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

 

* * *

Nothing too heavy

It's the tension between heavy and light.

Tomorrow night, I'm zooming as feature poet for Off The Wall poetry.

Hugh Hodge, who ran the Off The Wall poetry gig in Cape Town for many years, was the first person I remember to point me out publicly to myself, as poet. It was the Cape Town Book Fair 2006. He passed by me, accompanied, as it happened, by Liesl Jobson, whom I'd also never met. He pointed his finger -

"You're a poet," he said, "come and read."

It was a few seconds in my life. A moment like that weighs, because it's so beautifully light: in passing, people who don't know each other, a gesture, a voice. A shape for the future.

My first readings I was so nervous that my body trembled to the extent that I feared people would see my dress shivering off my wobbling bum. I did not know it was possible to read while shivering so. But it is possible. It happened - even while it may be unexplained that my voice did not falter at all.

I've gone through intense soul torment, be-thinking the reading tomorrow ... that is to say: I've more than a thousand poems to choose from. Where, how to begin, how to nose the spoor that will find just the right track?

I've decided I'll read the poem about my nose, the sense of smell. And the one about the ear, which prefigures it. I'll read them chronologically, as they came to me in a simple, wide-eyed living of life.

How will it go down? How many people will tune in? The hopeful poet from Ecuador, who contacted me at the Frankfurt Book Fair - will she make it? Will she read?

I am happy. The tick of the kitchen clock steps me on to tomorrow. Beside me, at the table, Jacaranda root tortoises are being painted by my beloved, his concentrated breathing is audible on my right; the high whizz of his laptop hums on my left. It's domestic chaos: contained within an overall picture of peace - notwithstanding the so-called news across the Atlantic, which so many are busy with right now.

I've selected from 40 years of continuous work. Nothing too heavy. I'd like to leave my listeners feeling hopeful about being alive on our precious little planet.

List of titles for tomorrow night

The Snake's Song was published in New Contrast

Lines of our Days and The Loving Body were published in New Coin

  

Labour is blossoming or dancing where?

I have always loved to work. The work I have done - I mean here in the main my art and writing - has built, and over and again repaired, my mind, body, heart and soul.

The following small, personal selection of poems and extracts are a tribute to the beauty of committed human work. Whether it be sewing or carpentry, web design, computer programming, mining, gardening, catering or trading. There is no end to human talent and no end to the quest to get whatever it is you are doing right. To begin with, I've chosen one of my favourite stanzas from my old master, Yeats, for you to enjoy -

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

- from Among School Children by W.B.Yeats 

Not bruised, not born of despair, not blear-eyed, but dancing and at one: that is when a human being can attain a wholeness that compares to the completeness in the life of a tree.

I've always loved Herman Charles Bosman's poem, Seed, which be-sings the integration of a farmer's body, mind and soul by means of the process of working -

Seed

The farmer ploughs into the ground
More than the wheat-seed strewn on the ground
The farmer ploughs into the ground
The plough and the oxen and his body
He ploughs into the ground the farmstead and the cattle
And the pigs and the poultry and the kitchen utensils
And the afternoon sunlight shining into the window panes of the voorhuis
And the light entangled in the eyes of the children
He ploughs into the ground his wife's brown body
And the windmill above the borehole
And the borehole and the wind driving the windmill.
The farmer ploughs the blue clouds into the ground;
And as a tribute to the holocaust of the ploughshare -
To the sowing that was the parting of the Juggernaut -
The earth renders the farmer in due season
Corn.

- Herman Charles Bosman 

The shock of not being able to work anymore, due to a stroke, and the frailty of illness and old age, hit my mother and my husband respectively very hard - both were people who had been hard-working, who grieved the loss of their capacities to do even menial chores. My husband's frailty loaded on me more than is usual, and taught me - 

Beautiful body

My fingertips -
rough
from washing and rubbing -

rust in the whorls,
from scrubbing the pan, my back aches
from cleaning the floors,

my neck and shoulders are stiff
from sitting at the computer.
or maybe

from peeling and coring the apples;
my underarms sweaty and fragrant
from labour.

How beautiful
when your body
can work.

I think of my mother -
helpless after her stroke;
my husband so frail it's an effort to walk.

I shan't complain
about work, but give thanks
my body can.

- Silke Heiss 

Norman [Morrissey, my late husband] often quoted the following line from one of his favourite books and authors, and his passion for their meaning engraved itself into me -

"[They] came and went without fear of necessity, working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of the money."

- from The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

The great emphasis, with which Norman used to pronounce the phrase working hard because of the life that was in them leaps me straight to Maria Montessori's exploration of the human instinct to work - 

"The most important discovery is that a child returns to a normal state through work. Countless experiments made upon children of every race throughout the world have shown that this is the most certain datum that we have in the field of psychology and education. A child's desire to work represents a vital instinct since he cannot organise his personality without working: a man builds himself through working. There can be no substitute for work, neither affection nor physical well-being can replace it. [...] A child's instinct for work is a proof that work is instinctive to man and characteristic of the species."

- from The Instinct to Work in The Secret of Childhood  by Maria Montessori 

None of the above eulogies and thoughts about work concern themselves with forced labour, or with ugly struggles between "deviated men" (in Montessori's words) who have "lost the proper motives for work".

Just about every human has it in them to do something well. Each human has something to offer, which will help in however small a way to serve the whole. I never believed those who told me it's only about filling my stomach: they were trying to reduce my spirit to a machine.

Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

Alive and beautiful: Table Love now

"I effectively have std.8," he says, explaining, "I did std. 9 and 10 in one year, but it was a kind of a jippo matric. But it made me strong. I learned to stand on my own feet."
They're sitting on a bench in the winter sun shining its warmth equitably on them both.
"Well, I've two Masters degrees," she replies, "one of them with distinction, and - as precious as what they taught me is - I've never kept within the academy what I learned. University was never the place for me, I was never at home there. Even now I'm still muddling my way through life against all expectations. Formal education doesn't necessarily teach you how to survive."
"When I had my company," he says, "people with high education sometimes spoke to me, terrified of starting their own business. I used to say to them they should look around. How many people have they seen with their own eyes? Millions. How many of those people did they actually see dying or dead from starvation? None. I've never seen one. So start your own business, have the courage to do so. Do what you have passion for."
She takes out her notebook and pen. Sitting beside him, she is not with him, but with the bird of prey perched a little way from them, and the wintry horizon.
"You're so impatient!" she exclaims at one point, ducking the poem she is slowly composing away from his inquisitive eye.
Finally she is done.
"I've got my poem in my head," he says eagerly, "but I don't have a pen and paper."
"My book is full," she retorts, "and I didn't bring a new one."
He takes and opens her book on the back cover.
"There's a space," he says, and thinks, and speaks, and she writes down his words.
When he is done, he says,
"Let's hear yours now?"
She reads aloud the lines jostled by crossings out, arrows, insertions, revisions.
"That's awesome," he observes. "Same bird, same place and time, but completely different views."
"Yes," she agrees, "My father sometimes said what makes us all equal is our capacity to do harm, but it's the differences between us that make the world alive and beautiful." 

Food of intelligence

Working with
internet technology is
like I imagine our ancestors

must have found tracking
their quarry ... and here, our spoor of
dots and

slowly
turning
spools we

watch
while
waiting

on
the
hunt for

the food
of
intelligence.

Selected poems (July-August 2017)

(This post was first published on the Ecca Poets blog site)

Best drier

The best drier
of tears
is the wind.


Date: 23.7.2017

__________________________________

Still calls

I put your underpants
back in the drawer,
your t-shirt into the cupboard.


A time will come
to lose
those rituals


but for now
the Wood owl
still calls.


Date: 25.7.2017

__________________________________


In each other

At our usual
picnic spot
on the R63


I stop
to note my gladness
at these places


across
the country
we shared.


We were
without wanting
to be


a restless pair
forced to travel
these roads


– never really
at home
except


in
each
other.


Date: 16.8.2017

_______________________________________
Silke Heiss
_______________________________________

Carry on

Numb from news
– hate-speech, violence, lies,
noble essays, reasoned tries
defending values, hoping
to avert bad trouble, blues –

pained by poems
I’ve proofed
– by children and their guides
in townships under siege
by gangsters (“Satan’s servants”) –

I walk The Bluff
knowing, seeing,
but not feeling
the cliffs caressed by mist,
grey old bracken bending,
looking at their young
in bright green hoodies
coming up.

Stop.
Will I ever be
at one
with what I see
again? Grieved I stand
for loss
of me.

The mists heave lightly,
sucked by sun’s eternal thirst,
revealing slopes of trees
that never have been cursed,
the Proteas and Watsonias
hold up and shake
with flirting birds
(whose avian tongues dispel the worst)

and this
they do:
cancel me
to pull me through.

And I continued
walking.
I saw a Longcrested Eagle …
the wind flipped
through his crest
as if it were the Yellow Pages,
and there in silhouette:
he was all focused, black
and grand
and free
to look about him
there
on The Bluff;

and a little mongoose
did its delicate staccato stipple,
frittered over the path
and was gone;

and I knew
I must go on
cancelling my self
– cancel news and lands of pain –
if I want
to carry on.

20th November 2016

 - Silke Heiss

First published on the ECCA poets blog 

Freedom is

The wind on your skin,
your mother’s voice,
embracing a friend,
and that tree
against the skyline
dancing
with its branches.

____________________________

2nd November 2016 - Silke Heiss
____________________________
First published on the ECCA poets blog