I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent wondering what my calling is, what my purpose in life is, how I could work and make money and be happy. I find I even though I do work and make money (in many different fields), it’s mostly unlikely that happiness has been a given. There have been some notable jobs where I have been very happy, working in a children’s home and working in a backpackers’ lodge are the two that really stand out for me. The other was working in the quirkiest antiquarian bookshop ever, which was just a joy. I have a poem about that, I will find it and share it with you. One day when I was having the what can I possibly do that is not what I am doing now conversation with myself again, this is the poem that arrived to console me. It is a repeat theme, I know I’ve written about the joy of my orange tree here before.
Job description
Perhaps this is my work, to sit on a tree stump in the winter sun, eating an orange grown in this garden, while a kingfisher perches above me, calling his mate.
Another poem about walking , this time alone. You probably know the koan that goes along the lines of ‘if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?’ Well, I don’t have the answer to that, but I believe that as a poet, and as a person who loves nature, one of my tasks, a purpose if you like, is to bear witness the world around me. Whether or not I share what I see is not important, but recognizing the beingness of my surroundings, and honouring it in whatever way feels right at the time feels like something that’s worth doing. I have just realised that makes me an animist, if I wanted to give myself a label that would probably be a good one to carry with me. So here is a poem about being in and of the natural world around me.
who hears?
Walking through the pines I make no sound, needles soft underfoot. I hear the flight of the wood pigeon, the cry of the brown kite, I hear the groan of trunk leaning against trunk, the tap tap tap of the olive woodpecker.
Walking through the pines I am – walking through the pines I am the one who hears the tree fall, the one who hears the stones roll from the path, I am the ear of the world, I am a small witness, for a moment, walking through the pines.
I have two favourite ways of resolving problems. If the problem is technology or anything related to computers, I stop, make a cup of tea, walk out into the garden, sit on the step in the sun, do something that takes me away from the struggle for a while. It works most times. If the problem is in my head, I take the struggle with me, out onto a path. When I lived in the city I would roam the streets of my neighbourhood, late at night, alone. Now that I can walk in nature, I walk in the hills that surround me. Sometimes with a friend, sometimes alone. No matter how I feel when I begin, by the end I have found a place that is calmer, and easier. It doesn’t always stay that way, but it’s always a good way to start to feeling better about whatever might be troubling me. I rarely meet anyone else where I walk, and often my walks become a poem or else a song of some sort, which in itself brings healing and cleans out the lurking gremlins. This poem is about walking with my best friends – one of them is in the photo.
To begin again, again
In walking we find solutions, together but not not face to face, moving across the land supported by path, stone and wood, heard by all that is more than human, our footsteps received like bells tolling hours, words like dust in the wind, sweat falling rootwards, we circle out and back somehow finding answers even if only in the emptying out of questions, setting fire to them in the sun that sinks as we walk into the dusk darkness falling.
It’s been a somewhat crazy few weeks, work-wise, but in-between the madness there is a poem that I have been wanting to find. I finally realised that it must have been one of the lost generation, gone with my laptop’s hard drive into nowhere land. I also have a notebook full of beginning poems, that I take and cut and shape into poems until I am then ready to share them. Since I couldn’t find this one anywhere else, I have rewritten it from my notes, and made it into two poems. As I prepare to post this, I saw that the first time I wrote it was two years ago. The mystery of how our being remembers significant events is always so fascinating to me – the poem has been lurking, asking for attention, and sure enough, it’s the anniversary of its writing. This is part of the story of a man I once loved, and divorced, the one whose childhood was haunted by his mother’s traumas, by his grandfather’s addictions and by who knows how many generations of unresolved pain.
Cards for a dead man (June 2024)
The mystery is not so much the pain, your heart transfixed, but how the pain became your shackles.
In your last attempt to claim your life, you moved to a small town where no one knew you, no one waited for you to come home late at night, from the pub. Only the bottle store counted on your custom.
After days of silence, the police found you sitting in your chair, empty bottle at your side. They took your wallet, your computer, perhaps more, left your body in a house with a broken door.
Who paid the boatman to carry you across the river? Who placed the coins upon your eyes? Whose voice did you hear as you sat there, did you find peace?
I used to live in one of those big old buildings close to the sea, which must have been a mining magnate’s holiday home, but over the years it had been subdivided over and over, as families became smaller, or perhaps as a way of extracting more money per square foot, whichever way, the magnate and his large family were long gone, and the building belonged to someone who didn’t care much about anything except getting his rent. The subdivisions created interesting issues, which almost became a poem of their own – The deaf electrician crossed the wires, so the baker downstairs paid to light my kitchen and I unblocked his drain when it overflowed into my courtyard. At the top of the stairs that were added during one of the subdivisions was a piano player who had an unusual view of the world around him. This was long before the days when conspiracy theories were something that were bandied about in common conversation, or even considered to be a legitimate way of operating in the world. These days I would probably think he was a lot more normal that I did back then. Times change in interesting ways.
The piano player’s world view
The world speaks to the piano player who lives upstairs, he sees portents and omens. He says: “The rasta’s stick lies broken in the gutter his stool is overturned on the pavement, this tells us the rasta is powerless.”
Words are scribbled on the dusty window – “this way up”, but the arrow points down. He says: ” This is a secret message that says I am not wanted here any more.”
The piano player says: “The car guards sell drugs the overlords direct them, hidden behind designer sunglasses. They meet at the baker’s flat and talk in foreign languages.”
The piano player sees it all, unravels the tales that tangle the streets, interprets the secret codes, finds the hidden truth.
If you listen he’ll tell you how it works, show you fear marked on the map, teach you to read the signs that lead you down the path to sleepless nights spent weaving conspiracies in the dark.
Today as I sit in the window I hear the song of chainsaws all around me. There was a windstorm on Sunday night, which continued through to Monday. Winds reached speeds of 99km an hour, which is a Force 10 gale on the Beaufort scale. In real life that means that trees are uprooted or torn apart, roofs fly off, and sometimes houses are destroyed. Electrical and above ground cables can also be damaged and fly off their poles. Along with the wind we had relentless rain, which kept clearing and falling, clearing and falling, so bridges were flooded too.
The oak tree in front of our house tore itself in half, some branches landing on the roof, some in the front garden and some in the back, but we were among the lucky ones – our home and our doors and windows stayed intact. One hundred and twenty four families lost their homes – blown away in the storm, and many of their possessions vanished too. Some of them are staying with relatives, but some are in the community hall, and now that the sun is shining again the task of rebuilding will begin.
No one has counted the cost to the oak trees. They lined our main road and some of the older streets in the village. Most have them have fallen, either completely, roots ripped from the ground, or else they have shed branches and are barely trees any longer. They’ve shaded the villagers for more than two hundred years, and overnight they’ve been destroyed. The cows are eating oak leaves off the fallen branches, but next year there will be no acorns for the pigs or the horses. This year there was a place just down the road from me where flocks of doves gathered in the shade, on the tarmac – I didn’t understand why, until I saw that passing cars were crushing the acorns and feeding the doves.
We still have no electricity, so anything in a freezer is now indedible, our local shops will have lost so much stock. To charge this laptop and our modem we drove to the next town, but it took almost four days for an internet (cell phone only signal) to be restored, by which time we had all run out of battery power.
In closing – all is well – and we had the privilege of enforced time out from the demands of the world, which felt very strange, but very real. Reading by candlelight. Having conversations in the street. Getting our news from people we know instead of algorithms. That was good.
Catastrophe! How very sad, Karin. At least you tell us that you and your own home are undamaged. But, what a catastrophe for the village and for wildlife!
It amazes me how resilient and resourceful both people and animals can be – the sunbirds were singing a happy song this morning, a calf was sunbathing in the field across the way. In the village people are collecting building materials and sharing what they can, although it’s not exactly straightforward, ever, these kinds of events bring out the best in those who have and who can share what they have, and people work together to rebuild, patch and repair what can be repaired. There was a thanksgiving gathering in the village square on Sunday. There have also been fights and theft, what can you do except say – humans, humaning, as my friend here comments. Humans being humans, in all their ups and downs.
I married a man whose mother was a Jehovah’s witness. We are long divorced, and he died in his chair a couple of years ago, with an empty bottle of vodka at his side. That is the brutal truth of it, there isn’t an easy way to say it, really. His childhood was hard – his mother (and her father before that) was a drinker – I don’t think she was alcoholic, but my radar wasn’t yet tuned in to that particular way of being. One of the things she believed was that there was a limited number of places in heaven and that they were probably already all allocated to the faithful who had come before her. To be clear, I don’t know exactly how it works but it does seem to me that there wasn’t much hope of ascending to Paradise in her world, and I imagined that made her even more bitter about life. Whatever it was, she thoroughly disapproved of me, although she hid it well, only letting the truth out after I left her alcoholic and delusional son.
No place in heaven.
She beat her son as her father beat her in drunken rage, in love, in fear, to save his soul.
He turned 16, refused to go to church. She made a bonfire of his clothes chased him with a spade, forgave him, fought with him, cooked him lunch on Sundays.
She disapproved of his marriage, silently. Rejoiced in his divorce, told him so. He never spoke to her again.
She died in her car, in the garage, seduced by the idling engine, into a slow blue sleep. There were no places left in heaven, no love left on earth.
Oh, this is a profoundly sad and moving recollection and poem, Karin. And I’ll add that I admire the restraint and clarity in the poetry. Hope all goes well for you at present. J
There are wonderful moments that happen when children are old enough to want to know about what your childhood was like, and not yet old enough to be critical or to prefer their stories in a digital format. It’s my very sincere hope that many children will still grow up wanting to hear about real life and engaged with the world rather than passively consuming content. My (step) grandson was passionately curious about the natural world, and by extension, about my childhood. He had an insatiable appetite for animal stories, which helped me to sharpen my gaze when I was out walking, because I always knew that he would want some kind of story from me. It certainly made life feel exciting, revisiting my wild childhood and then also finding new stories to tell him as I went about my day. But of course children also love retelling stories, and maybe adding to them too, there’s the comfort of familiar excitement in a way. So here he is, my childhood in his words.
Bedtime story
Tell me a story he said, a story about animals, about when you were small and there were snakes in the garden, the bush was just there the dusty yellow shaggy veld where ant-bears lived and scorpions and things and the snake you skinned and fried in butter or the worms that you stewed and the ants that you boiled, did you eat them, did you really?
I won’t tell my dad, I promise just tell me a story about when you were small and the paths led you away into the trees where the cicadas sing and the rain came in summer with thunder and lightning or sometimes flames in a crackling wall so you had to be fire-fighters with wet sacks and all.
Oh tell me the one about the grey dormouse who lived in the cupboard, or the soft black bat who slept in your shoes and the snake that went to school, about the boy with crutches who could walk on his hands you know, the one who caught the python that swallowed a rabbit and was too fat to escape oh, please tell me that one, tell it to me again.
Much like houses, cupboards, cars and life, flower beds need to be tidied and cleaned up. I always wait for plants to absolutely finish flowering and then I wait for the birds to eat all the seeds and then I finally do some cleaning up. Last year I had wonderful primroses. I know they go underground for summer, and I always forget to make space for them come autumn. This year I had a moment where I thought – let me see if I can find them, and there they were. I’m just missing one, but I hope it will still pop up.
Today
Under the clover’s matted and tangled stems three primroses have survived. Each one now sees the sun, and will flower when winter comes.
As children we fished every Christmas holiday, and kept a record of our catches in a special fishing notebook. Our fathers were the teachers. Looking back now I suppose it was a moment of pure peace for our mothers, the one time when we all left the house. There were conditions that came with catching your own fish, namely, you had to collect your own bait, put it on the hook yourself, take the fish off, gut and scale it yourself. A lesson in self-sufficiency, which I embraced eagerly. I think my mother, the biology teacher, also took the opportunity to point out internal fish anatomy at the same time. I can remember learning that the shape of a fish’s body affected the way their organs were accommodated. Last thing, we were usually expected to cook the fish for everyone too, or at least for ourselves, plus a taster for anyone who felt they wanted one. Fishing, and catching a fish, was one of the highlights of our holiday.
Fishing again, thirty years later
I remember my father’s thumb, holding the fishing line against the rod, ready to cast. I stop fumbling, cast from that memory, sinker arcing out over the waves splashing down just as it should. The sky is sunset red, there is a rainbow in the east and rain on the horizon.
One of the lessons we had drummed into us as children is that the sea is dangerous. There was a list of what we mustn’t do. The most important of these were “never go out of your depth” and “when you are on the rocks exploring, never turn your back on the waves.” Every one of us had some frightening thing happen to us, but it was never serious. I remember floating in my tube away from the shore, blissful until the moment my toes no longer touched the sand. My beloved uncle came to the rescue, the water probably didn’t even reach his armpits, but I have never forgotten how he waded in to get me. The other warning was that full moon spring tide is always a dangerous time – the waves enormous, the backwash powerful and the current strong. I dream of those waves, engulfing the beach and climbing up the sand dunes to grab me. Here is a poem about that beach and that tide.
Swimming at spring tide
I remember the days of shells strung into necklaces, dolly varden sea urchin periwinkle, they lost their shimmer away from the water but still tasted of the ocean still spoke waves into our ears the sand the salt the waves that took us in and threw us out again, the waves that brought that body back to shore.
I know I’m not the only one who grapples with this strange disconnect that virtual lives bring to us. The idea of our lives being for public consumption and therefore having to be immaculate, or carefully imperfect, and for show, not actually lived in companionship of any kind, feels like an overriding ethos to me. I feel the lack of real connection, connection that comes through working side by side, whether that be cooking or gardening, or heavens, these days it’s not even a given that we work in the same building, or ever see each other in person even if we do work for the same organization. As an introvert I find it hard enough to navigate face to face interactions, where at least I am in real time and can read the other person’s reactions as they happen. Put me in a whatsapp group and I find myself wanting to react to unkindnesses or mistakes, to draw attention to them. It doesn’t work, more often than not. People who are unkind on groups love any kind of kickback and take it as fuel to their fire. But that’s not what this is about. This is just about the loneliness of long distance relationships, that are only long distance because life seems to have become more and more about isolation, busyness and exhaustion, and less about having time to be with others.
Offline again
I’ve been missing you, our conversations. My messages, one-sided, paper in a bottle, letters on a screen, set afloat.
Not looking for rescue but for connection. Replies arrive, unpredictably. I imagine you somewhere other than here, sometimes a friend, almost a stranger.
As a child I saw my parents’ world as deeply mysterious, but one thing I was fascinated by, and convinced of, was that my father was courting my mother. I remember asking them, after seeing them holding hands in the garden, “are you courting?” Obviously that strange concept was something I had read and needed to make sense of. At least it was reasonably age appropriate at the time, and didn’t talk about the messy parts of being in love and married and having children, otherwise I might have earned a talking to and some censorship of my voracious reading. All through my life I’ve read enormously, and as as a child I used to help myself to my father’s books. I secretly read Rags of Glory, which was definitely not appropriate for someone of my age. I knew enough to say that I thought the parts about war were the most interesting when my mother cross questioned me about it. Goodness me, I was already finding out how to protect my parents from myself, even at the age of twelve. Anyway, this is about how parents protect themselves, I guess, and about how my parents will always be unknown to me, now that I can no longer ask them these things. And would never have dared to, most likely.
Questions for my mother
What I want to know is how huge was your love in the days when there was still freedom when the world bared her heart and you only knew choice?
What I want to know is did you regret or did you shape yourself to fit his hands did you abandon your dreams at the feet of your children did you find your way in the end?
This poem touches me Karin as I had three aunts who ‘abandoned their dreams at the feet of their children’ and I felt sad about it for a long time, but also knowing that their choice was almost not a choice – life was so different then…..
Life was very different then, with very little choice in the matter! Now that I have shared this I realise it’s a question that you can’t ask a mother, because it would mean that she would have to abandon her identity – or at least that’s what I feel in retrospect. Also, motherhood can quite easily become a weapon wielded at childless women. It’s all very complicated, really, and we are all mothers of one sort or another.
So one of the reasons I stopped posting for a bit was a kind of strange end of year inertia, followed by a pre-birthday shut down. Does anyone else have an odd kind of hiatus around their birthday? Our bodies remember the anniversaries of all kinds of events, and birth must be a pretty shocking one, ejected into the world after nine months of having some protection from that worldly assault on your senses. The other reason for me halting in my tracks is that my laptop keyboard stopped working – not entirely, but enough that it’s no longer portable, unless I want to carry an external keyboard. So no more mornings in coffee shops quietly doing my thing, away from the distractions of home. Replacing it is entirely out of the question right now, unless a hundred or more generous souls sponsor me a coffee (just saying, the link is on the left 😉 In the meantime, today’s poem….
Green tea, blue cup, grey sky
I listen for the sounds I cannot hear the footfall of a caterpillar on the rose stem the beating wings of gnats the voice of silver wormwood the thirsty roots of banana palms, the singing of the rain spider, as she weaves a nest for her children.
Getting older, for me, brings questions about how to say yes to life, since there is less left than I have lived already. How do I live with what is here, how do I make the most of those moments? One of the gifts of being almost but not quite retired, living on an odd schedule of flexible work that can make demands at inopportune times (I’m trying to be polite here), but to get back to the beginning of my sentence, the gift is that time opens its doors, if you allow that, and that wonderful moments can slip through those open doors, if you stop grasping at that idea that there is not enough – not enough time, not enough space, not enough.
It’s good to be back, I hope to stay for a while.
Do not do those things
Don’t set the alarm to wake you in the dark, leave the curtains open instead let the sun’s light open your eyes.
Don’t say time is running out. Don’t say I’m frozen by the ticking clock, counting the grains of sand in the hourglass.
Say I choose to sit here, in the sun, on this blue bench against the wall, watching the light change, waiting for the shadow to cover me.
Don’t say I am alone, say today I will visit a friend and talk of nothing more than the shape of the winter wind, and tonight I will watch the flames in the fireplace, and eat soup with dumplings.
Two eights in a row. Things you should know: Tassenberg is a cheap red wine, much beloved of those who like cheap red and cheap wine. A French friend did tell me that the French would consider it to be an acceptable table wine, so I used to tell myself that it wasn’t such a bad thing to drink. I also once threw an empty bottle of Tassenberg against the wall in the small courtyard of the house I was living in at the time. I was pretty angry at the time. The bottle bounced off the wall and landed back at my feet, miraculously whole, with only the metal screw top slightly dented. My anger dissolved into laughter, but it’s not something I’d recommend that anyone else try.
We moved here just over eight years ago, coming from the city to the country and landing rather wide-eyed and quite uncertain, although we had a good friend living here who helped to soften the pains of adjusting to a completely new life. Coming from the city there’s a level of alertness to potential threats, the constant question of is it safe? I think even if it’s not a conscious question, it’s the substrate of city life, that need to scan for danger, even if nothing bad has ever happened to you, you will know someone who has had bad experiences. So out here too, the questions are those like – can I walk here, can I walk alone, is it safe, why are there no burglar bars, why are there no tall fences???? It’s true that petty crime exists here, but really in an opportunistic way, not more. Two of my friends have lost phones out on walks and have had them returned. If you leave your car lights on at night (old car, no warning beepers 😉 ) or if the tap in the garden is running for no reason someone will knock on your door and let you know. It’s good to feel there’s a community who are keeping an eye out for each other. This poem is about something that happened not long after we arrived, which left a lingering sense of wonder, a feeling like a gentle blessing.
October 2017
The sun rises early. The air is clean, still, cool. The streets are silent.
A cock crows. I hear the sound of a guitar, a voice raised in song, “Oh what a view Lord, what a view, what a view, Lord, what a view…”
The singer walks on. I rise, open the curtains, look at the mountain. Sun-streaked, verdant, it watches over me.
I’ve spoken about Byron Katie before, somewhere. She says that the source of our unhappiness comes from arguing with reality, or rather, arguing with what is. I think the Buddha said something along those lines, although his angle was that suffering is caused by desire, and that desire is usually for something that we don’t have, but think would make our life perfect if we did have it. It’s a tricksy thing, living life in the age of consumerism. Everywhere we are surrounded by influences that are designed to create desire for something we don’t have. My desire for a bigger faster car is something I manage to rein in without too much trouble, but my desire for a new ring, some earrings too, and for a coat embroidered with flowers and mirrors, is something that’s almost but not quite attainable, so I’ll always feel that yearning, which means that my life isn’t quite the way I’d like to picture it. You know what I mean. So when a moment like this one arises, it’s worth writing about.
Nothing to argue about
Today my view is peach blossom plum blossom apricot blossom. My fingers are sticky with just picked orange, my mouth still sweet. The clover blooms for the bees, my dog is at my feet, there are weeds, there are beans, rain would be good, but all I can say is Thank you.
It’s been so dry that I’ve been asking myself what will become of our vegetable garden, of our fruit trees. The first year we lived here we watered by hand from the rain tank, and it was hard work, but worth it. Now we have agricultural water, which comes from a dam on the mountainside. As long as there is water in the river, and as long as the pump that sends the water up into the dam works, we should have water. However as the hot days of summer come the demand for water rises, the fields of sweet potatoes and beans need watering, the cattle need grazing, and water becomes precious – it barely flows from the tap, or doesn’t flow at all. Those are the nights that I water the garden under the light of the moon, when everyone else is asleep. It’s a beautiful time to be out, the rustle of small creatures in the lemongrass, the sudden hopping of toads from under my bare feet. That’s when I hear the mice, and see the silent flight of the owl as it hunts. The stars are present above me, and some nights I’ll see them falling to the earth.
Surcease
When it seems that nothing will survive but dust the rain comes under the cover of night. We wake to clouds on the Middelberg, the song of water falling. Then we rest.
I wonder what it would have been like to live back in the days when holy people wandered the land, and all who met them fed them and housed them and thanked them for their life. There were times when this happened. There were times when people who wandered and saw visions and communicated with other-worldly beings were seen as dangerous too. (That’s today I’m speaking about, as well as then…). In India there are, and were women who awoke and became holy vessels for a deity and lived as the holy men did. Mirabai was one of those – born a princess, she became a wanderer, devotee of Krishna. I don’t know that many Western women were afforded that freedom, although they have been allowed to be holy and secluded, often confined to a cell for most of their lives, by their own request, as Julian of Norwich was. Joan of Arc is a notable exception, but her life was pretty short. There are so many freedoms we take for granted, yet there are still so many who are in chains.
The wanderer
Love hides in the flowers of the syringa tree surprising me with its perfume each year.
I share a meal with strangers, forget to be afraid. We walk together barefoot in God’s garden, where fat-bellied secrets sprout from the seeds of lost words.
Red dust roads ache in the sunlight this journey is not yet over.
Sometimes i love 
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