How dare I speak?

Raggèd rocks, weathered like the skin of my belovèd wrestling with himself,

rough and grooved and sharp with linear agonies borne over time

and no conclusion

Abiding like an outrage of completely opaque mirrors,

too shocked by the truth to reflect it, hiding

The rocks reveal the inner tissues of our bullet-riddled souls,

the marrow’s holes, where marrow sits now only as a polka of shadows,

cast by an aghast sun

How dare I speak for or against those who attack, those who defend,

when I don’t know the difference between those words, those actions?

When I’ve so much violence within myself?

Nor, if you kill me, will you rid yourself

or the world

of the virus

One way only can subdue it embrace it in yourself, bind it, befriend it,

show mercy to the beast that inhabits inhabits inhabits

wrestle befriend show your self unknown compassion

unknown compassion unknown

It takes practice more quiet

eventually it comes

Listen to no one,

cry

Thus I teach, reach

even myself

– Silke Heiss

All photos by the author. Graffitti on rock captured 18th October 2023

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 leopard is a person

We took ourselves to the Cederberg for the first time as parents ... it must have been 2003 ... our son was 5 years old at the time. The camps were in transition, the old Parks Board was giving way to the new SAN Parks, and it was possible, in that administrative gap, to snatch incredible opportunities of empty, unattended campsites, costing next to nothing to stay in.

There was one other occupied camping spot, besides ours, and the people there said they'd seen leopard tracks and scat, and that if we left early, for our hike planned the next morning, we might be so lucky as to spot a royal mother and her young one.  

Our son made sure we were up before dawn. He just about sprinted up, ahead of us on the extremely steep incline. Once on top, we lost the path. We traversed five mountains that day, ever on the lookout for a path we never found. Our son was finally asleep on his legs, walking with his eyes closed as I pushed him gently onward, and my poor then-husband sprained his ankle at the eleventh hour. Only with difficulty did we get back to the tent, and to the miracle of a woman with ice wraps, as it happened, unbelievably. She had been sent there to take the little money we owed.

This poem - written as an Italian sonnet - developed out of that day.

The leopard is a person

The leopard is a person who conceals

herself, but likes to loer to see where you

might keep yourself and what you do. She reveals

no pawprints, though occasionally a youngster's poo

provides a possible track for you to follow,

past rocks with eyes, in heat and fearful hollow:

where who knows what may lurk, and watch, and wait,

with centuries to spare, while you meet fate.

Sit down there, eat your lunch and breathe her home

of purple lava, rippled down in curves,

jump frog-sung ditches, turned to stone -

and feel the flitches of your human nerves.

The leopard is a person so alone.

Could be she is the one who made this poem.

- Silke Heiss, October 2006

loer = Afrikaans, integrated into South African English, meaning to spy on, to look secretively or furtively

According to Anne Keating, in Wild Voices Messages from the Soul of Africa, Leopard cautions you "to be alert to the signs and omens on your path [...] You feel the need to cut the extraneous out of your life and hone in on what is really important." 

There is further caution, which the energy of this shy, highly adaptive survivor of a creature brings:

"For you to win, no one must lose."

Leopard travels alone: 

"You will not compromise what you are learning merely to fit into the expectations of others." 

Photographs of the Cederberg, and of the Agama Atra, by Silke Heiss

Leopard photo by Uriel Soberanes

All that's left