'Tis the season for reflecting

2017 is almost over and I made the decision to end 2017 and begin 2018 with a sort of retreat. I write this while in Magaliesburg at a farm called Lalela (I'll write a long post about it at the end of the experience). I could have gone to India but instead I felt I needed to stop and rest (being a tourist in India would not have been stopping nor restful). I've had quite a busy year: I started a new job in January, I registered for a PhD, I’ve been attending conferences and speaking at public events more than ever, I decided to support a friend to start a school in January 2018 amongst a litany of other experiences which were both public and private. Like many people; it's been a year. 

The Olive Trees

The end of the year is always a time of much flurry with end of year celebrations, holidays, family time etc. By choosing to literally retreat from all the end of year buzz means I have three weeks of nature, good food, good company and lots of time to think and reflect. While 'tis the season to be jolly I find I am in a different season of contemplation. I deliberately chose contemplation in a different environment because I realised I needed to be more intentional about responding to the experiences I've had this year. I'm a reflective person; I overthink and belabour everything. My entire orientation towards the world revolves around how I think and feel.

A view from the stoep

Part of this trip has allowed me to remember parts about myself I hadn’t had time for. My sister did a retreat a few days before me and in reflecting about her experiences she said “I feel like a whole new world is unfolding. Just a new way of being. Or maybe an old way that I’m remembering. It’s like unravelling the original intent of how to do living”. A key part of both our retreats has been land; it’s beauty, expanse and ability to heal. In our daily life we don’t have the time nor place for reflection with a view of mountains and the sound of birds and the wind. For someone who grew up in the city with pockets of time ‘in nature’ I’m beginning to realise that without cultivating time for being still and having markers for being still, something is lost. Unlike most black people, I don't have ilali that my family returned to at the end of each year for Christmas. Both my parents had families who lived elokishini and we stayed in the suburbs. Growing up we lived near the beach and when I look back at my childhood, while it was challenging and most times I’m surprised by how I survived, I know that being near the beach was an important part of surviving because the expanse of the sea was a constant part of my life. The sea was where we went for walks and to escape the emptiness in my family. The sea and the library kept me alive.

Part of my quiet time away has led me to reading from a website which is a podcast series On Being. While it’s a website of podcasts, I have been reading the transcripts instead. One of the transcripts I read was a conversation between Krista Tippett and DavidSteindl-Rast about the anatomy of gratitude. Amongst the many profound things which emerge from the conversation a few stand out for me:

• …This idea of listening and really looking and beholding—that comes when people ask, ‘Well, how shall we practice this gratefulness?’ And there’s a very simple kind of methodology to it: Stop, look, go.”

•  “I believe that everyone of us is a mystic, because we have this experience of belonging, once in a while, out of the blue…Or sometimes without any particular reason, suddenly out in nature you feel one with everything. And every human being has this.”

•  “Silent openness is a wonderful form of prayer”

• “In mysticism experience, that (mystery)is something that we cannot grasp. We cannot put it into words, we cannot imagine it in an image, we cannot put it in a concept. We cannot grasp it, but we can understand it”

In a sense, this end of year period is my attempt at stopping and looking and come January when I head back to Joburg hopefully I’ll have a different perspective that continues with “stop, look, go” while practicing silence, contemplation and gratefulness. This is part of the remembering I’ve been doing. Remembering an old way of being in my life where silence, contemplation and gratefulness were not compromised as they have been in the past few years. Part of forgetting this part of myself is that I left the church for almost ten years. Since childhood church and Christianity were the two things which formed my spiritual practice. And by leaving the church I didn’t quite know how to continue with fostering a spiritual practice without the church. While I returned to the church last year, I am more intentional about developing a spiritual practice that isn’t solely about going to church and ticking the good Christian boxes. There’s so much more to this mystery of what it means to be alive in this moment and I am reminded of this everyday when I meditate or listen to the wind or watch the stars or swim in the river.

By the river (picture: N. Patel)

This time away has also meant contemplating land. This has been a major conversation this year amongst friends and even more on social media. Without the experience of being around land I couldn’t quite grasp what it means when people talk about the significance of land. I understand what it means politically and historically but it’s taken this experience at Lalela for me to grasp it experientially and perhaps spiritually. Most of the conversations about land are misplaced because they largely focus on the commercial aspect of land: farming, agriculture and property. But this doesn’t capture what many mean when people say “we want land even if it means it’s there for us to look at”. This has been the experience I’ve had since arriving at Lalela. There’s something mysterious, spiritual about having land to look at. There’s a different way of being when one is confronted with the beauty and expanse of what it means to have beautiful land to look at. It’s healing. I have been reminded of all the childhood rituals which involved the land and water: going to the sea wearing white clothes and listening to my mother and aunts talking into the sea, leaving beads in the sea as a way of connecting with ancestors nje ngabantu basemanzini. I haven’t done this in my adult life and being surrounded by all the beauty in the land I am reminded of how alive nature is. It is charged in a way that leaves me breathing easier but also asking questions.

My sister’s retreat was in Hilton and she sent me pictures of the beautiful landscape and how healing the experience was for her. We chatted about what it means for millions of black people to wake up in places like crowded townships or in proximity to pollution  when our bodies remember the expanse and space our ancestors enjoyed before land was stolen. Our bodies remember that we belong to the earth and the land. And as this is about knowing who we are and how we respond to our spirits which constantly reminds us who we are. As my sister said in a voice note while reflecting on the connection between the land and our spirits: “There’s something about the experience of living in the township that actually kills the soul because the spirit knows but the soul is having absolute turmoil with this thing and that’s why it’s such an injustice, such an injustice, not to have access to the land…these are just my musings”.

Hilton (Picture: Koyana)

While this experience and these musings are unfolding it feels right to end this post with a poem which captures the experience I'm having:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins) 

In the veldt (picture: Z. Marie)