A smell my nose is now hunting - Review of Did You Get Married To Her When I Was In The Mental Hospital? by Abigail George

Dear Abigail

Your story, Did You Get Married To Her When I Was In The Mental Hospital? (published by ZamaShort) is not meant to be an easy read. I know it took it out of you to write it, and I am not surprised by that. While I read it, I felt almost as if I were being confronted with the life that might have been mine, had it not been for … what? The two facts of your childhood that distinguish your life and mine most significantly, in my opinion, are, firstly, the fact that you were burdened with the stigma of mental illness. As you write in the 24^th of a total of 25 passages, or prose stanzas, that make up this work: “It was my destiny to call stigma a companion” (The Sea.) Oh, I empathise with you saying how tired you are of the illness:

  

I am tired of being mentally ill, this chronic sickness, this flame, the powers that be. I watch it burn between my fingers. It tastes of Palestine. Cold stone turned into rubble. Make it go away but it doesn’t go away. (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.)

 

I was diagnosed with mental illness in my 30s, but I was compelled fiercely to refuse the stigma, because my father told me in no uncertain terms to right myself, he did not want to, or could not, pay for more sessions with the psychiatrist. (I don’t have medical aid, you see.) And I had a three-year-old child to look after. So, I weaned myself gradually off the meds I was told I’d need to take for life, and focused instead, fully, on having to mother, and having to be a wife. You lament that those age-old, anonymous roles weren’t for you – “I could never be wife material […] I could never raise children. Oh, madwomen couldn’t do that” (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.) These roles can indeed help, can ground us – as you, too, I think, are finding, by having to look after, to mother, to care for, your two-year-old niece, and your elderly, vulnerable father – ?

 

But back to the illness with which you were loaded at such a young age, as we discover in your bio that precedes your story. As I see it, this load was weirdly and unwillingly (or unwittingly?) linked into the thing you state unequivocally saved you: language, poetry. I will say more to try to explain what I mean by this, but before I do that, I want to name the second significant event that for me distinguishes your and my destinies in, I hope, mutually instructive ways: the fact that both your parents supported and encouraged your writerly gift. We learn from your bio that your father proofread your drafts when you were in your twenties and thirties, and that your mother “recognised my talent for writing early on” and bought you a typewriter, first a manual and then an electric one, wow! And this happened even though she “makes it a point never to read anything I have written”, preferring Barbara Taylor Bradford and Danielle Steele novels. Well, as Richard Bach famously observed: “Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” Still, your brother, though far from filled with joy over your life, as you describe him, nevertheless published your first book. The bitter contradictions life forces us to accept! And so:

 

Writing was a sign from God […] it gave me a reason to live, a purpose and I could heal myself, and others. (From your Bio)

 

Despite the hatred and the absence of peace around you, despite the sickness inherent in the social structures of school and the nuclear family, despite the fact that your family members, teachers and peers “had no time” for you and “severely bullied” you, “leaving [you] breathless, or half deranged with all the negativity in [your] environment”, you found “a sea of wildflowers” in poetry, “a bed on which [you] could rest the vessel of [your] body.” (From your Bio) That is beautiful. The same motif serves your experience of reading: Reading, you write in Eating Rice and Potatoes with some Steadfast Patience, “is for the wildflowers in our imagination to blossom”.

You begin your story addressing your First Love. Later, in Don’t You Forget About Me, Pinky Swear Promise Me, R., you address your toddler niece, then, in We Need to Discuss Crystal Meth, Struggle, the Healer, and Forgiveness, it’s your brother you’re talking to. And in This is My Convent, you talk directly to Anne Sexton. And then, in Poem for Gaza, Songs for Me, you revert to your First Love, O. Have I got that right? Seeking a hearing, a connection, a conversation – just like any ordinary woman, like any social creature.

I like the way each of your passages, your prose stanzas, begins with a sentence full of capitals, there is something stately and leonine about that.

 

Years in Summer Days.

Let Me Sleep Now in Peace, Please.

I mean, it reminds me of the Lion in Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, the way you make the words march in, heads held high, bringing that energy of the Unquestionable Arrival of the Sovereign. And that allows, later, for the “vessel of [your] body” to claim her vulnerability in the ‘aquarium’ of your suffering, to announce:

 

I Don’t Know How to Start.

Or:   

The Gap Between Symbol and Reality. (The final passage.)

 

… where the capitals seem to submerge the reader, with equal grandeur, but no longer breathing with lungs, there is almost a having to hold the breath as you write that:

 

The sea began screaming at me.

And:

I held the blueprint of my wound and stopped breathing.

(Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown.)

Henry Lombard calls your story “claustrophobic” in his comment, and remarks that you “prove” writing to be “a holy act of reclamation”. That is what I want to dwell on now, I mean the role of literary language and its implicatedness, as I see it, in illness, and in “the brutality” which “was the same”, whether you were at home reading a magazine “whose words hurt [your] eyes”, and “A refugee camp falls out”; or whether you were in Israel, which you discovered while your mother watered the garden, in Finding Years in Summer Days, or whether Netanyahu speaks, in Gaza is not Dead, and you

 

squeeze blood out of stones in a refugee camp and wash soiled garments in the sea. The aroma of death, the rubbish, and decay, I need to get it off my hands. (Forgiven, but not Forgotten, it Doesn’t Matter you see.)

 

Now you are Lady Macbeth, and all of humanity’s horrors are yours to cleanse. And the reader is with you and it’s awful.

So, what is happening here, the way I see it, is that language is dumping itself into you, into us, via an unchecked flow of sounds and images. You write that “when it appears in the newspaper it has a beating heart” (Finding Years in Summer Days) and there is this sense of the limitlessness, the continuous increment, the boundarylessness, that dreadful slipperiness of the medium you use:

 

I can’t throw out my feminine energies with the past, nor with the pasta water. (Octopus Flowers in the Dark.)

Or:

Nothing grows inside this garden except the dead bodies of children, and snails who were somehow not involved in the Palestinian struggle. (Silence.)

And:

These pills fill me or are they peas? (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the

Ambulance Chasers.)

 

The snails are actually comical in their non-involvement, a last, languid bastion of feet and feelers in Eden. Even the pills and the peas bring in the curl of a question mark, or is it a shy smile, after their shared p’s – ? But when you “fry the ham in the pan” (A New Love), I accidentally read “harm” for “ham”; and in This is My Convent I see you eat “my friend egg”, and only afterwards realise it’s a perfectly regular “fried egg”. I mean, what is happening is that the language is uncontained, or should that be untamed? The verbal stew of torment is bewildering, the fine details are so awfully human, again I gasp for breath, asking, where is reality, where is the realness of the animal I am, my connection to the wind? I want to run away and breathe an air free of language. Maybe on the mountain, who “have ears and a kind of feminine energy” (Finding Years in Summer Days)? I have to admit that I don’t have the tenacity, I don’t have your ability to live this remarkable destiny of showing the world that the word was NOT God, the word was far, far too HUMAN!

The truth reveals itself. Unlike your mother, who eats an apple “in tiny bite-sized pieces” (Octopus Flowers in the Dark), you “tear the apple apart with [your] teeth” and “deconstruct [dried fruit] on [your] tongue” (A New Love), and “Gaza falls like the neck of a wildflower falls” (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the Ambulance Chasers.)

So, you are Eve, abandoned by Adam to a fallen Eden, eating the whole apple by herself, teaching us that we have not survived the Age of Permissiveness, where the sea is language and, as female writers, we inhabit an ocean of suicidal female poets: “Ingrid Jonker’s sea” (Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown). Who can deny this fact? Yet you crave for your mother to SAY she loves you, her gifts of actions are NOT enough (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts). I was the same, exactly so, where I likewise craved to hear words from my parents that I eventually learned to accept could not and still cannot be articulated by the soft animal that is love. Is that why the following paragraph touches me so deeply?

 

My spirit has evolved because I loved you. On lonely nights I gather this fact of life to myself. […] What is this observation that challenges me to overcome my suffering? (I Don’t Know How to Start.)

 

You write, “I don’t know how to end this on a positive note, so I will end here” (I Don’t Know How to Start) – words which must surely move even the most coolly detached of readers.

And then!

Then you ask. You ask with a directness that jumps beyond words, it’s the gentle curiosity of a wild animal. Cautious, but fearless. The Gentle Curiosity of Woman. You jump, no, you pounce straight to the heart of matter (not “the matter”, just “matter”):

 

As a poet, as an individual, whose joy matters most to you? What is your response to loneliness?

 

Oh, Abigail, thank you for those questions! I want to do nothing more than respond. I want you to know, and I want myself to know that, As a Poet, As an Individual, it is The Voices of The Earth that matter most to me. And my response to loneliness is To Move. To Walk. To Extend a Kindness to Someone. To Make Something Using My Hands. Maybe then, after all, to write (By Hand). For, to be a female who writes, I have learned, I may not prioritise the role of ‘being a writer’. For a writer such as I am – and this is, despite everything I did not want and did not ask for, a destiny of choice – the act of writing must come last of all. For a woman, writing is a verb, not a name, not an identity. Then it is easier done than said.

I see your story as the beginning of The Dance Of Wildflowers In The Wind. Your wildflowers. Your seeds and your planting. For, the way I see it, your hands are clean now. From All The Work – writing and otherwise – which you have done and still do, through the summertimes of your father’s embrace, through the winters of your mother and sister and brother, through your wound’s blooms every spring (Finding Years in Summer Days) through to “the silken smell of autumn” (Let Me Sleep Now in Peace, Please) – a smell my nose is now hunting to harvest!

Love from

Silke

– Silke Heiss, Sunrise-on-Sea, 6^th April 2026

https://www.zamashort.com/2026/03/zamashort-12-did-you-get-married-to-her.html

Abigail George

Family lines, or: Alchemising lineage. A pair of personal tunes

One of the most primal ways in which fear is programmed into our cells is through language and stories. The songs, rhythms, idioms, parables and tales we hear as babies and toddlers shape our thinking and feeling bodies for a lifetime. That surely is a reason why Struwwelpeter and Noddy, for example, have been much debated and, to some extent, adapted as to their ‘suitability’ for our children and, by implication, our future. The writer Janosch even made attempts to re-write the Brothers Grimm stories, censoring or altering the crueller parts into more innocent or jovial fare.

A case can be made – as Clarissa Pinkola Estes does in Women who run with the Wolves, and as Robert Bly does in his engaging discussion of Iron John – that conflict, rendered symbolically in frightening and gruesome incidents, conveys an indispensable message to our souls (much as the figure of Satan does in the Bible). We need to be aware that life is not without challenges, conflict and, above all, the presence of evil, whether that evil be “banal” and perfectly everyday, or self-consciously gleeful, like Heath Ledger portrays the Joker.

It is my own position that the vital factor is not so much the presence of what is ugly, awful and unwelcome, nor how the ugliness is depicted, but the happy ending. Happy endings seek to redeem the greatest horrors, if not with saving grace, then at least with understanding. Certainly a story addressing children must end or resolve, if not to happiness, then at least to peace and order. If it leaves disturbing questions hanging, it will very likely harm an innocent mind. A writer with the desire to disturb the peace needs to use their discretion as to whose peace exactly it is they wish to destroy in the name of whatever cause.

Two common German rhymes I grew up with have repeated on me willy-nilly throughout many decades. One of them is a proverb, which, however silly one may deem it to be, runs in its groove at the sight of a spider, as follows:

Spinne am Abend                                Spider at evening

Erfrischend und labend                       Refreshing and inspiring

Spinne am Morgen                              Spider on the morrow

Bringt Kummer und Sorgen                Brings grief and sorrow

Now any experienced person will quickly realise that these idle, easy rhymes (in the original)  can only come from an addict, most likely an alcoholic, whose mood of happiness at sundowner time has given way by morning to a hangover, and the spider – that mistress of endless, intricate creation and renewal – is roped into the human’s tragic cycle of self-harm and lack of will. And language, that treacherous tool, is only too willing to bend to human weakness.

Being one of those ‘sensitive’ people who are condemned to misery because of other people’s carelessness with words and images, I found that the power of those lines continued to force me to feel fear and anguish whenever the sight of a graceful daddy longlegs in the early morning triggered the ‘poem’. It was not the arachnid I was afraid of, mind you, it was the ill-humoured human rhymes.

Until I decided to act. I wanted none of this grief and sorrow thrust on me by ‘good ol’ tradition’ anymore and altered the lines accordingly:

Spinne am Morgen                  Spider in the morning

Geschützt und geborgen         Protected and sheltered [It rhymes in the German]

I repeated this whenever I saw a spider, until my new rhymes became so entrenched as to be triggered in place of the old, sour lines, reminding me each time, with a small sense of triumph, of my own true desires.

The second groundbreaking transformation came only two days ago, in relation to a truly horrific song, which my mother used to sing to us blithely as a lullaby. It goes like this:

Maikäfer flieg                                      May beetle [cockchafer] fly

Der Vater ist im Krieg                         Father is in the war     

Die Mutter ist in Pommernland           Mother is in Pomerania           

Pommernland is abgebrannt                Pomerania is burnt down

Maikäfer flieg                                       May beetle fly

This horrible ditty, with its innocuous tune, was triggered for me when I returned the hand-embroidered Christmas tablecloth to the cupboard and tucked it in underneath the hand-embroidered birthday tablecloth. My birthday is in May, and my grandmother’s hands had once upon a time lovingly stitched May beetles (cockchafers), birch tree catkins, ladybirds and four-leafed clovers into the cotton fabric that was smoothed over the table with my candle and gifts each year.

Embroidered May beetle

A spoiled child was I, to be given so much! Indeed, the wars featured magnificently and unavoidably in the transgenerational, mostly silent pain of my family on all sides, not eased by the fact that there were intermarriages with French, British and Jewish individuals, and the merry little melody with its dark lines perfectly captured the bitter contrasts. Historically accurate though they may have been, by the time we slipped into the year 2026, their purpose seemed spent and their energy far from helpful.

The birthday table cloth. Obviously I will only iron it when it comes out of the cupboard in May.

Again, I was gripped by a sudden urge to strengthen myself by means of linguistic alchemy. The mention of the Father and Mother figures in the May beetle song made me think of my parents as they are now – together in a home for people with dementia, both in nappies, my mother half-paralysed in a wheelchair for ... going on nine years in April. When she suffered her debilitating stroke, my father dropped his work, all future travel and research plans, and transformed himself from a pampered, tempestuous patriarch into a patient house husband and carer of his beloved wife. He learned to cook, took her on outings, wiped her bum, and generally ran the household as best he could at the tender age of 78. (Although I am the eldest daughter, I could not assist as I had been expected to do, as my husband was busy dying and I had to tend to him at the time.)

That was the one time in my life that I witnessed my mother eating with a hearty appetite! She put on so much weight with my dad’s dishes that we had to replace her kiddies’ wheelchair with an adult one. She’d been a pretty discontented wife all her life, and her frustrations had made her an expert at tiny, toxic remarks to and about my father, whose love she diligently kept at arm’s length, and whose retorts and behaviour in turn I leave it to you to imagine.

With my father’s self-engineered career change from award-winning physicist to devoted minder of my mother, she fell in love with him all over again, and her respect for him blossomed in a completely new way. Despite this, however, he never managed to upstage two rivals (whom he himself wisely never perceived as rivals), namely, Beethoven and the sun. Since her stroke, the sun is definitely my mother’s first love; as for Beethoven, he has always been the one she wants to be the first to greet her when she gets to heaven. Or wherever. She isn’t altogether sure about post-mortem geo- or celestiography, but that’s beside the point. She has always been touched by and grateful for my father’s goodwill and total absence of jealousy in this regard. I confess I have seen him just a little bit envious of her adoration of the sun every now and then. But let’s be bighearted enough as to let that pass.

My parents directly inspired my reconstitution of the May beetle song as follows:

Maikäfer flieg                                                  May beetle fly

Der Vater hat den Sieg                                    Father has the victory 

Die Mutter trinkt das Licht der Sonne             Mother drinks the light of the sun           

Beide haben ihre Wonne                                  Both are blissful, having fun

Maikäfer flieg                                                   May beetle fly

I wasn’t sure about the word “victory”, as it’s of course closely tied to violent conflict and war. I ran the lines by my sisters, who also felt that it was wrong. My youngest sister (she is seven minutes younger than my middle sister, as they are twins) – anyway, my youngest sister came upon this perfect solution:

Maikäfer fliege                                                 May beetle fly [above]

Der Vater hat die Liebe                                    The Father has the love

We are officially shedding the cruel karma planted through our soft ears into our bodies, and are literally singing a new song. I look forward to my birthday. It might take a lifetime to get to re-write ‘a harmless ditty’, but more’s the pity of you don’t!

My parents on their diamond wedding anniversary, in the sun, perusing their wedding album.

Diamond wedding anniversary outing.

The road to nakedness

My recent attendance at some of the online interviews and discussions at the Collective Trauma Summit taught me a new vocabulary to comprehend trauma on a variety of levels. Above all, it made me realise that I am far from alone in my attitudes towards grief, the environment, and war.

A dominant theme that was articulated repeatedly was that we need to learn to feel each other at an emotional level, in order to create and sustain a lived awareness of interconnectivity with one another, all life on earth, and, indeed, the cosmos. For, life, when it is hurt, is cold, distant, and repetitive in endless hamster-wheeling cycles. And who wants that?

The conversation between summit organiser Thomas Hübl and climate grief expert Britt Wray confirmed that humans, both individually and collectively, frequently cling to a refusal or an inability to "digest life" as Hübl put it. Covid, for example, was a collective trauma which we did not digest fully, either at the time or since, and, as such, it was a "lost opportunity for harvesting learning". The avoidance of distress manifests as an inability to honour, let alone deal with and channel it, and is a mark of emotional immaturity that resists natural change, growth and transformation.

So, an overarching question is: How can we channel distress into care and action? The more aware we are of any distress we feel, and the more tools we summon to help us channel this distress, the freer we become to "release our burdens" and to choose to lead our selves from one present moment to the next.

As Hübl said several times during the summit, "Trauma is the inability to be present". Closely related is his profound statement: "Presence does not have an other". 

Hübl emphasised that each individual who practises self-leadership, and who has the tools to regulate their own nervous system, has a healing impact on the collective, even if that impact may not be obvious to themselves or others. This was corroborated by bestselling author Gabby Bernstein, who shared how she "wrote herself back into life" after her soul (her unconscious) made it impossible for her not to face the trauma, and its cloaking by shame, of sexual violation. She highlighted the fact that healing takes place "one person at a time".

My personal favourite session was the conversation between Hübl and Prentis Hemphill on 'The Transformative Power of Vulnerability', where 'power' was redefined as:

... openness: Can I be soft enough to listen to what is asked in any particular moment? When I receive you in myself, and our combined agency, power is the creation emerging between us. When both are willing to be fluid, ego steps back.

Hemphill issued the wish that she would want to it to become commonplace for humans to "help one another to shine". Again, the topic of discomfort came up, and that our capacity to be in the discomfort of the world, with all the pain it brings, equals our capacity to grow into our own ability to 'shine'.

"When I let the pain do its work, something changes in me," Hemphill, or Hübl, said. My notes do not indicate which one of these two remarkable people actually uttered those words in that moment, nor would either of them need to claim the quote for themselves, as both live it, have learned to engage with the process of working patiently with pain, whether individual, ancestral or collective, and to trust what emerges from it.

"Kindness at the heart of human beings is the medicine that brings us back home." This quotable quote emerged during the conversation between Kosha Joubert, CEO of the Pocket Project, and somatic practitioner Linda Thai, which touched on multiple levels of trauma, ranging from war (which Thai called "an over-exposure to death"), refugee experiences, the transgressive dissociation from nature (for example, when ancestral land is turned into property), to vicarious trauma due to "hyper-attunement" to the other - which can cause collapse of the self, flipping into existential nihilism or hopelessness. 

One talk I attended, with such hunger that I did not take any notes I can quote or refer to now, was the discussion between the two co-directors of Combatants for Peace, Rana Salman and Eszter Koranyi. Their revelations came as a trauma relief mission to me personally, as the two women represent an organisation that speaks my language and my own heart's truths, namely: There is another way.

I have been near to hopelessness in regard to the war in Gaza, having seen friendships break up around me because of it. In the fray of that I remember saying:

I stand for no flag, I stand for the naked human body. Between Israel and Palestine there lies this form in the sand, and I see it clear as clear with my mind's eye: a naked human body. Who will pick up that body and rescue it from the madness of violence?

After attending the Collective Trauma Summit, I see that this body is being held and nurtured, not only by Combatants for Peace, but by all who refuse a language of othering, who refuse a violating, blaming language, and choose, instead, a creative, courageous language: There is another way. That way does not avoid pain, it does not avoid discomfort, it does not avoid trauma, but faces them all, and chooses to grieve together with 'the other', to hear the other, to see the other, and so to heal the Self.

Then, life itself becomes a poem, becomes attuned to what we could call the poetry of being, and begins to sing.

The creative way

 

What the terrain had to tell me

The lily pads on the little dam felt like delicate embodiments of the human children of all ages for whom the world is at this moment grieving. In wintry colours of flesh, rust and olive they seemed to be finely-sliced cross-sections of brains, floating here now, defying all explanation, delivered to this sanctuary, being breathed by wind, which was sharp and insistent, and combing his patterns persistently towards me. And I wondered whether "the beautiful" really does "change in such kind ways" (Richard Wilbur), and whether there really is a "mercy of wild things" as Barbara Fairhead has written. And whether I was transgressing something by seeing the lily pads in such an unexpected way? There was no contrivance, but it is true that my heart was unable to hear in the clatter of the bendy reeds anything other than a hoarse, multiplicitous grief. The Afrikaans word 'snik' came to mind to describe the sound they made - a perfect onomatopoeiac word to denote the spine-wracking gasps that often accompany intense sobs.

Despite my melancholy state, the communion of lily leaves and wind and water with my bemusement left me feeling no worse. A little clearer, anyway, about the depth of grief mantling our world. As if such a ‘living cemetery' in the sun, whence new blooms will soon spring, is the only way I am given to see the spirits of these many, once-warm beings?

Wisdom #22

Christmas '23 my Beloved gave me a tiny notebook, with a condition.

"This is not for poems," he warned (possibly thinking of the mess of scribbles that make up my notebooks),"it's only for wisdoms."

I've a nose for limitations that yield good quarry, hence I surrendered with gladness. Whenever I came across words that seemed worthy of copying out by hand, another page was filled in my little book. In all this time, I have gathered a total of 32 wisdoms. I haven't nearly half-filled the book. 

Then, last Thursday, he sent me a link to a YouTube clip, which I listened to while doing the dishes a moment ago. The clip makes for pretty worthy listening at this time in human history. It triggered my memory of a wisdom I'd written in one of my journals at the time (November '24) – my very own wisdom, born from my own experiences of a lifetime, which I decided to jot down in my little book. When I was done and had dried my hands, I went and found what I had written down. This:

Wisdom #22

I simply cannot think in groups. I can feel in and with groups, but think only as an individual.

– Silke Heiss, 9th November 2024

C'est tout. That is all. All-important, I'd say without a moment's hesitation, at this horrific time of historic mass psychosis (this link leads to the same YouTube video* as the one above). 

A wisdom based on pure experience. And: won from closely, but closely observing my own mind over the many decades.

*If you want the video in shorthand, please refer to Silke's Wisdom #22. Most importantly, please apply the wisdom as a daily practice. Earmark this blog. Think for and by yourself alone. Practise it. Stand firm. It's f***ing hard and completely vital for the survival of the human being. 

Note: being. Not species. The human being is far, far more important than the human species, who are, as we can clearly see, not important in the least.

Foam marrow

I reconnoitre a slightly different beach route for an upcoming Hiku Hike. The water is very loud and the pied kingfishers are unusually close and energetic, flitting almost like bats, uttering their high-pitched calls. 

Settling on some rocks, I grow absorbed in the bubbles of foam, which a few rather capricious swells are herding into the holds of the reef.

They are marrow cells and nuclei of foam, shuddering, spinning, exploding, reconsolidating, gaping, rotating. 

I feel myself becoming involved in their trembling existence. Can there be anything more insecure than foam?

The wind is stout and sharp as a small dagger, the sky's swathed in indecisive whites, partially obscuring a weak blueness, a blueness busy resting from having to be a hue.

Thus, the sea is largely colourless, a de-individuated expanse, retreating from language, from consciousness. 

That will be all for today. The softest parts of you are equally speechless. 

30th June 2024

When I zoomed into the snaps I'd taken, I saw that each bit of foam marrow had seen me too, replicated, with its compound eyes.

How dare I speak?

Raggèd rocks, weathered like the skin of my belovèd wrestling with himself,

rough and grooved and sharp with linear agonies borne over time

and no conclusion

Abiding like an outrage of completely opaque mirrors,

too shocked by the truth to reflect it, hiding

The rocks reveal the inner tissues of our bullet-riddled souls,

the marrow’s holes, where marrow sits now only as a polka of shadows,

cast by an aghast sun

How dare I speak for or against those who attack, those who defend,

when I don’t know the difference between those words, those actions?

When I’ve so much violence within myself?

Nor, if you kill me, will you rid yourself

or the world

of the virus

One way only can subdue it embrace it in yourself, bind it, befriend it,

show mercy to the beast that inhabits inhabits inhabits

wrestle befriend show your self unknown compassion

unknown compassion unknown

It takes practice more quiet

eventually it comes

Listen to no one,

cry

Thus I teach, reach

even myself

– Silke Heiss

All photos by the author. Graffitti on rock captured 18th October 2023

My Story of Pentecost. A simple woman’s testimony

Dedicated to those who have done the greatest damage

I am a simple woman on whom the gift of language might be said to be largely wasted, really, since I cannot speak of worldly affairs, nor influence men to cease doing harm.

However, I am well able to articulate personal experience, and I have the ability to see, and make, connections between corporeal and spiritual, between mysterious and rational dimensions. This can be useful to readers.

So, I want in this story to testify, describe an event that happened in my body, for you to make of what you will.

It happened the Sunday before last, on the 8^th of June, at the Pentecost Service. I was in Hogsback and attended with a dear friend.

Boughs of pyrocanthus and red hot poker lilies leaned into the dressed stone walls on either side of the altar, and another cherished friend had created an arrangement of coaly roses which glowed over the food table in the vestibule.

Pastor Barry named all the instances of fire as they occur in the Bible, and his arms and words fanned the yellow, orange and red flames of that famous day when the Holy Spirit came to the disciples and all of us mortals on earth.

As I listened to him holding forth, both impassioned and humour-filled, I became aware of a fine, fierce, contrapuntal gust pushing itself up inside me, sitting at the end of a pew beside the scarlet carpet that runs down the middle of the little chapel’s nave. From the waters of my sacrum I could feel a slender, burning blueness ascending.

As he ended his sermon, the pastor encouraged us not immediately to chat outside with one another after the communion, but to be quiet for a bit and pay attention if God’s voice was wanting to come through to us. He emphasised that God has a unique way of reaching each one of us, tailored to each individual’s capacity and predilection.

Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash  (photo cropped by the author)

When the three friends who were sitting beside me rose for communion, I was obliged to get up too, to let them through, and, despite the confusion inside my body, I was pressed from behind by the parishioners moving all together to the pulpit. It was not my first time attending an Anglican service in this non-denominational chapel, and I cupped my hands deferentially to receive Christ’s body, a weightless white disc, and stepped towards another friend in the community, Helen, who was holding the tray of tiny glasses brimming with vermilion liquid, the sacred symbol of the gory story.

At that moment, the blue fire blew abruptly through my heart, it was a torch in my conscience, and a whisper that found its way past my lips.
“I can’t! I can’t!” I breathed, staring at Helen.
“It’s grape juice,” she replied reassuringly, but I stared and repeated, “I can’t!”
I dropped the pale white disc into a tray of ice that just happened to be there, and stepped outside, feeling clean and light. I was aware of how icy the air had suddenly turned and how cleanly it entered my lungs.

I went around to the front of the chapel, where some people were huddling in spots of watery sun while others took shelter in the vestibule. Serenely I joined in the eating and talking. The pastor approached me, my sudden refusal of the holy communion had not escaped him. He asked whether I was a Roman Catholic and when I replied in the negative he invited me to come and see him sometime, adding that he would pray for me. I must have looked nonplussed, for he added benignly,
“But it’s okay.”
That made sense to me and I echoed, “Yes. I know it’s okay.”

We ate, talked, and then carried, washed, dried and packed away the cups and plates and tiny glasses. It was close to twelve when we said good-bye and I drove back home soon thereafter.

The next day (Whit Monday, which in some countries is a public holiday) I caught up with an unfinished, online creative group process I was part of, which involved drawing rainbow labyrinths while connecting specific colours with specific sounds. The colour the group had reached that Sunday happened to have been red, and the associated sound was ‘ê’ (as in red). I selected my red oil pastel and drew the outer paths of my labyrinths while chanting ‘ê’. Then, without any forewarning from my Self, I took a paintbrush, loaded it with acrylic paint labelled ‘Vermillion’ and pulled paths up and down and across between my labyrinths, going in all four directions, and, again, a wind animated my body and I knew: this is my blood.

I became excited, inspired, and squeezed thick red paint from the tube onto my finger and drew my blood thickly over the paths the brush had made. As I did so, I was inhabited increasingly by lightness and joy, as if I were purifying my own soul, my blood and my bloodline. My memories clarified as I sang and I felt the weightless Christ, my own liberated Self, and a joy my body could not have before this. Because I had never been able to stop thinking of Mary, feeling sick at heart all my life about what she had had to endure. Because, you know, Jesus too was covered in vernix at birth, and Mary had to brush her nipple on his cheek beside his mouth so it would open for him to suck her milk. He was born to live with friends and food and go on nice long walks and plant almond trees and trellis vines and give her and Joseph grandchildren, not be crucified by envious men and lies!

I felt that Ruach had broken through historic deeps in my body, she had breathed me, leaped me over a bridge higher than that gruesome consecrated murder on the red and speechless earth. Oh Mary, Mary, is it you or I who’s quite contrary?

Rainbow labyrinths, process art by the author

 

So there you are. This is my Pentecostal record, personal, simple, a single simple woman’s tiny crystal of truth, dictating nothing, prescribing nothing. I will say this, though: we women don’t give birth so you can kill bodies, hopes, trust, dreams, aspirations, natural complexities, and simple, ordinary joys. If you want blood, serve wombs and birth, become a midwife. If you want redemption, then grow the balls to serve the Mysteries of Life.

I thank my friends; Pastor Barry Wittstock and the St Patrick’s Chapel community in Hogsback; and Chantell Dysel, each for your part in this story.

– Silke Heiss, June 2025

  

From a province of rivers, another April

April was the longest month. It seemed to last forever, each day was open, elastic, filled with unexpected encounters, whence bubbled conversations resonant with possibility.

The sky was filled with clouds in all colours, shapes and sizes, freely embracing one another, texturing the airy canopy with endless dimensions. Vapour proffered fluffy lips coming together to kiss day after day.

Autumn sky over the Chintsa river. Photo by the author.

Ink flowed from the fountain pen and rains greened the hills. Sun warmed our backs and our bodies stocked up on the rays, as the mornings and evenings became chillier, energising us after the heavy heat of summer.

Then came the downpours, cackling into the potholes, mashing up farm tracks with wet abandon. And still the month was not done.

Butterfly with smiling wings,
sharing a rock shelter on the beach with me on 20th April 2025.
Photo by the author.

,

Butterfly effect in triplicate

A single person had expressed interest in the Hiku Hike on 29^th March 2025, and they were not in the area on that day. I decided to create a little momentum by reminding a friend to attend. She had always wanted to do a Hiku Hike, and I had offered one as a birthday gift to her last year, which circumstances had prevented her from taking advantage of. Now she was super excited!

Whether one, three or seven people sign up – I never judge it to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, because I trust completely that as many people do the practice as need my holding space and my attention on a particular day. The quality of the practice is first and foremost determined by my own respect for what I feel called and able to give.

I parked under one of the great trees at the Chintsa Beach parking lot and waited for Angie. Shortly before 9 a.m., I received a message from her, apologising for not arriving for the Hiku Hike. She said some good work had come up. Like me, she is self-employed and is obliged to seize opportunities as they arrive. I was happy for her, but oh! How disappointed I was for myself.

Still, one rule I live by is that when I have resolved to do something in service of the ‘Beauty Way’, then I am not permitted to cop out simply for lack of people support. The sand, the river, the rocks were waiting for my feet to touch them, my feet must connect, must pay homage to the beloved earth, I must give my time and my attention to the very morning. Furthermore, I had promised my sisters in faraway Germany that I would take them with me in spirit. How could I tell them that I had driven home like a dog with its tail between its legs?

So I traipsed across soft and hard, scalloped sand. Crossed the river tugging at my calves and ankles. A few people and one butterfly were about. I felt sorry for myself and had to admit that Angie’s unavoidable change of plans, and the general absence of interest this time (not the first time) in what I was offering, despite the usual advertising, had caused me to feel socially quite irrelevant and dispensable. A woman in the company of three dogs was walking further up the beach in the opposite direction as poor me. I considered approaching her with the offer to read her a poem. I remembered Patricia Schonstein-Pinnock often courageously standing and reading in public places as people passed by.

I made my way towards the woman.

“Hello,” I said, as she stopped in her tracks. I introduced myself and added, “I would like to ask you a favour.”

The woman inclined her head in a kindly manner and asked,

“Yes? What is the favour?”

“I ask for three minutes of your time,” I ventured, “to listen to a poem of mine.”

“You won’t believe it,” she replied, pointing to the rocks stretching out behind her, “I was just there with my head full of a poem by my daughter. Please read your poem.”

I gave her Angie’s copy and read it, told her its story: how it had come to me on a memorial bench in the Kwelera Botanical Garden, commemorating one of the young sons of Sunrise-on-Sea, who had been killed in a road accident. How much sympathy I felt for his mother, his family, and yet, how alive the message had come on the bench plaque: ‘You will never walk alone.’

“It’s beautiful. I will put this into my Bible,” the woman replied. “This was meant to happen.”

“Thank you for listening,” I answered, and then summoned the boldness to express my real interest she'd piqued: “Do you have your daughter’s poem in your head?”

“I think so. Can you understand Afrikaans?”

I nodded, and she recited words that drew me into an abysm of dark water, deeper than any darkness I have ever been able to describe, and when they had reached further than the deepest bottom, the words suddenly turned to let me see, touch a firmament of stars singing their own luminosity. I was dumbstruck. The emotional contrasts, the courage!

“She was raped during a farm murder,” the woman explained. “She was only 16.”

She fell into my arms which had opened of their own accord and we both wept.

She explained that the incident lay several years back, and the young woman who had been so grievously violated was now studying and achieving extremely high results. Our conversation took longer than three minutes and it is not necessary to divulge every detail thereof. One thing is certain, however: it was an unforgettable encounter for us both, a gift straight from the great Mystery, whence the inexplicable, unpredictable phenomena of life are born and unfold. I felt as if I had stepped through a portal from one world into another, more expansive dimension.

We said good-bye and I traipsed thoughtfully to ‘my’ sacred ‘stone-horse-person’ (a formation that is very special to me), greeting and examining her in the bright light of the warm autumn day, when my phone rang.

The 'stone-horse-person'. Photo: Silke Heiss

“Are you still at the beach?”

It was Angie. Her prospective client had cancelled after all, due to the glorious weather.

“I’ll walk back,” I told her, “and meet you across the river.”

The beach had filled with what could easily have been 100 children of all ages in surf suits with boards. While waiting, I recalled some of my own childhood days in what was then the ‘homeland’ Transkei, when my exploring immigrant parents had remarked with interest that the indigenous people along this coast did not seem to go into the ocean for simple, childish refreshment as we did. I remembered a weekend away in my early twenties, with pupils from Soweto Township, who had implored me to teach them to swim in the pool that we had had access to, their eyes hungry to fulfil mermaid and swimming champions’ dreams. I now revelled in the shiny water babies around me, splashing, running, trusting. Trusting the tide, the current, the wildness of their own dolphin delight. Numerous butterflies of different kinds had also come down to the ocean to join the solitary one I’d seen earlier, and were all dancing in the air.

I spotted Angie on the other side of the river and waded across.

“I haven’t seen you in ages!” she exclaimed as we hugged.

I explained the process of the Hiku Hike to her and we walked in perfect silence. We passed the stone-horse-person rock, and other rocks of various shapes and colours, toed through smelly, scrunched-up clumps of kelp, and climbed a flight of wooden steps into a dune forest. As we entered the caravan site on the other side (I had been given permission to do so), Angie apologised for becoming distracted, saying that she was ‘freaked’.

“I dreamed of this,” she said. “It was exactly, exactly like this! The moment we walked through here, I had déjà vu!”

“What do you make of that?” I asked her.

Through the dune forest. Photo: Silke Heiss

“That I am in the right place, where I am meant to be,” she replied, “but it’s still freaky!” She smiled.

A highly intuitive and experienced fairy card reader, she had brought her book with her and now offered me cheery Ffaff the Ffooter’s simple wisdom that, in order to receive intuitive guidance about that which we must do in our lives, our feet must be on terra firma and the head well-connected to the rest of one’s body.

As we trundled back and passed the stone-horse-person rock, Angie sat down. She opened her Faerie Book and said,

“The Fairy of Alchemy, Nelys, wants to say something to you.”

Moments before Angie handed me Nelys' message. Photo: Silke Heiss

I had not heard of Nelys before. I tried to say her name, Angie pronounced it 'Nels'. I studied Brian Froud's painting of her for a long time, intentionally losing the last vestiges of judgment of such images, which my mother's harsh condemnation had inculcated in me long ago, and I absorbed myself in the teaching. I was patient with myself, allowing the words about the fairy to reach me in the right places. I felt grateful that I no longer needed to waste energy rebelling against my mother's opinions in order to appreciate the gift that Angie was offering, but was there and then disentangling myself from the last sticky strands of ancestral webs of fearful ignorance.

The next day, Angie wrote me a message, which she kindly gave me permission to share:

The minute I saw that green door and went through it, I could feel myself stepping out of my old self and stepping into my AUTHENTIC SELF. The Age of Aquarius is a time of inner transformation of our true selves. Not what we have been told and taught to be. It encourages us to believe in ourselves.

For Angie, I opened a door and helped her to step through it, bringing an ending and entering a new way of being, seeing and doing. And I, too, had no less been brought to such a door twice over that morning and the whole world had changed. What a story I had to tell my sisters over the equator. Were the experiences of three women on the beach that day a butterfly effect in triplicate?

Hiku Hike promotional pic from March 2023

 

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