Holy expansion

Holy expansion

 

Twice five k's on the beach

from Butterfly Blu to Buffalo Bay

and back again -

no one but you,

a couple of oystercatchers,

one little heron,

mussels on rock,

and the mad tide with its foam.

This is the sea our mother and father

taught us: strip, and run into,

to be bathed and renewed,

always they sought the isolated places

for their essences of bliss.

An excellent religion,

this womb of truth,

the dispassionate aggression

of the waves, attacking one another, joying

in complete trust that they cannot be tamed,

nor hurt themselves.

We'd return from the holidays

humbled and imbued -

they were holy expansions,

preparing us to wash each upcoming, 

difficult day.

- Silke Heiss

 

 

Wild life is a tangible dream

Just before lockdown last year, my beloved and I moved from the mountain hamlet of Hogsback to a house on a coastal dune, where kikuyu grass had been planted without thriving.

Behind the house is farmland, where wilde els, afrikaners, arums, metalasia, vygies, felicias and dune daisies, christmas berry (chironia baccifera), bulbinella, buchu, salvia, podalyria, varieties of restios and other fynbos species make a life for themselves between invasive acacias and reeds (which the farmer clears occasionally). To our joy, we discovered that a healthy number of species of wild birds, tortoise, mongoose, porcupine, duiker, possibly even Cape grysbok, share this area.

Amid the wild sub-alpine grasses in Hogsback, I had grown accustomed to the close company of birds, bees, beetles, skinks and shongololos; it made sense to create similar meadow conditions now, once more inviting the small creatures near. Wild life keeps me sane.

To begin with, we let the wild grasses and bushes completely take over - you could say that we deliberately neglected the ground. Small felicias appeared in spring and clovers blossomed merrily. Then, between them, we planted an array of lavender bushes and butterfly-bush (gaura) from a nursery. We left all the weeds and scraggly grasses to continue to do their bit between the molerat hills, trusting that over time, a natural balance would even things out.  

Our neighbours on one side, who are only seldom in their house, employ a garden company, which regularly, noisily razes their sun-scorched 'lawn' further down to sand, no matter the white-flowering succulents that try, despite everything, to survive in the barren ground. Recently we noticed candelabra flowers (brunsvigia) popping speary red shoots out on their property. Luckily, the neighbours came for a visit just then and we could get their very glad permission to move these glamorous plants, before they be decapitated by the machine-minded company.

No sooner had the candelabra flowers been transplanted than three greater double-collared sunbirds - two females and a male - came to feast on the nectar. They were completely unafraid of our proximity, showing us that our dream is perfectly tangible.

Our dune stands out in the suburb by looking 'untidy', 'wild', 'neglected', even. Yet no: it is cared for and loved, for being at one with the dry season coming, now, to its natural end. Nor is the space unnecessarily howled upon by that terrible suburban neurosis, the leaf blower. 

We hope that our tiny farmland-type garden might, over time, set a trend. Reeling your dreams in, bringing them home to where you actually stand and walk, gives simple happiness a chance. 

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

Gratitude and your own, mad song

In what were probably some of the darkest times of my adult existence, I was obliged frequently to sojourn in the Eastern Cape frontier town, Grahamstown (privately and helpfully nicknamed Grimsberg during those years).

When in Grimsberg, I must do shopping.

I used to go to a little complex, called Peppergrove Mall. The front of the Pick 'n Pay there is roofed, and a part of the area is marked, by a railing, containing shopping trolleys. There used to be a slender, youngish man there, who wiped the handles of the trolleys for each customer, with sanitising wipes, which he nimbly reached over to pull out of a bucket with a hole in the top.

Not only did the man's helpfulness make the act of extracting a wipe, and sanitising my own trolley handle, unnecessary for me to do. He also wiped my grimy soul, by filling me each time with wonder.

For, on each occasion, without fail, when I fetched a trolley and greeted him, and asked him how he was, he would reply -

"I am alive! I am so grateful to God that I have today, and that is why I am happy!"

His fervour never waned, his line never changed.

When circumstances altered, and I no longer needed to frequent Grimsberg, I made a point of going especially to thank him for so liberally tossing his good cheer into my days. I am not sure that he recognised me, for I had not been coming to the town regularly anymore, and he looked, perhaps, a little nonplussed.

"You made a difference to my life," I told him, "it was a difficult time for me, and your thankfulness for being alive always meant so much."

I did not get the impression that my thanks made a difference to him. I don't think he needed it.

I never bothered to find out his name, or to make conversation with him - he did not exactly open himself up to conversation - and so, other feelings, which I could have had, such as pity for his station; or guilt and shame about the differences between us; or worry about his well-being - none of those feelings stood a chance with him.

Here was a king, as the German folk round sings it -

Froh zu sein bedarf es wenig                                        To be happy one needs very few things
und wer froh ist, ist ein Koenig.                                    and the one who is happy is a king.

One sees many memes, which highly recommend the trolley-handle-wiper's attitude of gratitude in practice. But you have to be wild to do it - wild enough to know your life can be snatched from you at any moment, wild enough to know that all you have is NOW; wild enough to be mad enough to sing your song as wholeheartedly and as wholesomely as you possibly can. And thus, the trolley-handle-wiper's song is humbling and no doubt an example for all to follow.

Hah, and there's the rub!
YOUR song is not the trolley-handle-wiper's song.
Your song is NOT the song of A.A. Milne or Piglet or Pooh Bear in the accompanying, famous illustration below.

Personally, I would have to exercise brute force on myself in order to do for somebody else what that lovely youngish man did for me. The sheer horror of having to tell myself (never mind somebody else) daily that I am happy to be alive is enough for instantaneous gloom to pour itself out within me and spread depression diligently through my system over the next five weeks. Why? Because I would be forcing myself to do something utterly monotonous to my spirit - the words would not spring up naturally out of my heart as they did out of his.

I surprise myself over and again by how fluid I am: how, not seldom, the cornucopia of disappointments and sorrows, which my life has generously granted, seem far too heavy for me to carry. Despite the fact that I am richly blessed with joys AND am grateful for them, I flop UNGRATEFULLY like wet clay back into default position, i.e. flat dust, which not even the wind can whip into a prettty storm, because this thing is way too waterlogged.

That is the moment when you become grateful for tears. Or just for honesty. Or for the teeth you're gritting all over again. And, at last, you really do resolve to make that appointment with the dentist. Tomorrow.

Photo acknowledgment: Saeed Al Jafar from Kuwait in the Masai Mara, Kenya. 'The end of a cheetah yawn'.