Freedom

“Good luck to the farmer!  Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous!  I can love him, I can revere him.  I can envy him.  But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life.  I wanted to be something that I was not.  I even wanted to be a poet and a middle-class person at the same time.  I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home.  It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both, that I am a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps.  A long time I castigated myself before gods and laws which were only idols for me.  That was what I did wrong, my anguish, my complicity in the world’s pain.  I increased the world’s guilt and anguish, by doing violence to myself, by not daring to walk toward my own salvation.  The way to salvation leads neither to the left nor the right:  it leads into your own heart, and there alone is God, and there alone is peace.”   -    an extract from “Wandering” by Herman Hesse

                                  

Tom Waits reads Charles Bukowski

The crazy one.

I worked at a bar in Observatory, Cape Town many years ago. It was a meeting place for locals and travellers who called themselves writers, sculptors, painters and philosophers. They drank and smoked together for so many years that they became completely entangled in each others lives and I was happy to call myself one of those people. Some nights that place would go crazy, people got naked and danced on the tables and we would only switch off the lights after the sun came up. There was the resident homeless man who obsessively built sculptures out of trash. The alcoholics, the deranged. Some overdosed, some committed suicide, some have continued on their paths of life with joy and pain. We all grew up in that place.



One of our regulars was a real card. Grant was always standing up in the middle of our evening rush and reciting his poetry out of the blue. He organised slide shows in the café of his trips abroad, usually ending with a recitation or an improvised skit, or music; whenever inspiration hit him he’d indulge it. We shook our heads behind the bar counter as we poured more drinks and people got up and walked out en mass. At some point while I was still working there he disappeared and I forgot about him as I did with many of the other faces that peered at me over glasses in the dimmed smoky light of Café Ganesh.


My accommodation in Barrydale is on the property an old accomplice from there, a light-hearted Blacksmith as big as a bear that used to spend a lot of quality time sitting on the seats of that bar. He moved here a couple of years ago and offered for me to stay in the tower above his gallery for a month or two. At ten o clock last night I got home to find the Blacksmith downstairs cooking up something frightful and slugging back brandy-and-cokes with his old pal Grant who was passing through with his wife and child, and had stopped by for tea. Their tea had turned into drinks, which in turn had become dinner. The Blacksmith was The Orchestrator, throwing on old LP’s and humming to Neil Diamond, Oscar Peterson and U2. Grant’s daughter, a girl of perhaps seven or eight with short, dark hair and the same intense glare as her father walked around aimlessly. Her mother, a mathematician, wafted in and out of the room covered in a shawl, smiling blissfully as I passed her by.


“Well, hi there!” a voice boomed as I walked in. Discordant electric guitar cords had started competing with the Blacksmith’s LP’s. The place was mayhem. Grant descended on me wearing a large blue kaftan that hung loosely over his tummy and hips. His hairline had receded some since the last time I saw him, and what remained had grown down to his shoulders where it hung in oily curls. He shook my hand as if for the first time. If he smiled anymore it would drop off his face.


“Hi Grant,” I said and introduced myself.


“Ah yes, I remember you I think!” he said, as if hit in the face by an old light bulb that was flickering on and off rapidly. “How lovely to see you again. Café Ganesh…. That’s like a different life now! I left Cape Town nine years ago. I just realised that the people there would never be able to think any bigger, you know? Perhaps it’s because they’re stuck between the mountain and the sea!” he laughed and the kaftan jumped around his stomach. “I went travelling after that, nowhere and everywhere for a couple of years, until I found my enlightenment, and then I came back.” I blinked twice. Did he just say he’d found his enlightenment?? “Now I’m based in Grahamstown… Hey, have you met my daughter?” He pointed to her. “I think I lost my desire to be an artist after we had her. I mean, isn’t she perfection?? What an amazing creation! Isn’t life amazing?! We’re starting a band, the two of us. Have you heard of the White Stripes? I’m totally inspired by them! I mean there’s just the two of them and you know, if you can read you can do anything! No really, you can teach yourself anything. I got this book…” Grant was gesticulating wildly and pacing and produced a small ring bound booklet with a guitar on the front. “I mean, this is all you need to start a band, isn’t it honey?!” he shouted to his little girl who had taken over the guitar and was noisily banging away at it. She ignored him completely. His wife, tall and thin, wafted through the room again like an ethereal Christian effigy, briefly stopping to applaud her daughter’s efforts on the guitar.


From this point on the conversation gets a bit hazy. Graeme spoke about how he’s discovered that sound is the ultimate art form, that it’s basically “sound sculpture” in that every sound that you make becomes an actual form in space, and that depending on what music you listen to, the shape of the object that you have created would vary. Or something like that. He quoted the Bible. He spoke fervently, like his mouth could barely keep up with his head, and all the time he looked like he might take off at any moment, like the excitement was almost too much to bare. Nothing could put him off. He wasn’t concerned by what either myself or the fourth party, (whom I haven’t mentioned) thought about any of this, which I felt was somewhat of a mistake on his part. At some point whilst Grant was blabbering on, the fourth party sucked hard at his cigarette and surreptitiously rolled his eyes at me whilst Grant went off on another tangent. I giggled. Grant is crazy, I thought quite plainly. He’s mad. His wife is as cooky as he is, and I’m sure their daughter will grow up to be a wonderful but deeply cooky person as well.


I slipped upstairs to the tower soon after that, but the music continued for most of the night. Sometimes things quietened down, but then I would hear uproarious laughter, or something breaking. There was dancing late in the night, and at about four am I was woken by Grant shouting: “Rachmaninov! Rachmaaaninov!!” The Blacksmith turned up the sound and a piano concerto blasted itself to smithereens. I might as well have stayed for the party, because sound loves a good tower. I heard them locking up after the sun came up, and later I heard a car drive down the driveway and leave. His wife must have been the driver, I thought. He’d barely gotten into bed before getting up again.


I couldn’t get Grant out of my thoughts after that. I played our short conversation over and over in my head. Something about his confidence had made me feel insecure during our conversation. The fact that he hadn’t played by the same rules as everyone else, the fact that he DIDN’T CARE what we thought and that it obviously worked for him, made me resent him. I part of me felt like saying: “Are you deaf and blind?? You’re getting pretty old buddy, you’ve never been exceptionally beautiful, you drive an old car and your daughter looks like she might just have walked out of Children of the Corn. You have NOTHING to be happy about!”


I only laid eyes on the Blacksmith again two days later, after his recovery. “Sounded like you and Grant had a great time,” I said winking. “Oh God no, Grant went to bed soon after you did. I went to the bar and brought home the German from town. It was the two of us going crazy down there. Sorry…”


The question I’m forced to ask myself is: On what grounds do you we judge people? And what do we reward them for? Did my judgement of Grant make me a happier person or did it just reflect my own rigidity and fear of going against the grain of what is acceptable in society? Let’s face it, it’s not ok to be that happy in our world. Too much joy makes you a freak, a crazy.


If he'd been a conformist he would probably have been a bored old bastard, slightly cynical about the world with a chip on his shoulder, but he’s not. Perhaps he HAS found his enlightenment; how would you go about telling someone you're enlightened anyway? Hey, the man is happy, there’s no doubt about it. Grant has been faithful to what’s in his bones, and in my book that makes him a superhero.  I'm the crazy one here.  I'm the one who's crazy.

Love is a tower.

I gave notice on my flat a couple of months ago. After I got back from America I couldn’t settle down. At night my feet burned and my dreams felt too real. Finally I conceded.

On the first of December I moved out, packed up my life and stashed it in various places in and around the Cape peninsula. There are bits of me in ceilings, at the top of garages, in other people’s flats. My travel bug has not been satisfied. Cellini Euroline was reinstated as my official Travel Companion, so I tied her up and gagged her, threw her in the boot of my car and quietly left Cape Town. No big goodbyes, no big deal. I slipped away like a shiny eel, out through the tunnel and passed Worcester, wine farms and horses, townships and trains. Out to Barrydale, a small town in a Karoo valley that’s surrounded by big blue mountains and Pierneef clouds.


My room is perched on top of an art gallery; one room, a basin for washing up. At the back an old ball and claw bath. A winding staircase laps down to the ground like a lazy tongue, and so I am Rapunzel although I have no hair. Downstairs my landlord, a metal worker, puts the final touches on the door hinges he’s been brooding over. Blue light flashes through his studios’ windows and when it does, the lights in my apartment flicker down, then up again.

Clouds roll in late afternoon to deliver a short but violent shower of rain. A hammer maims a sheet of metal below. Dogs bark. The traffic on the R62 surges past. Out one window lies a grey cemetery; beyond that houses, dogs. Out the other, endless blue sky broken in pieces by mountains, sometimes mist. Next door a couple of men are digging a grave. They’ve been at it for three days now. When night falls their employer pulls up in his car and leaves the headlights on so they can see. He sits on the bonnet drinking a quart of beer while I watch from behind a curtain in my tower. His legs dangle in front of the headlights, throwing strange shadows on the ground.

Two nights ago I woke up to scratching and flapping, a bat in my room. I chased it, we wrestled, I lost. The next morning I woke to find Bat Baby hanging upside down next to the window like a strange doorknob or light switch, deep in beautiful sleep. We gently detached it and put it out the window. I walked outside to check on it; it just lay there, entangled in the bush like a dead thing, but when I checked again an hour later, it had disappeared.

This morning it was the banging of baboons on my roof. They come after sunrise; you hear them barking in the hills, then closer, closer. In two weeks I’ve had three encounters with them. They pull at people’s doors, break in and ransack their houses. One day I walk back home and find them in the middle of town, chasing down the main road with food in their mouths as people stare and drop their groceries.

It’s the week before Christmas. I have no TV, no radio. Consequently I have taken to reading, poetry mostly: Eugene Marais, Leonard Cohen, Pablo Neruda. At night I dream of old lovers, people I used to know, and I wake up aching. I concoct wild fantasies in which I am the heroine and I get the man. I am not unhappy. I’m just nowhere.

One of my oldest friends lives in town. We went to school together, to varsity together, but he moved here five years ago and since then our time spent have been short encounters involving sushi and wine in the Waterfront. He makes chandeliers out of recycled material, he makes things with beads, he paints. He’s a sculptor. For Christmas he helped make a huge Christmas tree in the main street of Barrydale.. There was a marching band, dancers, flashing Christmas lights. I thought about the lights in New York, the shop fronts my cousin and I had gone to see at Macy’s last year this time; the bustling crowds, the subway, the cold. A year has passed.

Welcome to the movie.

The life of Alice would make a good thriller at the moment.

Or perhaps a drama. Either way, it has all the elements necessary to induce total and complete madness or to make you change your religion.
The current story line looks something like this:

Woman bravely gives up everything to follow her dream of becoming a location independent, travelling pro blogger and Sangoma even though everyone thinks she’s finally lost the last of her marbles (or just the big important one in the middle). At least, that’s the sexy way of summing it up. The unsexy way is to say that she’s now homeless by choice. (Hence many references to madness.)


As Woman prepares for the final cut (moving out of her flat), she knuckles down and braces herself but all and all copes exceptionally well with the loss of her cat, the loss of her home, storing her possessions for the next five years and blindly believing that she’s going to find funding for above mentioned adventurous lifestyle when there’s absolutely no proof to support this.


But then!


Her beloved and trusty car breaks down. It’s serious the mechanic says, but don’t you worry Little Miss. R6,000 should cover it. You’ll have your car back in a week he says, when the parts have arrived. (If they arrive.) Woman has large and dramatic nervous breakdown all over the mechanic’s floor but he doesn’t look too perturbed about it. He just says: sign here. Woman signs. Then goes home to spend the rest of the week shaking, crying and staring at the wall.


She sits in her flat and feels like her guts are falling out of her bottom, but they don’t. In fact, now that she thinks about it, nothing has fallen out of her bottom in quite awhile.


The Blouberg wind comes up. It blows in that specific way that makes her feel like her head might come off. In an effort to combat cabin fever she does go for a walk but the wind blows her hair up her nose and she almost chokes to death.


A couple of hours after she arrives back home, she realises that baby birds have hatched in an unreachable location on the other side of the wall and they squawk and scrape on the side of the house all day long. Her madness deepens to a new shade of purple.


The two old yappy dogs downstairs bark at her when she comes home, when she leaves and when the wind blows, which means that they bark all the time. The birds are not disturbed by the barking. Their feet scrape against the inside walls and Alice listens to them as they settle down wake up scuttle about scuttle and crawl. They wait for their mother to come back baring gifts and when she does all hell breaks loose. The wind slams doors closed. They bang like bombs down the street, and the wind howls with joy and goes looking for another.


This time a year ago Alice was packing her bags in New York City to go home. A year later, almost to the day, she’s packing them again.


Almost to the day.

The Art of being Alice.

Purpose. It’s a recurring theme in my life, one I return to again and again hoping that time would have allowed me more clarity to understand what mine might be. The dictionary tells me that purpose is simply ‘knowing what the intention is and working towards it’. In order to be a powerful human being you need to be clear about what your Life Purpose is and follow it boldly. When you are operating from this “place of power” your intention and actions combine to open a clear path that leads to your destiny.

Knowing your own purpose is no easy feat these days. The onus lies heavily on each of us to figure it out for ourselves, if we’re lucky. In earlier times it wasn’t always such a puzzle. In Burkina Faso the name that is given to you at birth is directly related to your purpose, which is ascertained by means of ritual or divination before birth. Malidoma Some writes beautifully about his name and purpose in his novel “Of water and the Spirit”.

“During the ritual, the incoming soul takes the voice of the mother (some say the soul takes the whole body of the mother, which is why the mother falls into trance and does not remember anything afterward) and answers every question the priest asks. The living must know who is being reborn, where the soul is from, why it chose to come here, and what gender it has chosen. (…) Some souls ask that specific things be made ready before their arrival – talismanic power objects, medicine bags, metal objects in the form of rings for the ankle or the wrist. They do not want to forget who they are and what they have come here to do. It is hard not to forget, because life in this world is filled with many alluring distractions. The name of the newborn is based upon the results of these communications. A name is the life program of its bearer.” (p20)

Westerners don’t have the privilege of this kind of ritual and our spirit purpose isn’t exactly considered in the West. What is considered is how we might add value – not to the earth we live on, but to the system we operate in. The task set most clearly out before us from an early age is not to figure out who we will become, rather what we will become and then to be defined by that. We are rarely propositioned with alternatives that fall outside of this clear cut agenda and it’s only those with the means, desire, brains and bravery who can create lives outside of it. The standard has been set so clearly and completely that to oppose it is considered dangerous, even suicidal. Many people force themselves to operate in frameworks they don’t really agree with and that don’t contain their actual life purpose purely because no other options have been offered to them as actual viable options. So we stick to the program. And it continues.

‘Ruin is the road to transformation’: says a character in the new film of the book Eat, Pray, Love. It sticks with me long after I leave the theatre. Ruin allowes you to open up and excavate old parts of your being, ones that you’d forgotten about or buried, ones you’d hoped you’d never see again and yet they’re still there, intact, waiting silently to be rediscovered. Yes Liz Gilbert, I understand. It’s only when you’re down to your foundations that you can see the map of how the house is to be built.

I’m lucky. When I was twenty five I was initiated into an ancient African culture that gave me an alternative framework or container to operate from. It’s like an ancient world reached out and saved me just when I really, really needed it to. I was given a life boat in an age when everyone is drowning and without this container I would certainly have continued to be depressed, suicidal and sick.

Besides for giving me a container, being initiated also offered me clear indications of what my purpose is. Naturally, I got to a point where I believed it to be more of a curse than anything else. Being a Sangoma really didn’t fit in with my plans. I had dreams see, aspirations. I wasn’t ready yet to live my purpose and accept my power, and so I danced around it like a headless chicken saying: “this isn’t my purpose, my purpose is to be an actor! A director! No wait! I’m going to be an English teacher!”

For the longest time I believed that my purpose would fit in with what they taught at school. I didn’t want to be (what I considered to be) different, so I always played down the aspects of myself that I considered to be unacceptable. The only problem was that that was pretty much the bulk of me. The past couple of years I’ve been looking at the world and wondering why I don’t feel passionate about anything anymore, and I’ve finally realised that although I felt passionate about many things, I didn’t think they were acceptable, or that they fit into the framework, or that they were impressive enough to be passionate about.

Although most of us don’t have the blueprint of our purpose locked in our name like the folk in Burkina Faso, I think most people know innately what their purpose is. It’s in your bones, down in those foundations of yours. The only thing changes is your perception of it, and most importantly your acceptance of it. Many people are unhappy because they dance around their purpose for so long that eventually they just feel really tired and lost. I’ve forced myself into many awful situations where I didn’t really belong purely because I believed I had no choice about the matter. Boy, was I wrong. I create my own blueprint for my life. I am the Master Architect of my existence.

I still don’t know what my future holds, but I know what I enjoy, where I feel most comfortable and what my strengths are. The longer I follow that, the better I feel about myself. The further I step away from them, the more desperate I become.

I’ve given notice on my flat and for the second time in two years I’m packing up my life. The first time it was partly out of desperation. This time it’s with clarity. It’s from a place of power. I don’t know what happens next but I’ve never felt more certain that I’m doing the right thing.

I’m striking out in my power.

And that is the Art of being Alice.

These boots were made for walkin

The story goes something like this:
   
Girl comes into large(ish) some of cash and can either use it as part of a down payment on a property, or she can go travelling the world. She decides to pack up Cellini Euroline and head for the hills.

The hills turn out to be America. Girl traverses said America for six months. She sleeps on couches, on bunk beds, in hostels and strangers’ homes. She just keeps moving and goes right across The States. Newness oozes out of everything around her and for the first time ever Girl thinks:

“This is what it’s like to be alive! This is what it means to be free!”

Six months later her visa expires, her money disappears and her heart aches for her Lover left back in South Africa. Girl hops a plane and arrives back to turmoil and confusion. Said Lover wants nothing to do with her and has found new love in the arms of Other Girl Living Next Door. Who could blame him, but Girl’s disappointment is staggering. She spins and spins like a top that won’t stop. At night she dreams of planes and airports, of faraway places. She dreams of falling down rabbit holes and meeting strange characters in strange lands, and on waking her heart aches. She finds the perfect place to live, but she turns it down. Can’t figure out why. She struggles to get back to work. The idea of working for somebody else makes her throw up a little in her mouth. Eventually she rents another flat at twice the price and unpacks her life piece by piece. It’s not as fun as she thought it would be. Every now and again she still tries to convince the Lover to come back, but he won’t and he doesn’t. Somehow she feels out of place, like a sore thumb sticking out.


Life returns to what it was before she went on her journey (bar the love interest, the job, the cash flow and sea view) and soon boredom returns with a vengeance. Her money dwindles. Her cat dies. She finishes her crying quota till like the age of 60. The new car and apartment suck at her wallet like a vacuum cleaner on vendetta. She struggles to pay the rent.  Life turns a little grim.


The dreams of faraway places become overwhelming. When she closes her eyes she’s transported to Hawaii, Amsterdam and Panama. She starts spending large portions of her time fantasizing about these places in detail, conjuring up un-taken journeys and when she wakes she shakes uncontrollably. She buys herself a map of the world and stares at it for hours. The lottery becomes her religion and she spends the little money she has on buying up tickets and then praying loudly and continuously, but she doesn’t win. During her internet job searches she ends up on doing research about "how to find the perfect backpack", "location independent living" and "how to travel the world for free".


Ten months after her return to Africa she's flippin tired of it all. She lets go of the Lover. She lets go of the cat. She wakes up one morning with a hangover and gives notice on her flat when she's not looking. Contrary to what she expected she feels enormously relieved, perhaps even a little excited.  She gives in to herself, to her desire for awe and adventure.


She lets go and goes shopping for a new pair of boots!