Imbolc awakening on the veld

 

In the northern hemisphere, it is the seasonal feast and celebration of Lughnasadh or Lammas. Out here there is the barest greening of spring, a sprinkling of small white and blue daisies, fiery aloes, a whirlwind of peppery dust: and time to turn towards new life and rebirth.

Not that  the weather here is very spring-like: there is a dusting of snow on the mountains around the village and I am still shaky from a burglary, intruders coming into the house unseen while we were in another room. The small dogs have no watchdog sensibility and no desire to bark at strangers or guard the house. I feel as if I am huddling in a shabby fortress, with locks and padlocks changed, doors bolted, windows barred. Horrible to live like this. But the anxiety and hypervigilance will pass.

 

The old word imbolc derives from a Celtic phrase meaning in the belly. It is traditionally  a day in the colder northern hemisphere to watch for snakes gliding from holes and badgers coming out of dens, a day deicated to Bride. In this southern climate, it is a marker for blossom on the wild pear or Dombeya, the final glory of the aloes, scarlet flowers on bare branches of the coral tree. My strelitzia  bush looks heraldic in indigo and orange.

And as the new moon begins to wax in our wintry skies, I shall be able to do my Imbolc celebrations each evening along with a lovely ritual at dawn when the skies are filled with birds and starlight criss-crossed with the rising sun. A time for initiations and  the setting of new goals and visions.

So I shall do my rituals of fire and smoothing the ashes, the gathering of firewood (twisty vine stumps, acacia thorn) for the remaining days of winter, the trance journeys into the Lands beyond. Access is always easier during these days and nights when the wheel poises in its turning. There are Elders to consult and dreams to dream and signs to be read. The deciphering of another kind of descent as I re-embark on a study of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Nettles to be grasped, plunging amidst thorn.  Diving, delving deeper, bracing the self to encounter terror and the concealed hope behind the  slipping mask. One  way of readying the explorer for  new territory, a season of growth.

Magdalen, the Wild Girl

 

The Magdalen. Who might she have been before the hagiographers got hold of her?

As a convent schoolgirl I dreamt of her as impulsive, tormented, searching for what might be found in excess, in extreme places, what we would call the wilder shores of love. I always burned a candle  on her Feast Day. My wicked  and untamed sister.

 

She was a women  who lived by her wits and her sexuality in a time when there were very few choices for independent women. Because of this, the Magdalen was known as a sinner. She was a sex worker, perhaps consecrating her sexuality in ways we have not understood. She saw in a strange new spiritual movement some possibility for becoming; and perhaps she was wrong — or maybe there was space and freedom since obscured by historical dictates. She became a powerful  woman leader in a persecuted movement, as the first person to witness a kind of resurrection, something luminous and  very real, a dialogue, an encounter with a friend become Other.

 

Love was her transformational experience. From the Nag Hammadi  Gospel of Philip:

 

“But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, ‘Why do you love her more than all of us?’ The savior answered and said to them, ‘Why do I not love you like (I love) her?’”

There is a woman weeping as she cracks open the alabaster vase of sweet-smelling oil, wiping  the feet of a beloved friend with her dark shining hair as she anoints him for death. An intimate anointing that is the act of a priestess and not a subordinate. There is the woman grieving at the tomb, surprised by love and revelation. There is the woman in the deserts of Egypt, going into monastic seclusion,  the woman standing together with her sisters against martyrdom. A woman proclaiming  her own truths, teaching, preaching, leading. 

There is the woman who may have gone back to the older ways, or never have departed from those ways. A woman with parched lips and haunted eyes crossing the desert. A woman at dawn,  gazing into the heart of light in an empty tomb. A passionate greedy lustful woman walking her own path, shamelessly. A woman of wisdom, hidden from those who put up statues to her. A woman living by her own notions of love, lost in that consuming fire.

 

The Wild Girl running free. For her  the music of that great pagan Song of Songs:

 

The bride says this: On my bed, at night, I sought him whom my heart loves. I sought but did not find him. so I will rise and go through the City; in the streets and the squares I will seek him whom my heart loves. I sought but did not find him. The watchmen came upon me on their rounds in the City: “Have you seen him whom my heart loves?” Scarcely had I passed them than I found him whom my heart loves.

Total eclipse of the sun

 

 

When I was a child in East Africa we would go out and look at  a solar eclipse through tinted sweetie paper, not much of a protection that red cellophane but it added to the dazzle and sudden ebbing of light from the sun. The total solar eclipse of 22 July 2009 will be the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century and mostly visble from Asia and the Pacific.

 

In symbolic terms the eclipse will take place at 29 degrees in watery Cancer, with Pluto in Capricorn. A time of unpredictability and sweeping change. The 29th degree has long been linked with  the fata morgana and karma, a sign of the turning wheel bringing consequences to bear on our choices and decisons of the past. These eclipses are also historically linked to tidal waves or tsunamis, typhoons and earthquakes, manifestations of external rupture and upheaval. Not a comfortable time.

 

And it is also the new moon in Cancer, a sliver of light in our hemisphere, a time for planting seeds of hunger and longing. A celebration of water, fire and new beginnings, however tumultuous. A quest for the mother, a call to dive deeper into the Unconscious. As I plan to go out into the garden at night, bracing myself against the winter cold, I ask myself: what is ending? What is beginning? And open my spirit to a revolution in consciousness, the possibility of unsought transformation.

 

A total solar eclipse is always a wild card. And I am a child of the dark moon, the unknowability of what is about to happen.

Who by fire, who by water

 

Through all of this week I am doing rituals from a distance for very special people in Vermont. I like to do my rituals here at dusk when the evening star appears on the horizon. A starry twilight is a magickal time.

And who shall I say is calling?

I do this simple little ritual with my handpainted ostrich egg, red stones from the Great Karoo, an old chant for fecundity, birthing, renewal, healing, balance; and a kind of high-intensity focused breathing to help overcome the distances. From the Overberg to green Vermont is just a hop. skip and jump.

And who by fire, who by water

who in the sunshine, who in the night time

I first began working my healing rituals from a distance for my loved friends in political exile, for those left behind in Zimbabwe, for those who felt rootless and scattered. I called them home in my rituals, held out a long and winding cord across the oceans and continents and years apart.

 

As I grew bolder I began to do small hopeful rituals for those lost in places that are nameless, those far away in depression, those in bereavement, those beyond the veil. And those  in proximity but distanced by anger or misunderstanding. The energy going out from me like concentric ripples in a still lake, like heat waves in the Kalahari, like  an embrace across the kitchen table. May all be well with you, my beloved friends and those unknown to me but beloved by others. 

And who by brave assent, who by accident

who in solitude, who in this mirror

who by his lady’s command, who by his own hand

who in mortal chains, who in power

and who shall I say is calling?

Still point of the turning wheel

 

Almost imperceptibly the Wheel is turning and spinning into the green of spring. We drove through to another country town to take our puppies to the vet. Stopping en route so that I could admire the wet ditches crammed with white fleshy arum lilies. I stood there with the cold sweet chill of snow in my nostrils, looking at that unearthly white of the sheathed lilies with their fierce yellow stamens and great glaucous blue-green leaves, rejoicing within. Zantedeschia aethiopica, the most beautiful and abundant lily of late winter across the rainy Cape. It is named after Professor Giovanni Zantedeschi, who was born in 1773 and was an Italian physician and plant lover, but arum lilies were  introduced to Europe much earlier — there is an elaborate botanical sketch of arums growing in the Royal Garden in Paris in 1664. The leaves have been traditionally used as a poultice and treatment for headaches (there is no plant in Africa without magical or healing properties long-known and respected).  White crab spiders and the tiny frog Hyperolius hopstocki make their home in colonies of the arum lily, which mysteriously is neither an arum nor a lily. It is another African plant that defies categorization of name and genre.

The Wheel is turning. Soon there will be baby house martins fumbling their way to pratice flights off the low walls of the stoep, the japonica will be cherry-red alongside the flowering bulbs of ixia and freesias. Already the paper-white narcissus has shimmered and gone. The indigenous confetti bush is dotted with tiny lilac and white flowers. Within weeks farm workers, women and children, will be clambering into icy farm dams and ponds at dawn to harvest the waterblommetjies  cooked into a bredie as a local delicacy. I will go into vineyards with a small knife to gather new vine leaves that I can stuff with pine nuts, chopped mint, rice and lemon juice for a version of dolmades more Lebanese than Greek. The bare apple trees have tiny reddening nodules that will become blossom in September. Nature’s secret processes becoming visible.

 

My small puppies were born last spring and the world is still all new to them — they sniff and race around and get a frsiky look as they scent the libidinal energies of the spring  gathering force. There is light bluish snow on the mountains edging the Karoo and much of the valley here is flooded, low bridges under water and water gurgling into cellars and basements. My neighbour stayed up all night in his flooded kitchen so he could keep rescuing a fieldmouse  diving into flood waters near the pantry.

And we are planning an August holiday in the Hantam, a day’s drive perhaps, heading towards the Tankwa Karoo. Some of the earliest known Khoi and San (Bushman) folktales were collected and transcribed here on the farm Zovoorbij near the Hantam River close to Calvinia, between 1880 and 1883. They are stories told around the fire at night by Khoi shepherds, recalling the older stories told by the wandering peoples of the great lonely Hantam. In these stories, it is said that the Moon began as a feather, the stars as coals from a white fire, that the evening star is the large eye of dusk. I get goosebumps  reading through the folk tales of the /Xam, a people hunted like animals and driven to extinction.

Dancer, the Fire-Man, or the Fire-Maker, was once human and of the ancient race. Light shone from his head, and it was he who put fire in stones, in the wood and in the clouds. Hunters would follow him to see where the game was, but sometimes he was lazy and wouldn’t cooperate. Out of frustration the hunters killed him as he stood near a river. He fell into the water and his light was snuffed out. They hacked off his head and placed it on the river bank, but the light didn’t return. Later, when it had begun to dry out, a woman saw the head and sent her children to throw it up into the sky, and so it became the Sun. The decapitated body is still searching for it’s head, but has withered and became the crab, scuttling about at the water’s edge. And the head searches incessantly for his body – in the mornings he starts searching at the mountains in the east, climbing into the sky until he comes to the mountains at the western side.

The charmed lives of the dwarf chameleon

 

This morning there is a Berg wind blowing, a mountain wind that is hot and dry, signalling thunderstorms. I have been out in the garden picking olives to cure and made a wonderful miraculous life-changing discovery.

 

I have a small Halleria lucida tree, also known as the Tree Fuschia because of its discreet tubular apricot-orange flowerrs. It is one of our loveliest South African trees and a great place to hold a ritual — a crown of glossy bright green foliage and pendulant dancing branches. It has an abundance of green and black berries that birds love, berries with seeds as tiny black flakes buried in the flesh of the fruit. Birds go crazy for them and planting this little tree was originally a gift to my birds. Then I came to love the tree for itself and to watch its steady upright growth and glossiness like a green shimmer in the twilight. It has relations among the snapdragon and foxglove families, quite a magical pedigree.

 

The Zulu use Halleria lucida for skin and ear complaints. Dry leaves are soaked in water and squeezed into the ear to relieve earache. This tree is also considered to be a charm against evil. The twigs are burned when offering sacrifices to the ancestral spirits. The plants are set alight each year, the ashes mixed with crocodile fat and this mixture is smeared onto cuttings of Rhamnus prinoides which are then driven into the ground around the village to protect the community from malevolent wizardry and lightning. The wood can also be used to start a fire by friction. Halleria lucida timber is light coloured tinged with yellow, hard, heavy and strong, well suited to carpentry, but is not much used because the pieces are small. It was once valued for wagon poles, tools and spear shafts.

 

Such a powerful history for a small shining tree!

 

And this morning I found four baby dwarf chameleons sheltering in the foliage. I stood rooted in stillness and blessed beyond words.

 

The Cape Dwarf Chameleon (Bradypodium pumilum) only exists in a small area of the Western Cape in South Africa. Because of the spraying of DDT in the 1960s and the use of organic pollutants, this tiny chameleon is a Cites-protected Endangered Species. It is headed for extinction. And because I have spent six years creating an organic rewilding sanctuary, this rare and beautiful beast is breeding in my sanctuary space, mving between chocolate-brown restios and  the Tree Tulip. The presence of chameleons has nothing to do with me personally, you understand, but I may have facilitated a Gaian mystery. O joy!

If I were a medieval virgin approached by a white unicorn in a forest clearing, I could not be more amazed. Ordelighted.

Old dreams wake like birds

 

Reading histories of colonial Mozambique, a country post-liberation I know well and have always loved. Women as slaves, peasants, workers, assimilados, activists, revolutionaries. The jungles, the fierce swift-flowing rivers, the red soil, the landmines, the floods, the spectre of famine always there. The fevers and poetry, the memoirs of imprisonment,  the people I still see in dreams: the white cotton shifts of workers that were inferior to the cotton clothes worn by white Portuguese settlers. The straw hats of the tropics, the plantations and haciendas, the blue-black body markings of black women in southern Mozambique. The folk Catholicism. The raw and vital animism. Heartbreaking African fado. So many ways of co-existing and all marked with oppression or difference.

When I was a child, a foreigner, in Beira so long ago I wanted to stay there. At the age of 12 I dreamed of marrying a tall Portuguese army officer and living with him in a blue-tiled apartment overlooking streets clouded by beach sand, a bay undulating with sandbanks, the brown ocean silted by the river mouth. Myself a childbride in a tower, folding bedlinen and towels, ironing  his uniform. His mother would care for and protect me because he was an angry man, but vulnerable under the hauteur and uniform. Each day he would bring me gifts and bouquets of scarlet and yellow flowers, tropical blossoms heavy with fragrance. I would put up my face for a kiss.

A daydream that chills me now. That illusion of lasting erotic power very young women have in puberty. And around me, Portuguese settler girs were marrying at the age of 12 or 13, just as the menses started, wedding men much older than themselves. Deflowered and rendered worthless by 14, turned to brood mares in the public eye. As Helene Cixous says of French Algeria where she grew up, ‘it was unlivable’.

 

But as I think back on that daydream, the desire to become a woman, enter into the veiled bedroom, to be married and made adult, knowing, sexual — I realise I am talking about the lifelong desire to be Other, to escape the known. And when I was a child in Beira all those years ago, I was sunburned from walking around the beaches  all day so I would not have to be alone with my father, who sat drinking in the hotel room, sly and incoherent. I already knew too much and in the daydream I was recreating entrapment but on my own terms. As the women passing me in the colonial avenues dreamed of the harem, the brothel, the nunnery. Ways of managing sexual oppression and violation on our terms.

 

And even as the young conscripted Portuguese soldiers marched through the garrison towns of Mozambique wolf-whistling at young women, waving to small black children whose parents they had come to kill, those 300 years of colonial nightmare were ending. Frelimo was taking up the fight for liberation, boys and men were going into exile to be trained for revolution. Portuguese East Africa on the brink of war and transformation.  Again I would watch and listen from a neighbouring country, learning what was possible and at what price. Jorges Rebelo was one of those young fighters writing in 1965:

 

Letter from a Freedom Fighter

Mother, it is beautiful to fight for freedom!
In every bullet I shoot there is a message of justice,
and old dreams wake like birds.

In the hours of combat, in the battle front
your image comes close to me.
It is for you too that I fight, Mother.
That you should not have tears
in your eyes.

Sea Goat: the full moon in Capricorn

 

This July’s full moon falls on the 6/7th and in the sign of the sea goat, Capricorn. There is a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the moon falling on the earth. Making a space for the negative, the non-being in each of us.

I long for the full-bellied reassurance of the moon, I feel very strongly this week that I am a daughter bereft of both parents. Do we ever get used to finding ourselves orphans?

And at the same time I don’t know that many of us have known ourselves ‘parented’ within our families of origin, so I just wait for the moon rising over the mountains, that symbol of compassion and connectedness, with something of the wayward quirky nature of the sea goat. A bearded horned sure-footed rambunctious creature.

 

I like the cold lunar clarity of the moon on my winter garden; a time for looking squarely at reality and ‘what is’ in my life and  in the world right now. Retrograde planets all around: Jupiter, Uranus, Pluto, Neptune and Chiron, so nobody’s gong anywhere in a hurry. What is there has to be  accepted. And in Capricorn’s goat I glimpse what is stubborn and intransigeant, resisting change.

 

The sea goat swimming against the tides, scrambling ashore, leaping from rock to rock, strange-eyed and knowing. But elusive, restless, taking leap after leap with sure-footed precision — but following its own eccentric path up the mountainside, over boulders, into the eye of the storm. The goat as survivor, with its reckless gaiety and stubbornness. Very much a creature after my own heart, albeit maddening. The goat butting at my preconceptions, a pain in the arse.

John Updike once remarked of the wonderful witchy writer Sylvia Townsend Warner that she had ‘the spiritual digestion of a goat’.  Nothing bored her, nothing repelled. She was always receptive and processing the oddest and most unlikely of topics. Amused, infuriated, admiring, quizzical. That too I like.

 

The sea goat has escaped from the ocean and is in the garden eating the dirty laundry! Greedy horn-twisted green-eyed bleating goat — I stand and admire the energy and zest, the wilful  if random leaps, the jauntiness.  I too am a survivor of sorts. And have the occasional goatish appetite and zest for uncommon places.

Making art in a forest of grief

 

All morning I have been painting on boxed and stretched canvases, edging paint thickly onto surfaces with a small palette knife, layering wedges of  off-white and umber and Venetian blue, masking my erratic impulses with grey or Naples yellow. I have brushes of camel hair, mongoose and squirrel, red sable, the bristles of wild boar. I have twigs for scratching and soft nubby bits of charcoal. Tubes of oils and sealed jars of lime and copper and magenta acrylics.

Landscapes come and go, shorelines napped with green water,  skies before storm, forests darkening the cleft between hills. I am painting the body,  I am shading each brush stroke with grief, the paint trickles like violet or ochre tears over hot sand, down chalky walls.

Art is such consolation, I am free to breathe and weep and ache when I stand at the easel with the raw umber of African light pouring into this makeshift studio. The little dogs’ furry backs have splashes of acrylics and watercolours like dabs of affection. My sleeves are daubed indigo and stark white. I smell of womanly sweat and turpentine and greasepaint and salty grief.

And this is both relaxation and heartwork, a kind of demanding therapy. An artist friend of mine once spent a year making art from her wounds, painting sutured flesh and scarlet lacerations like woollen thread knotting a torso, stapled incisions, blue puncture marks, necrosing ulcers, blistered lips, bruises like a violet rose.  She gave an exhibtion in a large neon-lit gallery and the spectators stood there stunned, too afraid to cover their eyes or place a protective hand over their hearts. The body flayed and split and sewn together and scarring. Unforgettable.

 

And then she boarded a plane and flew away to live in a village on the edge of the desert for a year, painted only palm trees and flamingos and ecstatic mirages of cities floating upward as if on magic carpets, rose-red ancient cities of myth, palaces of glass, towers and minarets and saucy onion domes. She had come through.