Self-tuning: The Tonic of Choice Words

I would like to present you today with two poems by Norman Morrissey, which perform very lucidly a dance of change in the spirit of a man. This change concerns a self-healing process, recorded in words, moving from a divided to a more integrated sense of self. 

For me, one of the most remarkable qualities of my late husband Norman – as man AND poet – was his determination to self-examine, to self-edit the tissue of his being and writing alike, in order to enact a continuous transformation of both poetry and psyche into a truer timbre. Self-tuning would be a choice word here.

 

Conscientious nerves

 

You talk

of a life

without regrets

 

– some line walked always true

so you never must

ache for your myriad mis-steps.

 

I’ve never been

that lucky,

there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop:

memories,

conscientious nerves

 

rooting

in

my marrow.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in Sound Piping, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2015

 

I confess that I’ve long felt accused by this poem – of failing to be ‘conscientious’ in examining my wrongdoings – but this is probably due to the fact that the poem models the act of self-accusation by means of the conscience: describing the man’s very bones (“my marrow”) as being strung through with “conscientious nerves”. The lines, which alert the reader to this, are:

  there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop

 

There’s an open display here, a FREE EXPRESSION of feelings of low self-worth and shame as performed by the body. 

Now I remember my father – a self-proclaimed atheist, fervently reverent of life – reminiscing on conversations with a pastor friend, in which he took issue with the Christian term ‘sin’. I can do wrong, he maintained, I can, as a human, do harm – but that does not make me a sinner. 

Hiding in this rejection of a fallen state is the heathen’s freedom, but also his innocence (though innocence is, of course, not necessarily innocuousness). The word ‘heathen’ originates as a designation of the ‘uncivilised’, but probably largely harmless, folk, who populated the rural areas (heaths) beyond the precincts of state and religious control. The online etymological dictionary observes:

It is most probably that the Germanic word haiϸana (heathen) referred to a person living on the heath, i.e. on common land, i.e. a person of one’s own community. It would then be a neutral word used by heathen people in order to refer to each other rather than a Christian, negative word denoting non-Christians.

I don’t see an untouched Bushman with “stooping shoulders” due to a deep, inner “ache” for his “myriad mis-steps”. But, on being told he is a sinner, surely her or his posture will change.

Nietzsche, in his critiques of the tenets of Christian civilization, examined the ominous build of resentment in the collective human psyche, due – if I recall his writings rightly – to unacknowledged guilt and shame over the fact that our species had murdered God;  resentment, then, being a phenomenon whereby negative feelings (grief, horror, shock, rue) are not felt and expressed, but denied and repressed, thus generating a continuous acid reflux (the metaphor is mine) of powerful energies denied the opportunity for natural transformation or –mutation back into the flow of life. 

The miraculous turning-point in the Christian story is, of course, that our wrongdoings, including, I would guess, the murder of God – surely our ultimate crime – are forgiven and, moreover, REDEEMED, through penitence before that same God, resurrected. The orthodoxy (Bible) prescribes words for us, with which to realise that miracle, which I understand even today serves the more non-verbal among our species, who are not given the listening tongue – but, for the poet, there is a different kind of freedom, that is to say, the freedom of conscientiously elected words. Consider the “shift” in the heart of him here:

The story

 

Something has shifted

in the deep of me:

the constant memories

 

– starting like a grouse at my feet –

fly differently,

don’t lurch

 

sickly

into shame and griefs

and thoughts

 

of clumsiness and wrong-headedness

– of ineptitude and folly.

There’s still

 

the whirr at my feet

and the wings beating

at my face:

 

but each visitation

starts to whisper

new words:

 

starts to hint

a new

language of belonging,

 

the replays

start making a movie

that shows the essential me.

 

I still have a script

of bungles and crimes

– but at least

 

it’s becoming a screenplay,

becoming a history

that makes sense:

 

and that changes

the shape of the story

as something to live with.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in This Moment’s Marrow, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2017

 

What I notice in this poem is the transition from a prevalence of guttural sounds and clipped consonants in the first four stanzas – sh, ch, f, t, c, s – to a lovely in-breeze of gentle w and wh sounds, and even the s in ‘visitation’ is heard as a soft z, in stanzas 5–7 – as if the breath itself were taking command to expel fearful tension in the body. 

The image of the grouse in stanza 2 – which strikes me as strange, foreign, even – suggests itself, to me at least, as an unconscious memory, “in the deep” of the poet, of the German word Graus (horror) – a word, which is pronounced the same as ‘grouse’. In the fifth stanza, this gives way to a softer, much more English-sounding “whirr”. 

“each visitation/ starts to whisper/ new words” we read, as the last four stanzas take on more measured, calmer rhythms and employ longer, soothing vowel sounds; while a prevalence of alliterative s’s snake confidently through – perhaps delivering a shimmer of Hippocrates’ staff of healing? Indeed, that staff is invoked in ‘Grasp’, a subsequent poem in the collection, whose last line names ‘This Moment’s Marrow’.

The poet’s use of the word ‘story’ to mean something he has shaped “to live with” must be firmly distinguished from recent usage of the word in a negative sense as ‘the story you tell yourself, which repeats old patterns’. Norman’s “story” is one which he has built himself, resulting in a sovereign, “essential me” – HIS history and life, which, despite “bungles and crimes”, he CAN live and, by implication, be at peace with. 

The choice of the word ‘crimes’ is particularly interesting, and, in my view, suggests that – unlike the sin-free heathen, or atheist – the poet faces his “essential me” as inextricably entwined into a species NOT FREE OF a violent and sacrilegious past.

Between ‘The Story’ and ‘Conscientious nerves’ lie two years; the last two years of the poet’s life. They record a process that took place inside the man, and allow readers to witness genuine self-healing, self-tuning, as it were, by the tonic of choice words.

For a more indepth examination of the minute particulars whereby Norman tuned, exercised and trained his voice to become the medication it could be for his soul, see John van Wyngaard’s superb Introduction in Gripscapes. This posthumously published book contains two of the three poems referenced here. Reading MORE of my beloved late husband’s carefully crafted poems CLOSELY may be the best thing you could do today, in order to prepare for tomorrow.

– Silke Heiss, February 2023

Trinity of blogposts 3 A flash of ancient insight (on earth as it is in heaven)

 “Look how much a weed in a crack

has influenced you,” she said.

The epigraph of this article derives from a recent blogpost I shared, in which a Journey through dance I’d signed up for triggered an early childhood memory of a miniscule, flowering weed, which had ‘spoken’ to me, saying it was from the stars. William Blake, in his Auguries of Innocence, confirms in the first four lines of the poem the inherent emotional logic of such an experience:
 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour. 

This article is not concerned, however, with the similitude between the design of the cosmos and a single, earthly bloom, as perceived by a three-year-old child. It is concerned with the concept and phenomenon of influence, that is to say, with the experience that the flowering weed ‘spoke to me’ – in such a way, moreover, as to have a profound and lasting effect.

The original meaning of the word, ‘influence’ – deriving from the Latin influere, to flow in – does not convey the image of water. Rather, ‘influence’ was used to describe the power to produce an effect “in indirect or intangible ways”, “without the apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command”, so we read in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary.

My Shorter Oxford Dictionary highlights the use of the term first and foremost in Astrology, where it denoted the “supposed flowing from the stars of an ethereal fluid acting upon the character and destiny of men, and affecting sublunary things generally.” It adds that in later times, the term applied to the exercise of “occult power”. Subsequent usage shows that the term continues, over the centuries, to be associated with the operation of exertion that is “unseen” except in its effects; or the “capacity of producing effects by insensible or invisible means.”

These definitions are borne out by the online etymology dictionary, which notes that the use of the word in Middle English was limited to describing “any outflowing of energy that produces effect, of fluid or vaporous substance as well as immaterial or unobservable forces” – in other words, usage in this case referred only to the elemental, and not the human, world. I am interested here in particular in the phrase “any outflowing of energy that produces effect”.

The burgeoning literature and audio-visual material available on the power of human thought have made the fact of the ‘invisible’ or ‘insensible’ influence of both conscious and unconscious human thought one of the central concerns in contemporary human culture – from mystic, religious, spiritual, psychic, psychological, artistic, literary, philosophical, biological, neurological, chemical and, even, mathematical perspectives (i.e. the attempt to find the numerical formula required to calculate the number of human beings needed for a prayer in a specific situation to take effect.)

The knowledge that we are, in the words of Dr Zach Bush, “columns of water”, and the tremendously active focus on conscious breath-work amongst health-conscious and philosophically- or spiritually-oriented human beings across the globe in this day and age, includes us as a species, arguably, yet easily, in the “fluid or vaporous substance[s]” from which energy can flow out to produce an effect.

It's hardly a one-way street, however. Three years ago – despite skepticism – I had my astrological birth chart mapped and interpreted for me. Ever since, I have consulted the astrologer annually for what you could call a kind of check-in to the year ahead. She offers ‘trends’ and ‘currents’, which I have the choice to be aware of, if I should experience these in my personal life. One of the most influential moments during these readings was at the last one, when I revealed to her that I felt I suffered a lifelong addiction to romance (love, magic and beauty) and that I was eager to wean myself of this addiction. She informed me that the fact that my birth chart shows the planet Venus in Taurus, in opposition to Neptune, would naturally render me prone to an insatiable longing for oneness – oneness with love, with nature, with beauty, with all that lives. She observed that this longing would likely be so vast that it could not possibly be fulfilled by another living human being. It would therefore be wise to channel it into nurturing a spiritual oneness with nature and/ or my relationship with the Divine. Of course, my nature poems do (mostly) exactly that, and my habit of communing with biological and elemental nature alike, does indeed satisfy my need for being-at-one-with-all (the Divine as well as the Earthly) in a timeless, or eternal, zone.

An astrological explanation of an innate tendency is, of course, only one perspective among a variety of possible ones, which could potentially provide a similar, or even an identical insight.

Depending on whether you inspect the phenomenon of a flowering weed ‘speaking’ to a child about the stars from an artistic, mystical, spiritual, religious, psychic, psychological, philosophical, biological, neurological, chemical, or mathematical perspective, you will use your field-specific language and vocabulary to probe this phenomenon; although I hazard that a mathematical induction would be the most foundational. The chances are that none of those perspectives would cancel any other. In concert, they might create a complex bouquet of new formulae – verbal, musical, visual or diagrammatic, as well as numerical – of insight into the power of the human mind – not necessarily only as a driver, but, indeed, as a receptacle of thought: as a direct result, for example, of the influence of a (not even ingested) vegetable substance upon it. Whether such receptivity is affected by the heavenly bodies whose energy streamed into that mind, at the moment of her birth on the planet, offers a further, valid path of enquiry. There is, I posit, a measurable give-and-take between our consciousness and our – both organic as well as elemental – environment.

Certainly the sounds and rhythms used to explore these notions with you, dear reader, by means of the English language, have been chosen with the intention of effecting the greatest possible curiosity, not to say fascination, in you.

I trust that this article is a miniscule seed, gifted by a miniscule weed, assisting in the birth of a radically new order of seeing – a ‘miraculous’ order of infinitely various forms of influence. This order of seeing is, I think, already well under way.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour. – William Blake 

Trinity of blogposts 2 Course correction (with yoga, dance and fairies)

So. Life drives you with a momentum that makes it really hard for you to take stock. “It’s all too much” is the daily feeling, you’re in survival mode: keep going, keep going, keep going, keep gggg ... And I kept goinggg, stuffing my days up with humdrum duties, dredging ever deeper down into – actually beyond the remains of – my energy (!) to summon patience, more patience, AND MORE patience and loving kindness for the endless admin and communications required, to organise the daily physical and emotional support my parents asked for, fitting in (against my, secretly somewhat languid, nature) with THEIR WORLD (a world of, to me, too many false securities); and, simultaneously, trying to learn more about my new partner and his – to me, in many ways, completely foreign – outlook on life. Looking back now, at the three moves in three years, which I was obliged to weather, they reveal something about the panic my own heart and its lostness.

I ‘skidded’ off the mountain in Hogsback, which had been my home for 8 years, and skidded up and down the coastline, in a manner of speaking, as each place Jay (not his real name) and I found to rent, albeit all were beautiful, was quickly sold, due to unfortunate circumstances besetting the owners. Were we hexed, Jay and I?

Absolutely. The hex was: my utter idiocy. Possibly that germ of languidness. So, what was the turning point in the tragi-comic tale?

Well, the first course-correction, I believe, was that I chose to leave the beautiful village of Brenton-on-Lake – or, rather, I chose to accompany Jay, who was set on returning to what I privately call “the belly of the beast”, that is to say, the Eastern Cape, where it is impossible to ignore or avoid South Africa’s notorious problems. Jay had never felt at home in the Western Cape, I was sure he was secretly yearning (my take, not his) for his home environs outside East London; and he also wanted to be closer to his shop again. As for me, I listened to my heart in following, not just Jay, but a ‘geographical piety’ – a kind of deep, inner compass that drove, despite everything, joy into me on seeing again the lush green grasslands and roaming cattle so typical of the Eastern Cape (definitely not a mis-take).

We found a place to rent that had been advertised, of all places, on Gumtree, and it turned out to be situated in the very village where I had enjoyed art lessons during my latter four years of living in Hogsback. The rocky sea shore was more familiar to me than it was to Jay – I’d sat there every other Saturday with sarmies and a boiled egg after the art class, writing poems whipped by the wind.

I was now geographically twice as far as I had previously been from my parents and, although my father’s dementia made him unable to remember where I was now, I could hear in his voice over the telephone that he felt in his heart – as I did in mine – that I was distancing myself from his and my mother’s extreme emotional dependence on me. This was no bad thing for any of us. They have the privilege of very loyal and loving carers in the familiarity of their own home. Of course I kept up with my duties to them, and of course I visited them for Christmas, but, even so: there was new room for sanity to re-enter my sphere.

Several people mentioned that I ought not to feel guilty about re-moving myself, geographically as well as emotionally, further away from my parents – to be honest: there was no energy left for any guilt in me. I knew that a cycle had, necessarily, ended. True to their natures, my parents did not complain at all. There was an overall feeling that things could not be otherwise. This, of course, is the precondition for inner peace and, I daresay, they have grown more peaceful.

So the daughter in me was making progress. But what about the wife/ female partner aspect? Unmarried though we were, my womanly heart was given to Jay – and she was distraught, if truth be told. Jay is a lifelong nicotine addict and, although I knew this when I first teamed up on the journey through life with him, I had become increasingly intolerant of what to me was his enslavement. I was helplessly jealous of his ‘first love’, Lady Nicotine, whom he cherished a hundred times more devotedly than he cared for me. As I saw it, Nicotine was his true partner in intimacy. Clearly, I needed to detach from him, too, leave him in peace, and give myself space to lose my possessiveness. But how?

It was the second ‘course correction’ that helped me with this question. The second ‘course-correction’ occurred very recently, as a result of three momentous events happening in quick succession.

Firstly, my yoga teacher, Cher, invited me to offer a writing workshop at her upcoming yoga retreat. This opportunity, again to collaborate with a woman whose mission I respected and chimed with, blew the exact wind into my sails that I needed. At last I could be working again on MY terms! I’ve been eagerly getting back ‘out there’, renewing my commitment to my writerly calling, not merely in private, but as a public phenomenon; and also focusing on my connection to my precious readers again – even this trinity of blogposts are evidence of that.

Secondly, I signed up for a Journey through dance with Cher.

And, thirdly, I went for a fairy card reading with Angie Vanstraaten.

I had consulted the fairies, as mediated through Angie, a total of three times in my life at major crisis points and each time I had been shown a way forward. This time, though, I was in for a shock of major proportions. The fairies warned me in the strongest terms that I was drained to the bone from endlessly giving without replenishing myself; that my masculine aspect was completely upside down; and that I would lose everything and suffer extremely painful experience if I did not step out of MY addiction to SERVING THE PRIORITIES OF OTHERS AT THE EXPENSE OF MY SOUL.

Wow. They freaked me out big-time, those fairies. There was one, whose hideous face with missing teeth has stayed with me in particular – fittingly called the SOUL SHRINKER! – who warned of keeping company with people, including loved ones, whose comments were habitually, unconsciously critical in the most innocent (unconscious) ways, steadily eroding my self-confidence and strength. The habit is probably best summed up in the old proverb ‘familiarity breeds contempt’, expressing with wondrous brevity the harmfulness of not maintaining proper boundaries – something I had NEVER learned!

Shaken, the days that followed I was on hyper-alert and actually began to notice this habit – both in myself as well as in Jay. I consciously applied the medicine of kindness, accepting nothing less than genuine warmth from either myself or from him at ALL times, no matter how insignificant the occasion might seem. If it isn’t kind, rather keep silent and self-examine. Fortunately, Jay was completely with me on that particular track. You could say it actually helped our relationship become ‘more professional’; we orbited in our respective (very different) worlds, with greater distance between one another, which actually gave us both the breathing room we each craved.

The Journey through dance took place three days after the fairy card reading. What a truly healing process! It’s re-ignited my passion powerfully. I’ve documented it, with view to showing a way for others, who may be at similar crossroads in their lives as I am. I urge you to seek your kindred spirits when your soul is as emptied as mine has been.

Best of all, the Journey through dance brought me a fascinating insight, which I definitely had to explore. This insight came through an offering, during our feedback session, from one of the participants, owner of the venue Driftwood Studios, ClaireKockott.

To be continued. 

Angie says: The Singer of healing tells us ...
Healing begins when we let go of what hurts us,
and embrace and nurture what benefits and heals us

The terrifying soul shrinker

The beautiful venue for Journey through dance @Driftwoodstudios

Trinity of blogposts 1 The great mis-take

 “A mistake is an invitation to look again,

more closely, at something, so you can

understand better what is going on.”

 – Philippa Podlashuc

Shit happens. It happens in life, at times, that it tears you, suddenly, along with it. The tide of demands, which you feel are on you, can be so great, that there is no chance to think or ask yourself whether what you are doing is actually for the greater, or any, good. Being ‘caught off-guard’ happens to many of us, time and again. The wonderful thing about such times is that they usually, hopefully, come to some kind of end – possibly only when you are completely burnt out. But that point – the point at which something else occurs, enabling you finally to yell STOP! – is the turning point: the moment when you are able to “look again, more closely”, in order to get another ‘take’ and in order to understand a situation better. 

What you are about to read is the first in a trilogy of blogposts, in which I am allowing myself the freedom to understand my previous take(s) better. May it increase your compassion for and interest in your own mis-takes. Here goes.

A sudden heap of demands descended upon me after a two-year lull of sorts and I guess I was, at the time, too contented (blasé?) or too busy, to notice what was happening.

The lull occurred after my husband (who was a poet) died in July 2017. I’d stood by him without pause in his last months, when his health plummeted dramatically, but he also made dramatic comebacks, several times. When it was all over, I began to assemble poems I’d written in his bodily presence, as well as ones that were blossoming in his purely spiritual presence. In the space of two years, I published two solo collections, one fat and one slim, entitled Greater Matter and Sweet Nothings, which were launched in October 2019 and February 2020 respectively.

The creation, publication and marketing of these books signalled the beginning of my independence as a poet ‘in my own right’, and I was working hard on nurturing a small readership, as well as keeping up with the daily discipline of writing and self-editing, ever on the lookout for ways of improving my craft. Although I was still very much grieving, I felt deeply fulfilled by having finally learned to hearken my inner voice.

As anyone who has lived a little knows, whenever anything “finally” falls into place, it is a certain marker that one thing has ended and something else is beginning.

The momentum of my life upped significantly when I fell in love with a charming person, who was intrigued by the fact that I was a poet – a phenomenon he had not encountered before. His educational background at a technical school had been largely untouched by poetry, and famous titles from the literary canon had never been part of the curriculum. He’d made a life for himself as a businessman, who, amongst other ventures, had owned bookstores; he was well-read in crime thrillers and latched now, with happy fervour, onto my late husband’s extensive Zane Grey collection; journeyed from there through non-fiction and survival stories into, at this point in time, philosophical classics, such as Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Love naturally pulled him closer to learning why poetry is special; he’s written some of his own poems and has, over the years, occasionally been a sounding-board for mine. 

As a poet, my prime interest is, of course, not poetry, but life itself. Intensely romantic and idealistic as I am by nature, as far as I was concerned my life was, here and now, presenting me with the most remarkable and undreamed-of opportunity! This man, no doubt, would sell my poetry books and turn us into a formidable team, with me creating and him promoting beautifully shaped words to reach and heal the hearts of all humanity. (Off-stage, whispering: mis-take.)

Well, to give him due credit – he did sell six copies of Sweet Nothings, the first nogal on the day we collected it from the printers – AND it was Valentine’s Day! I couldn’t believe it! We were on a roll! (mis-take)

However, to my naïve surprise, Jay (not his real name) had limited patience with things that are difficult to sell and, of all the things there are in the world that people do NOT readily put their hands into their wallets for, poetry wins first prize. To put it more succinctly, when it comes to saleability, poetry and ice cream are poles apart.

Well, Jay’s realism about marketing my poetry personally was a bit of a damper on my high hopes, but I still had my eye on life itself. He had (and still has) a shop in Hogsback, where he generously (at no profit to himself) gave shelf space to the poetry volumes I wanted to sell – my own, those by my late husband, as well as books by the Ecca Poets. This set-up has worked, and is still working; the books sell slowly, as is to be expected. I love to imagine the poems flowing out like starlight, reaching people long after they are first published. For THAT is their power. Unlike ice creams, poems do not melt.

BUT. BUT. BUT.

Here I was, a novice poet still wet behind the ears, choosing to be with a person who could not be blamed for having no inkling of what it meant to BE a poet. I would have to teach him what that is and what it means to live with one. Did I turn out to be a bad teacher, phew! If one can excel at failure, then I am truly excellent. For, clearly, as it turned out: I did not know myself what it meant; certainly I did not know how to manage it in balance with nurturing a new love relationship. So, being a good woman (not a mistake), what I did try to do was choose to serve my love for Jay. I put that love higher than my love for bringing poems into the world. It felt like an ethical choice – that is to say, not a choice at all. Of course a beautiful, living human being has more value than words strung together! (Not a mistake.)

However, looking at it now, I guess that was the story I told myself – in order to justify the rather unbalanced belief system I clung to, which was: my relationship with a beloved other is more important than the relationship with my independent self.

AT THE SAME TIME.

My parents were growing increasingly dependent and, one month into hard lockdown, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I REALISED then (mis-take). Life is asking me NOT to be a poet (huh?), for that, I told myself, is selfish, irrelevant, economically unviable and socially irresponsible (???). Besides, there are millions of poets out there, with a few hundred of them bloody excellent, so the world definitely does NOT need to read anything I write. FINALLY I was going to be a PROPER PERSON, an ORDINARY person, just like everybody else, who PUTS SERVING REAL PEOPLE BEFORE WRITING POEMS.

It’s sad, or maybe it’s actually, ultimately, funny, but my poetry seemed to me to be nothing but solipsistic (mis-take); nature- but not people-centred; pampering nothing but my own soul and helping nobody (mis-take!). I ask, on my knees, forgiveness – for all this mis-taken, negative self-talk – from my loyal fans and readers. You guys truly helped me, privately, lovingly, patiently, with steady encouragement, to keep my waning little flame alight despite myself, during these years of my own stupidity descending, mis-take by mis-take, onto and spreading out its darkness within me.

Truth was, I felt I owed society something for having published two solo volumes in the blissful solitude of a paradisiacal house and garden. And here, before my very eyes, in front of my own door, so to speak - where one is, for good reason, told to sweep first and foremost - were my parents, one struggling with her own body (my mother is paralysed in a wheelchair), the other with his mind (Alzheimer’s is an unnerving disease for the person suffering from it). As for Jay, he was soul-searching, writing his own book, trying to understand his nicotine addiction. The last thing any of them needed, so it seemed to me, was my poetry, let alone the complications involved in creating it. I confess I imposed it – very gently – upon them, at times (if for no other reason than to give myself breathing room). I can testify that they were never the worse off. My mother’s and Jay’s responses were virtually always sweetly affirming. But, too often, their interest was painfully temporary. I see now, with a grimace of resignation, that I was looking to them to give my poetry the attention I wasn’t giving it!

As for the rest of the world – clearly it agreed with my negativity, so it appeared to me at the time. Covid and lockdown, government corruption, the continued desacralisation of nature, poverty, hunger and, later, war screamed at me: DO YOU FINALLY SEE HOW IRRELEVANT YOUR POEMS ARE??? I suppose, dear reader, that you might relate to some of this? When harmful self-talk blots all your blessings and sadistically breaks all your motivation?

For, despite this illness in my soul, my guardian angel, and my God, called me – often – and gave me motivation and encouragement. The extraordinary blessings in my life during that out-of-synch period put ever more real conflict inside me, making it impossible to COUNT those blessings. I was invited to read alongside other poets, musicians and dancers, at the African Women Writers’ Symposium in 2021; I painted poems onto a public wall, working alongside formidable artists in Knysna in 2022; I publicly read a well-received poetic tribute to those artists at the launch of that wall; I collaborated in an amazing poem-dance at an animal charity art exhibition. I organised two successful poetry readings in the privacy of my home; AVBOB accepted three of my poems for their poetry library, and also, very kindly, did a punt for me; I had poems and even art published in respected US literary magazines; I walked and wrote daily (for me, those two activities belong together) and continued, albeit erratically, to trial modest poems on my precious private readers – all the time at war with myself, feeling completely fake. Why? Because: I was failing properly to acknowledge these achievements, they were strange, if exhilarating, puzzles, more than anything else, to my confused mind. (No-take) I cannot emphasise enough that the word “count” is all-important in the idiom, “count your blessings”. Alone to create the links now to all those precious moments has been more than humbling.

At the time, all the puzzledness and confusion, by the way, was taking place OFFLINE. Online I continued to show a more ‘professional’ face, as best I could, hiding the grimy truths of my soul and – even though I did try to be honest and published some posts on this blog about bitterness and sadness – the fact was that I felt utterly out of control. The best I could do was to announce that I was taking ‘a Sabbatical’.

During that ‘Sabbatical’, I burnt myself out in the service of loving my needy loved ones.

Organising my parents’ household from afar; being there for them emotionally on a daily basis; driving the long journey to visit them once a month; being there emotionally as well as in very practical ways for Jay – all of this, thank the Lord, I could do and did. (Not a mis-take.)

But, prioritising this service, and simultaneously trying to make THEIR PRIORITIES mine, giving insufficient time, attention and authority to my craft, my readers, my finances, was a mis-take. I felt unseen, unacknowledged: I had been caught in the web of a plight endured by far too many women and men, who attend to their loves at the cost of paying attention to their independence, inner balance, fulfilment and own resources.

My vicious temper, which had disappeared with the appearance of my poetry publications, returned.

My feelings of serenity and fulfilment, which had blessed me when I was centred in my independent creativity, evaporated.

My experience of being at one with myself gave way to feeling more and more torn.

Stress will always show the places in you that require further attention.

Yes, I was still feeding morsels to my Facebook Page and social media platforms, was still showing up here and there, as I could. An online persona really gives one the option of faking it – not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose, as you can give faking it your all until you actually do make it. I couldn’t bear to come out publicly with the conflicts on my heart and the severe loss of a sense of control I suffered privately, because, on the one hand, the world seemed to be ending in disease, lies and violence, how could I possibly, in good conscience, add to the bad news? On the other hand, I also did not know in the least how to write about my stuff WITHOUT mentioning all the dearly beloved non-poets I was so focused on – so, on top of everything I was in a permanent spin about the ethics of what poetry and writing were asking of me. Posts on this blog, in which I came out with some of the facts of my life, were a source of inner pain and turmoil.

Closer to home, my duties towards the Ecca group kept me strung into those beautiful people, who had once been my fellows; friends, who still saw me as one of their own.

I tried as best I could to conceal it, but I grew increasingly unsure of myself. I actually became afraid of speaking publicly, especially, for some reason, of being seen on the zoom poetry readings at Off The Wall and The Red Wheelbarrow (where I was even featured!) all too often I’d want to say something and then just sit, with a horrible hardness locking my throat. I can’t believe it myself, and I won’t blame you if you don’t, but I actually cringed with the sense of shameful inferiority I felt in the presence of other poets.

I began to doubt the power of love itself, I felt abysmally disappointed in myself and convinced that I did not love enough.

As time went by, however, I gradually began to understand that – like so many PROPER PEOPLE, like so many ORDINARY PEOPLE, who put THE PRIORITIES OF THOSE THEY LOVE BEFORE THEIR OWN PRIORITIES I was living a life of “quiet desperation”.

Thankfully, by the grace of God, I would be given opportunity to course-correct. Seeing your MIS-TAKE is always an opportunity for a RE-TAKE.

 To be continued.

Two of the very good reasons I am infinitely grateful to have made my mis-
take: and why I have not a single regret!
Photo: Brian Bartlett