Lower Main Road, Woodstock

Winter nudges closer. With it, the welcome change for me in the less harsh light. Also, are interesting and unusual cloud formations. This is as increasingly hostile cold fronts push up from Antarctica and ravage the Peninsula, before sweeping northwards and eastwards over the country, quite often bearing snow.

Even closer to home, it's also that time of the year when the odd, slender and sleekly-black millipedes escape my pot plants and haphazardly crisscross my floor going God alone knows where. At first, I put them back where I thought they belong. Then I realised that I know nothing about the behind-the-scenes machinations inspiring their actions and that, rather, I should stop meddling. Because I'm quite helpless, but nevertheless in awe, before the 'algorithms', formulas and miracles that wire our magnificent world.

It's not unlike how I've, also, let go of my fear and dread around the climate change spectre; it's really too late, I believe, to effect change, although I'll do my best, and trust somehow I do, that everything is exactly as it's meant to be. And I don't mean that fatalistically, but rather faithfully. (I strive with all of my might to not let my heart be troubled, worrying has never got me anywhere.)

From my writing table, as always, the handsome charcoal and white Edwardian facade above the District Six Meat Market on the corner of Lower Main road and Devon street draws my eye. As is often the case, on the electricity wires rigged between the old silver-painted street poles, a haphazard flock of dark-jacketed pigeons perch as if at a convention for serious-minded undertakers.

A seagull brilliant white, in contrast, with wings widespread soars in sheer gracefulness across my window view, quickly followed by another one, its partner?

Then an unexpected gap in the hum of the traffic, which is just as suddenly filled with a seagull shriek. Followed by the deep attention-grabbing clarion call of a minibus taxi as it scavenges the streets for passengers; these are the most informal bottom feeders of the city's transport system, often dangerous, always effectively uber regular.

I reign my gaze back inwards:

This is my sixth year in Woodstock. I'm happy here, much more so than I believe I would be elsewhere in much of Cape Town. Woodstock - harsh and rough, but real - is certainly not the bourgeois suburbia of the Southern Suburbs, nor of the Atlantic Seaboard. Well not yet at least... but make no mistake, they're working (hard) on it.

Southern Tip: Zen and the art of road tripping

The Southern Cape coast has always powerfully and mysteriously fascinated me, thus drawn me to it.

It's big sky country: the southern ocean is expansive, never-ending. There's nada in your way, a definite sense that nothing stands between you and the world's end

It's the awesome, even overwhelming sense of being at Africa's tip: it is this far and no further.

The next stop, southwards, is Antarctica, about 6,900 km away.

To put that into perspective, bear in mind that the African continent measures about 8,000 km from north to south.

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I had no idea where I was heading as I left Cape Town that midwinter's afternoon of my spontaneous road trip. It was the end of June. Merely days from the winter solstice, and this far south, the days were short.

There are only two main routes out of the city, the N1 or N2.

Thinking that I would head into the semi-desert Karoo - seeking breathing space and solitude - I began making my way towards the N1, which begins within sight of my bedroom window in Woodstock.

I was still uncomfortable in the hired car, also anxious. We were still strangers then. That would, naturally, change over the next ten days: The Zen of Hire Car Relationships.

I didn't get to the N1 - this national route runs from Cape Town in the south to the Beitbridge border post at Zimbabwe in the north over a distance of approximately 1937 km. Exactly when I saw a claustrophobic back-up of traffic en-route to the highway I shot awkwardly, abruptly down a side road. And decided to take my chances on the N2, whose source is also not too far away from home.

The N2, on the other hand, extends from Cape Town - along the Garden Route, through Knysna, Port Elizabeth, East London and Durban - to Ermelo. It is the main highway along the Indian Ocean coast and languidly stretches for 2,255 kilometres. The longest numbered route in SA.

Far out of the city, or so it seemed for someone who mostly travels on foot, and on the N2, I hit another traffic snarl, just before Sir Lowry's Pass: freedom and expansiveness were so close, but the end of my patience was much closer. 

I saw it as further confirmation that I was due for a road trip, alone. 

Another spontaneous, sharp right turn off the beaten track at the Gordon's Bay sign. 

At that moment my mind was made-up; I'd take the quiet and less-travelled, much slower and spectacularly scenic R44 route along the coastline. Travelling beneath the Kogelberg, on the coast edge, towards Hermanus I'd see how far I got before dark before I felt content to stop. 

Rooi-Els, Pringle Bay, Betty's Bay, Kleinmond. 

Then another right turn on to the R43 past Fisherhaven, Hawston, Vermont, Onrus, Sandbaai, to Hermanus. 

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I always pack books with me on my travels. Never too many though, as I want there to be a vacuum for the books that I'm sure to collect along the way.

I'd recently been gifted Henri Nouwen's The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom (1996, Doubleday). I had not yet even opened the sun-bleached hardback. As always it was meant to be and proved to be, invaluable company, even now.

As always, when you get yourself out of your own way - by slowing down, stopping, also pausing to (truly) listen, began a journey within a journey:

Work Around Your Abyss

There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes. 

Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.

 
There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

- Henri Nouwen (p. 3)

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I took the photo from Gearing's Point, over Hermanus's old historical harbour. It was shortly before the sun disappeared behind the mountains and few people were about in the sharp breeze. I pointed the lens in the direction I intended heading the next morning.

Dial 999

A cold spell with tendrils reaching all the way from Antarctica is lashing Cape Town and much to my surprsie I've had to wear a jacket for most of the day. 

After midday I met Douwe for lunch and bubbly at Cafe Paradiso in Kloof Street, which was a blast from the past: I'd worked there as a desperate and hungry, literally, waiter at night while I worked - for free (times were tough, I needed  portfolio of work) - for the Weekend Argus newspaper during the day. This was 1995. The first year of our democracy. The year I returned to SA from London and moved for ten months to Cape Town because of a short-lived love affair with a Jewish Irishman studying illustration in Dublin. I worked though the 1995 rugby world cup that SA won, on home ground, while observing the hullabaloo from a vague distance while confronting my crossroad of insecurity and passion.

 

It was a hideous time of poverty and, at first, intense loneliness for me. As I freelanced as a writer while scratching my itching flea bites from sleeping on the floor as a desperate digs-mate, first in Mowbray, then in Kings Road Seapoint. And surviving by scraping leftovers from customers' plates into plastic bags that I would take home and devour because I could hardly afford food. My treat was one Amstel lager a week that I nursed until the green glass and beer was piss warm.

This afternoon after lunch I was pleasantly surprised by the the mauve jacaranda blooms on a street in the Republic of Tamboerskloof as we wound downhill to the deep pleasure of an early evening Italian art movie in an uncomfortable-but-who-cares bucket seat at the Labia.

Right now the heady blend of Chilean cabernet sauvignon and my medication seep into my consciousness, to make it un-, while lines / emotions / undotted I-s and uncrossed T-s blur as I gratefully slip away into another world in the deeply nourishing suburban silence of a comfortable apartment in Tamboerskloof. 

This - my 999th blog post at Beautiful Mind - is likely to be riddled with errors, but hey this is a notebook and I'll correct those in the morning.

The Saturday-to-Saturday life-long relationship (I'll love you 'til Niagara falls)

The beginning of October Wednesday-to-Friday retreat had been coming for months: Noordhoek on the Cape Peninsula. I'd been excited, initially, but as the bottleneck of life had become more clogged and pressured, as I knew it would, I'd begun to dread it, foolishly. It became another pressure point on the acupuncture of my life: quickly as possible to stick the needle in and relieve the pressure, then reactively to move on to the next point (as opposed to proactively resolving the source of my dis-ease).

The first thing I did was compromise the retreat time.

Nevertheless it was a fantasy come true: to be sitting with a long-haired beach boy with a big heart at a fave Kommetjie pub and restaurant renowned for its chill vibes, barefoot and sun-bleached folk all occupying a different time zone and attitude to Cape Town, despite that a mere 40-or-so kilometres separated the lighthouse-lit fishing/surfing village from the city.

Nature, ocean, the holiday-blue sky and ozone-laden seaspary straight off the vast and empty ocean, all that there was to separate the storm-thrashed peninsula from Antartica.

He had got there just before dusk, again in the car with the foreign yellow & black number plates.

That perfect melding of outer- and inner-beauty expressed in the eyes and the smile, the softspoken-ness.

They didn't make love on the beach. Instead, at first, they merely lay there body-on-body, breath-in-breath-melded-into-one-inhaled-and-exhaled-and-inhaled-again on the soft bone-white sand beneath a Southern Hemisphere black velvet void-of-eternity carelessly and gaspingly sprinkled with at least a billion carat. In a breeze just bearably cool, not far from the lapping and phospherent salt-water. 

Then in the dark-on-light he haphazardly scuttled around like a crazy-wth-happiness long-legged crab in the icy-Atlantic water. Endlessly whispering my name he scoopeds up shells, scallops and ocean-ground-to-smoothe and aeons-old pebbles. These he poured into my flimsy jacket pockets without weighing my down. 

Little did I know that he'd later describe us as falling stars, although he would mean it (in the past tense of course) romantically, despite it being his response to my goodnight-and-goodluck email a-few-days-but-many-years-later.

Tanned hands on hairy legs and bony knees / a now almost-empty bottle of red wine clunking with anticipation against the steel undercarriage beneath my passenger seat / he'd excitedly lifted the Wolftrap from his sister's wine collection, in Muizenburg.

Falling over each other through the vegetation, between the parking lot and my double bed, he also tapped to the brim the deep and old fashioned bath designed for a time long before water became scarce and climate change a critical issue. 

Also snuck in was a slender plastic bottle of aromatherapeutic bubble bath that he then plunged in whole beneath the gushing, steaming streams to flail and careen not unlike a corpse gone over the Niagara falls.

He wanted to spend the night, as did I, but I didnt feel right - flying in the face of the people who'd sponsored my retreat, to write.

All that I didn't do was write.