My Western Front

From the promenade at Queen's Beach, Seapoint.

I was at my desk and feeling guilty for, mostly, being at it and indoors for the whole of that day. 

At 4 pm I couldn't anymore. 

I showered and then took the bus at 16h30 to the far side of Seapoint: Queen's Beach to be exact. 

From there, hugging the coastline, I walked with a bounce in my stride all of the way to Camps Bay. 

From just before its main drag, I watched the sunset, which was showing itself off. Then, dunk, it was gone.

Had fish 'n chips, grilled calamari and a carafe of white wine at Ocean Basket while scribbling in my notebook; this while intermittently observing the Camps Bay Saturday evening strip get busier as people, many of them tourists, emerged for drinks, cocktails, dinner. This as the clammy but exhilarating reek of the icy Atlantic seeped upwards from the beach, then crossed Victoria road, leaking into the restaurants and shopfronts. 

Then, away from the lights and madding crowds, I decided to walk back to town,  this time over Kloof Nek. Out of breath from the climb and over the saddle that separates Table Mountain and Lion's Head apart, straight into the bright lights and rowdiness of the city bowl. This sudden transition, not unlike flicking a light switch, from the relative darkness, silence, and obscurity above Camps Bay in the lee of the Twelve Apostles. It was like walking onto a brightly-lit stage before a packed to the gills auditorium.

Strode down Kloof Street, a fast-flowing steam of raucosness for its pulsating length, where my instincts warned me to be alert and on guard.

Just in time, I managed to catch the last 102 home to Salt River from Darling Street at 21h20. Alighting from the bus at Salt River Circle and into the hushed darkness among the softly catcalling prostitutes on Lower Main, before walking the last stretch home in the metallic light along the facade of the Biscuit Mill, still disgorging restaurant goers, still on gaurd and scanning the road, before a quick right into Mill Street, an even quicker sh'rt right into Bromwell.

The Three Feathers was already in darkness with its gates bolted, my contentious back Street quiet, me the only one on its length, before bathing in the bright security lights at the back of my apartment block. Elevator upwards, then the darkness and familiar homely scent and silence of my apartment. With its, always, jaw-dropping view over Woodstock, with Devil's Peak almost invisible as a mute hunchbacked backdrop.

Clinging to the edge of Bantry Bay, just after Seapoint, the view that most miss.

To bed with Adam Feinstein's biography of Pablo Neruda, wherein I'm approaching the end of his life and the first signs of the prostate cancer that took him from it. 

Just over 16,000 steps, my muscles strained with exercise and tiredness, almost exactly 11 km later, all's quiet on my Western Front.

Close to the heart of God

I've picked up another faded and very 80s-looking copy of Richard Foster's 'Celebration of Discipline: The path to spiritual growth', which intermittently throughout the last12 years has helped me enormously, has given me respite.

Though published in 1978 and reprinted many more times in the 80s, I find it just as relevant, if not more so, in the much crazier 'now'. And nothing smells nicer than the pages of an old book... 

Foster writes, and I've quoted the following here before, but again I've needed to read it, today:

"In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in 'muchness' and 'manyness,' he will be satisfied. Psychiatrist C G Jung once remarked, 'Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.'

"If we hope to move beyond the superficialities of our culture--including our religious culture--we must be willing to go down into the recreating silences, into the inner world of contemplation. In their writings, all of the masters of meditation strive to awaken us to the fact that the universe is much larger than we know, that there are vast unexplored inner regions that are just as real as the physical world we know so well. They tell us of exciting possibilities for new life and freedom. They call us to adventure, to be pioneers in this frontier of the Spirit. Though this might sound strange to modern ears, we should without shame enroll as apprentices in the school of contemplative prayer."

As for me, personally, I want to be called to adventure. I want to be close to the heart of God.

[The photo is of one of a series of stained glass windows that light up the dark and sometimes foreboding but short Mill street - where the street lights never seem to be working. Mill street runs down the side of the Old Biscuit Mill and from it I turn left into Bromwell str. to get to my building, Here I always feel that I'm being welcomed home, especially on cold and wet and blustery Cape winter evenings.]