Sleepwalking through spring

And I wish I felt more connected. When I go out into the hot brilliant streets and se the oaks greening and smell sweel mauve alyssum, that intense honied fragrance, I want to come back to life.

But it is adjustment and can’t be rushed.

Sine I have been away, there have been changes in the small village in the mountains. A new pub has opened, calling itslf The Green Dragon and I think of the Welsh national flag and the hotel named The Green Dragon in Hereford. The latter a terrible place to stay with lumpy beds, mildewed sheets and shabby furnishings, from all accounts.

Then there is the new establishment to be called The Fat Lady, on the site of the Old Mill. Trepidation about the food because the previous owners served excellent pizzas.

And then there is Dagbreek, meaning ‘daybreak’ in Afrikaans. A television actress has bought the old Cape Dutch gabled house and is planning a club with theatre suppers and a cosy intimate atmosphere. She is anorectic and nobody holds out much hope for the food, although some look forward to months of sultry Piaf by candlelight.

But the main street has not changed, it still smells of hot tar and eucalyptus, the mountains swim in a noon haze and everything is very quiet and I walk down Kerkstraat trying to connect. I have left part of myself elsewhere, I am at a loss, I feel as if my energies have ebbed.

This will pass and I breathe in deeply as I walk past gardens filled with the honey-sweet fragrance of mauve alyssum. The sky is lead-white and boiling with sun. Here I am adrift in memory, in the rubble of my past again, and I take another breath, just to stay in the present moment.

Things have been much worse than this. And I have survived the unimaginable so many times. I look hard at the pink and deep red of the flowering raphiolepsis in my neighbour’s garden. I think about my own garden wrecked and neglected during myabsence and that old despair comes over me again.

I have loved untrustworthy people, I am myself untrustworthy. Just notice the moods, I say to myself, and let them pass. I don’t want to cry hot tears while walking down a village street at noon. Words like ‘bereft’ come to me and I shrug them off. It is not that bad. Other women have lived through this loss of love and come through.

There is the feeling of a deadend, a cul-de-sac, but it is only a feeling. Another neighbour, an elderly man in a felt hat, frowning, drives past in his battered pick-up truck and I wave to him. After the stroke he should not be driving.

Walking country roads. I have lived in South Africa, here in the Cape, for almost 30 years, longer than I lived in Kenya or Zimbabwe or Scotland. I am at home here and I understand the landscape and its people from within. For so long I thought of this place as home, worked hard at belonging, at deciphering the subtext of the continent.

Now I am no longer at home here, I am adrift. It is rather like finding myself tossed out to sea by the insouciant hand of a goddess, so that I might be carried elsewhere. Not an easy time and the waves aimless and eddying around me like a riptide.

But I need to trust the process. Something has shifted within me. I am a sojourner without a map or destination, a traveller crossing borders and frontiers and exploring the veiled places of the psyche. Neither here nor there. A time of walking between dream and reality, crossing back and forth. More will be revealed, I tell myself, and until then I am just treading water.

The day unfolding

The rain is pouring down. Woke up to the steady thud of falling rain and realised I wouldn’t be able to get out and walk in this bleak weather. Trapped indoors, in a draughty study. All the same, after just a week back, I’ve adjusted to the deeply felt notion that rain is always welcome in Africa. The alternative is drought and thirst and dust.

 

So I’m glad of the downpours and to know the garden will be greener tomorrow. I have on thick blue socks patterned with orange tigers and a large woolly overcoat. A large pot of chamomile tea for soothing the frazzled nerves and raw emotions.

 

But I always know I am a little depressed when I find myself reading strictly vegan recipes and wondering about quinoa. There is some puritanical aspect of myself at work, a kind of ‘for your own good you should experience a little deprivation’ dynamic at work.

 

Embrace the brokenness already, I tell myself. There is plenty of exciting vegan stuff around — I love vegetables in season and combined in unusual ways – but I don’t have the exciting ingredients that would help me liven up red lentil dhal or quinoa with broccoli. My fresh spices are depleted and — well, you know, the magic isn’t there.

 

All the same I have some black beans soaking in a jug and I might do something with chilli, cumin and carrots. But it doesn’t flow right now — nothing much flows. It is all a grind, and anyone who is also going through a bad break-up or loss will know what I mean.

 

I want back what I had and that is not possible. I want back my hope and energy and dreams of a new life and all that tenderness and giving and belonging — and that is not going to happen. Right now my life, like my person, feels dismally unloved and the only person who is going to reconnect all those energies and reach out and do some self-nurturing is me. But not with quinoa and boiled grains or lentils. I need a little food magic around this cottage.

 

And it is nearly new moon and I must stay with that lunar phase, listen and trust the seasons, the moon, the landscape in which I am now embedded. Check herbs in the garden, take a long scented bath with candles burning and listen to some deep blue jazz.

 

I have begun planning a retreat, a chance to get away with others into the wide lonely spaces of the Karoo and spend time letting the well fill up, shared sitting practice and focused attention. Watching eagles and goshawks in those light blue skies over the Swartberg.

 

It is all of the same mysterious pattern, the weaving together of strength and brokenness and acceptance and rejection, abandonment and coming home. We are where we are, and that is our truth. If we fail to notice our own lives or pay loving regrd to the hurt and anger, who will notice for us?

And all this rain is doing wonders for the origanum, my two little Greek bushes, so pungently aromatic, and the new rocket, the sage on the stoep. Time for a rain dance under the olive trees…