Alice in America

Freedom

2011-01-15T01:49:00.000-08:00

“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

2011-01-01T06:14:00.000-08:00

The crazy one.

2010-12-30T01:16:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-15T02:18:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-10-13T01:57:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-01T23:28:00.000-07:00

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!

Shifting Sands.

2010-09-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

I am but one among a vast army of bold adventurers who have chosen between a life of certainty on firm soil, and a life of surprise on shifting sands. We are the troubadours, seafarers, merchants and explorers of our age. We are vagrants and vagabonds. We have no houses: the world is our home. And wherever we go, we envision. We instruct. We construct. We forge alliances across continents and oceans. We beat the drum to the great march of progress.

Marie-Therese le Roux
August 2009

Clarity.

2010-09-12T12:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Universe,

Fine! You win! I get that it was probably not the best strategic move to come straight back home after my epic six month trip to the US. Check mate world. Message transmission completed.

It took me awhile to receive it though. And in the process The Depression has become strong with me. Nine months can really stretch when you don’t have a life. Nine months. NINE LONG MONTHS of trying to stay sane. I have failed miserably. It's significant though, my friend says over coffee. Nine is the number of completion; the time it takes a foetus to become a baby. Goody gum drops, I say to my friend. Please pass the salt.

I nurse my old travel habits like they're terminal patients. I take Cellini Euroline out from time to time, stroke her under belly, put her up on my bed so she can have a view of the neighbours garage at least. We chat, but not like we used to when we were out on the road. Things have changed between us. With the demise of my last remaining functional relationship I have turned to fantasy.

Today's fantasy menu read something like this. I fantasized about:

1. Being recruited by the CIA/FBI to work on their next major undercover project. Angelina Jolie: kiss my butt.

2. Being kidnapped by my “real parents” and taken to Italy to meet “the family”. Or to the Caribbean. Or anwhere other than where I am right now.

3. Winning the R75million lottery. (Email me if you would like the detailed breakdown of exactly what I intend to do with it.)

4. Winning a round the world plane ticket in a travel competition. First class. Hotel accommodation included.

5. Someone rich reading my blog and deciding that I’m wonderful. They give me a million dollars, on the condition that I travel the world and write about it. And sleep with them.

6. Meeting a rich, handsome secret agent and travelling the world with him.

7. Meeting a rich, handsome adventurer and travelling the world with him.

8. Meeting a rich, handsome vampire and traveling the world riding on his back.

9. Getting notified that my third uncle thrice removed has passed on. Since he adored me (even though we never met, except that one time when I was but a baby) he has left his sixteen homes across the globe to moi. I live in all of them for a year and write a novel about it. It becomes a best seller.

After the above list of fantasies were completed I spent a disproportionate amount of time planning a wedding I don't intend to have to a man I don't know, and later I even named our baby I don't want. I'm living in the Twilight Zone people.

What is happening to me???!

Dear Universe, please intervene. In whatever way you see fit, as long as it's exciting, adventurous, and maybe only slightly dangerous.

Let's get it on!

Alice

Images

2010-04-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

He liked words and images. "Blue" was one of his favorite words. He liked the feeling it made on his lips and tongue when he said it. Words have a physical feeling, not just meaning, he remembered thinking when he was young. He liked other words, such as "distant," "woodsmoke," "highway," "ancient," "passage," "voyageur," and "India" for how they sounded, how they tasted, and what they conjured up in his mind. He kept lists of words he liked posted in his room. Then joined the words into phrases and posted those as well:

Too close to the fire.

I came from the East with a small band of travelers.

The constant chirping of those who would save me and those who would sell me.

Talisman, Talisman, show me your secrets. Helmsman, Helmsman, turn me for home.

Lying naked where blue whales swim.

She wished him steaming trains that left from winter stations.

Before I became a man, I was an arrow - long time ago.

- The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller

Frequently asked Questions about Sangomas:

2010-04-24T05:53:00.000-07:00

What is a Sangoma?
A Sangoma is an African Doctor, a ritual specialist, a healer, a mediator, a negotiater and a diviner. They serve as a link between this world and the world of the ancestors. The word "Sangoma" means “off the drum” and refers to the use of drumming as a means to enter trance. It’s a pity that this term has come to collectively refer to all traditional African Healers. I am in fact a Mungoma, a type of ritual specialist found in the Shangaan tradition in the southern parts of Africa.

Sangomas work closely with the ancestral realm, collaborating with them in order to diagnose and treat clients. (Different traditions might have slightly different ways of how they go about doing this.) To this day people in South Africa visit Sangomas more frequently than western doctors.

Is a Sangoma a fortune teller?

I would like to encourage you to think of a Sangoma as an African "Homeopath" who diagnoses you by looking at where you are at in your life, looking at your environment and the people around you.

Why are you a Sangoma?

Becoming a Sangoma is not a choice, it’s a calling. It’s not a course that you take, but a long and often painful initiation process. My calling came in my early twenties when I developed all kinds of strange symptoms and illnesses. I visited many different types of doctors, homeopaths, psychologists, psychiatrists and a range of other healers over a five year period but couldn’t find any relief. I grew up in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg and had never had any contact with Sangomas and was quite frankly frightened by them and what they represented. At a time when I really had nothing left to lose a friend told me about a man who was practicing as a Sangoma nearby and out of desperation I made my first ever visit to one. It turned out to be a life-changing event for me. He diagnosed the “calling-illness” and shortly afterwards I went to Botswana where I stayed for the length of my initiation.

What can I expect to happen when I consult with you?

The traditional method of divination and diagnosis it through a bone reading. The client is seated on the ground opposite the Mungoma. A short interview follows after which the Mungoma will literally throw a collection of objects on the ground. He/she will then proceed to "read" them and lay out the meaning to the client.

A bone reading tracks the natural cycles inherent in all people. It can be likened to a weather prediction: there are natural patterns in every living thing, and if they are tracked it is possible to diagnose and predict the most likely outcome.

After a diagnosis has been made the doctor might suggest a course of treatment. My treatments are made up of ritual and the use of local herbs and plants that are administered mostly through a course of baths or steams, but treatment varies from person to person.

Why would someone visit a Sangoma?

Sangomas have the tools to take people on very deep transpersonal journeys. They assist and support people who are in transitional states, they mark important events in people’s lives, the balance what is unbalanced and shed light on what has been hidden. They work with what is seen and unseen and liase between the two on the clients’ behalf. They are visionaries and can add a new dimension to your healing process. I work with ancestral and personal blockages, psychological and physical ailments. I also do house and property tyings and cleansings.

What is the role of the Ancestors?

Speaking about our ancestral connection in an African context is a multi-layered concept. It refers firstly to our direct lineage: our parents, our grandmothers and grandfathers. It refers to all those who came before us and those that come after us (our unborn children). If we follow our ancestral lineage back we are related to everyone who is alive today, and if we follow it even further we are related to every thing on the planet and in the universe. In this way when we work with our ancestral connection, we can say that we are working with our connection to everything around us and how we are placed in the world. You are the current incarnation of your direct ancestral lineage, and therefore when we work with the ancestors we are doing deep self-transformative personal work. You are the result of a long line of people. Your ancestors are outside of you, just like your father is separate to you, but also inside you, as his blood runs through you.

Do I have to believe in the world of the ancestors in order for the treatment to work?

No, you don’t. You don’t need to believe in medical science for a panado to take away your headache. The same goes here.

I hear alot of bad things about Sangomas.

My opinion is this: when you consult with someone you consult not only a specific methodology but also a person. If that person has hatred and fear inside of them, chances are they will have bad intentions with you. The chances of you visiting a dodgy Sangoma are about the same as your chances of visiting a dodgy medical doctor; they are often bought by pharmaceutical companies and push drugs and medicine onto people that you don’t need, give you operations you don’t require, all of that riding on the back of greed. The point? Make sure that you are visiting someone who is reputable, do your research, and if something doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t.

Remembrance.

2010-04-20T04:18:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a great King who ruled over a large piece of land in a far away country. All the people loved and honoured him, and he was happy. The Queen gave birth to a beautiful baby boy and the land rejoiced.
“Our country will flourish when he is King,” it was predicted, and the prince grew into a beautiful boy.

A rivalling King was jealous of their happiness and wealth, and decided to make war on their Kingdom.
“Hide the boy,” the King ordered his Magus before going into battle, and so he hid him in the bud of a rose that grew inside the walls of the castle. The war raged on for many months and eventually the King and Queen were found and killed.
“Now I will reign over this land,” the evil King thought, but the Magus went and fetched the prince from the bud of the flower.
“You are to be King now,” he said to the boy, “and all will be well when you rule.”

A great festival was organised to announce that the prince was taking the throne and becoming King. When the rivalling King found out that the prince was to take the throne, he sent a witch to the prince in the night and she bewitched him.
“Forget yourself,” she whispered into his ear whilst he was asleep, “and forget your own value. You will find satisfaction in nothing, and your hands will be closed to success and accomplishment.” In the morning when the King woke up he looked around and didn’t recognise the palace.
“Where am I?” he asked the maid who came in to bring him his breakfast.
“You are in your castle my Lord.”
“And who am I?”
“You are the King my Lord.” The King shook his head.
“I’m no King and this is not my castle. I was a servant here and now I must be on my way. There are more important things to do and I must do them all!” and with that he got up, put on the oldest clothes he could find and abandoned his Kingdom.

Once he left the castle he met a woodworker next to the road.
“Where are you going?” the woodworker asked.
“I’m looking for my destiny,” the King replied, “do you know what it is?”
“Perhaps you are a woodworker,” he replied. “Come with me and I will teach you everything I know,” and so the Prince went to live with the woodworker who was true to his word. The Prince had a remarkable talent for woodworking and his teacher was impressed. “There is something about him,” he told his wife one night, “I don’t know what it is, but he’s special.” After a couple of months the Prince started having dreams about his old Kingdom and a strange yearning opened up in him.
“I have to go,” he said one day to the woodworker. “Woodwork is not for me. I can't even remember why I started doing it in the first place. It’s not my destiny and so I must leave.”
“It’s a pity,” the woodworker said, “as you were just getting the knack of the thing. He sent the Prince on his way with a couple of coins.

Further down the road he met a shoemaker in a tavern.
“I will teach you to make the best shoes in the district,” the shoemaker promised, and led him to his small homestead not far from there. The next morning he started teaching the Prince his art, and he immediately took to it. “What a talent,” the shoemaker told his wife that night over dinner. “I’m lucky to have found him. And he works for less than the maid!” The King worked diligently for a couple of weeks, but every night he would dream of a castle and a crown and in the morning he would wake up with an ache in his heart.

One day he met a beautiful maiden in the meadow.
“Who are you?” she asked him as he sat down next to her.
“I don’t know anymore. I think I’m a shoemaker, but at night I dream of castles.”
“Then you must be the Prince!” the maiden cried. “You are the lost Prince of this land and it’s your destiny to be King,” and she rejoiced in the knowledge and hugged him and kissed him, for she was a princess and had been searching for him.
“No no,” the Prince said. “I’m but a poor shoemaker and have never lived in a castle.”
“It’s your destiny to be King,” the maiden said, “and I will be your Queen.”
“You’re wrong,” he said, but they kissed in the meadow, and the maiden took the Prince to her castle. “I don’t know why you treat me so well,” the Prince said one day. “I am not as rich as you, I don’t have a house like yours, yet you treat me like a King.”
“That’s because you are one,” the princess said and a tear slipped over her cheek. Perhaps if I love him enough, he will remember himself, she thought, and so she showered him with love, but the Prince would not remember.

One day the Prince went to work and said: “I am not a shoemaker, it’s not my destiny. It’s a silly thing to make shoes and I don’t have a knack for it,” and he thanked the shoemaker for his help and left that place. He wandered around the country side looking for something that felt right, but nothing did. “I’m not sure who I am you see,” he would say to the princess, “I’m either a beggar dreaming that I’m a King, or a King dreaming that I’m a beggar.”
“You are the King of this land,” she said to him again and again, and he would shake his head vehemently, and she would turn away and cry. “Oh where, where is my King? He is here in my house, but he has abandoned himself, and now I can never be the Queen.”

“If you love me like you say you do, you will marry me,” the King said to the maiden. “Let me make you my wife, let’s be a family,” but the maiden refused him.
“I am destined to marry a King, to have a wedding in the palace my Lord. When you remember yourself I will be your Queen.” The Prince felt angry at this and withdrew from her. Soon they started to grow apart.

One morning the King woke up to find the maiden had packed her belongings. “I am leaving,” she said to him. “You have abandoned your Kingdom and yourself, and so you have abandoned me, and even though you live here with me in this house you are only the ghost of the King that I love. Nothing ever satisfies you my Lord, because you are not yourself, and I am not satisfied my Lord, because I am a princess and it’s my destiny to be a Queen,” and she cried and cried and then left him there to wander the land alone, for she too had become lost.

She travelled to far away lands and saw many great things, but always the memory of the Prince stayed with her. “He is my King,” she said to people, “but he can’t remember himself. And now I am nothing, for I am his Queen.” She walked and walked and travelled by boat and cart, drifting from place to place, but the ache in her heart wouldn’t leave. She had seen her own reflection in his eyes and couldn’t forget about it. One morning she woke up and looked around her and said: “Where am I? And who am I? I dreamt that I was a Queen, but now I wake up in rags,” and so she got up and went back to her own Kingdom where she reigned alone, but always looking for the King, hoping that he would return onto her, and that he would remember himself.

THE END

A touch of fire.

2010-04-18T02:14:00.000-07:00

I spend my life coming up with inventive ways to haul my ass out of various comfort zones. Seriously, give me a day or two and I will stay at home with a good book, the internet and this here small netbook and be 100% entertained. That is until I completely lose my marbles see.

If I'm not forced to I can get real comfortable like and it's bad. That's why I'm glad I have friends who make me walk on hot coals, just for the heck of it. Yup, that's right friends. Saturday night was spent at a birthday party that turned out to be more. A facilitator arrived who put us through our paces, and by about 21h30 there we were outside, playing drums and singing our heads off and most importantly, walking on hot coals.

Exhilirating? Yes. Inspiring? Oh yes! Depression? Gone.

Thank you Nial!

Endlessly changing horizons.

2010-04-17T02:35:00.000-07:00

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."

— Chris McCandless

A whisp of despair.

2010-04-17T02:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Universe,

I could win a competition for feeling sorry for myself today. I’m feeling it deeply, the treachery my poor lonesome bottom has to endure.

Before I went overseas I had money, I stayed in a beautiful flat and dated my very own Mr Mcdreamy with whom I shared two cats. I was bored out of my mind though. Consequently I gave it all up and headed to America. Now that I’m back it seems very little has changed in my life. In fact, post-America might be even bleaker than pre-America. The man has gone. Oh, and I don’t have any money. Whether or not all the bills will be paid this month is debatable.

I’m back to spending all my time at home, which is where I work from. I chose to live outside of the city, so I’m at least 30minutes away from friends. I rarely see people. The cabin fever’s got me bad. My jogs are turning into walks and I have to forcefully throw myself out the door in the mornings. My cats follow my every move and although I sometimes find it endearing (they’re my only company) most of the time their neediness drives me batty.

I’ve been single for a year now. In the interim I haven’t had a single interaction with a man that even vaguely excited me, or looked excited about me. As I sink deeper and deeper into my Sangoma work the same old issues start to surface. Am I alone because I’m a Sangoma??? Sometimes I think yes. I’m a chicken killer. I’m possessed. It’s not easy for other people to accept what I do and so I fight with myself; about who I am, what I am, what I want and can have.

Over dinner the other night a friend looked at my astrological chart, just for a laugh. “You’re going to be single for at least another year,” she said. “Next March looks promising on the love front.” Then she laughed. I didn’t.

Can I do this for another year? Live like a monk, in solitude, removed, poor, bored and fantasizing about a trip I once took and the freedom I felt? The problem with such a trip is: nothing is ever the same. As when I was hijacked, I am now privy to knowledge very few people have. I have travelled. I know the freedom that comes with it, the freshness and continuous stimulation. I know what if feels like to be really alive, and so my life here is even bleaker than it was before I left.

A friend of mine is travelling Scotland. He sent me a note yesterday:

Dear Alice, we saw such an amazing theatre piece the other day. It was performed by people with a range of disabilities and was completely mind blowing. How lucky we are to have arms and legs doll! We are truly, truly blessed.

Universe, save me from myself. My head will be the end of me. Feeling sorry for yourself isn’t sexy at the best of times. Heck, I spent last night watching “Into the Wild” again and cried my eyes out into my bowl of spaghetti. Should I pull a Christopher Mccandless Universe? Should I give it all up and hit the road??? If I lived in the US that might have been an option, but in South Africa… The ending might not be quite as romantic.

I know there’s more to life than this Universe. I’ve seen it. I was there. Help!

A mountain called distraction.

2010-04-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

I embroider a new tapestry for my life.

When I was overseas the pattern was big, bold: one central design with detail added into it. Now it’s a patchwork of small pieces. There is nothing central, no coherency. It's a busy piece of work that leaves you feeling dizzy if you stare at it for too long.

The thing about travelling is that it simplifies. All the things that used to fill up your time just fall away. Now it's spent visiting the grocer, servicing the car, fixing my shoes. I’m constantly distracted from life. I spin a warm and safe cocoon that consists of nothing substantial yet manages to block out the world and all it offers. I barely write. Instead I get lost in the technicalities of my life. I worry about money. I spend most of my time living in a future I’m uncertain of and where the uncertainty of travel brings you into the here and now the uncertainty of being in one place leads to sleepless nights and worry. How will I pay the bills? Will I find a partner in crime again anytime soon? I make lists of things to do and run aimlessly after them all day long. At the end of the day I have no sense of completion. When I was travelling my blog did that for me. I felt like I had a voice, like I could say something. Now my voice has gotten lost in the white noise of my everyday existence.

The only thing that means anything here is being a Sangoma. It gives me meaning, makes my life valuable in some way. I throw myself into it and learn a box full of new tricks. Slowly clients trickle back into my life. Treatments start to happen. They leave me with some sense of real satisfaction.

It's so easy to get lost in all of this, to just let go and fall into the drama of life. Get absorbed in one small world governed only by me and my rules.

I really, really don't want to do that, but I'm watching it happen a little more everyday.

The Maniac.

2010-03-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Universe,

Forgive me for I have sinned. It’s been 34 years since my last confession (assuming that I came clean just after emerging from my mother’s womb) and I can’t keep it to myself any longer.

I have raised a blood thirsty murderer, a crazy killer who plays games with his pray and tortures them for hours. It all started so innocently: first it was a cockroach that I thought he’d caught in the house. I was proud of him for keeping the pest at bay and patted him on the head like a good boy. This spurred him on and a couple of days later it was a gecko in his mouth. As time past the frequency with which he brought similar bugs home became closer and closer together, and although these specimens satisfied him for awhile I came home one day to find a mangled chameleon lying shattered at my front door. Since his head was missing I couldn’t find out for sure if my suspicions were correct and I chose to turn a blind eye Universe. I am a mother after all. I didn’t last long though. One night I came home to find him lying in the lounge with a mouse in his mouth looking utterly pleased and somewhat hungry. Then a dove that he must have poached out of a tree.

Oh Universe, what am I to do?? How do I stop this path of destruction that has opened up under my roof? How do I convey my condolences to the small furry creatures that live in my neighbourhood? How do I warn them of his crazed obsession with anything that moves quickly or scuttles about? Besides, his disguise is top notch: a black coat that covers his whole body. An unmatched agility and a fondness for climbing trees at night. What will he bring home next Universe? A squirrel? A poodle for God's sake??

Dear Universe, have mercy on the animals in my neighbourhood. Let them sleep with one eye open and tell them that Swarties the Siamese has moved in. They need to watch their backs because if he finds them… Oh if he finds them Universe, the games will go on for hours.

The Tortoise and the Hare

2010-03-21T04:17:00.000-07:00

I jog for my sanity. It makes the vacant space in my head lessen for just enough time to figure out what I’m supposed to do on said day. Soon after the jog the veil comes down again and I turn into The Vacant Lot of Nothingness, but for that one hour I have some vision. (It’s a small window, but enough for now.)

I run along the beach front, and faces become familiar after a couple of weeks: the anorexics, fatties, rugby players, professional runners, the gaggle of older woman. Mostly they're white people. There are black people who also run, but they’re usually in work clothes and trying to actually get somewhere quickly instead of just running for the sake of it, or to lose weight or the like. Some people walk their dogs, others sit on benches staring out over the sea. There’s a girl who jogs past me every single day with her dog tied around her waist and gum in her mouth. (Surely that’s a health risk?) A couple of perverts roam around, bums litter the tarmac.

Frilly Broekies (pants) is my favourite. She must be in her late forties and she runs every day. She runs far, I’ve tried to establish the length of her route but it’s much longer than I’m prepared to go and so it remains a mystery. Her outfit begets the name: a strappy little black top with matching black frilly broekies that just cover everything it’s supposed to. Her hair is a matching black bob, her eyes dark to boot. Her pants are incongruous with her age though and so she always stands out when she comes past. I never miss her.

My nemesis is a man we'll call The Destroyer. He's there at the same time as I am and so we compete. Most days he wins, but not for long my friends. I'm planning on taking him out. Just because he's eighty doesn't mean I should give him some kind of special treatment, not where I come from. I run like a maniac and then walk till I catch my breath, at which point I start running like mad again. The Destroyer keeps a steady pace but just keeps going and going and going, and so I will overtake him with speed when I’m running but sure as fuck, after a bit of walking there he will be, passing me again, driving me to drink. He's a machine I tell you. He never stops, but just you wait Mr Destroyer, just you wait...

Back to front.

2010-03-21T01:46:00.000-07:00

Life happens. I get distracted. I stop writing. I spend a lot of time worrying about the future. What work will I do, where will the money come from. I forget to focus on the things that feed me, I find it harder and harder to concentrate. “Ifs” and “whens” start to rule my life. I'm back in the corridor, waiting for life to happen. I yearn for the emptiness of travel, the immediacy of the moment. I'm Alice caught behind the mirror again and find myself peering through it to see the vague reflection of another world on the other side.

I have settled on this side of the mirror for now. I have a home, I’ve unpacked my life. Where I was always eager to write about my travels whilst I was away I’m now impatient to get it done so I can move on to the next thing. My life slowly becomes a trance again, one which I will continuously try to escape from, mostly without luck. My head becomes filled with empty space, cotton wool. Words escape me. My shopping lists get longer as I spend more and more time at home. I am restless, lonely. I read too much into what other people say and talk my mouth off when I see them, which is rare. I have settled.

Could there be anything less rewarding?

Vacancy

2010-03-08T13:07:00.000-08:00

I’m having a Blank Stare day. Maybe you know this one.

Wake up and feed the cats: blank stare. Go for a run: blank stare. Sit down behind my computer: blank stare. Make some tea: blank stare. Really, really try to work: blank stare. Drive to the shops, pick up some stuff, run some errands: blank stare. I win the lottery on tv and the presenter says: “So Alice, tell our viewers how you feel!” Blank stare. Walk, sit down. Blank stare. Blank stare. Write. Blank stare.

I am one with the blank stare. I go deeper into the blank stare.

My brain is a marshmallow.
I am an empty vessel people.

Focus.

2010-03-08T01:42:00.000-08:00

Consciously fill you life with meaning everyday.

If you don't, someone else will fill it with nonsense.

Dear Lovelies,

2010-03-01T13:38:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the silence.
Alice is writing her fingerprints off on another project and fantasizes about writing her blog at night when she gets falls into bed.

I'll be back Captain, I'll be back!

Divide and conquer.

2010-02-25T00:58:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the cruellest trick the age of science and the western world has played on us was taking away community and isolating us.

It has left most people grasping for a sense of belonging and put untold pressure on the family structure.

No matter how we try to compensate for it we can’t. We have been delivered out to the world

singular.

Day 4 - The Cahuna.

2010-02-24T09:35:00.000-08:00

I’m driving a beat up red truck in 40+ degree midday heat in Botswana, southern Africa. My head bobs up and down with every bump in the road like a dashboard doll. Sweat runs down my back. There’s no aircon and the warm wind has flushed my face, hands slip on the steering wheel.

Here’s to hoping everything goes well when I get to where I’m going. There is protocol to adhere to. Etiquette. I’m fetching my Great Grandmother and her entourage in South Africa where they are waiting for me at their homestead. I will fetch her; someone else will deliver her back home. We will tend to all her needs whilst she stays with us. We will make her feel like a Queen.

I’ve been to her house only once before and I wasn’t the driver. The person in question spent hours getting lost and asking locals who barely spoke English for directions whilst the rest of the people in the car systematically lost their marbles and screamed at one another. It was a nightmare that I don’t want to repeat so I asked my teacher to give me directions. They were vague: turn right at the big tree on the right hand side of the road just after the spaza shop in the third small settlement that you reach after crossing the border. Keep going till you see a church that has a big “no smoking” sign painted above it. There is a small Cell C kiosk not far from there. Drive between the two and keep going on a dirt road till you find some bushes on your left…. I smile and nod even though I have no idea what the man is on about. He draws a picture: there is the school, there is the spaza shop. It’s easy, he says. I can't help but trust him.

The car groans with every gear change and chugs along like a wounded soldier. Progress is slow and deliberate but I don’t mind. I love this landscape. It has the same spirit as the place where I was born in Johannesburg and a part of me will always prefer this to Cape Town. This is real to me: thorn trees, tall dry grass, koppies in the distance, mud huts and small settlements dotted along the road. Woman wander with umbrellas to keep the sun off. Donkeys drag about. Goats follow the white lines in the middle of the tar, hypnotised by its length. Chickens flutter and scream as I swerve and miss potholes. The sun a bonfire asking for drumming. There are no walls here. Nothing separates me from nature except the grey road I'm on. I'm connected to this place and it brings a joy into me that I can’t contain. The bush waits for me whilst I speed along to go and fetch my Great Grandmother.

At the border post the guard eyes my beads out suspiciously:
“What is this you’re wearing?” she says with a frown. “Are you a Sangoma?”
“I am,” I say and smile.
“Yoh!” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t believe you koko. Look at your hands.” I pick them up and turn them over.
“What about them?” I ask somewhat perplexed.
“Huh uh, they are too clean. You are not a Sangoma. Sangomas are dirty always!” I laugh as I turn to head back to the car.
“Just wait,” I say, “I will be back later, then you will see.” She shakes her head and chews on her pen as I head out.

Over the border and I’m back in South Africa. I turn right and follow the curving road. Forty five minutes later I’m there: a tree, a kiosk, the cell c shop. I find the house without much hassle and park at the front gate. Her homestead consists of a couple of buildings: the outhouse, main house, an ndumba (sacred space of the ancestors), a shrine by the gate. She lives with numerous family members who all stick their heads out when the car pulls up and then disappear again like dassies. I dawdle in the car as they register my arrival and hurry off to tell her. It is protocol for my spirit to greet her first as a sign of respect, and so they put down a mat for me at the place where she is seated. One of her daughters wave at me to come in; she is ready. In a second my spirit escapes my body and runs into the house where much loud greeting and acknowledging takes place. It's only when I resurface that I realise that the radio has been on and that I’ve been competing with Mariah Carey’s “Dream Lover” for my Granny’s attention. She smiles and claps her hands when I am done, exchanges words with her daughter.

Now understand: the woman speaks not a word of English. I have been taught an official greeting which I employ and which she responds to, but besides for that my Tswana is limited and her English is non-existent. A series of hand gestures follow. They’re happy to see me and ready to go – their bags are by the door. I load them onto the back of the truck as her daughters pile on as well. Small black faces appear from around the neighbourhood to come and see the white woman who is paying homage to the person at this house. Some reach out to touch me. A couple of the young ones cry because they’re not used to white people yet.

My koko is riding shotgun with me and so when everyone is ready two of her daughters appear at the side of the car ready to help her in. I don’t know how old she is but she's the shortest woman I've ever come across. She literally can't get into the truck and her daughters have to boost her from behind. Each of them grab a foot and finally she clambers onto the seat like a baby onto an enormous bed. I am a giant, she a little girl. This is "Tshwene", I remember, her official title meaning baboon in Sotho. It's a reference to the spirit that she works with and today I recognise it in her. My Granny is a cross between Yoda and a tokolosh I think and smile as I pull away and she delves into her snuffbox for a good dosage of nicotine.

We drive. The language barrier makes for silence. Twice she mentions names of people involved in our lodge, enquiring if they will be there when she arrives. No, I say to the first inquiry. Yes to the second. She smiles, looks pleased with herself. Her four daughters are now wrapped in cloths on the back of the truck talking and gesticulating amongst themselves. This heat hurts even the locals.

Back at the border post my previous assailant’s eyes almost pop out:
“You are Mrs Bones!” she shouts arms in the air when we walk through the door and we all laugh. I have to fill out 3 of my travel companions forms because only one of her daughters can write. When I’m done I hand back their pieces of paper so they can sign it. Granny just holds out her thumb which makes no sense to me until the woman behind the counter produces ink and takes their prints. We hurry back to the car. Again the sister’s boost her into her seat. She clambers in and shuffles about to get comfortable. More snuff is taken. We drive through a puddle of yellow butterflies on the dirt road back into Ramotswa. We pass Chankos, a shop we visit frequently to buy tobacco and ingredients for traditional dishes and drinks. We drive past small shops, a petrol station. Traffic increases. We hit a couple of potholes and her daughters heave about on the back of the truck.

When we get back to the lodge all hell breaks loose. Their bags disappear instantly off to their sleeping quarters; chairs are brought and put in the shade. Tea and coffee arrive. Strings of Sangomas and Malombos fall down in small heaps at her feet greeting her profusely. She smiles and laughs uproariously when we present her with gifts. Joy flows out of her.

Over the course of the weekend she does her work with dignity and integrity. She is stern but kind, powerful but small. Everything comes easily to her. From the moment she arrives we become a meaningful community, one with clarity of purpose and a drive to succeed. She unites us by merely being there.

She is Tshwene. My Great Grandmother.

Let it go.

2010-02-24T03:48:00.000-08:00

Western culture is the only one in the world that focuses solely on gathering and hoarding.

All ancient cultures know the importance of emptying out and letting go.

Day 3.

2010-02-23T11:19:00.000-08:00

Sleeping is hard when the three people with you wake up at 3am and break out dancing and singing. The mozzies don’t help. Neither does the fact that this place rarely cools down. I’m exhausted when I wake up but the altitude might partly be to blame.

More beading. A drive to Ramotswa to buy ingredients for traditional marula beer. Much organising as other doctors start to arrive and do shopping for food, goats and chickens. Everything needs to be in order by tomorrow when our Great Grandmother arrives from South Africa. She is our big Cahuna, a Sangoma of great stature and knowledge, the oldest living member of our lodge and by far the highest ranking. She is also the smallest. (When she sits on a chair her feet don’t touch the ground.)

When jobs are doled out I offer to go and fetch her from her home in a small hamlet across the border the next day. It entails an hour and a half drive there, getting cross the border and getting back, and possibly waiting around for Granny to finish packing for an hour or two. But that’s tomorrow.

Uncharacteristically we attend a cocktail party at the University of Botswana in Gabarone to witness my teacher’s father honorary doctorate ceremony. He delivers a moving presentation and lecture about his work over the past 40 years and we all marvel at the astonishing life he has lived. Everyone living at the lodge is surprisingly clean which is fun in itself.

By the time we get back it’s 22h30 which is way past the witching hour when you live in the sticks. We fall into bed immediately, knowing full well that sleep will not be indulged over the next couple of days.

This is it people. It's all going to become blurry from here.

Day 2.

2010-02-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

Wake up in Africa. Tea. Run. Cold shower. Spend the day beading and making preparations for the coming ceremony. For the next day or two there are only four of us living here: the two initiates, our teacher and yours truly. It’s blissful and quiet. Birds call from the trees. Bees buzz around the kitchen. Mosquitoes and flies invade us from time to time. The sun calls back every inch of moisture he can find and by lunchtime the mud pools are almost completely dried out and the sky sears us with brightness.

On Friday hoards of the initiates' family members and friends will arrive and more doctors will come. Both the thwasanas have big eyes. Anticipation burns in them. They know from experience that whatever is about to happen will be big, probably extremely taxing, will involve very little sleep and change the course of their lives forever.

We chat, giggle at each other, make light of what’s about to happen. The lodge is cleaned, swept, chairs are washed, more mattresses bought for visitors. We are slowly gathering momentum. Soon things will come to a head.

In the evening the four of us huddle around a gaslamp quoting “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and “The Jabberwocky”.

If this is Wonderland, I am the Queen for today.

Day 1.

2010-02-23T11:13:00.000-08:00

No sleep. Sit up at 5am. Pack last things, eat, my bowels tap dance about 5 times in the next half an hour in anticipation of a flight I really don’t want to take but have to to get to where I want to go asap. The extra set of keys I made for the Ex (who is coming to feed the cats) don’t actually open the door and so I drive to Melkbos at 6am to drop my set at his house.

Back home Rox is waiting. My bowels do the jig one more time before I take a Spasmend and hop in the car. Traffic fucking traffic. Drop and go. The Spasmend hasn’t touched sides and as my spirit once tried to climb out of my body whilst in transit on a plane I’m only slightly concerned. Find airport clinic and have a Valium shot which makes everything just dandy. Lovely flight. Picked up by friend going the same way at OR Thambo Airport, Johannesburg, and hit the road to Botswana. Still calm as a cucumber even though she overtakes like a racing car driver.

Arrive at borderpost five hours later, just as the rain sets in. Huge dubble decker grey clouds that resemble the oros man merge overhead. Thunder. Lightning. Damn I missed this place! The air smells fresh, it’s still warm even though it’s pouring with rain. Instant homecoming party. By 7pm we arrive on the farm and the Valium finally wears off. Greet everyone, have some tea. Carry belongings down to the lodge in the rain. Mud splatters up my legs and within half an hour of being there I’m already filthy. This will be a consistent state of affairs for the rest of the week.

Pass out at 9pm in a mudhut at the bottom of a farm in one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever visited, thankful for the discovery of a mosquito net. Water spiders sit flush against the wall. A small oil lamp burns deep into the night and I fall asleep to the sound of frogs gurgling their songs in a dam on the farm next door.

Warning

2010-02-23T11:11:00.000-08:00

WARNING:

Now I would love to tell you all the gory details of what transpires on a weekend like this, but as I’m sure you will notice in my entries there will be key elements that I am purposefully excluding.

Sangoma ceremonies are sacred and I could never do it justice by writing about it (although I promise to do my best!). Also, I am forbidden to divulge the finer details about what we do to anyone, especially on the internet.

But the essence of what it feels like, that I can share.

Here goes.

The Wild North.

2010-02-23T11:09:00.000-08:00

My ancestors seem determined to get me to Botswana.

Yes I have no money. Yes I’ve just come back from the US where I spent 6 months travelling like a woman of luxury. Yes I should stick around and get a job, but a friend has offered to help me pay for my plane ticket to Jozi and I’ve gotten a lift from there to just outside Gabarone where there is a beautiful farm that I attempt to visit around this time once a year for the past 8 years and I’m going, come hell or high water.

The itinerary includes the final ceremony for two Malombo thwasanas, after which they will be fully qualified doctors. It also includes a yearly ritual of closing and re-opening for our lodge. It is a ceremony of thanksgiving. There will be dancing, beading, hard work, lots of people 40 degree (and up) heat, and the most beautiful blue sky you’ve ever laid eyes on.

Nothing in the world can fill me up in quite the same way. That place is where I find my community.

I’m comin home Pappy!

So long Marianne

2010-02-15T11:37:00.000-08:00

I'm off then!
To the land of Botswana where I will spend the week wireless (in the most extreme sense).

Happy tidings to you all, I'll be back on the 23rd with detailed updates.

Till we meet again,
Alice

Lovers lost.

2010-02-15T11:27:00.000-08:00

My korean neighbours are very sweet. They spend alot of time playing ping pong in their lounge and by the sounds of it they're rather competitive about it. I could be wrong about that, my Korean is non-existant. My assumption is based purely on the amount of screeching I am privy to, living right across the hall you see.

For the rest Mom cooks up enough garlic to ambush the vampire headquarters of Tableview and take them out instantly with one waft of her pot.

All hopes of taking a vampiric lover have been dashed then Universe.
(I hope you have something even better up your sleeve.)

Rivers and rivers.

2010-02-15T01:36:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I go to Botswana for a week. It’s a yearly custom, everyone from my Sangoma lodge goes to ground, attend the necessary ceremonies, connect back in.

My memory of being there last year is of sitting in the bush crying because my relationship was falling apart and I already knew that some kind of separation was unavoidable. It was the beginning of the end, but it still took another 5 months for me to gather enough strength to leave and go overseas.

I’ve been crying for a year.

I think that’s enough now.

2010-02-14T09:50:00.000-08:00

Becoming a shaman then is, in the last analysis, nothing but an extension of inner purification. The more transparent the inner world, the more transparent the outer, and the greater the power of magic.

Purification, Transparency and Magic are the core words of shamanism.

-Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men
by Holger Kalweit

Travel

2010-02-14T09:46:00.000-08:00

The supreme principle of being is the change back and forth between accumulation and emptying, filling and purging, space and emptiness.

The greater the emptiness, the greater the shaman.
- Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men
by Holger Kalweit

Run Lola Run

2010-02-12T22:33:00.000-08:00

Going for a run on the Blouberg boardwalk on a Friday afternoon turns out to be not that great.

Where there are usually a myriad of people frantically jogging, running and cycling up and down the beach, today there were zero none besides for yours truly.

The reason?
It’s Friday afternoon and they all have a social life.

Universe,
If you're out there, hear my plea!

You can send in the horses now.
I’m done with being singular.

The Dress.

2010-02-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you are familiar with this experience:

Every time you go off in search of new outfit you return with a collection of items that are all two sizes too small. Why, do you ask (the one sane person over there in the corner) would you do that? Ah. Yes. Why indeed.

The truth is that I have nothing to do with this decision you see. It’s my tricksy mind that does the work. Once the conscious part of my brain realised that I no longer fit into a size 38 it closed up shop and stopped communicating. Things have never been the same between us. It refuses to come shopping with me which means that when you meet me in a mall all I am is an empty vessel, a zombie of sorts in desperate need of clothes that fit.

It's like a weird kind of stroke obliterated the part of my mind that knew that I could in fact be even larger than I had feared I could become and there was nothing I could do about it.

I now have an entire wardrobe filled to the brim with things I can’t wear. The most loaded item is a beautiful black dress I bought for a small fortune and that I’ve never worn outside the confines of my room. Do you have that dress? The one you buy because one day you’ll fit into it and when you do you’re going to look just gorgeous and so it sits in your cupboard year after year and every time you see it you’re reminded of the devilish pact you made and it depresses you to no end because the chances of you ever looking good in it becomes slimmer by the day...

The dress looks at you as if to say: “You’re a money waster, lard ass,” at which point you start humming a little upbeat tune and quickly pick up the stretchy pants you wear most days that still has a label in it reading size 38 but you know just know that it's gotten much much bigger over the last12 years...

And then you one day my friends, one day you come back from a long and lovely trip from abroad and you fit into your clothes, and you’re not sure if it’s the trip that did it or the part where you pined yourself half to death but you don’t care because either way it worked and now all you have to do is to hold on to it, hold on to your new body that’s at least 2 sizes smaller than it has been in the past 10 odd years without obsessing over it.

And perhaps when you go to that wedding next month, perhaps you can throw on a little black dress you've been hanging onto, just in case.

A whole new world.

2010-02-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

One of my oldest friends joined a high class escort service whilst I was running around North America. She’d been unemployed for like 6 months when she finally decided that maybe her morals weren’t quite as high as she’d originally projected them to be. She’d had a couple of threesomes and saw no problem with it, enjoyed sex and was clear about what she would and wouldn’t feel comfortable doing (meaning that poo-ing in her mouth is a no-no). So with a renewed sense of optimism she set off to go and find somewhere classy and incognito where she could call herself Wanya, fake a Russian accent and make poodles out of cash. She dreamt of living in a great big apartment in the centre of town. She was ready to grab whoever wanted to be grabbed by the balls and yank it. Hard.

Back in my UCT days we often heard tales of students who worked as strippers and put themselves through varsity with the money they made. Nice girls, sometimes even ones who came from rich homes did this to the delight of their friends, throwing their skinny and taught bodies around onstage, high on the crowds’ response. I always secretly envied those girls, imagining what it might be like to dance naked in front of a room full of men. Life lived always beats the sidelines, but I never had the stripper experience and project with certainty that now that I’m 34 the chances of me dancing naked (for that matter even fully clothed) infront of a room full of men is very, very slim. I am no Diablo Cody.

I now have three friends who have swayed before the lure of easy cash for sexual favors. The latest edition is one hot mama. With a body like that people throw money at her just for being around. Besides for the body she got herself some Brain. This woman has more self esteem than five of me put together.

The agency she’s found is an internet-based escort service. Their clientele are high class businessmen from abroad who are looking for dates to take to business functions and the like. The owners of said establishment charge their clients a flat fee for the privilege to have a beautiful woman on their arm. What happens after the party is negotiated by you and you take all the money that you make in that arena. They want nothing to do with it and make this plain to the girls they employ.

On my return from the US I found said woman moping about in her house, lamenting life.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said sadly, “I’m not even a good whore. I joined the site two months ago already and I’ve only been on two dates. I thought I would’ve been loaded by now, I mean, isn’t that how it’s supposed to work when you have sex for money?” She paused and stroked her long shapely legs deep in thought, looking mournful and kinda cute.
“That’s… just terrible,” I said with a look of understanding. “Just terrible. So um… did you sleep with either of those guys?”
“God no!” she said, suddenly all fired up. “Not for all the money in the world, thank you very much. I mean they were both fat. Guys who pay for dates often need to because they’re so butt ugly. No no no I didn’t sleep with either of them, but I’ve met some very interesting people though.” She then proceeded to tell me about the functions she attended and practically gave me a lecture on the corporate material discussed. Aha, I thought to myself. No wonder they don’t come back. My friend is no tits and ass kind of girl. Nope, she’s self assured, certain of herself, has a flare for learning and excelling in life and there ain’t no one in the world who’s going to be able to take that away from her.

Dear Universe, I know have the contact details of a high-class escort agency which I could contact should all other job applications be rejected. I don’t know if I would be accepted (your body measurements have to be exact) but perhaps it is no accident that I became blonde on my return to SA? Perhaps I am being led by my new friend Marilyn. Perhaps all will be well, just not in the way I originally anticipated.

Universe, be honest. Are you trying to tell me something? Is this your way of getting me to have a social life again?

Your alert friend,
Alice

Book me.

2010-02-10T00:51:00.000-08:00

A book fetish can be a curse at the best of times.

I travelled the width and breadth of America lugging an assortment of soft- and hard covers with me, some of them bought believing that I would otherwise “never see them again” and that this was a “once in a lifetime opportunity” having briefly blocked out all knowledge or recollection of amazon.com and Kalahari.net

The smell of a brand new book beautifully bound, or an old one discovered in the back of a hidden shop and brought to light like a long forgotten poem to an old lover. Each one is a world within a world, a secret to some greater puzzle. What’s not to like.

I can hear the wild call of The Bookshop over the noise of a building site, hear the soft whimper of a discarded novel left lying under a hostel bed like a used-out whore whose services are no longer needed. They entice me.

I returned from the US with no less than 20 odd new collectables. Now when I use the term “collectables” I use it very loosely. I could have picked up “Fearless Fourteen” by Janet Evanovich in South Africa easier than genital warts from the postman yet the lure of buying it at a little shop in San Francisco was too much for me. (Besides for that I was bored and needed something to read you see.)

And so my collection grows. It’s my pride and joy. I love looking at them, running my hands over their backs, categorising them from time to time. They are my collection of orphans, and I am a very proud parent.

During my second week in residence in Stellenbosch I discovered a quaint little bookshop a little out of town that stocked an enormous amount of old Afrikaans poetry books. In high school I was an avid drama student and once a week would attend class with a wonderful woman called Aletta Gericke, an old stalwart of South African theatre with a passion for literature. She single-handedly educated me in South African authors and gave me a love for their work and the sound of it rolling around in my mouth. There they were, a collection of books I hadn’t seen since 1992, all nestled together in a bookcase by the entrance. I simply had to have them, regardless of the fact that I haven’t worked in about 10 months and still don’t have a job and my money is starting to run extremely thin I simply closed my eyes, reached out, took their little hands and told them to come home with me.

We’re friends now. Every morning when I traipse into my office they wave and I wave back. Sometimes I softly caress them, a look of pride glinting in my eyes. Some nights they even join me in the bedroom.

Yes. I believe this is called a fetish people.

Week 2

2010-02-09T11:06:00.000-08:00

Few things brighten my day like when I meet someone new and interesting.

In the spirit of community I slipped letters under all my new neighbours' doors urging them to be kind to my cats and to call me up if they like. Now: asking a Capetonian to call you (especially by slipping a letter under their door) is about the same as spitting into the wind and hoping it will transform into a piece of cheese. That's right people, it's just not going to happen. Well, true as bobbery, my one neighbour called me! (She turned out to be from Jozi though, and so my world can keep on spinning and the planets are still aligned.)

What a nice yet tiny lady. Her head reaches all the way up to my thighs when she stands on her toes on top of a chair. She has electric blue eyes and her jeans must be a size -0. Freshly divorced she moved into my block 3 months ago to be closer to her new lover who's an ah-tist. That's how she says it, with that look that says "he's really exotic-like, you know?" She's a feisty little ball of dynamite, I'm sure she drives men completely crazy. The smallest little hot elf lady I ever did see.

We drank Rose and talked about men and art and Afrikaans people and Melkbos and sales and Christianity and all and all whilst her two kids watched Ice Age and complained about how loud we were talking. More Rose, more talking. She has great furniture, the kind that sidles up to you and says "hi" in a languid kind of way that makes you wonder why you don't have the same couch in your house because it seems it just utterly belongs there.

Now I'm not big on kids but hers are kind of sweet. The little girl had two stick on tattoos on her arms and was wearing silver shoes with heels. Her little brother was falling happily all over the show and eating his food off the floor with glee whilst we sipped Rose and giggled.

Nice lady, nice kids, nice neighbours! Praise be for that. Naturally no one else called. They must all have been living in Cape Town for longer than 15 seconds and known that it would be downright wrong to communicate with me in any direct way. I've seen some of them though. They duck and hide, but they can't get away from this sharp Mama. Right across from me is a Korean family whom I've seen only snatches of, but they seem really kind even though it sometimes feels like they spend their days cooking too much garlic and play ping pong past the reasonable hour. That sound... it could drive one over the edge.

Ok, so there's one part of a new story. I've made a new friend. Now all I need is a couple more I guess. Then the fab new job and the hot new man.

Any day now people...

(The view of Table Mountain from Bloubergstrand.)

Week 1.

2010-02-06T23:56:00.000-08:00

A move, a birthday the reacquisition of two cats and a downright nasty case of pms. It’s been quite a week.

Alice has officially settled down in one spot which continues to feel rather unreal. Boxes have been unpacked, crockery neatly stacked in kitchen cupboards. Nails have been whacked into walls and familiar pictures hung whilst the cats slowly feel out the neighbourhood and the local birds hold their breath.

The first week was privy to two parties: One for me and one for me Ancestors. Friends came over, brought presents, ooh'd and aah'd over the new flat. Plants arrived, a new mat for the front door. A blondie shirt, a small pink wallet with a gold lining. I put down medicine to chase out the old and bring in the new. It’s amazing how quickly you can become part of a place.

I applied for a real job this week, a full time placement, a nine to fiver. I’ve never had one of those. I’m officially 34 and I’ve never had a full time job...

Slowly I solidify. Different parts of me melt back into one another to form one blob of liquid. I become grounded. Let’s hope I don’t dry out and turn to stone before the end of the week.

Could it be true? Could this be it? Is life about to get dull and boring again?

Please Universe, please say it isn’t so.

Movement.

2010-01-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Alice is a mover.

She's not a shaker yet, but give her a week or two.

For today she's just smiling, smiling and smiling, and communicating telepathically with her cats. (Don't worry my babies, I'm on my way, I'm coming to get you, it's not long now.)

Yeeeeeeehaaaw!

Look up

2010-01-30T00:57:00.000-08:00

It becomes obvious.

When traveling your eyes are always searching for a new skyline. Your head is up, your attention projected. The picture that grows around you is fresh and wide, it stretches as far as the eye can see and so your world becomes bigger and you automatically stop worrying about the little things.

When you live in one place your world shrinks and your eyes follow the pavement. You know the scenery and stop paying attention. You obsess about the little things.

There really is no competition here people.

A prayer

2010-01-30T00:47:00.000-08:00

Amadlozi, we call you

The old ones
Who still clamber around in our bones
The old ones
Who’s blood rushes through us
The old ones
Who know the sound of our voices
And the thud of our footsteps
On the ground
The Ones we knew
Whose names we still howl in the night
And the Ones who we’ve forgotten
Who still watch us from the shadows
And cry for our forgetfulness.

Badimo,
I have not forgotten you,
See for yourselves.
Here is your child,
I crawl ever closer to your ears
And bring the food that you crave.
See for yourselves,
There is the beer,
And there is the whiskey,
And there is the snuff.
I have not forgotten about you.
Madlozi

The architect.

2010-01-27T01:52:00.000-08:00

Five more days of limbo. Life encroaches.

Monday the movers come. They will delve out the boxes, bags, tables and chairs found stacked in the garage and escort them to a newly rented flat in Bloubergstrand. By lunchtime everything accumulated over the years should once again be assembled in the same place. Money will be handed over, the sound of a truck pulling off. Then silence.

In the afternoon I will uncover a past life that’s been waiting mutely in boxes, covered in dust, and as I unpack each one memories will surface (then disperse like clouds overhead). A jumble of forgotten furniture, clothes, my gran’s brown crockery. A book filled with pictures from another life: a happy couple on the beach, at home.

I will re-arrange my life, putting up paintings against the walls, arranging the lounge just so. Friends will come over and throw themselves down on the couch, talk about this and that. It will be my house they’re visiting, my space, my life.

Within a week or two the old contexts of those things will dissolve and I will return to an older version of myself. The girl who lived in Wynberg. The one who runs a business, who writes, jogs, watches dvd’s, goes to the beach, meets with friends, life goes on.

I am the architect of my own existence, picking the elements I want to keep, turning them over in my hands like precious stones, and chasing out of the ones that are no longer useful like old ghosts.

New elements, dynamics, hopes and dreams. New world. New day.

New Alice.

Unfortunately.

2010-01-26T11:41:00.000-08:00

When you join two people who are both in pieces, they don't necessarily make one hole human being.

Bliss me.

2010-01-24T00:29:00.000-08:00

After having lived the life of a virgin for going on a year now, the idea of bliss and where to find it has become a prominent preoccupation for yours truly.

There are few things at first glance that have the ability to bliss one out to the same extent as a good and proper rodgering by someone you adore. However, the person in question needs to be very familiar and comfortable with the workings of their own gearbox, your wiring, the labelling of your buttons and your heating system in order for the bliss factor to happen. It is often necessary to supply them with a map and if they still struggle you might have to show them exactly where the gold has been buried in order to get all blissed out. Worthwhile work my friends, worthwhile work.

When this kind of attention to one’s under carriage isn’t an option, you have to start looking around for other things that might evoke a similar reaction. Similar in the sense that it leaves you feeling relaxed, calmed and satisfied, somehow connected to the world and yourself. Blissed my friends, that’s what I’m talking about.

For a long time I thought that alcohol blissed me out, but I’ve finally realised that it actually just makes me drunk and later hung-over and depressed.

Jogging blisses me out. By the end of a nice long jog through the leafy suburbs of Stellenbosch my brain switches off and my body becomes warm and radiant. It took me a long time to realise that exercise was a bliss zone. For most of my twenties I looked for bliss in every self destructive thing I could lay my hands on. I'm glad I'm not 20 anymore.

One of my goals for the year is to take up yoga – I have it on good authority that it will have the desired effect. Writing a fabulous blog entry has the ability to bliss me out. The idea of living with my cats again, that blisses me out.

A wish: may my life be filled with bliss from morning to night. May I find it in places that supply the real deal. Good quality, 100% bliss in a can. May I have it on hand whenever I need it.

Bliss me Universe, bliss me.

In retrospect.

2010-01-23T10:06:00.000-08:00

One of the most basic meditation techniques goes as follows:

Sit comfortably. Breathe deeply. When you are relaxed and calm, look around the room where you are seated, concentrate on each thing that you observe around you and name it out loud. A cupboard, a table, a chair.

By naming these things you instantly pull yourself into the moment and become present. This is the goal of any meditation technique: to be fully present and aware of your surroundings. To stop living in the past or the future. To trick your brain for long enough to really appreciate the beauty of the here and now, and if you could manage to do that you would live without attachment and in peace. You would be able to completely accept, absorb and let go.

Whilst doing research for a project I read up about the meaning of swans and it turns out they're a symbol of spiritual enlightenment. Buddhist masters are referred to as “Paramahansa” which means “Great swan” because the swan is able to live on the water but it’s feathers remain dry. The swan lives in this world but doesn’t get attached to it. It soars to the skies as easily as it swims on top of the water. The swan is a symbol of graceful detachment.

Travel brings you into a state of constant meditation because everything is new. You spend your days walking around strange places, observing, taking pictures, naming. This is a cathedral, a strange person, a big shop. This a famous bridge, a potential friend, an unknown place. Your body goes into a state of alertness, because in the unknown lies threat, a bit of distrust. You are ripped out of your comfort zone. You can't get attached to anything because you know that tomorrow or the next day you'll be moving on again. You become a zen master.

However, the repetition of newness also becomes predictable, and so at some point it becomes advisable to do the opposite, just to keep you on your toes and all. I go back to predictability. Live in one place, drive the same way everyday, have a clear routine. I'm amazed at how much detail everyday possesses, how much I previously missed.

I go for lunch with my cousin. She tells me about a couple who walked across the continent. It took them three years. She tells me about their trials, the people they met, the lives they lived. Under the table I can feel my toes curling up and my heartbeat quickening. I know that no matter how difficult their time might have been they will remember their trip in detail for the rest of their lives. I envy them. I want more.

I can't begin to tell you in how many ways my trip has changed my views about life, myself, the world. It's woken a sleepy monster in me that won't allow me to sit around for too long. Don’t hoard too many possessions, it says. Live light. Don’t get too attached.

Surprise yourself.

In search of.

2010-01-22T22:09:00.000-08:00

Freedom is something that mostly happens out of context.

Companions

2010-01-21T00:04:00.000-08:00

I dream about my cats.

In 12 days they will once again be shacking up with me, 8 months after my departure. I feel like the children are coming home from the war I’m so excited. I want to buy them a big jungle gym, feed them only chicken for weeks on end, dream up recipes for cats and publish a cooking book.

Will they still remember me? I try to remember the way I used to speak to them, our private lives. When I see them I’ll remember.

What if they don’t want me anymore? What if they’ve forgotten me? What if they pine for their garden in Melkbos and my new flat is too small for them? What if they pine for their kitty friends who reside their with them? What if it doesn’t work?

I imagine that they dreamt of me last night. Our dreams intersected and they woke up this morning thinking of me, knowing that I will be coming for them sometime soon.

I’m coming my babies, I’m coming!

Future: uncertain

2010-01-20T06:35:00.000-08:00

Home: check
Mover: check
Furniture: check
Stuff: check
Money: hmmm
Job: Nope
Balls: check

Lover: Vacancy. Apply within

Overhaulin

2010-01-19T00:19:00.000-08:00

Some relationships are clear cut and easy to explain. You are my mother, my friend, my lover. The mechanics and rules inherent to it never change. These types of relationship are predictable, that’s why we need them, but there are some relationships that don’t fall into any one category, blending from one to the other and back again. They are more dangerous than the others but much, much more fascinating.

I spend Sunday sitting with an old friend who is giving my computer an overhaul. I ask him to fix one or two minor things but the more he checks the more he finds and it ends up taking hours. I sit on his bed and watch DSTV whilst he fingers my equipment and stares deeply into my screen.

I’ve known him since I was 15. We met one vacation by the sea and fell crazy in love. It was doomed from the start. He lived in Bloem, I was in Jozi, then he moved to George and I moved to Cape Town. In 2000 he got married and moved to Cape Town and so our relationship changed and grew into a friendship of sorts.

Whilst I went off in search of adventure in the US he got divorced from his wife of 9 years and so for the first time in a long time we now live in the same town and are both single. We’ve both changed, we’re not the same children we were on that beach in 1992, but I can still see the 18 year old boy who didn’t want to go to the army, the rebel, the artist. I can see it in his eyes when he smiles. I can see it when he talks about his kids.

He plays me his favorite music: Paganini, Stef Bos. We drink wine, sit on the porch watching the kittens play with each other on the grass and laugh at their antics. Whilst he upgrades my computer we sling insults around and talk about everything. I remember how in love with him I was at one point of my life, how I cried and yearned for him. I remember going to visit him by bus in Bloemfontein and how I believed he was my destiny. When he’s finally done my laptop is brand new, clean and virus free.

He is not my friend, not my lover, and it's been like that for over 16 years.

A one of a kind relationship.

Horses and demons.

2010-01-16T23:30:00.000-08:00

Over the years it's become obvious that most of my girlfriends go for a specific type of guy: the joker, the bad boy, the wild man, the doctor, the guy with tattoos. Every new boyfriend might for an instant appear to be different, but soon you discover that he’s exactly the same cup of tea as the previous one, just dressed in a slightly different outfit. Sheeps and wolves come to mind here.

I’m a “dark horse” kind of girl, nothing thrills me more than a man with a social inept-ness that can’t do a 9 to 5 job and writes bad poetry in his spare time. The list of famous dark horse types I aspire to sleeping with include Dr House (otherwise known as Hugh Laurie) Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Tom Robbins.

The only man I really felt even vaguely attracted to whilst I was in the US of A was a man in his late 40’s who was a philandering womaniser who drove his wife up the wall. However, he looked spot on like Tom Waits, had more brains than all the people in the room put together and painted like a demon. I had to leave the party in order to cool down.

My list of previous engagements with men read like a who’s who of Dark Horsey-ness. There’s been a musician, a dope head, a magician, a small town boy, an artist… All of them sporting some kind of addiction, history of abuse, depression and the like.

The one that pushed my buttons the deepest dragged me home with him the first night we met to "show me his collection of David Lynch movies", and so I sat watching Eraserhead whilst he kissed me up and down my neck and told me about the genius of the filmmaker in question and his travels to Spain. Night after night I would listen to him philosophying with his Spanish mentor in the restaurant where I worked and without even realising it I became obsessed with him, his leather jackets, his sad eyes. He was so big, so strong, and yet so vulnerable at the same time. It was round 2002 that he overdosed purposefully on heroine.

See, there are a number of problems with dating this specific type of man. Off the bat they aren't that easy to track down and once you do, they're often non-committal jittery types who don't like to be pinned down for too long or don't want you to interfere with their art regime. Besides for that they are often anti-social types so where the hell are you supposed to meet them I ask you???

Oh, dark horse man, I'm over here in my room if you need me. Just leave a message on the door or something, and someone will get back to you sometime soon. Perhaps we can meet up Dark Horse... Perhaps...

Give

2010-01-15T23:01:00.000-08:00

Miracles do happen.

Yesterday, more than 2 months after Standard Bank deducted unautherised charges off my account, I was finally reimbursed. If you remember correctly it was the second time this happened on my travels except that the first time my money got paid back within 48 hours…

I don’t know if I’m supposed to laugh or cry about it but I'm happy to have gotten it back right this second. Still work-less, still in limbo, but the future is starting to look bright at least. The world has slowly started to notice that I’m back, like I’ve been dawdling in a dark corner where no one could see me. The world slowly opens its fist and starts to give again. My feet grow back into the African soil and I start to bloom again.

Yesterday I had one of those days that I pined for so often overseas: visiting good friends, having a laugh, just hanging out. I looked at my friends and thought: You are awesome. Don't ever go away. Please stay.

I'm mad, you're mad, we're all mad here.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Momentum

2010-01-12T23:16:00.000-08:00

Alice has found a home.

(See me dancing the jig, stripping down naked, running out in the street and hollering like a banshee.)

As of the 1st of Feb I will once again inhabit a hole of my own, with cats, in Bloubergstrand.

How long has it been? 8 months in the end, all that time leaning on other people, depending on them to take me, drive me, feed me and house me. Ah yes, it was good being a homeless bum. (I will always remember you homeless bum. Respect.)

The hole in question is situated conveniently close to friends, the fabulous beach, the shops, yoga classes and pretty much everything else that an Alice might desire.

Indeed, my Ancestors have been good to me even though I could have been kinder to them over the last couple of months.

Watch out world. I’m gathering momentum.

Niknaks

2010-01-12T06:03:00.000-08:00

The first Thursday of the month means FREE HAIR DAY at Poxy’s salon. Employees are allowed to bring family in the late afternoon to have their hair done and I do believe out of all of them Poxy has the most. There’s me (not really a relative) her cousin (who’s name I can never remember) and Kitty and Honey who’ve adopted Pox since she moved down here a couple of months ago. Today it’s just me and the cousin who arrive and qeue up excitedly for our turn. What in the world could make me happier.

Now, they say it's free hair day but really it's free blonde day. Everywhere you look there are family members getting the crap bleached out of their skulls and looking really pleased about it. Yup, you guessed it. Me and the cousin are totally keen and so when Poxy says “Sit down,” we hit the chairs as she clearly wants to get this over with asap.

The first time I got my hair bleached it was really quite pleasant. Nothing major, she put stuff on my hair, I sat around, read a mag a yazoom! Hair as white as the lilies of the field. The second time was not quite as calm.

Poxy chucked the white stuff on and then got involved with her cousin’s highlights whilst I disappeared into a mag. After about half an hour she tapped me on the shoulder. She was frowning and looking at my head. “It’s dried you know, which means it’s probably going to go yellow.” She said this in an accusational tone, like I had some mysterious hand in it, like my scalp is too warm or something. “You need more bleach doll,” reaching for the pot of Omo paste and layering more goo onto my head.

It took about 30 seconds for me to start bouncing around the salon like a delusional puppy. Oh. The. Pain. It felt like a thousand warring ants have invaded the country of my head. “Don’t scratch!” she screamed everytime I reached up. “It’s going to blister if you do that!”

Oh misery. Yellow hair and no scalp. The only thing that could possibly cheer me up was looking at the girl a couple of rows down whose hair had just come out a lovely shade of niknaks.

“Is it very yellow?” she asked anxiously, her eyes darting around the room. “No dahling no, nothing we can’t fix,” one of the hairdesses chirped from the side and I thought to myself: Never, ever have your hair done by that one. There are few things as evil as a hairdresser who lies.

Maestro Poxy toned my hair (and scalp) and wha-la! I was once again a natural blonde.

Now if only my scalp will grow back before the next Free Hair Day…

Sing it.

2010-01-11T12:11:00.000-08:00

Freedom. The idea of it haunts me. Whilst driving in my car, going for a walk, before I go to sleep. It’s always there scratching at the walls of my grey matter, an itch I can never quite reach. I went in search of freedom when I left for America and I’m still not sure I ever found it. Bits of it perhaps, small sweet morsels that I savored and rolled over my tongue, but inevitably it melted away before I could identify any of the defining traits of it and so I'm back to square #1.

Over breakfast Poxy does my numerology chart and my root number ends up being 5. She flips through her book and opens a page with a big heading that reads: “Don’t cage me in.” Yes, I decide. I am a 5. Don’t cage me in. Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t marry me. Don’t have babies with me. Don’t expect the same reply from me everyday. Don’t become predictable. Don’t put me in a box. Don’t define me as one thing only. Don’t assume to know me. Don't expect too many things of me. Don’t don’t don’t.

Ever since I’ve been back in SA I have had little good to say about being here, but the truth is that when I went abroad I gained one freedom and lost the other. I gained America but lost all sense of privacy because I had to live with people in small confined spaces for most of my trip. I had to give up my own head space completely and perhaps that was the most difficult thing to do. In many respects I lost my independance because I consistently needed other people to take me, drive me around and feed me. At the same time I gained the freedom of movement, of choosing where and when and for how long. I gained the privilege of snap decision, of very little responsibility except to myself. I had to pay a price for it though.

Today I signed a 1 year lease on a flat that will cost me twice as much as the one I lived in before with half the features. My overheads will have more than doubled in the last six months, but hey, I am still a single woman without kids or a family. The only person I can really let down is myself. I am jobless at the moment, a small fact I might be able to remedy but it still remains to be seen. It’s starting to knaw at me. My sleep cycle has gone to the birds and my brain spins like a hamster on a wheel when the lights go out.

I go for tea at a friend’s house and she encourages me to get a full time job. “I just think you’ll be great in that kind of set-up,” she says. “You know, working with a group, being in an office, that sort of thing.” I cringe. The idea of spending every single day in the same place with the same people doing exactly the same thing is enough to bring on nausea. Meeting with a crew once or twice a week and working on my own for the rest of the time, no there’s a recipe I can deal with. Send me on assignment for God's sake, let's pretend I'm 007 for a second and you can send me to as many tropical islands as you like, but just please, please don't put me into an office for 8 hours a day.

Perhaps I lie to myself about all of this. The question becomes: what is freedom? How does one define it? How does Nelson Mandela live in a cage for so many years and come out being so nice. How do people go to war, live as slaves and still come out smiling and having joy inside of them? Their secret surely is the realisation that no one can cage you in and that any perception that you might have that suggests that you are not free is an illusion. Can someone please upgrade my hard drive?

Maybe I’ve watched the Matrix a couple times too many. Maybe I read too many self-help books. Maybe I’m just a privileged girl from a rich family who thinks she is privy to too much.

To Alice there is nothing more important than freedom.

Feedback.

2010-01-10T10:48:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago I posted two entries on my blog. Luckily a reader soon posted a comment about it that made me realise that it was perhaps too close to the bone and so I removed both of them within an hour or two.

However, I would like to address one of this reader’s statements. As you may or may not know, I work as a traditional doctor (in Africa known as a Sangoma). Part of this work is doing bone-readings which is a way of tracking a person’s cycles and patterns, thereby giving them insight into situations and sometimes even possible future outcomes. This particular reader stated that he/she had been a client of mine before and that they were confused as to why I couldn’t have summed the situation in question up better if I have access to bone readings and work as a healer myself. Surely, they thought, I should have known better than to walk into such a destructive situation, surely I should have known what the outcome would be?

Dear reader, it is always easier to have perspective about other people’s lives than it is to have it in your own. We all have our own lessons to learn and if you believe that I am devoid of that you are sorely mistaken. Just like you I can be very vulnerable and sometimes believe what I want to believe rather than what the actual reality of the matter might be. Suffice to say that the event I mentioned had a very positive effect at the end of the day,helping me to move on with my life, and for that I am very grateful.

Thank you for reading, coming with me on my journey, and keep posting your comments.

It means a lot to hear your thoughts.

Alice.

I'll be back.

2010-01-08T08:40:00.000-08:00

Dear Lovelies,

The strangest thing happened today.

I was outside playing in the garden of our house in Benoni with my sister and our new kitten, Dinah, when I fell flat on my face on the paving in the driveway and passed out cold for at least 30 seconds.

Now my sister says she tried to revive me but she's always had it in for me. I'm certain she left me there for dead whilst I was dreaming the weirdest collection of shit you could possibly imagine.

America... Dishes... I don't know. Suffice to say it was detailed and long and kinda nice, but then I woke up. Someone had chucked a bucket of icy water in my face and I sat up like a revived corpse, all stiff-like and gasping.

Dreaming. It’s a funny thing you know. At some point you always wake up.

Today was that day for me.

I’m back ladies and gentleman.

I’m back.

The Hot-ness.

2009-12-31T07:32:00.000-08:00

If assy blondes are your bag you better buy a ring cause I ain't gonna last long on this shelf over here.

I recommend you come and witness the extent of my assy blond-ness by coming to watch me jog between 5 - 6 at night. Now hold on you eager beaver. You have to stand in line. That's right, qeue up buddy. There are other drunk and homeless people who like to watch my junk jump.

That's right. It jumps. I know this because it was shouted at me as I jogged by a collection of men who have teeth missing, smell like pee and could be my father. Wait, that's not fair. That one guy might have been fifteen for all I know. Dirt, lack of sleep and abusing substances from the time you can say "pass the glue" would age the best of us.

Happy new year friends.

May TwentyZen bring out the best in all of us.

love and appreciation,

Alice

Sylvia Plath

2009-12-30T11:53:00.000-08:00

Elm
for Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? ----

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults

That kill, that kill, that kill.

Dinner.

2009-12-30T10:08:00.000-08:00

Feeling unhealthy?

Is nutrition sorely lacking in your diet??

Why not make that old family favorite tonight:

TUNA DORITO SURPRISE!!

Let me pass on the secret recipe to you, as taught to me by my food gurus at the Burning Man.

Ingredients:

Ramen noodles (or 2 minute noodles in SA)

Canned tuna

Doritos (your favorite flavor)

Meex it up.

Chow it down.

Voila!

(Guaranteed to put a smile on your face when you're a broke-ass bitch.)

I know what comes next.

2009-12-29T23:44:00.000-08:00

It’s the comfort that I’m afraid of. And the predictability standing behind it and patting me on the back.

Too much comfort will kill you people. The most comfortable you’re ever going to be is when you lie down in that big wooden box one day and get lowered into the ground where no one can disturb you. Now that's comfort.

Let's think for a moment on the characteristics of Life:

Movement is a biggy. You stop moving, you're out of the game.
Followed closely by action. Think about any book/movie/play you have recently gone to see. The good ones are action packed. No one cares about watching someone talking their head off, no. We want to see them physically struggle with something, otherwise it's not really that interesting.
Breathing. Which causes your chest to move and is deepened and activated by action in the body.

Ofcourse you can get by with the minimum of all of the above, but do you really want to?

My life before I went to the US was more predictable than time. There was nothing, and I do mean nothing that happened that was surprising, exciting or fun. My life had turned into a giant cushion of comfort and security and I was the main feature. And when I say main I mean big. Large. Spreading exponentially. I closely resembled the cushion towards the end.

I could feel it happening but thought nothing of it at first. We all know the drill: you move in with someone and instantly drop into homemaker mode. You nest. You spend time together at your new home because you're so goddamn proud of it. You think it's ok because you're not going to sit on that couch forever, it's just for a bit till you get over the nesting phase, which should happen at any moment except it doesn't and your life becomes smaller and smaller and smaller until you don't know how or when it happened and there's no going back.

At some point about a year down the line I knew it was happening and I tried to move things a bit. I started walking and jogging, but it didn't really help seeing as the high point of my day was what I was cooking for dinner. Seriously, some days I would go to buy food just so I could see other people. (If you are considering working from home I hope you have a live-in family or good friends that live real close by.) No matter what I did I couldn't jolt myself out of that place. I just couldn't shake it.

The only way I could bring myself back to life was to give it all up. It was a high price to pay, and I'm still paying it, but perhaps that's why I value it so much.

I don’t want to go back to Comfort Land. I want to stay active, stay surprised by the world around me. I want to remain an adventurer regardless of what happens. How do you do that when you live in one place and drive to work everyday the same way to do a job you’ve done for years and can do with your eyes closed? How do you do it without going completely bonkers?

I’m scared, dear reader. Before I left I was going to bed at 9pm and getting up around 6am. Then I would have a little snooze in the afternoon, after having read some of my book. I would listen to classical music a lot and spend enormous chunks of time on my own, and guess what I’ve spent most of my last week doing???
Please Universe, please. Don’t let me go back there. Help me to create a new life, to find a new challenge. Help me to better myself, to live life to the full, to grab it in both my hands and savour every single moment of it.
There is so much to see out there, the world is so big.

Only slightly scared out of my wits,

Alice

Yearn.

2009-12-29T02:06:00.000-08:00

Today I dream of far away places.

There’s an ashram in India where I scrub the floors for hours on end and meditate for the rest.
An Irish pub where I’m hanging out with my work colleagues.
In Scotland I meet the most beautiful man in the world.
In Peru I become a monk and live a pious life surrounded by mountains.
In Australia I hike up a gorge and when I look over my shoulder it’s just wild wild wild.
In America I live on a farm in New Mexico and grow my own vegetables.

This time I would know what to pack. I would get better bags and buy an ipod before I leave. A new pair of sneakers would be good, I already have a netbook...

I dream. I dream.

Released.

2009-12-29T00:08:00.000-08:00

Today is Tuesday the 29th of December 2009.

One month has passed since I waved goodbye to the cousin, got on a plane and landed back in Cape Town 22 hours later where ye old dad was waiting for me.

So much has happened, so little.

This morning I finally managed to track down my favorite cushion from the mountain of my posessions gathering dust in the garage. I also finally managed to find my cd's which has made my day a smiley one.

Last night I had a 20 minute conversation with the X concerning posessions and cats - it's the longest we've spoken in 2 months - and this evening my trusted friend Poxy will swing by his house to get my stuff and bring them back to me.

One month exactly, to the day. A month spent praying, negotiating, fighting. Perhaps today I feel released of all things gone and past. And since I don't have to think about what was anymore I can finally really start thinking about the future.

I hope month 2 delivers a home and a job.

Or perhaps the opposite.

May it deliver the opportunity for more travel. (The lottery would be nice.) A new job abroad?

More than anything, I want new adventure, a challenge for yours truly.

Don't hold back Universe,

I'm ready when you are.

Take me to your dealer.

2009-12-28T10:58:00.000-08:00

Writing a blog when you have no life is an interesting dilemma. (Luckily I'm more of a "glass half full" kind of person, which is probably good under the circumstances.)

It's not the easiest thing in the world to enthrall a readership when you do little more than cruise the internet for a place to live, eat food, sleep, stare blankly at the wall...

I know. You're riveted aren't you.

Go on, admit it. You're sick to death hearing about me struggling to let go of the same old things, the same story over and over again.

Let me tell you, it's getting to me as well.

I need adventure. Some new juice in my bones.

Now if I could just find a dealer...

Anyone?

A balancing trick.

2009-12-27T00:23:00.000-08:00

Western ideology demonises the chaotic, the unpredictable, the cyclical, the feminine and the destructive element inherent in every single thing. In all other traditions (that I know of)the opposing nature of the world is embraced, praised and accepted as a fact of life. Voodoun, Greek mythology, Indian mythology, all of these pay tribute to the darkness, the Kingdom of death, destruction in all its different aspects.

Perhaps the fact that the society that I grew up in doesn’t acknowledge these things is partly responsible for the devastating way in which we deal with death, with turmoil in our own lives and the lives of those around us. We push it away, shove it under the carpet and refuse to fully acknowledge it, knowing somewhere in the depths of our being that it is the villain we need to keep at arm’s length. We don’t want to be associated with it. We fear the unknown.

Both the “good” and the “bad” are necessary in the creation of something whole. Is it surprising that the American preacher that everyone believed in was having a sexual affair with a man on the side? In my world view he was merely acting out of the base of his core, trying to naturally balance himself. Is it also so far fetched that celebrities set themselves up to fall time and time again? Tiger Woods, considered one of the most powerful men in the world, that he would be such a philandering womaniser, is it really such a surprise? Perhaps he was merely seeking to right the balance in his own existence. In truth, he has done a great job of it!

We all have interactions with the dark, be it through an experience in which we are abused, mugged, attacked or victimised or whether it only happens in our dreams, whether we create it for ourselves, we are always aware of it crawling on the periferies of our vision, just out of reach waiting for an opportunity to engage.

Should your life be lived in squalor and darkness, there will always be a ray of light somewhere on the perifery of your life, ready to stand in whenever you should require it. The world supplies us always with what we need, whether we like it or not. The world supports us in all its awesomeness.

As we live, we die. As we prosper, some part of ourselves seek out the destructive and the under handed to balance out the light. The more we try to hide it the more demanding it becomes, in fact, the more it may control our lives.

The darkness challenges us. It offers us power by ripping us apart. It gives us the opportunity to put ouselves back together in a new way we could never have done without dying a little.

The past six months ripped up my previous life down to the roots and I’ve fought it every single inch of the way, even though I wanted a new start so badly. Even though I asked for it.

Two days ago I finally gave up and stopped fighting.

I think I can breathe again now.

Accountability.

2009-12-26T01:38:00.000-08:00

I had not paid attention to it, but once Don Juan made me aware of it, I also noticed an incredible silence in the desert around the house.

"Don't get jumpy," he said calmly. "There is nothing in this world that a warrior cannot account for. You see, a warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he's clear and calm; judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything."

- Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda.

The sound of Bells.

2009-12-24T01:07:00.000-08:00

Dear Universe,

It's flippin Christmas! Which means time to eat, drink and be merry.
Mine will be spent with a psychologist who’s also a tarot reader, a lesbian who’s a medium, a medium who’s a hair colorist, three Americans and a pitbull. Parts of it will involve sushi, other parts barbequeing in Sea Point. (I might also get a free haircut out of the deal.)

This will be my first Christmas not spent with close family, either mine or my significant other’s. It means I have grown up this year. It means I hold my own.

Happy, happy Christmas to you, Universe. Thanks for the kicks, the dreams, the people and the laughs. Thanks for the pain, the suffering, the hardship and the joy. May we still be doing it this time next year.

Yours truly.

Burn the maps.

2009-12-23T10:30:00.000-08:00

I drive through the streets of Cape Town.
They map a tale of lost love
like a faded photograph
a song I used to sing.

I drive through
Stellenbosch
Kogel bay
Wynberg.

This is the street where we held hands.
Where we kissed.
Here we had a fight.
Here we laughed.
We talked.
We understood.
We witnessed.
We held.
We kissed.
We kissed.

I drive through Bloubergstrand
I drive through Melkbos
in the rain in December
and I think:
What a strange day for rain.

Your maps were burnt a long time ago.

I will need a cartographer
to etch out new lines on mine.

Bring it home.

2009-12-22T08:46:00.000-08:00

My knack for annoying people seems to have branched out. It now also includes small furry animals.

On my first day in the flat in Stellenbosch I saw just the sweetest little squirrel running around outside. I watched hypnotised as it ran along the rafters, once with a nut in its mouth, once without, once with, once without. Such a great example of diligence I thought. What a sweet neighbour.

That was till I actually opened the back door. Well. Let me tell you, everytime I do that squirrel pops out of nowhere and puts up an academy award winning performance in which I’m the husband who’s just arrived home at 3am drunk. The tail taught, the scream high pitched, running forward and backward like it’s calling the troops and showing the enemy in the distance. Except I’m like two meters away.

After the squirrel has finally gotten the award, thanked it’s parents, God and it’s lover I attempt to water the garden. Here I have to contend with a small brown mouse who inevitably is in disagreement with my decision to wet everything. It runs from this bush to that, and back to the first. If it’s screaming at me (which is suspect it probably is) it’s in a pitch foreign to my ears, and if it’s attempting to get rid of me all and all it’s not doing as good a job of it as the squirrel is.

Perhaps I should follow the example set by one of my American hosts. They were resident in New Yersey and had bear cut-outs in the back garden which supposedly kept live ones at bay.

Perhaps I shall make myself a collection of mouse- and squirrel family cut-outs and position them amongst the plants in the backyard to see if this strategy really works. Perhaps I shall indeed.

This is what is called bringing the knowledge home and applying it at grass roots level people.

Blondie

2009-12-21T21:14:00.000-08:00

Schedules.

2009-12-21T09:49:00.001-08:00

I watch the news. They say it’s snowing wildly on the east coast of America. I think about my cousin and her husband in their little house in Great Neck. I imagine them huddling together, not able to go anywhere really, just watching tv and eating and sleeping and working. I imagine the snow falling and falling.

My original scheduled flight was for the 17th of December. That was before Standard Bank lost my money. (I still haven’t gotten it back.) My flight would’ve been canceled according to the news. All the planes have been grounded. Who knows what would have happened.

I wonder if it would have been any easier if I came back only now.

I doubt it.

In one spot.

2009-12-21T09:47:00.000-08:00

I walk out the door because I have to walk. Everyday I find myself sitting more: in my car, in a restaurant, behind a computer. I am sitting again. Gone is the exploring, the getting lost in strange cities. I have to walk but I know this place well so I just pretend to be going somewhere and I walk all the way to the bottom of Dorp Street and then turn around and walk back. I watch the foreigners walking arm in arm and pointing and laughing. They are mostly Dutch and German. They think Stellenbosch is Eden.

At the bead shop I stop and buy two packets of beads: one red bag and one blue. I’m going to make bracelets out of them. I will wear the red beads on my left arm and the blue ones on my right. It will be the first time since I left that I wear beads because I decided to take them off for the first time in 8 years before my trip. I took them off.

I have an extensive (and expensive) bead collection of my own but it’s at Roxanne’s and I keep forgetting to take it when I’m there. I get home and I think I forgot to take my beads again and then it’s too late and I’m still not wearing any. I’m taking matters into my own hands you see.

My legs ache at night. I’ve been thinking about joining the gym but we all know how that story ends. So the last couple of days I’ve taken to jogging on the spot. Yesterday I jogged in place for an hour and a half. I jogged in the lounge in one spot till the sweat poured down my face and my legs hurt.

But actually if I think about it I’ve been jogging in one spot for about a month now.

A wish.

2009-12-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

2009 will go down as a year of great highs and lows for yours truly. Many things have been discovered and many things lost.

Perhaps the most painful was losing the same person three times: first as a lover, then as a companion and finally as a friend. (The last being by far the most painful.)

A Year of Great Love Lost, Found and Destroyed.
The year my heart couldn’t walk but my body went everywhere.

Dear Universe,
My wish for the future is simple:

May I be less disabled in 2010.

Lost. Found.

2009-12-20T09:17:00.000-08:00

My life is still in boxes. They’re standing in the garage of the flat where I’m living in Stellenbosch, and everytime I open the door they eye me from afar. I’ve opened a whole lot of them, searching for my favorite things: a very expensive cushion for my weary head, my cd collection. Neither has been found and slowly but surely it is starting to drive me mad.

However, on a small outing into town this morning I found large quantities of the Butterfingers and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that I dragged from abroad for my nieces and nephews, and further down the road I even found the Redken Shampoo my mother wanted from America and that I couldn’t find and spend days searching for.

Those I could find. But my cd's...

Reward.

2009-12-20T09:13:00.000-08:00

This week I put together my entire blog in a word document, edited out the pics and the entries urging you to join, and then triumpantly printed out all 128 pages of it. I had it bound beautifully and brought it home (word used very loosely) where It can now be found lying on the table next to my bed. It’s big and thick I’ll have you know. It looks rather impressive.

I feel like I actually accomplished something whilst I was away.

Sucka.

2009-12-11T00:35:00.000-08:00

It has been my hope to move to Stellenbosch for quite some time. However, after spending the last week or two driving to and from Cape Town like a woman posessed I am reconsidering.

For the first time in a long time maybe moving back to town sounds plausable: it will be great to be surrounded by friends. One of the best phases of my life was when I was staying in a block of flats where one of my best friends was also resident. We both had our own flats but were close enough to drop in for a sundowner and far enough away to not feel cramped. What a great set-up! In reality this is probably what I desire with a future mate. After having lived with four different men in my life it has become abundantly clear to me that I have about a year and a half of co-habitating before it all goes to shit. The year and a half can be divided into 3 distinct parts:

Part 1: Love. Nesting. Happiness.
Part 2: Comfort zone. Feeling stuck. Frustration.
Part 3: Figuring out how to split. Splitting. Moving.

Arrrgh. I don't think I could do it again. But then that's what I said last time...

I wish I wasn't such a sucker for love.

Oh balls.

2009-12-11T00:25:00.000-08:00

With the hair colour job on the house and feeling absolutely gorge, a free haircut is promised and after some telephone action a date is set for Thursday.

Now, I need to cut. The hair on the back of my head has gone more of a cheesy yellow than a platinum blonde and although it doesn't really bother me, being on the back of my head where I can't see it, it totally has to go. I am planning on growing my shag out a bit though and at some point in the future envision having lovely long locks again, as inspired by my new bud Marilyn, so really its just a trim. What could go wrong?

My wonderful friend Rox is my hair connection. She works at a very upscale hair salon in Sea point as a colorist and has organised out of the goodness of her pure and lovely heart for one of the appy's there to cut my hair, mahala. (Meaning for free Julie!) Now who turns down a free haircut my friends? Certainly not me.

I knew I was getting an apprentice from the start, which seemed totally fine as I was certain that she had had lots of training and had in fact practiced on other human beings, but when I realised that my appy has to be overseen by a professional and when she starts off saying things like "So am I cutting up or down?" it's cause for some concern.

Fear is the last thing you want the appy to witness though. You don't want to broadcast it and make her feel any more nervous than she needs to be when she's clutching your hair between her fingers. So you smile calmly, exuding an air that clearly says: ""I trust you. You know what you're doing. Hair? Who CARES about hair anyway." When actually you're thinking "That's my sex life you're clutching between your fingers bitch. BE CAREFUL."

As Mr Cool guy who looks like just the most fabulous hairdresser ever shows poppie what to do she keeps asking: "But why, why do you want me to do it like that. Ag Eric, you're such a perfectionist!" and then she laughs. I disagree with her. I'm quite fond of the fact that Eric is a perfectionist myself.

It's striking that neither of them have ventured to ask me what it is I was hoping to achieve with this haircut and so after listening to them debating for awhile I offer an opinion: (cough-cough) You know, in my experience (it being my head and all) when you thin my hair in that way you are demonstrating there, it ends up looking like my hair has been eaten by a rat sort of. You see, my hair is very thin," I say. Afer a moments pause they both burst out in suppressed fits of laughter and give me that look that says: "You have no cooking clue what you're talking about," but ofcourse they don't say it, they just ignore me and carry on talking amongst themselves.

At this point it all becomes a bit blurry. I guess I can't blame them completely because I do recall myself saying someting to the effect of: "Nope. That's not the way the girl in San Francisco did it. She cut it MUCH shorter." I remember the chair swiveling, the sound of hairdryers and people chatting and I distinctly remember praying to God repeatedly and saying: "Dear God. Right now I'm hot. I love my hair. I love that's it's growing and that's it's feminine. Please, please don't turn me into an a-sexual lesbian with bleached hair.

Alack alas dear reader, God it seems, doesn't believe in me. When I looked in the mirror one and a half hours later I saw Marilyn ducking out the door in a rush, without even a goodbye, and I felt somewhat betrayed, the friendship having been so new and all.

Dear Universe,
Does this mean I have to give the balls back?

Into the Wild.

2009-12-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

I've made a new friend. Sure she's invisible, but we all make do with what we have people. We met the same day that I miraculously turned into a platinum blonde and we've been known to partake in each other's company ever since.

Day 1. There I was, looking at myself in the mirror and thinking: Hell, blonde is totally hot on you! When out of nowhere she materialised behind me and kissed me on the cheek. She introduced herself as Marilyn, giggled like a fountain and instantly I was in love. Now I'm not a lesbian but she can park her white slippers under my sofa anytime. The world seems to agree with me on that one. She's a very pretty lady, just hard to focus on her face with a rack like that.

And then: poof, she's gone! In a giant puff of sexy smoke. I'm starting to get used to it but it took awhile, her always popping in and out of my life like that. She never sticks around for very long and says very little. Maybe it's just that I can't remember what that woman says because the cleavage just sucks you in like a giant vacuum of loveliness.

Day 2: a hot sweaty day in Stellenbosch. I'm walking idly down the street when behind me a hear a man saying loudly: "Jirre ma is dit nou nie a parrrragtige vrou nie." And there she was, her skirts blowing up in the street, winking in my direction.

Day 3: I stop to put petrol in my new sexy silver Daihatsu Sirion (for the second time this week) and the pump attendant gets all chatty: "Now where did the missus get such a niiice car hey? Did the missus' husband buy it? No husband? He-he-he-he. The missus is too lovely mos." And as I drive off: "Keep on shining!" like a giant final hooray. I look in my rearview mirror and there she is again, parked off in very little clothing in the backseat, sucking the life out of a cigarette who loved every moment of it.

Day 4. An old lover, freshly divorced, proposes marriage over a long overdue dinner and when I look down there she is, sprawled on the ground, stroking his balls.

Day 5. He proposes again, over the phone this time as she sits down next to me and hands the pair over with a smirky smile and a cavernous cleavage.

And so it seems that what people say is all true. Blondes, and specifically of the platinum variety, have more fun, attract more attention and get more doors opened for them than any other brand of haircolour in a bottle. (Mine does not come out of a bottle though. God no. I have connections in the hair colouring industry.)

Eddie Vedder's soundtrack to the movie "Into the Wild" is on a loop in my car. I can't get enough of it, and in a strange sort of way I guess it's appropriate. The film (based on the book by Jon Krakauer) tells the true story of Christopher McCandless who abandons society after graduating from university and sets out to Alaska without money, a car or any other posessions. Let me not spoil the movie if you haven't seen it. Suffice to say that at the end he realises that nothing means anything if it cannot be shared with someone else.

I relate. Obviously he also didn't have anyone to hold the damn camera.

What have we done.

2009-12-08T22:36:00.000-08:00

Ag my kind, I'm in alot of pain. It's the back operation, you know I can't even type at the moment. I don't know what I would have done if Lynette hadn't come to take care of me. Do you remember her? She's my sister, the one in Gordonsbay.

Louise, one of my oldest and dearest people. I call her last night to say hi and tell her I'm back.

You must put me in your prayers child, it's been a hard year, she says.
It sounds like it has been for everyone, I say.
But not for you, you went overseas, you had a great time.
It was great my auntie, but it was hard too. It was a remarkable experience, but it wasn't easy.
Ag my kind, so much happened whilst you were gone. Barbara's husband got hijacked and killed a couple of weeks ago.
Barbara that works for you?
Ja you remember her? She's the one who's boyfriend literally cut off her nose to spite her face all those years ago.
I remember her auntie.
When her husband died... It was terrible. I thought of you because we had a big traditional funeral for him and I attended. I was even allowed to sit with all the women, it was so amazing, so whole, seeing all those proud men mourn that way. Did you know that the ancestors in Jozi wake up at 12 but in Mpumalanga they wake up at 11am?
Hmmm, I say. In Botswana they wake up at 3am!
I can't help but feel a certain amount of white guilt you know, she says and sighs.
Why, I say. Why do you feel guilty if her husband got hijacked? There's nothing you or anyone else could have done about it.
Ja, I know, but you know when I went for this operation... I had 10 specialists dancing around me and poor Barbara... He could have survived if he'd been given blood a bit earlier. They just didn't get to him quickly enough, you know? He could have survived...

The hijacking stories really get under my skin because of my own hijacking, because friends of mine have died horribly this way. How do you explain to people what happens to you when you've had a close encounter with something that dark? It's like a disease that infects you and breaks open your world forever. You can never go back to the way it was before. Louise sounds defeated tonight. Her voice drags on the phone. What have we done in this country, she asks me before she puts down the phone.

What have we done?

Disconnected.

2009-12-07T02:09:00.000-08:00

Alice is currently offline and in search of a home, a life and a great wifi connection.

I won't be able to blog as often as I would like to, but will do my best to keep you posted.

Much love to all ya'll,

x

Lighten up.

2009-12-04T13:49:00.000-08:00

The only thing to do in a situation like this is go for some good solid hair therapy.

This is a tried and tested method of mine, sure to beat any bout of depression, and although it doesn't work all of the time it works most of the time.

I am now officially a platinum blonde.

Yeh baby.

Yeh!

Shell shock.

2009-12-03T04:56:00.000-08:00

Change for me has always been accompanied by a hightened sense of death: as the Ultimate Change it can be found in every micro-part of itself. This time is no different. I dream that I am shot, that I fall off the top of a building, that I am eaten by animals; gruesome dreams that shake me awake late at night. I feel my skin burning off leaving raw open wounds behind and I wake clutching myself.

Slowly I drop back into a couple of storylines. I am the character in the soapie that mysteriously disappeared 6 months ago and my surprise return has left everyone agasp. I've been re-cast as the villian/bitch/disillusioned child who brings a renewed sense of drama to the scene and mechanically I play my part, as surprised by it as everyone else.

In the first week of returning to SA (exactly like in my first week in the US) I have lost people I believed I never would, fought with people I never expected to and realised that 2009 will go down as a life-changing and painful year for yours truly.

I am spinning like a top.

Deja Vous

2009-12-01T08:35:00.000-08:00

Hold on a minute. This is starting to feel suspiciously similar to the first couple of weeks I spent in the US:

Let's see:

Jetlag
Disorientation
Doubt
No home
No car
No cutting clue what's happening next
The crazy smile that tries to say "I'm fine!" but ends up saying "take me to the closest sanitarium"

Only difference is that instead of trying to let go I'm now trying to put down roots and really I don't know who's idea that was.

Not loving it today. Can I please cancel my reality check doctor?

Invisible.

2009-11-30T23:37:00.000-08:00

The Dad and I go off in search of a car. He's been doing meticulous research (which is his way) for a month to find something that has all the trimmings and what-whats I desire and has lined up two cars for us to go and look at. Since I've been unemployed for 6 months no one is SA is going to offer me a loan and he's taken one out on my behalf. For the first time in my life I will be paying off a car, or as my friend Sean says, I will be renting a car from the bank. It really isn't mine at all.

I haven't seen much since I landed so this is really my first venture out into the world. I've watched some tv though which was a culture shock all in itself, Kyknet mostly with my parents. It's an Afrikaans station that promotes our culture and having been away for so long it felt like I was an alien watching a strange parody of my heritage. It's the weirdest feeling. I spent alot of time laughing my head off.

My mom introduced me to a show called "Die Glammer Guru" (which she recorded) in which this extremely gay boy called Hannon with the thickest Pretoria accent you could possibly imagine does mini-makeovers on ladies from Paternoster and Bloemfontein. At the end of the show the woman are revealed to themselves instead of a live studio audience, and inevitably they do a "Oe Hannon, ek kan my oe nie glo nie! Oe! Dis 'n wonderwerk! Jy's 'n miracle worker!" and then they burst into tears and he gets the same look on his face men get after they've had a little orgasm.

I have the same feeling I had when I arrived in the US: I am an outsider looking into a glass box in which there's a pre-recorded show that I am now a part of.

The Dad-man and I drive through Darling and head to Malmesbury in his big four wheeler, complete with aircon, airbags and heated seats. We are listening to some classical music as we drive past my first township in 6 months. People living in shacks, metal sheets stacked together. A couple of faces follow us as we drive by and the music plays on. We stop at at an intersection. There's a woman who's been trying to hitch a ride but when she sees us she puts her thumb down. I'm finding it hard to look at her. I think back on riding the bus in New Orleans, the readiness of everyone to engage me, a stranger, and me engaging back and here I am back in SA unable to look a normal bystander in the eye.

I am ashamed you see. Here we are, in our big-ass car. My ancestors oppressed, raped and pilaged this land to make space for me and because of it this woman is standing on the side of the road unable to get where she's going and we are driving this car. She knows we won't give her a lift because we're too afraid of being attacked, robbed or having our car stolen. And so there is a quiet understanding that our lives are completely different, and we all look away.

And it feels like my heart is breaking into a million little pieces.

Touch down.

2009-11-29T11:35:00.000-08:00

The first thing I did on African soil was chuck up my breakfast.

The turbulence got me bad and it happened twice more as the plane ambled along looking for a nice place to park. The guy sitting next to me clasped his hand over his mouth like you do when a monster jumps out from behind a cupboard and looked at me as if to say: "You managed to hold out for 15 hours, is this really necessary??". Caught between my vomit and the window. Welcome to South Africa.

After emptying out my bowels completely I melted into a bench at Jozi Airport and slept for 3 hours clutching at my luggage until I took a much more pleasant flight to Cape Town. I'm pretty sure the higher grade tranquilizers that old lady gave me had something to do with it though. Dad picked me up. On the drive home I realised I was shaking. After a car ride, a plane, another plane and a car ride I got to my final destination. Said hi to my mom. Fell into bed.

Sunday morning I woke up in a double bed in my own private room in the most beautiful place in the world: Jakkalsfontein, South Africa.

Mom organised a victory lunch in my honour and so my boet, his wife and their two kids and my sister, her husband and their three kids all rocked up. My sister's kids ran and flung themselves into my arms, holding on till we fell down on the ground and the four of us rolled around laughing. It was the best welcome home present I could have hoped for.

Later I watched my brother and his wife hunt around the garden for a shongololo so that their 18 month old would eat her food. (It's become a ritual. She enjoys killing them on her plate and for some reason this makes her hungry.) Before everyone left I doled out chocolates from America and instantly became the favorite aunt which made me feel like Father Christmas and the Queen of England all at the same time.

I watched my entire family assembled in the kitchen drinking wine and thought: I am part of this. This is where I fit in. Here I have a name, a history. Sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse. The same as traveling I guess.

And it felt good to be a part of it.

The Grand Finale.

2009-11-26T05:36:00.000-08:00

This is a picture of me packing.

In 24 hours I will be boarding SAA flight UA9816 non-stop to Jozi which will be a substantially shorter flight than the one that brought me here. Then I will have a 3 hour stop-over before getting on flight SAA 333 to Cape Town, due to land @ 14h10 Saturday 28th of November. At the airport will be my parents, the same people who delivered me to their doors five and a half months ago. They will load me into their car and ship me off to Jakkalsfontein on the west coast where I will spend the weekend telling tales of my travels to my family and their offspring.

On Monday I will most likely go to Stellenbosch where I will start making some clear decisions about how to re-assemble my life over the next month. On Tuesday I have a dental appointment in town. By Wednesday it will feel like none of this ever happened, like no time has passed at all, and I'll wonder what's happening at the places I've visited in America, and if I've left any mark whatsoever.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Feed me.

2009-11-24T12:39:00.000-08:00

I've decided to only live on things that I won't be able to eat when I'm back in SA.

Consequently I now live on Reese's peanut butter cups, good pizza slices, mexican food, Corona, Pacifico, Ketel One and...

well, actually that's about it.

A last visit.

2009-11-24T05:30:00.000-08:00

Boston:

Renowned for a tea party, a strangler and a bar called Cheers this place reeks of history. The architecture is detailed and old, complete with turrets, broad streets and sculpture scattered across the city. Beantown is home to Berklee University, Boston University and with Harvard University just around the corner it has the feel of turning pages to me, of Good Will Hunting and Boston Legal.

It feels like the most European city I've visited in the States. Have you ever watched any movies about the Boston Strangler? Think back on the setting: it's not a set. Parts of Boston still look like that today, exquisite in the denseness of history it carries.

I'm sitting in a dive bar called TC's round the corner from where I'm staying. Two guys wearing business suits are shooting the crap out of buffalo running across an African-themed screen whilst their girlfriends feed the jukebox coins. I suck back a vodka-soda and ponder where I will be this time next week, how I might feel and if I might stand aghast at how quickly this journey has ground to an end. Who will I be when I go back to my homeland? It is the partial loss of identity that makes traveling such a thrill: you're no one's daughter, lover or friend. You are only a traveler.

Right now I feel a bit of what Earl is feeling: the knowledge of impending ending and the high that comes with it. I savor every moment of it, gently scooping it up in my hands for a second before releasing it up into the sky.

Am I the girl sitting and writing in a bar in Boston Universe? Or am I a little girl who has fallen asleep in her sister's lap on the lawn outside, having played with her kitten Dina.

Am I about to wake up?

Observations of SA after 5 and a half months away from home.

2009-11-23T15:03:00.000-08:00

I always thought that South Africa was a really big place.... Bwahahahahahaha.
South Africans are rather serious about life/the weather et al.
We live in a third world country but I was brought up as a first world citizen.
Living in a third world country means that we have tremendous poverty. It's not found in all other parts of the world.
South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world. (Google it.)
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world. (ditto.)
South Africans are afraid of one another. We spend alot of time and energy on making sure that we are all nice and seperate.
South Africa has a tremendous shortage of policeman and traffic officers, and the ones that we have don't get paid enough and alot of them are corrupt or traumatised by their job.
South Africans drive like assholes.
There is no place like Africa, no matter how you slice it.
It's going to take a couple of generations for SA to get over the pain and anger that comes with our history.
White South Africans are holding on to their identity for dear life. It's time consuming and takes alot of energy. I'm one of them.
There is no other place in the world that could possibly compare with SA. It's a unique place filled with wonderful people. It's a country on the cusp of something big.

Thank you notes.

2009-11-23T11:00:00.000-08:00

To Jana and Patrick Leddy. For fetching me on arrival, giving me the best orientation I could have hoped for and being relentlessly worried about it me. For the couch, the food, the tv, the computer. For the love.
To Thain. For making me a key and being excited about my visit. I'm sorry for any pain caused, I wish you the best and hope you get to visit Africa soon. I know you miss your family.
To Earl Dax. For offering to take me on as an apprentice.
To Patrick O Rourke who was my first host who didn't know me from a bar of soap. For your deep generosity and offers for me to go back to Blue Deer. Apologies again for the mix-up with the you know what. I believe it's all sorted though. Call me when you're in SA, my khaya is your khaya.
To Randy (and Linda in her absence) for showing me Bal-di-mor. For teaching me that a bathroom has a sheer, a toh-let and a zinc in it. For teaching me all about the wonders of Pho. For letting me stay in your beautiful house and generally being an awesome guy.
To Randy's cousin who's name I can't remember! For taking me back to New Jersey and letting me sleep over. For kicking her poor daughter out of her room so I could sleep like a queen. For taking me all the way to the train station the next morning and for eating those enchilada's at that taqueria down the road. It was an experience.
To Temma for showing me more mosquitoes than I've ever seen, for taking me in off the street, for beer and chats in the pool and being a wonderful host. I will never forget you.
To Belladonna for letting me stay over. I know it ended badly but I really appreciate everything you did for me. I hope we're all good, I hope pregnancy finds you.
To the Sacred Fire Community for making me feel like I was part of something, for allowing me to see someone channel the spirit of Fire, and taking me to the coast of Oregon.
To Rowan. When I saw you it was like we were right back at school and no time had passed. For picking me up at the train station in a porche, the quiz, the restaurants and making me feel rather royal for a bit.
To Dalia Burdy and Emily Gordon. For being the nicest, sweetest, loveliest gals in the world. For taking me to the yoga chanting session, feeding me much steak, taking me camping in Big Sur, introducing me to all your friends, preparing me properly for Burning Man and just for being you. Can't wait to see you in Cape Town!
To Yuko,Dylan and everyone else at the hostel in SF. For making my time there electric and even sometimes fun. I often think of both of you and wonder what's happening with you guys. I hope you're still an item.
To Thomas. For arriving when I really needed him to. For listening to me ramble. For calling me when I had a bad case of the lonelies.
To Andre. For making me feel like I had come home even though I was in a foreign place. For the braais, the South Africans, the loooong talks about life, the universe and everything, for educating me about golf and helping me to understand that it's the way to enlightenment. Can't wait to see you in SA!
To Frances. For giving me new insights as to the origins of my friend Roxanne, for giving me a room, the space to do my own thing, for naked swimming in the pool, food and friendship. For the biggest coat the world has ever seen, socks, a warm hat and for dragging me off to buy shoes even when I didn't feel like it. It was a worthwhile trip. I hope you get a job that will take you to Cape Town to see the offspring.
To Vickee. For picking up a stranger on a train and taking them home. For showing me the most beautiful little town in all of texas. For repeatedly inviting me back. For being one of the the kindest people I've ever met. I sincerely hope that your mother's painting is beautiful.
To Glen and Leana. For going way beyond the call of duty to ensure that I had a clear idea of just how awesome Marfa really is.
To Steve. For calling me Jumanji and showing me that Father Christmas is alive and well.
To Earl. For being a teacher.
To my sister Roz. For really understanding the meaning of Family.
To Rox. For being my skype slag and promising to make me a platinum blonde.
To Werner. For being my skype slag and giving me something to hold on to.
To Marleen. For being my skype slag and giving me hope.
To Mia, Anti, Anthony and Fiona who sent references when I needed them to.
To Pieter, for helping out with technical details on this site when I needed him to.
To anyone I might have forgotten to mention.
To all the Americans I met on my travels. Thank you for being kind, engaging me, and generally being unoffensive. You okes are awesome.
To Andre en Els. For being catalysts. For being amazing role models. For shitting on Standard Bank. For looking for a car. For supporting me on this project, and for always accepting me and my crazy ideas, even when I'm sure that they won't. I couldn't have done this without you.
And to you, the reader, without whom this journey would have felt empty and meaningless. Thankyou for coming with me on the ride.

Big love to all of you,
Alice

Travel tip #3

2009-11-22T18:56:00.000-08:00

An eye mask and earplugs are your best friends when hosteling across America.

Don't say I didn't tell you so.

Alice's observations of America after 5 and a half months of traversing it.

2009-11-22T14:55:00.000-08:00

It's the most humungous place you could possibly imagine. It's huge. To traverse all of the States would take me 2 years to do.
You can't consider Americans in the same breath. They're all wildly different.
A South African township and an American township are two totally different things. On explaining to Americans what a SA township is their faces go white and their teeth drop out.
You are defacing the neighbourhood if you put a fence around your property in most of the States that I visited.
Consequently puppies live indoors and dog-walking is a big business.
You need headshots to be a waitress in LA.
Americans like eating red liquorice. Yuck.
The quality of their clothes and shoes are waaaay better than ours. We live in sacks compared to these people.
Most Americans seem to have the perception that it's cheaper to live on take-out than it is to buy food at the grocery store. Thusly you can find a take-out place about every 3 feet, no matter where you are.
Burger King sucks even more than Mcd's.
The best burgers and milkshakes I had in the States was at "In and out" a burger chain only found in California. Go there. Have a vanilla milkshake.
Americans everywhere have an obsession with coffee and tea, and iced coffee and iced tea. It's like a weird fashion statement if you walk around with your deluxe coffee grande skinny latte what-what. This country runs on caffeine and the easiest way to overthrow them and take over would be to deprive them of their caffeine fix.
Although Americans speak English it might as well have been called by some other strange name. Often words have different meanings and I had people laughing in my face and then calling their friends over and saying: "Ok, now say that again..." An example of this would be the first time I enquired as to where I might find the loo.
Drawers are in a cupboard and are definitely not pants, the bill is only the cheque and nothing else, scones are biscuits and robots are lights. A handbag is a pocket book and an sms is just plain a text. Just the ones to jump to mind.
People in America generally obey the law. They wait for the little green man to flicker before they cross the street (except in NY and Boston) and stick to the speed limit.
Americans drive a whole lot better than South Africans. It's unfortunate that they do it on the wrong side of the road.
Most Americans that I met were completely fearless and for the most part blissfully ignorant about the rest of the world. A wild generalisation, I know.
Most Americans are seekers. They are looking for spiritual experiences and they're very open to hearing other people's point of view.
In all the towns I visited I was able to walk back to the hostel (located in the heart of the inner city) late at night, on my own, without being in danger.
The west coast of America is incredibly forward-thinking. Everyone recycles, rides their bikes and worries deeply about the environment.
Having tattoos in the US in most States is common place.
I've never seen as many tattooed people as in Seattle. Even the old ladies have chest pieces that they are still showing off.
Americans don't have many enemies and have therefor created some of their own. Germs top the list. They are totally obsessed with them. You don't understand. OBSESSED.
Medical aid costs an absolute fortune and there is a huge ongoing debate about healthcare in the States. In the meanwhile the healthcare industry is making a killing off inducing the fear into people. It's like you're going to die if you don't go for that flu shot.
Thanksgiving is a more important holiday than Christmas. It's the time of year that the whole family gets together, they eat turkey and open the house to whoever wants to come over. Personally I think it's a damn fine idea, thanksgiving.
Out of all the cities I've visited I like Boston the most. The last place I got to, the place I almost missed. Heck.
They eat pizza slices like we eat pies. The best pizza I tasted was in New York City.
There's no such thing as a tot measurement in the States. If you ask for a tot of whiskey, expect to get a glass. I love that about them.
If you're a woman living in California, it's generally considered uncool to look excited about anything, or to smile.
The most beautiful beach I've ever seen was in California. The widest, whitest beach you could possibly imagine.
A number of people warned me not to go into the water though. It's toxic.
Texas looks like the Karoo. The people who live there are just like the folk in Bloemfontein.
The largest concentration of South Africans living in the States live in San Diego because the climate is almost exactly the same.
There are alot of South Africans living in the US. It felt surreal meeting so many of my country folk in another country, and although many of them are happy to be here, the majority of them, when pushed, admitted that they dreamt of someday going home and it made me sad to realise that to some extent, no matter how many years they had spent abroad, they were still foreigners in a foreign land.
If you visit a bar most people just take out a wad of cash and leave it on the bar. The barman will take what he/she needs as the night goes on. In the meanwhile you can go off to the toilet and have a dance and apparently your cash will still be there when you get back.
They have toilets that flush themselves and doors that open automatically but in most places you clean your own table and get your sugar and milk from a table in the corner.
There are over 100 different types of banking institutions in America. They compete with each other and consequently they smile when you walk into the bank, give you bank cards even though you're a foreigner and generally deliver on their promises. (Read: we get ripped off by banks in SA.)
Americans have a great culture of accountability that I wish we could adapt in SA. There's a website called yelp.com where you can make comments on shops and services in any city in the US, and consequently it's easy to compare hairdressers/restaurants etc.
They have competitive advertising, meaning that the competing product will often be mentioned in ads, and it will be shown why the product is inferior to the one being advertised.
Politicians also make commercials that will highlight the corruption of their competitor, or will show that they didn't live up to the promises that they made the public.
Ofcourse, the natural extension of the above mentioned is that Americans also love to sue each other.
You get jewish neighbourhoods, chinese neighbourhoods, polish, korean, irish, russian, italian, south african, but there aren't alot of Indians who live in the States. Maybe I just didn't see them.
Most American places and streets feature Native American names. In actuality I saw 3 actual Native Americans.
The Native Americans that managed to survive and get their land back have now opened casino's on it. Most casino's in the US are run by Native Americans.
Cancer is huge. All kinds. There's no doubt in my mind that it's because they live on friggin take-out.
Alot of Americans still smoke. In NY there are people smoking cigars in the street.
Pharmaceutical companies can advertise their products and so you often find yourself watching commercials advertising anti-depressants etc. except that the list of side-effects that they have to mention by law on the ad takes longer than listing the pro's. Completely surreal to watch.
Americans all come from different backgrounds but they all have one thing in common that brings them all together: they are all immigrants who have come here in search of freedom and a better life.

That's it in a nutshell. I wish I could have seen more and stayed longer. I probably learnt more about myself in the time that I was here that I learnt about America.

Hmmm.

Read it.

2009-11-20T16:04:00.000-08:00

Read the directions and directly you

will be directed in the right direction
- the doorknob

Take that.

2009-11-20T15:50:00.000-08:00

Standard Bank can stick it up their bums.

Most mornings start off with me sending hate mail to various different people and departments at said establishment. My insults seem to have improved over the last couple of days as my pms has crescendoed, but it still hasn't had the desired affect. They're cold and unresponsive, a familiar theme for them. It's part of their business plan you see. And I am just a number.

When I'm not busy sending them insulting letters I like to spend my time imagining their building going up in flames, that sort of thing. Thoughts of destruction have definitely been present.

And then, finally, when that wears off I worry about going back to SA, starting over, whatever might wait in my future. (I'm thinking tall, dark and handsome.) I look for cars on gumtree and sneak a peak at apartments and their rates. This is limbo: I'm dangling somewhere in the middle of two places, waiting for things to give and move.

In order to save myself from over-thinking my future I've made a small loan from me cousin and decided to hit the road one last time on Sunday. Hell, it's not like I'm going to get another chance to visit Boston anytime soon. I'll be there till Wednesday at which point I'll head back to NYC to spend Thanksgiving with Jana and Pat. Friday morning at 10h30 I jump a plane to Jozi.

My fear of flying doesn't seem to wear down and I'm going to have to come up with just the right coctail of tranquilizers to get me through 18 hours on a plane. Flying will definitely be more bearable if the plane is empty and spacious.

If not the person sitting next to me will need their own stash of tranqs in order to deal with me.

I'm not sharing.

Moving. Shaking.

2009-11-20T15:19:00.000-08:00

I'm moving to Stellenbosch!

My parents own a flat there that's been on the property market for a couple of months and consequently they've graciously offered it to me till I find something else that's suitable and get my business off the ground. Hold thumbs no one buys.

My entire family have moved to Cape Town from Jozi over the last couple of years, so both my siblings and their spawn now inhabit homes in Stellenbosch. I anticipate being a real aunt for the first time in my life and spending time with all of them kidsez.

Moving to Stellenbosch actually seems like the logical next move since I've covered all the other parts of Cape Town. In the 16 years I've been a Capetonian I've lived in

Vredehoek
Gardens
Tamboerskloof
Rondebosch
Woodstock
Observatory
Wynberg
Muizenberg
Blouberg/Big Bay

I try to keep things interesting.

Friends of mine used to stay in the most beautiful block of flats right on the river in Stellies, with lawns and trees outside. It was pretty central yet if you drove in there it felt rural. I would love to stay there.

So it's official. That's where I'll be landing. A clean slate.

And I'm excited abaht it.

Listen:

2009-11-18T18:32:00.000-08:00

True love will find you in the end

You'll find out just who was your friend
Don’t be sad, I know you will,
But don’t give up until
True love finds you in the end.

This is a promise with a catch
Only if you're looking will it find you
‘Cause true love is searching too
But how can it recognize you
Unless you step out into the light?
But don’t give up until
True love finds you in the end
True love finds you in the end
True love finds you in the end

- As sung by Beck: a tribute to Daniel Johnston

2009-11-17T19:08:00.000-08:00

Indeed.

2009-11-17T18:57:00.000-08:00

Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.
- The Duchess