The Depth of the Divine: Aries New Moon

This last week I’ve been facilitating with others for groups of humanitarian aid workers struggling to process their time in the violence of north Congo. Very humbling and revealing work, so hard just to listen and stay with the tragedies.

 

One woman who had worked in north Congo for two years and witnessed massacres and survived assaults, spoke in a very quiet voice about the hidden God who appears at the margins of history.

 

She said:

‘My God is unknowable but he comes into the unspeakable where there are no words that can make sense of all-powerful evil. He is not concerned with the comfortable of this world. This God is a God of non-peoples and non-memories, a God who stands together with those of us written out of history and whose lives make no sense because we have been silenced by the immensity of death and horror. God speaks only a great compassionate silence to us now. Silence meets silence.’

 

Afterwards I went and sat out in the garden at home and thought about the immensity of compassion needed in this broken world and how the reality of the Divine, this God-for-Others, smashes through many of my images and petty concerns and self-centredness, the tunnel of neurosis. That I need to reach  deeper and risk more.

 

And it is the Dark Moon in Aries this weekend: as Pluto begins a journey through Capricorn, the true beginning of the strological year and a time to look at what is truly valuable for us in this lifetime. The lasting and durable qualities we desire in relationship, in life choices, in work. And, curiously, the Sabian symbol speaks of someone ‘able to live successfully in two worlds at the same time.’

 

This resonates for me. Autumn, more than spring, is the thinning season when the worlds blow through one another and death is just a fine gossamer veil, barely concealing the Otherness and void. I watch leaves tumble and birds with their avian iridescence, sit on and dream in the garden in the mild sunlight, waiting for the chill of night, Hekate’s hour. Letting the Unknowing blow through me.

Autumn equinox in Africa

Woke to lowlying mist and shining wet fields and grasses, the restio ggrasses gleaming and pearled with dew. Bitter smell of woodsmoke drifting across the old valleys of the Riviersondereind, the ‘river without end’, as early Dutch explorers named it. A landscape of wild figs and river reeds and mountain fynbos that has not changed in 500 years despite the predations of agriculture. If I walk four miles north of Blokkop towards the old Elandskloof Pass (named after the eland buck that came down into the valley each spring), I will be able to sit under old yellowwood and teak trees that were mature when Vasco da Gama set sail from Lisbon to round the Cape of Good Hope en route to India.

 

It is the first day of autumn, the equinox, and tonight I shall do a starlight ritual with bowls of shining red and purple-stained berries, a small bonfire and some dancing around with friends and small dogs and geckos tumbling from farmhouse walls in the lamplight. Libations of apple juice and honeyed quinces, the ceremonial breaking open of the crackle-skinned pomegranates. Starlight a benison.

 

I burn more fiercely in the autumn, it is my season.

 

But Mabon in Africa is a dry and harsh end of summer, marking the period of waiting for the winter rains. The rivers and dams are low, the birds are beginning to fly north on their long journey across the Atlantic. Wild bush fires rage across plateaux and  atop Table Mountain, ash blackens the air. The days are dusty and arid, at night the owls hunt in vain over the harvested fields, it is a transitional and vulnerable time.

 

Yet it is, paradoxically, a season of plenty. Here in the countryside, old farm trucks piled high with sweet hanepoot grapes roar along dusty white roads.. My neighbour has brought me a basket of squishy persimmons the colour of a glowing orange streaked with ochre. In the barns and cellars on the older farms, the winemaking has begun. No, it is not bacchanalian, but the firelight glows in the barns and tumble-down cottages and there are cast-iron pots of pumpkin bredie in slate hearths, rows of white and green squashes  set out on stone walls to dry a little, mounds of red sweet potatoes with the dirt still clinging to them. Sweet potatoes are like maize, the staples of daily life here.

 

But as I watch the mist burning off, the skies opening to the molten blue of all African canopies, I feel strangely divided and hardly at home to myself. I keep dreaming of the early autumn in Wales, with rosehips like boiled sweets in the hedgerows, the blackberry brambles down by the river Wye, the cursing well hidden behind the circles of black yew — and I long to be back there again. I am adrift between continents as I have known myself adrift between worlds, and the longing within, the wrenching, is painful.

 

Like the astonishingly insightful Inanna, I too believe that 

‘Though we often speak as though healing is something we do for another person, as in a doctor healing her patient, in fact we can only heal ourselves. I can care for another person and provide some conditions for healing, but only he heals himself.’

And yet so often I find myself at a place where self-healing is slow or seemingly impossible. Patience, I say, watching the acorns go brittle and the wasp-stung quinces turn sere yellow. Autumn’s mix of austerity and abundant ripeness is finally on the doorstep.

The bean as humble deity

This is not a title in jest: I have been reading an article on the booming global  future of the cunningly tasteless soybean (unless fermented) and reflecting on my love of beans and legumes and nubbly rice grains and split peas and dried aduki beans shining red  and black in a glass jar. In another life I would specialise in food studies and spend a blissful half-century getting to know all there is to know about white haricot beans or the red rice of the Camargue or those small blackish-green Puy lentils that are caviar to some of us.

 

There is a little floury orange bean that only grows on the silt-rich river banks of the meandering Mazoe River in Zimbabwe and my eyes fill with tears to think I may never taste that sublimely nutty flavour again. The small ovate bean is quite simply boiled and eaten with steamed moroq or muriwo (Shona name) which is an African wild spinach. This is often combined witb a pounded and spiced plantain and roasted peanuts or monkey nuts. Soul food.

 

Pause while I sit and reflect on tyranny and idiocy. The average life span of a Zimbabwean woman today is 33 years.

 

But I would love to look out of my back door and see again those wonderfoods of my childhood. The multi-coloured maize with silky tassels, the African rice (Oryza glabberima), those white finger and pearl millets, fonio, teff, a dozen varieties of groundnuts. Vegetables I once took for granted: amaranth, egusi, enset, moringa, okra, and shea. The same way I grew up listening to women pounding manioc in hollowed out tree-trunks and singing as they pounded, a sound as familiar as my own heartbeat. I believed I could live that way forever.

 

And now because of the short-sighted forces of unmindful food aid or profiteering, globalization, etc, there will be fields of GM crops, all the same, all hybridised  through modern technology, stretching away as far as the eye can see.

 

So that little orange bean once prized by those lucky enough to live near the river where the fish eagle cries at dusk and the water is sweet as a melon, may no longer exist but I reverence it and hold it sacred in the altar of memory, the living memory of a people close to the land, moving through flooding and drought, plenty and scarcity, secure in the cyclical rythyms of nature.

My vegan weekend

My beloved housemate the Carnivore-of-Note has gone away with work colleagues for a team-building weekend. I am home alone with the awesome moon and two fat joyful puppies and three woman friends coming around for supper. We were once in an incest survivors group together and know a great deal about how vulnerable we once were and how we grew strong at the broken places.

 

I am going to surprise my friends with a vegan supper and hope they do not leave early and rush off for cow hamburgers. I am concocting a delicious  but complex dish of cauiflower with toasted cashew nuts, fresh coriander and cumin,  a  spiced mushroom and lentil dish, a choice of wild salsas. I love vegan food and all I need are a few cups of beans, dal and brown rice as basics. My secret is to have really good freshly ground spices and crisp fresh fenugreek, masses of pungent leafy coriander, fragrant curry leaves. Coconut milk perhaps and a good tomato puree of ripe summer tomatoes on the vine. Just-squeezed juices and homemade ginger beer, lassis, ripe figs with honey and mint for dessert.

While I was planning this healthy appetising meal full of vegan goodness I absentmindedly ate up a whole bar of dark Lindt chocolate. Being home alone allows me to break all the rules.

Full moon in Virgo

I once worked with a Managing Director who was Virgo and colour-coded her jeans. Obsessive, nitpicking, over-organised and very much somebody who wastes others’ time. Yes, I admired her — that ability to make the world revolve around her petty concerns, to extract perfectionism in the pursuit of trivia — but, no, she and I were not compatible. She mirrored my own love of distractions and a certain unseriousness in my life bound up with ‘getting it right’ — and I needed to move on.

 

On 11 March the Moon will be full at 20°39′ Virgo, opposite the Sun at 20° 39′ Pisces, falling in close alignment with the Saturn-Uranus opposition.  Virgo and Pisces, which I find hard to imagine. How I fumble my way forward in this service to Mistress Moon and her starry constellations!

But I remind myself that ruling Virgo and Pisces are Mercury and Neptune, and that great oceanic Neptune is still traveling in close conjunction with the wounded healer Chiron in Aquarius, calling attention to collective woundedness (my poisoned garden and threatened landscape, the suffering planet, the injustice and suppression of freedom of thought and belief). A time for greater awareness of what is happening and a time to strengthen resolve to work for transformation.

 

Turning, as I take down my pestle and mortar and choose scented candles, to the Sabian symbol for the Sun at 21 Pisces I find a very Easter-ish image: A little white lamb, a child and a Chinese servant, with the keyword WHITE HOPE. In Chinese symbolism the colour white stands for death, a kind of extinction. I don’t like the colonial overtones of the image and am not sure I can work with it. Here on the African continent we are moving into the autumnal equinox and I am surrounded by hot reds and golds and dark purples, falling leaves, ripening fruit and acorns, dark berries clustered on the bushes. But I retain the sense of an innocent mesenger and something luminous, a star rising in the East, Something protective awakened in me.

 

Mercury is my astrological messenger, an equivalent of Hermes, bringing news from elsewhere and alerting me to the new and unexpected. Probing a little deeper, I find the this full moon takes place in my 12th house as a Libra sign, raising issues to do with health and the past. My heart quails a little — and that connects again to the twinge of fear I always get around Saturn. A time to think clearly and be prepared to organise my life to meet the untoward.

 

Traditionally Virgo is a tree-lover and I shall do my full moon ritual out under the avocado tree, dense and leafy, but standing within sight of the moon over the mountains. Because Venus turns retrograde throughout March, I want to celebrate the dark face of Venus who rules my sign of Libra and who took me on a collision course with Mars-Aries as a lover last year. I’m still feeling my way through that one!

 

And I need to ground with earthy  practical Virgo — so I shall be grounding throughout this ritual, sinking into the earth, conscious of my roots, of the need to care for the piece of earth entrusted to me, however briefly. I want the colour silver, I want a deep gleaming bowl of water sprinkled with salt, I want a circle of candles like stars.

I want to dream my way forward into the unsettling new, to be prepared for unsought transformation, even to welcome another descent.  Stepping through fear into the future.

Encounters, visitations, meetings

Up at the boys’ high school this afternoon my housemate was supervising a swimming gala when a teenage boy sudddenly keeled over at the poolside and fainted.

When he came around, my housemate checked his very faint pulse and gave him hot sweet tea. She asked if he had a history of epilepsy.

 

‘No,’ the boy replied. ‘My father came to speak with me and it gave me a great shock.’

 

‘Is your father very ill?’ asked Una. She does not approve of apparitions unless the relative concerned is busy dying.

 

‘My father has been dead for 12 years,’ the boy answered. ‘But these days he is keeping me very busy. His beard has become very grey and he is still angry with my aunt, he wants her to begin healing work and she is too busy having fun with her new husband. She will not listen to the dreams he sends her, so my father has to visit me to give her a message.’

 

There is probably no Western equivalent of the complex, troubling and vital relationships with the ancestors that is experienced among the Nguni peoples. The dead are not spiritually abstract or concerned with the afterlife: they meddle constantly and forcefully in the lives of their descendants. Frequently a long-dead grandmother is criticised for giving  the wrong advice or turning daughters against mothers, making mischief, insisting that urbanised nephews buy  an ox instead of a small car or take a second wife when they still owe lobola on the first wife. These departed relatives go on smoking clay pipes filled with cheap tobacco that stink up their descendents’ homes, craving putu with meat gravy or jugs of grain beer; they coax reluctant church-going daughters to gamble on the horses for them, they arrive in the middle of the night and break cups, rummage through bathroom cabinets and even gossip with the neighbours. Sometimes they turn up with warnings a year or two after the event has already taken place, confused and irascible.

 

They are loved and resented perhaps more than revered and their faults are as annoying as ever they were in life. In death the aancestors tend to become petulant and bossy and the younger generations find them a handful to manage.

‘Whenever I consult my grandmother, she comes to stay and brings with her an infestation of fleas and tokoloshes,’  a Sotho friend tells me. ‘She comes shopping with me and puts extra packets of sugar in the trolley and laughs at all the other shoppers, quite rudely. I want to apologise, but most people can’t see her.’ 

All the same, my friend would not accept a job offer or consider repainting her home without consulting her grandmother because the old lady (dead 40 years) would be hurt and bad luck might ensue. The ancestors are a fact of life (and death). Nobody doubts that they exist, and that they are family.

 

A few years ago the local school had to close for two weeks because of a tokolosh that appeared in one of the classroom and began to bite the girls’ legs and smash windows. The tokolosh is very unwelcome presence and often the ancestors have to be called in to chase the malevolent creature away. As the same ancestors might have sent the tokolosh to torment a disrespectful child, the negotiations are very tricky and placatory. When I was a small child in eastern Zimbabwe I slept on an old iron bedstead with four legs that stood in petrol cans filled with water to discourage the tokolosh from pestering me at night. My sister saw the tokolosh eating soap in the bathroom, small and furry with a bony ridge on top of its head.

 

When I was studying African literature many years later at university, a professor from Sheffield University in the UK explained to us that the mythical tokolosh is a combination of gremlin, poltergeist, and zombie. We all howled with laughter until he got very pink around the eyes.

A tokolosh is not mythical at all, everyone has a  small toe-biting tokolosh in her or his life and tries to keep clear of it. The truly African knack of balanced living is to give the tokolosh a wide berth while maintaining friendly relations with the old lady in the corner chewing a dried mealie cob.

Demi-lune

 

Came home last night from supper out at a local restaurant where I had a delicious side dish of roast baby beetroot and a creamy goat’s cheese chevre — stood for a moment in the back garden looking up at the half-moon with a fine aureole of mist signifying rain.

 

But today it is hotter than ever. The garden services person who mows my grass and does heavy pruning informed me he had sprayed the back undergrowth with a toxic weedkiller, undoing five years of organic effort on my part. I went out to the back and found a tiny lizard curled up dead and dead spiders. Arachne or the spider goddess Maconda of Voudou are key to the sustainable ecology of this garden and I am stricken. My puppies cannot go out to play for several days and so many valuable beautiful plants will have been poisoned.

 

I have certain great sustaining comforts at times like this and one of them is the poetry of Adrienne Rich whom I first read when I was 25 and shrivelling up with despondency and her lucid penetrating vision saved my life.

 

In Those Years

In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and, yes, that was the only life we could bear witness toBut the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through rages of fog where we stood, saying I

Pillar of fire

 

There are veld fires burning through the farmlands of the Vyeboom Valley and eating up through ravines of wattle and acacia, great crimson pillars of flame visible at night from 70 or 90 kilometres away. Yesterday afternoon, the roads out of the valley were closed ecept for firefighting teams.

 

This is nothing on the scale of the Australian tragedy, but  destructive enough for farmers and livestock and the vegetation. The birds are wheeling and scattering over the sky this morning, diving through the pall of grey smoke that smells bitter as ashes.

No arsonists here, but there are things we could do and we don’t. The Earth Mama  is wringing her hands in despair. Monocropping is bad for the ecology of any area and fields of GM maize and rapeseed stretch across hillsides to the horizon. Exotics like eucalyptus and acacia ( Port Jackson wilow, imported from Australia) go up like Roman candles because of the volatile oils and are still planted everywhere as windbreaks. Areas denuded of fynbos and left barely clothed in dry grasses are highly flammable and exposed to the full brunt of winds fanning the flames. Too many mountain streams have been dammed or diverted.

 

But paradoxically the wild fires of the Cape mountains are necessary in that much of the fynbos – the grey shrubs and protea and leucadendron bushes and fine succulents, similar to the maquis and chaparral in the Mediterranean or California — needs the phoenix of flame in order to renew itself. Restio seeds propagate through smoke, a mysterious and astonishing process. The veld fires clear the deadwood of the shortlived leucacdendrons. Finely wooded fynbos plants are obligate seeders, which means that the whole plant dies after fire and can only reproduce through seed. The balance of survival and renewal is a delicate violence. The evergreen heathlands of fynbos comprise more than 8 600 flowering plants, most of them unique to the Western Cape and dependent on pollination by the endangered Cape sugarbird.

 

This tightrope we walk above the flames –