The book is coming along nicely ... while the journal holds my hand

9th June 2024

I have been thinking repeatedly about bringing out a book about the Hiku Hikes, in which I discuss the origin, history & process of the activity, with examples of what people have produced. I may even have captured some first original creations in our [Norman Morrissey's and my Give Your Writing The Edge] newsletters.

10th June

I have messaged some of my previous Hiku Hikers and have thus far received very positive feedback, have created a folder for the book, and am gathering everyone's creations.

12th June

I reconnoitred a possible new route today and took some lovely pictures, but decided that it is not suitable for the next Hiku Hike. L's feedback has made me realise that I need to differentiate between different clients. Writers, experienced or budding, and non-writers. There is so much potential. It makes me happy if I can work under an open sky, deal with weather & nature as they come.

13th June

Of course, nature includes humans and their natures, as well as my own.

17th June

Eons have passed since I wrote the above. I had forgotten there was no rehearsal on that day [the 13th], but I had the pamphlets and posters printed at half price in Beacon Bay and left some pamphlets at E's practice. Friday I hung the last poster at Tea in the Trees.  

18th June

I pray I shall be led according to the best way forward. I came to Kwelera to catch up with myself and it is most vital that I walk and write each day. It be fitting that I write the book on the beach, in the forest - oh yes! That is what I must and wish to do!

Not bound to my desk, but to the beloved trees, the sky, the cormorants & kingfishers.
Precious, unostentatious rocks, tumbled assemblies of stone, foamy breakers - so exuberantly obedient to the forces of wind and centrifugal laws, delicious freedom, let my heart burst its human banks & consort, completely at one, with these wild and safely tethered powers, beyond the narrow range of human wilfulness, its vast illusions, let me be liberated into the cormorant, looping her neck down into untired pools, fresh and curious, and finding food.

21st June 2024

Today a wild berg wind is blowing & it is likely to remain gusty - let's see how that impacts the Hiku Hikers.

What is this wild wind, this warm day, at the winter solstice? An unnerving, dust-laden messenger that all must endure. And as a truck arrives with tons of further sand to unload at the building site, cattle graze within not unlush grass on their farmland, dust clouding the air and probably coating their tongues, insisting they imbibe extra minerals.

A freshness there is not, yet it beckons & tomorrow, coolth is forecast. In the ragged turbulence of this time, the strelitzia sheafs, long-bearded, with a crackling of ancient, grey leaves, slap and rustle in the boisterous air, shedding the stuff of human neurosis, human madness, unsapient, back to nakedness and, maybe, wonder.

23rd June

And we changed the route & it was sublime.

And the afternoon workshop was enriching.

24th June

Woman is a thought-adventurer.

26th June

A poem.

Not quite exactly

Rats' feet in the ceiling -
my only companions, at this hour,
when quiet is a philosopher's dream!

27th June 2024

I shall spend the rest of my days making sure that my writing sees the light of day, so to show its worth, its testament to love & life & art & a woman's self.

29th June

At long last. Fidelity to my soul: I am on the blue rocks again, a prodigal daughter.

Here is my place of work,

here is my desk: my lap; 

my seat, a granite boulder,

peppered with periwinkles, poking their miniature noses

into my flesh. I don't mind, the day is young,

laziness can come

after a little creative labour.

30th June

I am reconnoitring the route for the 20th of July, a very short beach walk. The water is very loud today and the pied kingfisher very close and energetic. Almost like a bat.

3rd July 2024

I have taken myself, or have been taken by the urge in my body, to the beach, a wash-up of stones on this less familiar side has stopped me in my stride & I am seated on a high-rock edifice, with a hearty, incoming tide rushing in semi-opaque greens over purples, greeting from below, purple-seaweed-brocaded rocks, and the foam is laughing over the stirred surfaces, and a hah-di-dah is laughing overhead. 

I am aware of anxiety in my heart, beneath my skin ...

I become still in a dimness of not knowing what I understand.

A man with a backpack walks by in boots over the stones, looks back & waves, I wave in turn.

Blessed am I to sit here, to try to catch the news that comes with these strong, fearless waves: that labour of the delivery, the labour of the water's cold, green, foamy truths, which have no opposite, just as life has no opposite. And B's homage, & my tears.

I know this, but only in the stillness.

Writing, writing, writing the anxiety down into these thin fibres of ink, serenity in the movement, natural, unstoppable, divine. Surrender. Surrender takes courage that ...

...

...

...

... that what?

What?

My womb. This wind. My partaking of the elements of which I am constituted. Wind from the west, from the north-west, harassing my bare neck, my shoulder.

Never stop.

Never stop.

Never shall the ocean,

never shall the wind,

never shall the rocks,

the light of fire,

nor the song from the womb,

stop, nor the blood-fed tissues, swollen

with longing for expression, sharing

their hour

with all

this.

An ecstasy, then, a letting go, surrender to the perfect patterns, the immeasurable and curvaceous geometry, the chemistry of sheer surprise, that is the gift of love.

Deeper & deeper the waters advance, higher & higher the splashings, empty now the cartridge of my pen.

6th July

The Hiku Hikes - A practice to evolve a healthier relationship with earth and language.

7th July

The book is coming along nicely.

At my desk. Which makes it possible to use a laptop, to type, to cut unwanted lines easily, to upload and to send stuff off into the human yonder.

The fragrant ground and I

If you want to live happily ever after - and whatever place or realm (on or off earth) you finally (or not so finally) end up in, presumably you do want that - it is a good idea to stop at times, turn around and take in the view presented by your life thus far.

I bet you it's an amazing landscape, which you may be glad not to have to traipse through again, but which you're justifiably really proud of having got through. I mean: look at those cliffs of conflict between yourself and others; curious wetlands, alternating with high-lying plateaux, of love, relationships and friendships; deserts and forests you survived of classes, courses, exams, jobs, all kinds of duties; rapids of ill-health; oceans of grief; lakes and waterfalls of indolence and fun; fruiting orchards of joy ...

If you keep looking, you'll be bragging before long about all your adventures and tests of endurance and how often you definitely had enough, but, somehow, here you still are. So claim your title: top topographer, flagbearer, first explorer! Which you are: since none of us have ANY competition when it comes to our own life paths. We're once-offs, forever.

Each month I create a new cover for my Facebook Page, Give Your Writing The Edge, whereby I aim to project a concern or feel for the weeks ahead. Often, I allow my choice to be intuitive, but this month, both the picture as well as the poetry were a leap into the unknown as never before. I chose two poems, separated by more than 35 years (which is currently 63% of my life) - poems, which speak mysteries to one another.

I authored it, and can recite it on the spot, but I have never understood the first poem, Dog. However, a dear old friend, who has always favoured it, reminded me of it recently. Not only did that inspire the second poem, but also a new curiosity: what on earth (on earth indeed) was the language doing with me? 

I aproach the poem like any reader, tip-toeing carefully towards possible meanings. 

The houndedness of the faceless, fallen rose connects it, of course, to the dog - who doesn't even dig, so opposed is it: it "nibbles (nibbles!) own spaces in the ground" where nothing is wanted. The scene is tragic, a picture of perfect disempowerment, an apparently necessary secreting away of natural is-ness. The treasured symbol of love is nothing but an old bone.

The second poem launches on that connection between the rose and the bone and it turns out that not only has the flower survived, but it has multiplied subterraneously over three and a half decades. 

"in the ground" becomes, in Dog 2, 'under the skin', deep inside the tissues: the identification of rose and bone has built a structure, which not only has an I, but an unopposed, fearless, fragrant (!) inner body that can speak and declare its old ("after all these years") aliveness.

Whence comes this sudden up out of the adult marrow?

Certainly the identification between the "ground" (where roses and bones are buried) and the "I" (where years and sorrow have been buried) is a powerful place to begin. And end.

Photo: Detail from a picture I took of my potted peace rose. 

Trees and the earth's lovelinesses

Today 10 years ago two South African poets - Norman Morrissey and myself, for those who know us - made a covenant under a tree - a copper beech, whom Norman had named Guinevere, for her splendid auburn foliage.

Today 7 years ago, we formally tied the knot before friends and family.

When Norman fell mortally ill in 2017, I went to Guinevere and asked her for help and comfort. I took down words, which I felt streamed to me from her, and entitled it Song of healing. I made a crude monotype print, painting the words as a mirror image to themselves (a requirement for hand-printing letters), and used a few of Guinevere's leaves in the design.

Today 3 years ago, I gave Norman the framed picture as a fourth anniversary gift.

He died on the 26th day after that.

I published the song in Greater Matter, my book of poems tracking my journey of grief as a widow.

Norman's love for Guinevere, and for trees in general, built a foundation for me sounder than anything I had enjoyed before.

Is it presumptuous to say that Guinevere's witness to our covenant ensured that my heart be rooted into a love that was greater than our mere selves? A love that helped make me far more whole than I had been before, a love that healed woes and wounds and curses?

I don't know.

But I do know that I continue to live in and by the laws of love. And that love has deep roots beyond my human flesh, it has roots feeling into all the earth's lovelinesses.

Philosophy in loins

Philosophy in loins

My letters, these days, step
at times not in terrain
I've been -

barefoot, plain
they point
almost away from poetry -

take a train of thought
beyond space-time,

capsuled into stillness

- like a liner on the horizon,
suspended on eternity's curve,
steadily joins the dots
plotting her journey
into wisdom's harbour:

where brown and blue eyes meet
by a philosophy in loins
of sky and earth
and all the forms of water -
wild, and sweetly bowered.

- Silke Heiss, October 2018