HIKU HIKE interview 2nd June 2023

Silke: So just … let me know, please, how the experience was for you on this Hiku Hike?

Ed: It’s a lovely experience. What I found is that it makes you aware of the quietness, and that the quietness has, basically, words in it – and they will come to you if you’re prepared to go quiet and to listen. And then … then also to use those words, to write them down. Because normally it will just pass right over you and you lose it. But to write them down, to capture those thoughts, those words that came to you is something that you’ve got, tangible, to look back on. And then the editing of those words, to use those words to actually create a poem. A writing of the experience, of that – it’s beautiful, it’s opening up your mind to a whole new world.

Silke: And you said earlier that you usually go to the beach and you are looking –

Ed: Ja, you know I love collecting stones and shells and stuff, I’m always going down to the beach looking for stuff, you’re like quite busy looking for shells and looking: where’s the next shell? And that’s it. [Laughs] … come back and you’ve got nothing. You might have a few shells, physical things, ja, but now – going down to the beach I can now look for shells, and also I can – if I’ve got a notepad and pen with me – I can also capture words that are going to come to me, or sentences … and I can use those, so it gives you more. It gives you, like – you can go to the beach, for example, and you can collect shells, but you can also collect words and thoughts and images and, like I said, it opens up a whole new world.

Silke: And you can come back with things that didn’t exist before. Things that you created.

Ed: Ja, that’s true. So I can find things that are material on the beach, sure, driftwood and shells and stuff, but I can also create things out of the nothing. Ja.

Silke: And did the creative, you know, when you jotted your different impressions and then chose to work on particular lines and words – how did you find that choice in the editing process? You know, where you actually sift through your impressions and choose certain ones – can you say a bit more about how that was for you?

Ed: Well, I realised I’m having to create a poem, so then I sifted through what all I’d written and then I had to choose one, because there were actually many poems that I discovered that I could use and write on – different poems, but I had to actually, like, wow, okay, I have to actually choose one here in this Hiku Hike that you wanted me to write down, I had to actually choose one of them, which I did, but I realised it also takes a bit of time – you know, I’ve got to spend more time on it. I can improve my poem that I’ve already written down, but there are also other poems there that I can work on if I choose to and that’s great. I think it gives you so much more, it takes away that noise in your head, it makes you go to the quiet, you know, use the quiet.

Silke: And take what comes to you seriously, rather than dismissing it because you’ve got other things to do.

Ed: Ja, it’s a great experience and I think everybody will benefit by doing something like this, it’s like I said: it opens up a whole new world.

Silke: Did it help you in any way specifically with your writing? Because you said to me you don’t write, people don’t write.

Ed: Yes, it has helped, because you tell me to write something – it is a bit foreboding, like, gee, what am I going to write about? But just to jot down little simple thoughts, that’s easy, anybody can do it –

Silke: Yes.

Ed: And it’s great and I actually need to carry a pen and a notebook with me, and just keep on doing that and capture those thoughts, because I realised they’re coming out of the world, they’re coming from God or they’re coming from wherever –

Silke: To you.

Ed: Ja. It’s important. Whereas before you don’t realise it – you’re just missing them, you’re missing out!

Silke: Missing your own thoughts.

Ed: Ja. [Laughs] It’s crazy hey!

Silke: [Laughs]

Ed: It sounds crazy, but ja, if you do the Hiku Hike … everybody should do it, then they’ll know what I’m talking about! [Laughs] Ja, this Hiku Hike I found it kind of gives you the tools, but there are no tools, it’s no physical tool, but it gives you the tools to plug in to more of life.

Silke: Mental tools.

Ed: Mental tools. It gives you those tools, exactly.

Silke: Language tools.

Ed: Like I say it’s crazy when you think about it. If I look in the future at what I’ve written down I’m going to think wow! where did these words come from? But they do, they come to you and it’s an amazing revelation to … to know that things will come to you and you will be directed.

Silke: If you put yourself deliberately into a relationship with your surroundings.

Ed: Ja. And you can do it all the time, with everything, wherever you go . It’s like trusting your intuition and just looking for the signs. And it’ll help you. They’re there.

Silke: And they’re the ones for you. You know, different people on the same walk will obviously be receptive to completely different things, depending on where they are at in themselves, in their lives. And that’s what’s so beautiful is that each one is given what they need.

Ed: Mm. And I think this Hiku Hike actually helps a person to plug into that world, to plug into that reality that’s there, but because of our busy minds we’re not aware of it. But it’s there.    

/END

Thank you, Ed Low, for trying out a Hiku Hike, so we could have this chat :-)

Rocks on Sunrise-on-Sea beach, Amathole Coastal Resorts 

 

No sense of farewell - reflections on the the launch of Sweet Nothings

The manager called to ask, "How many chairs shall we put out, and how would you like them placed?"
The waiter said, "We have created and printed a special menu for you."
Later I saw that he had pinned one onto a board and framed it in his own hand with coki hearts and curlicues.
Guests arrived, including some who had travelled far that day, and the reading began. The rain that had threatened to fall, restrained itself. No thunder disturbed the quiet event.
The gardener, whom I had invited, came on foot.
"I want to walk," he had said, when we'd passed by car and offered him a lift.
He sat all by himself: solitary and composed. When he had finished his meal, he rose and came over to thank me, before leaving.
The others ate and talked together. The owner of the establishment bought one book for himself and one to donate to the library. He asked me to inscribe it: To the people of Hogsback.

Back home, a poem appeared:

After the launch

We sit in the courtyard,

wind hisses through 

the oak trees' leaves,

our voices lift and  fall,

soft and full,

mingling for an evening

well-spent.

I also received a few kind messages, from dear friends, after the event:

"Beautiful evening ...
You sat in your chair like a queen:
Reigning over words
So serene."

"A lovely evening well-spent indeed. Thank you for the gift of the evening, and for the gift of your poetry."

"It was indeed an evening well spent! You managed the evening with style and warmth that we all could take into our beings forever with no sense of farewell."

Indeed. My heart carries all this wherever I go.

The roll-back

Four launch/ reading events -
1. Hogsback (The Edge Mountain Retreat), 12/10/19;
2. Grahamstown (Reddits, Cafe D'Vine), 25/10/19;
3. Cape Town: Tokai (The Book Shoppe), 4/11/19;
4. Cape Town: Claremont (Exclusive Books, Cavendish), 5/11/19

Now, at my laptop at my parents' dining room table, I sit opposite my mother, quietly reading in her wheelchair. Her entire left side is paralysed and her body has as good as no independence anymore. She holds her lapidary brochure in her right hand. Flash photos of cut and labelled gems, displayed on royal red backgrounds, gaze at me.

My parents' presence at the Cape launch of Greater Matter at Exclusive Books, Cavendish, Claremont, on Tuesday was one of the most precious gifts to me personally.
"If I could, I would have got up and embraced you," my mother said.

Having had to have been so publicly present, both online and off, for the sake of marketing and selling my book, has felt unnatural, even stressful.

Don't get me wrong. I love reading aloud to people, I love intimate public events, which poetry readings mostly are. I love the microphone, which allows for whisper-soft words to slink into listener's hearts. And I love the fact that readers have bought Greater Matter and are being nourished by it.

But the tide is rolling back now.

I look forward to being in the arms of my beloved. I look forward to composing poems again, applauded by the stars and grasses. Perhaps more people will come towards me, who have felt themselves privately heard, or who are questing for more of the chime they sense hums in my book. 

There'll be further books, further readings, to build and nurture the "good/ By quiet natures understood" (W.B.Yeats, Prayer for my Daughter).

I thank Exclusive Books, Cavendish, and Eva van Belle for the photographs from Tuesday's launch.

Blunder, a lovely paradox, and 'A Wife's Entreaty'

My apologies to all who may have been inconvenienced by last night's post - 'Caution: Poet at Play' - which I had to delete after discovering that I had no authority to use the accompanying picture.

The picture is the front cover of a book created privately 33-odd years back, and the reason I wished to share it was really to show how longstanding my writerly 'career' has been going on, on the quiet, really ... I would not know how to write if it weren't happening on the quiet.

For me, poetry and love have always gone together - both by definition occupy a quiet, private, special space.

The love books, which Norman and I produced, questioned that definition, you could say, in that the private poems shared in public began to function as reminders to others of their own quiet, loving spaces, as well as the fierce relationship-work, that is necessary, to achieve harmony. You could say that our sharing of our private, intimate experiences worked to spread the possibility of private, intimate experiences between others. A lovely paradox if ever there was.

So today I'll share an old love poem, written to my ex-husband, when I was still trying to salvage our marriage. I addressed him as the poet I/ we believed he was, asking, as so many women do, for open communication. It was not to be. Today I can say I am glad that I/we tried and also glad that I/ we failed. He is far happier not to be a poet.

The poem was published in Love Gyres, my first love poem reading with Norman, in February 2011, in Noordhoek, Cape Town.  

A Wife's Entreaty

I have to find you                                                         

again.                                                                          

Where we are together

is such a quiet place.                                                    

                                                                                   

I mistrust you                                                               

in the world,                                                                

which I mistrust.                                                           

I fear your defeat,

and my loneliness.                                                        

                                                                                   

Good cheer is a chore.                                                 

I miss my joy                                                               

in hiding, a quiet place.                                     

Secluded with you,                                                      

undiscovered,                                                              

both of us.                                                                   

                                                                                   

I am not sure

that facing life                                                               

means being visible.                                                     

If so, I need you

to lift my face for me,                                                   

to put the garlands

in my hair,

so that people can say,

‘She’s there.’

We do nothing

for ourselves.

We scoop the water of our knowledge

from our hearts

and baptise thus

each day.

Let us not be silent

with one another.

Let us protest, entwine,

and say:

‘The quiet place

is full of murmuring. Let us echo

its delicate decrees.’

Look: my lip, my ear.

Clay worked to completion.

Please seek to place

your lip against my ear,

to speak. Your ear

against my mouth,

to hear.

In the din

of this frightening world

it is those intimacies I desire.

You may still steel me

with a verbal smithy’s fire.

You know I have words, signs,

writing in my blood:

captains of so many

red and white boats.

Therefore I do require constant flood

of murmured love.

- From Love Gyres, Simonstown, 2011 

So quiet, but not

You've been so quiet, said one of my readers.

But quiet has gone. A lone, lanky, lovely visitor dropped in on me
entirely unexpectedly. How now to find
my silence, whence the new things come?

It is an opportunity to strengthen, to refine me, to define
the boundaries of my crankiness, the rudeness of
my solitude.

And then a friend
whose face lends me
its poem.

Bow-line

You've a bow-line arcing

up from your eye 

into your brow -

as if you've always held a quantum of your thoughts aside

- in case you'd one day need them 

for a dancing star.

- Silke Heiss, 8th July 2018