and postcards, paintings and carved wooden pigs, jade-green bowls of apricots, glass jars of white beans and lentils, brass double-handled bowls from India. Not a stainless steel and melamine laboratory. I have never been so poor I could not have a small pumpkin or a few fresh eggs in the larder. Never so deprived I could not conjure up a meal for friends and hungry guests.

 

And I like to think I come from a long line of kitchen witches like Claudia Roden, celebrating the traditions of the marginalised and poor, those out-of-the-way culinary ways of cooking that celebrate both nostalgia and the present, whatever is there in the fields or on the back of the blackmarket lorry.

Number me among the almonds

Which comes of course from that master of black paradox, the poet Paul Celan.

“Render me bitter / Number me among the almonds”

 

I get emails, sometimes three or four times a day from my ex-lover, walking around the Welsh Borders and climbing the Black Mountain and talking to me in his head. He says that he feels like a stalker at times, half-apologetically. He says that he misses me. Nobody has understood him better.

The truth is that I like hearing from him. But the truth is also that I have no idea who I represent for him. I don’t recognise the Marya to whom he is writing. She has this agreeable idealised way about her, nodding her head and laughing at his political satire and family anecdotes, that is not moi right now.

There’s continental drift taking place between us. He is creatively misremembering me. I am an ocean and a continent away. He thinks of me fondly.

 

I am misremembering him, the bearded grouch I loved so nonsensically,  and have no desire to be with him above the snowline, floundering in mist and listening to his rants or dismissive comments on life, love and the unreasonableness of women he has known. I would like to be in Wales doing my own solitary thing and knowing he lived close by, but not in my space. I have some very mixed feelings about him. He has killed another black-eyed velvety crimson pelargonium this last week, one of the beauties I planted up in pots to render his garden  a place of enchantment.

 

But oddly enough, the misunderstandings are producing a friendship of sorts. A few fond illusions go a long way. I cherish my witchy bitter and solitary ways, he glows at memories of me being unlike myself. (‘Oh when I was in love with you/Then I was young and brave/And all around the wonder grew/How well I did behave’) We were in love and had no chance to get to know each other better. It makes for a congenial and mutual masque or harlequinade.

 

How lovers adore the irrational in one another! While seeking to destroy it.

Bragging eclectic

A few years ago, one of my editors in lifestyle media called me witha bleat in his voice.

 

‘I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘I love the feature you sent me but I wanted a gardening piece on irises and you sent me a narrative that included the poetry of Louise Gluck, a comment from theologian Miroslav Volf, remnants of Greek Orthodox liturgy, a political note on Palestinian poets of the West Bank and a cookery comment on the crocus and saffron. It blew my head off.’

 

I agreed with him that my way of writing is bold, bewildering and unfortunately eclectic.

 

It struck me as a child that there are no fixed divisions between sacred and secular. I was sitting in Presbyterian Sunday School and my Sunday School teachers were touching feet under the table as they talked about Jesus of Nazareth. She was married to somebody else and he was married to somebody else, but they ran away together. She was a brown-eyed lovely woman called Iris. The scrubbed little hall glowed and pulsated with her desire and passion and holiness, her love of Jesus and her love for the grinning fool across from her.

 

I thought about what makes us holy and luminous and it may or may not be morality. I thought about not feeling holy or luminous and the Shadow began to dance. I thought about how Victoria Falls, called Mosi-os-thunya, ‘the Smoke that Thunders’ is not utilitarian and has no purpose and how magnificent the greatest waterfall in the world is to watch through rainbows of mist and thunder.

 

The secrets of the world are hybrid and merge and fill the differences and separate like ice and mist, and belong and do not belong. This drives lawyers and theologians crazy but crazy is what they need to be. I have never known enlightened self-interest that is not just self-interest, but I may be wrong. And always there is life spilling over into life, abundance and incongruity and muddle and wonder.

 

There are no monolithic faiths left. Catholicism in Africa is syncretism, even if the bishops don’t like to talk about it. My Jewish woman friend who is a rabbi in London, plots out her life in astrological constellations. My local Anglican minister reads Julia Kristeva late at night alongside Julian of Norwich.

 

It all makes perfect nonsense.

Cold full moon

On Friday it was the last full moon of the year, a larger than usual cold Gemini moon. I sat outside with my puppies and grounded into the darkness and mystery and losses and hard-won understandings of this past year. The olive trees shivering and glinting like metallic chain mail in the moonlight.

 

The Moon in Gemini is mercurial and unstable and quite appropriate for a year of so many false starts and dead ends and tangents. A year of misplaced trust and inchaote longings.

 

The cold clarity of such a moon appeals to me. I need to gaze through a wider and more accurately focused lens. Images of the icy ocean and lunar tides come to me, images of being adrift and directionless. But it is an interregnum, a time of uncertainties and waiting.

Lines from Adrienne Rich’s poem Orion come to me:

 

‘and when I look you back

it’s with a starlike eye
shooting its cold and egotistical spear
where it can so least damage.
Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall’

Big Bold Magick

I’m busy with one of my favourite esoteric rituals. Making a stock from a huge raw  fish heads. Don’t all run away at once!

 

In another incarnation I may have been/may yet be one of those gummy smelly crones that trawls through entrails and tells her friends all the unsvoury truths they dislike about guts and bowels and undesirable lovers.

 

We came back from the wild Agulhas with a wet sack of red stumpneus wrapped in soaked newspaper. Last night our neighbours came over and we have a fish barbeque, delicious, just lightly grilled fresh fish with salad and  homebaked bread and unsalted butter.

 

Today I am simmering the fish heads with Florentine fennel, icy green and feathery, a sweet brown  onion stuck with cloves, carrots, bay leaves, thyme and lemon peel. I have half a mind to make a fish bisque because it is going to be magnificent, but I want to the fish stock for my moules marinieres over Christmas/Yultide/Mid-Summer festivities.

The biggest fish head with its red-gold and silver skin has the blue-eyed stare of a Methodist parson on the lam. So fresh is this fish that there is no fishy smell at all in the kitchen.

 

I went out to the garden for a few more sprigs of parsley and began communing with a sleepy Mama Earth lurking in a scarlet hibiscus bush. She has poured so  much bounty into this garden and I sometimes wish she would just stay Ceres or Demeter for a while, so I could praise her with Ovid’s pastoral poems and look at old classical images of her. But sometimes she is the small and dark petulant Inanna and sometimes a mischievous sangoma from the old Transkei and sometimes just a hibiscus bush holding dwarf chmeleons and a few odd figments of my imagination.

 

Perhaps just as well becaue if the hibiscus bushes begin to address you in Greek, it is the kind of encounter that Virginia Woolf had with King George swearing in Attic in the rhodadendrons and thereby lies a straitjacket.

 

But Mama Earth and I communed very prosaically about parsley and bolting coriander, until we were interrupted by  my small puppy Chloe who woke up and found me on the other side of a gate.

 

She had the most acute fit of spurious hysterics I have ever seen in a small white dog. Complete abandonment. She shrieked and shrieked like a Fury, got hiccups and threw herself onto her bck scrabbling at the air and squeaking pitifully. Her little dog sister Jezebel the treacherous was alarmed and went off to the other end of the stoep.

 

When I got in through the gate, Chloe was sobbing and hyperventilating and then wet herself. I have never seen such a display of panic. I called my housemate and suggested an animal psychiatrist. The phlegmatic Una said both myself and the white puppy are drama queens.

 

And Mama Earth just turned back into a red-flowering hibiscus bush and would not be drawn on the topic of childhood trauma in puppies.

 

I calmed Chloe down by singing an old Nina Simone song, Sinnerman. At which point the fish stock had mirculously turned fragrant and  golden and delicisou and the magical spell was complete. The blue-eyed Methodist fishhead has an embalmed look and I shall decant  all his goodness into containers for freezing. Any apprentice witch is welcome to follow this spell, lthough you may battle to find the right kind of hibiscus bush and a suitably histrionic small white dog.