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

 

* * *

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