It is very like scrying, peering through the fine wet mist that has descended on the fields and lower mountain slopes this morning. The roads and fields and bushes are wet and shimmering, but the views shift and open and close. I am never sure what I’m able to see, there is no certainty in the glimpses.
And this is true of so much in my life now. My computer is malfunctioning on and off. The much-loved and rather resented ex-lover emails me and I can tell he is lonely. I am determined not to feel sorry for him because us women spend too much of our time feeling sorry for men.
He doesn’t know how to make my killer salad vinaigrette, but that is his problem, damn it. He could have paid attention while I was there in the kitchen deftly whisking balsamic vinegar, extra-virgin olive oil and Dijon mustard together. But no, he was thinking about po-faced Richard Dawkins solving all the known mysteries of the planet and reducing everything to equations and common sense. While I was doing practical uncommon magic right under his nose.
He misses the flowers I placed in glass bowls around the house, roses and lilies and trailing ivy, the sweet-smelling oils with which I polished the furniture, the candles set near the foamy sea-green bath, the appetising smell of roast chicken or sauces for pasta when he came in through the front door, muddy and complaining. He even misses the piles of books and literary journals, the New Yorkers and London Review of Books, the music of Stravinsky, the recipes written down and left near the stove, spells for unforgettable meals. The mirrors I put up to catch and reflect green light from the garden, my pots of herbs and the spires of mauve petrovskia or red and yellow kniphofia that reminded me of Africa. He tells me, with that mean-spirited sorrow of the man who feels abandoned by his mistress, that he has killed off most of my plants. He doesn’t understand how he did it, he says slyly.
I grit my teeth and go out into my wild garden here in Africa, four or five times the size of my little Welsh pocket handkerchief. There is the African cuckoo, the piet-my-vrou, singing his heart out in a thicket of wild tecomaria, our Cape honeysuckle. The polygalas, or September bushes, are flowering in purple. The lemon tree is smothered in ripe lemons. My olives blow silver in the mist.
My lost love, the destroyer of nature and spoiler of passion. I cannot see what will become of us and I don’t know how often love affairs can endure the alchemy of transmuting into true friendship.
But the words of Virginia Woolf come back to me again and again. That women too often serve as mirrors reflecting men at twice their size and men depend on us, need us, take up all our time. My deepest spiritual connections come from earth-based practicality, the work I do in my garden with a little spade and secateurs. My rough magic comes out in my cooking and gardening and homemaking and listening to birds crying in the mist, looking at art, writing and striving to live more fully, more richly, more selflessly. I did not create a garden in Wales so that a discontented and selfish child could destroy it. Let him make his own garden, let him undergo my shamanic initiations of pain and grief — then he can talk to me of friendship. Enough of this coddling, enough of pretence. I am so tired of men in flght from mystery. Any man who has watched the blood and filth and splitting and tearing and flooding wetness of a woman giving birth will understand more of mystery than Dawkins or his ilk of lab rats.
Growth into the earth-based wisdom is crucial for human connectivity, to love the earth and respect her produce and nuture what is there before it is too late — enough of this celluloid Hollywood imitation of love affairs. There is another place we need to meet as co-workers serving the Great Mother before we play those tedious ‘he says/she says’ games.
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