Daily practice, enchantment, loss

Each morning at dawn I listen  and attune myself to the language of birds. There are warning cries, love calls, location alerts, mating choruses, little shrieks of danger. I name the birds to myself as I listen: house martin, sparrow, red-wing starling, malachite sunbird, pygmy falcon, wagtail, sugar bird, white-eye, lemoenduif, Cape canary. In this way, my day begins with music, opens up to what might be so easily overlooked.

Meditation is flying, grounding, sending down roots, unearthing and excavating. Every day I meditate for at least an hour, cross-legged, uninterrupted. That time has to be claimed and fought for as inviolable. The right to sit cross-legged in silence, uninterrupted and private. The right to sit with boredom, grumpiness, sorrow, content, peace of mind. Whatever is in me is what is there to be felt.

Meditation is body time. Keeping the belly soft and the heart open. Yawning, breathing in and out, feeling the breath prickle the entrance to the nostrils. Itchy foot, lower back ache, rumbling stomach, sleepy, blinking, vulnerable. The sticky unwashed places, slightly sour breath, tousled hair, freshness deep down. Listening to the body, being there in the body, body awareness. Body suffering, body at rest, body alert. Breathing, the flow of energy, the dissolving tensions. Sitting there and paying attention to aches and pains and body stuff, the glowing magical stuff that has to do with bodily awareness, the body craving, groaning, aching, relaxing, waking up. Jouissance, the body in joy, the body nurturing itself.

Each morning a single mug of strong Kenyan arabica coffee. I feed dogs and water plants on the verandah, greeting  neighbours who pass by, greeting pelargoniums and succulents, echeverias, cotyledons, clivias, lithops on terracotta tile, bending and observing and singing under my breath. Incantations and conversation and snatches of wonder. The cool water splashing onto my wrists and soaking into good black earth.

Each morning at dawn I work in the cool garden before the fierce sun is too high overhead. As I water and weed and cut back, plant memories surface in me, I recall dreams from the night before. There are birds flying back and forth in the garden, lizards on the bath, new seedlings with split leaves of bright green chlorophyll. There are snails mating on the flaking red brick of the garden wall. Grass  snakes curled among dead leaves. Sacks of compost to be unknotted and checked for damp. As I finish, the cicadas thrum more loudly, a lively hum that will increase to fever pitch, the intensity of a buzz saw, by noon. Heat is their elemental force, the heat is bliss for them.

Some mornings I walk in the mountains or across the grassy veld and stay open to the unexpected, whatever comes from the unknown. The body in movement, the senses awake.

What could be more mundane than morning rituals and routines? I toss fresh lavender springs into hot water before I take a bath. I warm a pot for green tea. Fold clothes, air towels. Exercises, yoga postures, t’ai chi, distractions, pleasures, daydreams, attentiveness, drifting, dancing, coming back to self. Attention flickering between familiarity and estrangement, strangeness and the well-known. There are holding routines that shimmy between sacred and secular. Breakfast with my housemate and sometimes her work colleagues. Students come in and we chat, there are dishes to be washed and dried. Bowls of fruit — peaches nectarines, bananas, plums — to be checked for bruising or over-ripeness.

Each day I write. This is non-negotiable, this is what shapes the day. Sometimes writing is magick and sometimes it is breaking stones in an abandoned quarry. But always there is writing. Writing as practice, writing as art-making, writing as story, writing as political activism, writing as an act of love, writing as iconoclastic myth-busting, writing as tedium, writing as an impossibility. To try again and fail better, to keep on. The Muse comes and goes with small gifts and comforts and then She stays away too long and I go around the silent rooms calling for her by name — Calliope, Seshat, Helen, Medea, Cassandra, Promethea – bereft and searching. Then she is where She has always been, close as a lover, a hand on my shoulder, an encouraging glance.

There are the mingled practicalities of kitchen witchery, neighbourliness, befriending, nurturing, weaving community. The intuitions and reflections that guide practicality, a life lived freely and well, a life lived in community, a life at the edge of community. Not every day but at least every other day I make a special place for risk. To speak up and look into the heart of danger, to protest and resist, to devise strategies, to craft explosive visions, to rage against the machine. This is what feeds the dream and vision. A new world  about to be born, the incendiary power of love.

And each twilight I move inward. That is the hedgewitching hour as the Evening Star begins to shine in the darkening sky. Then there is the Moon rising, the Moon travelling across my field of vision, the Moon moving between stars and cloudlight, time then for the rituals of the night, the watching and waiting, the the lighting of candles and burning of incense, crossing boudaries to wander through  a house become a palace of memories. A time made for the haunted places for grief and loss and what is not yet and what may never be. And then  in contrast to the nightly rituals, there are also the shared suppers, the brightly lit kitchen, music and conversation, a book before bedtime. It is all metaphor, it is all real, it is sacred and joyously profane.

A life dedicated to holding the door open. But how can this be written down, what can be said of this?

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