My sword

The banking consultant said, “I overheard your request when you were explaining it to my colleague. I saw you were burdened when you came up the stairs. But you still smiled when you greeted.”

He proceeded to tackle my request and, in the process, revealed that other consultants had (presumably unwittingly) blocked progress on the matter for three years, by giving me incorrect information. The consultant frankly expressed dismay and sadness over the fact that I had been given different stories, which effectively translated into loss of not insubstantial sums of money, with the bank benefiting on the side. Possibly the other consultants had not been adequately trained, or, due to innate lack of curiosity or interest, were simply inadequately motivated to assist.

The consultant had a mean wound on his forehead, which I was tempted to ask him about – had he been bitten by a dog? It was healing well, but it must have been a shocking and painful incident. Nothing in his manner, however, showed that the wound meant anything to him at all and it occurred to me that it might be intrusive of me to ask him about its origin, as it evidently did not cause him pain anymore and he had probably forgotten all about it. Indeed, he was giving all his attention to my finance-related instruction.

While he was working to resolve my situation, a little orange and black bug appeared out of nowhere on the camouflage trousers I was wearing. He was agitated, as bugs tend to be: busy feelering his way through a mission that was a mystery to me. I offered him my finger, which he climbed, scurrying up towards my wrist. I looked around.

“Is there a plant somewhere here?” I asked, but saw only non-living materials: comfortable chairs, sleek desks and counters, laptops, windowed cubicles, and numbered lockers in the space.

“Oh,” exclaimed the consultant, as his gaze moved away from the screen and fell upon the little creature exploring my hand, “I’ve never seen one like it!”

“Would you mind,” I queried, “if I run downstairs quickly and release it outside?”

“Not at all,” he replied.

I hurried past other clients, waiting in huge settees, who might have raised eyebrows, imagining that their patience was being tasked by the needs of a little orange and black bug, had they not also been surprised by the unlikely miniature adventure taking place before them. It was mizzling outside and I set the lithe little beetle into one of the trees that lined the village centre’s parking lot. It would be able to quench any thirst it might have, by sipping a watery droplet, and hopefully be able to make a new life for itself here. I jumped back up the stairs two at a time, aware that my body wasn’t quite acting its age, I am a woman nearing sixty, who has to watch her back. I slowed down enough to retain both health and dignity.

The consultant was still waiting for another department to answer his call and so, I, as well as the people seated around, were obliged to wait. The banker’s gentle presence exuded such patient peace that I felt moved to continue working on a poem that had come to me a couple of days before. I opened my notebook and quietly edited the lines. To my joy, they took on a shape I could not have predicted, a beautiful and profound shape I felt extremely pleased with. In that moment I realised that I must dedicate the poem to the banking consultant. It was a strange experience – an experience I have had over and over, without its ever being the same – of doing something I had never done before. I must set aside self-consciousness, all fear of embarrassment or doubt and judgment, and obey the impulse.

I wrote the poem out in full and dedicated it to the name displayed on the consultant’s tag. When he was done on his side, he gave me all the details of my case, explaining that, since it was a Saturday, my instruction would only be processed on Monday. I expressed my gratitude: he had helped me finally to shed a three-year financial burden. Then I told him what I had been busy doing in the meantime.

“You might have heard the expression that the pen is mightier than the sword,” I said, adding, “I am a poet and had been mulling over an unfinished poem. Your kind presence helped me edit it to a state I am very happy with. So I have dedicated it to you.”

I read the poem aloud and gave it to him. It's a few lines describing the shape and colour of a leaf, showing how it resembles a sword's blade and has its 'hilt' attached to the twig that joins it to the whole tree. The consultant's presence allowed me to understand the lines expanding their meaning to include the Tree of Life, upon which the poem is a small, green leaf, reflecting both the power of the word as well as the connectedness between living beings.

My sword

For Bradley Barnado

Sun through leaf:

bright blade

of green. Red at the hilt:

attached to twig, the holy place,

where sap flows from the tree

into your being.

“Thank you so much,” he said emphatically, “that is so beautiful! I will treasure it!”

He folded the piece of paper and added, “I am so glad I met you!”

“I feel the same,” I replied, “your attentiveness and kindness have made my experience in the bank this morning very special.”

“Thank you! Would you mind saying these things to my manager, emailing her?”

“Not at all, what is her email address?”

“Please also speak to her directly?”

He took me down to her cubicle, but she was not there. I promised to wait for her a few minutes and we said good bye.

When the manager arrived, I told her, “This young man is a gem,” and related what had transpired. She was delighted and asked me please to email her my feedback, something I have yet to do. I will certainly include the link to this blogpost.

A banking consultant who has time for a bug to be freed, and to hear a poem he feels privileged to treasure – he is a man of the new earth in deed. And the old earth, I’ve no doubt, agrees. Wounds do heal, mistakes can be corrected, and a mere leaf can tell us more than we might imagine about the Tree of Life.

– Silke Heiss, 3rd December 2023

HIKU HIKE interview 2nd June 2023

Silke: So just … let me know, please, how the experience was for you on this Hiku Hike?

Ed: It’s a lovely experience. What I found is that it makes you aware of the quietness, and that the quietness has, basically, words in it – and they will come to you if you’re prepared to go quiet and to listen. And then … then also to use those words, to write them down. Because normally it will just pass right over you and you lose it. But to write them down, to capture those thoughts, those words that came to you is something that you’ve got, tangible, to look back on. And then the editing of those words, to use those words to actually create a poem. A writing of the experience, of that – it’s beautiful, it’s opening up your mind to a whole new world.

Silke: And you said earlier that you usually go to the beach and you are looking –

Ed: Ja, you know I love collecting stones and shells and stuff, I’m always going down to the beach looking for stuff, you’re like quite busy looking for shells and looking: where’s the next shell? And that’s it. [Laughs] … come back and you’ve got nothing. You might have a few shells, physical things, ja, but now – going down to the beach I can now look for shells, and also I can – if I’ve got a notepad and pen with me – I can also capture words that are going to come to me, or sentences … and I can use those, so it gives you more. It gives you, like – you can go to the beach, for example, and you can collect shells, but you can also collect words and thoughts and images and, like I said, it opens up a whole new world.

Silke: And you can come back with things that didn’t exist before. Things that you created.

Ed: Ja, that’s true. So I can find things that are material on the beach, sure, driftwood and shells and stuff, but I can also create things out of the nothing. Ja.

Silke: And did the creative, you know, when you jotted your different impressions and then chose to work on particular lines and words – how did you find that choice in the editing process? You know, where you actually sift through your impressions and choose certain ones – can you say a bit more about how that was for you?

Ed: Well, I realised I’m having to create a poem, so then I sifted through what all I’d written and then I had to choose one, because there were actually many poems that I discovered that I could use and write on – different poems, but I had to actually, like, wow, okay, I have to actually choose one here in this Hiku Hike that you wanted me to write down, I had to actually choose one of them, which I did, but I realised it also takes a bit of time – you know, I’ve got to spend more time on it. I can improve my poem that I’ve already written down, but there are also other poems there that I can work on if I choose to and that’s great. I think it gives you so much more, it takes away that noise in your head, it makes you go to the quiet, you know, use the quiet.

Silke: And take what comes to you seriously, rather than dismissing it because you’ve got other things to do.

Ed: Ja, it’s a great experience and I think everybody will benefit by doing something like this, it’s like I said: it opens up a whole new world.

Silke: Did it help you in any way specifically with your writing? Because you said to me you don’t write, people don’t write.

Ed: Yes, it has helped, because you tell me to write something – it is a bit foreboding, like, gee, what am I going to write about? But just to jot down little simple thoughts, that’s easy, anybody can do it –

Silke: Yes.

Ed: And it’s great and I actually need to carry a pen and a notebook with me, and just keep on doing that and capture those thoughts, because I realised they’re coming out of the world, they’re coming from God or they’re coming from wherever –

Silke: To you.

Ed: Ja. It’s important. Whereas before you don’t realise it – you’re just missing them, you’re missing out!

Silke: Missing your own thoughts.

Ed: Ja. [Laughs] It’s crazy hey!

Silke: [Laughs]

Ed: It sounds crazy, but ja, if you do the Hiku Hike … everybody should do it, then they’ll know what I’m talking about! [Laughs] Ja, this Hiku Hike I found it kind of gives you the tools, but there are no tools, it’s no physical tool, but it gives you the tools to plug in to more of life.

Silke: Mental tools.

Ed: Mental tools. It gives you those tools, exactly.

Silke: Language tools.

Ed: Like I say it’s crazy when you think about it. If I look in the future at what I’ve written down I’m going to think wow! where did these words come from? But they do, they come to you and it’s an amazing revelation to … to know that things will come to you and you will be directed.

Silke: If you put yourself deliberately into a relationship with your surroundings.

Ed: Ja. And you can do it all the time, with everything, wherever you go . It’s like trusting your intuition and just looking for the signs. And it’ll help you. They’re there.

Silke: And they’re the ones for you. You know, different people on the same walk will obviously be receptive to completely different things, depending on where they are at in themselves, in their lives. And that’s what’s so beautiful is that each one is given what they need.

Ed: Mm. And I think this Hiku Hike actually helps a person to plug into that world, to plug into that reality that’s there, but because of our busy minds we’re not aware of it. But it’s there.    

/END

Thank you, Ed Low, for trying out a Hiku Hike, so we could have this chat :-)

Rocks on Sunrise-on-Sea beach, Amathole Coastal Resorts 

 

Equally human

‘The poor’ and ‘the rich’. Two terms, which, apparently, denote human beings according to their material property.

I recall teaching youths as well as adults in Soweto during the 1980s and early 90s. They were a relatively small élite, in that they were given the chance of receiving high quality education every Saturday, while their peers were watching tv, doing chores, laughing, squabbling or, worse, fighting in the streets.

A couple of years later I taught at a private college, which had sprung into existence to support young people who had not achieved university exemption, but whose parents wanted them to get some form of tertiary qualification. Many of them managed to register through UNISA, and not a few lacked the discipline and motivation to knuckle down and obtain their degrees. We, the teachers, were employed to serve this ‘clientèle’ by wrestling them, somehow, into passing.

What disturbed me at that time was the strong sense of the disadvantagedness of these ‘rich kids’. In hindsight, I guess it was the cadaverous fragrance of decadence that hung about them. Against all political correctness, I felt, strongly, the privilege of those select township children, who were loved and pampered by the education support programmes and really given the best in the allocated hours. By contrast, I felt sorry for and disturbed by the ‘rich kids’, who were paid for, but whose hearts and minds were all too often nigh impermeable. As human beings I judged more than a few of them to be quite stunted in their development.

It remains a horribly unquestioned perception that material wealth equals advantage. It is a skewed perception, however, because it is grossly superficial. The most advantaged kids I have seen in the last ten years were a group of grade 7s at a tiny school called Crabbush, in Hogsback in the Eastern Cape. They came to the local library once a week for supplementary tuition in English. They were considered disadvantaged because they could barely speak that language. However, they struck me as basically happy, healthy children, who recited new vocabulary in sing-song, and then strolled between free-roaming cattle from the library back to their school each Thursday. It disturbed me that such children should be saddled with so negative a label; just as it continues to disturb me that youngsters, who are fluent in English and who have private rooms in city dwellings, should be seen as ‘advantaged’ when too many of them are, in fact, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually dangerously neglected, in some cases even abused.

I cannot not mention the rich élite in the present government, who also demonstrate the potential 'disadvantage' of excessive material wealth when it comes to being a decent human being. The rich are helplessly entangled just like the poor in an outdated system and mindset, which is a system and mindset that prioritises the material identity of an individual at the cost of all that makes us truly human. The 'poor' who steal and lie and commit murder are not a jot better than the 'rich' who steal and lie and commit murder. BOTH classes are dehumanised.

I am trying to question, indeed, I would like completely to get rid of the mindset that says it's ok to steal and lie and even murder just because you are materially poor. THAT is one of the most HARMFUL attitudes, which robs the poor of their humanity and encourages material greed. That limiting mindset has rotted our civilisation through and through and stoked frightening hatred towards the rich, many of whom are, likewise, not in control of themselves – indeed, there are individuals in the South African government who are perfectly happy to demonstrate that it’s ok to steal and lie and cause the misery and death of others, just because they themselves are rich.

It is time that real human needs – for love, care, intellectual stimulation, manual as well as mental skills, as well as spiritual sustenance – are ranked equally alongside the need for food, drink, clothes and shelter. Nobody can enjoy the satisfaction of one need at the cost of excluding the other needs. The rich are just as human as the poor, and both are just as human as the middle classes (where, arguably, the greatest chance for a balanced lifestyle exists). Neither group benefits from being labelled, as these labels merely serve as blindfolds for the living hearts and minds inside the individuals branded so. The choice to honour your humanity exists for EACH ONE OF US – no matter whether you wear diamond-studded stilettoes or go barefoot.

Image by freepic.diller on Freepik

Image by Leroy Skalstad from Pixabay 

Self-tuning: The Tonic of Choice Words

I would like to present you today with two poems by Norman Morrissey, which perform very lucidly a dance of change in the spirit of a man. This change concerns a self-healing process, recorded in words, moving from a divided to a more integrated sense of self. 

For me, one of the most remarkable qualities of my late husband Norman – as man AND poet – was his determination to self-examine, to self-edit the tissue of his being and writing alike, in order to enact a continuous transformation of both poetry and psyche into a truer timbre. Self-tuning would be a choice word here.

 

Conscientious nerves

 

You talk

of a life

without regrets

 

– some line walked always true

so you never must

ache for your myriad mis-steps.

 

I’ve never been

that lucky,

there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop:

memories,

conscientious nerves

 

rooting

in

my marrow.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in Sound Piping, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2015

 

I confess that I’ve long felt accused by this poem – of failing to be ‘conscientious’ in examining my wrongdoings – but this is probably due to the fact that the poem models the act of self-accusation by means of the conscience: describing the man’s very bones (“my marrow”) as being strung through with “conscientious nerves”. The lines, which alert the reader to this, are:

  there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop

 

There’s an open display here, a FREE EXPRESSION of feelings of low self-worth and shame as performed by the body. 

Now I remember my father – a self-proclaimed atheist, fervently reverent of life – reminiscing on conversations with a pastor friend, in which he took issue with the Christian term ‘sin’. I can do wrong, he maintained, I can, as a human, do harm – but that does not make me a sinner. 

Hiding in this rejection of a fallen state is the heathen’s freedom, but also his innocence (though innocence is, of course, not necessarily innocuousness). The word ‘heathen’ originates as a designation of the ‘uncivilised’, but probably largely harmless, folk, who populated the rural areas (heaths) beyond the precincts of state and religious control. The online etymological dictionary observes:

It is most probably that the Germanic word haiϸana (heathen) referred to a person living on the heath, i.e. on common land, i.e. a person of one’s own community. It would then be a neutral word used by heathen people in order to refer to each other rather than a Christian, negative word denoting non-Christians.

I don’t see an untouched Bushman with “stooping shoulders” due to a deep, inner “ache” for his “myriad mis-steps”. But, on being told he is a sinner, surely her or his posture will change.

Nietzsche, in his critiques of the tenets of Christian civilization, examined the ominous build of resentment in the collective human psyche, due – if I recall his writings rightly – to unacknowledged guilt and shame over the fact that our species had murdered God;  resentment, then, being a phenomenon whereby negative feelings (grief, horror, shock, rue) are not felt and expressed, but denied and repressed, thus generating a continuous acid reflux (the metaphor is mine) of powerful energies denied the opportunity for natural transformation or –mutation back into the flow of life. 

The miraculous turning-point in the Christian story is, of course, that our wrongdoings, including, I would guess, the murder of God – surely our ultimate crime – are forgiven and, moreover, REDEEMED, through penitence before that same God, resurrected. The orthodoxy (Bible) prescribes words for us, with which to realise that miracle, which I understand even today serves the more non-verbal among our species, who are not given the listening tongue – but, for the poet, there is a different kind of freedom, that is to say, the freedom of conscientiously elected words. Consider the “shift” in the heart of him here:

The story

 

Something has shifted

in the deep of me:

the constant memories

 

– starting like a grouse at my feet –

fly differently,

don’t lurch

 

sickly

into shame and griefs

and thoughts

 

of clumsiness and wrong-headedness

– of ineptitude and folly.

There’s still

 

the whirr at my feet

and the wings beating

at my face:

 

but each visitation

starts to whisper

new words:

 

starts to hint

a new

language of belonging,

 

the replays

start making a movie

that shows the essential me.

 

I still have a script

of bungles and crimes

– but at least

 

it’s becoming a screenplay,

becoming a history

that makes sense:

 

and that changes

the shape of the story

as something to live with.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in This Moment’s Marrow, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2017

 

What I notice in this poem is the transition from a prevalence of guttural sounds and clipped consonants in the first four stanzas – sh, ch, f, t, c, s – to a lovely in-breeze of gentle w and wh sounds, and even the s in ‘visitation’ is heard as a soft z, in stanzas 5–7 – as if the breath itself were taking command to expel fearful tension in the body. 

The image of the grouse in stanza 2 – which strikes me as strange, foreign, even – suggests itself, to me at least, as an unconscious memory, “in the deep” of the poet, of the German word Graus (horror) – a word, which is pronounced the same as ‘grouse’. In the fifth stanza, this gives way to a softer, much more English-sounding “whirr”. 

“each visitation/ starts to whisper/ new words” we read, as the last four stanzas take on more measured, calmer rhythms and employ longer, soothing vowel sounds; while a prevalence of alliterative s’s snake confidently through – perhaps delivering a shimmer of Hippocrates’ staff of healing? Indeed, that staff is invoked in ‘Grasp’, a subsequent poem in the collection, whose last line names ‘This Moment’s Marrow’.

The poet’s use of the word ‘story’ to mean something he has shaped “to live with” must be firmly distinguished from recent usage of the word in a negative sense as ‘the story you tell yourself, which repeats old patterns’. Norman’s “story” is one which he has built himself, resulting in a sovereign, “essential me” – HIS history and life, which, despite “bungles and crimes”, he CAN live and, by implication, be at peace with. 

The choice of the word ‘crimes’ is particularly interesting, and, in my view, suggests that – unlike the sin-free heathen, or atheist – the poet faces his “essential me” as inextricably entwined into a species NOT FREE OF a violent and sacrilegious past.

Between ‘The Story’ and ‘Conscientious nerves’ lie two years; the last two years of the poet’s life. They record a process that took place inside the man, and allow readers to witness genuine self-healing, self-tuning, as it were, by the tonic of choice words.

For a more indepth examination of the minute particulars whereby Norman tuned, exercised and trained his voice to become the medication it could be for his soul, see John van Wyngaard’s superb Introduction in Gripscapes. This posthumously published book contains two of the three poems referenced here. Reading MORE of my beloved late husband’s carefully crafted poems CLOSELY may be the best thing you could do today, in order to prepare for tomorrow.

– Silke Heiss, February 2023

Trinity of blogposts 3 A flash of ancient insight (on earth as it is in heaven)

 “Look how much a weed in a crack

has influenced you,” she said.

The epigraph of this article derives from a recent blogpost I shared, in which a Journey through dance I’d signed up for triggered an early childhood memory of a miniscule, flowering weed, which had ‘spoken’ to me, saying it was from the stars. William Blake, in his Auguries of Innocence, confirms in the first four lines of the poem the inherent emotional logic of such an experience:
 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour. 

This article is not concerned, however, with the similitude between the design of the cosmos and a single, earthly bloom, as perceived by a three-year-old child. It is concerned with the concept and phenomenon of influence, that is to say, with the experience that the flowering weed ‘spoke to me’ – in such a way, moreover, as to have a profound and lasting effect.

The original meaning of the word, ‘influence’ – deriving from the Latin influere, to flow in – does not convey the image of water. Rather, ‘influence’ was used to describe the power to produce an effect “in indirect or intangible ways”, “without the apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command”, so we read in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary.

My Shorter Oxford Dictionary highlights the use of the term first and foremost in Astrology, where it denoted the “supposed flowing from the stars of an ethereal fluid acting upon the character and destiny of men, and affecting sublunary things generally.” It adds that in later times, the term applied to the exercise of “occult power”. Subsequent usage shows that the term continues, over the centuries, to be associated with the operation of exertion that is “unseen” except in its effects; or the “capacity of producing effects by insensible or invisible means.”

These definitions are borne out by the online etymology dictionary, which notes that the use of the word in Middle English was limited to describing “any outflowing of energy that produces effect, of fluid or vaporous substance as well as immaterial or unobservable forces” – in other words, usage in this case referred only to the elemental, and not the human, world. I am interested here in particular in the phrase “any outflowing of energy that produces effect”.

The burgeoning literature and audio-visual material available on the power of human thought have made the fact of the ‘invisible’ or ‘insensible’ influence of both conscious and unconscious human thought one of the central concerns in contemporary human culture – from mystic, religious, spiritual, psychic, psychological, artistic, literary, philosophical, biological, neurological, chemical and, even, mathematical perspectives (i.e. the attempt to find the numerical formula required to calculate the number of human beings needed for a prayer in a specific situation to take effect.)

The knowledge that we are, in the words of Dr Zach Bush, “columns of water”, and the tremendously active focus on conscious breath-work amongst health-conscious and philosophically- or spiritually-oriented human beings across the globe in this day and age, includes us as a species, arguably, yet easily, in the “fluid or vaporous substance[s]” from which energy can flow out to produce an effect.

It's hardly a one-way street, however. Three years ago – despite skepticism – I had my astrological birth chart mapped and interpreted for me. Ever since, I have consulted the astrologer annually for what you could call a kind of check-in to the year ahead. She offers ‘trends’ and ‘currents’, which I have the choice to be aware of, if I should experience these in my personal life. One of the most influential moments during these readings was at the last one, when I revealed to her that I felt I suffered a lifelong addiction to romance (love, magic and beauty) and that I was eager to wean myself of this addiction. She informed me that the fact that my birth chart shows the planet Venus in Taurus, in opposition to Neptune, would naturally render me prone to an insatiable longing for oneness – oneness with love, with nature, with beauty, with all that lives. She observed that this longing would likely be so vast that it could not possibly be fulfilled by another living human being. It would therefore be wise to channel it into nurturing a spiritual oneness with nature and/ or my relationship with the Divine. Of course, my nature poems do (mostly) exactly that, and my habit of communing with biological and elemental nature alike, does indeed satisfy my need for being-at-one-with-all (the Divine as well as the Earthly) in a timeless, or eternal, zone.

An astrological explanation of an innate tendency is, of course, only one perspective among a variety of possible ones, which could potentially provide a similar, or even an identical insight.

Depending on whether you inspect the phenomenon of a flowering weed ‘speaking’ to a child about the stars from an artistic, mystical, spiritual, religious, psychic, psychological, philosophical, biological, neurological, chemical, or mathematical perspective, you will use your field-specific language and vocabulary to probe this phenomenon; although I hazard that a mathematical induction would be the most foundational. The chances are that none of those perspectives would cancel any other. In concert, they might create a complex bouquet of new formulae – verbal, musical, visual or diagrammatic, as well as numerical – of insight into the power of the human mind – not necessarily only as a driver, but, indeed, as a receptacle of thought: as a direct result, for example, of the influence of a (not even ingested) vegetable substance upon it. Whether such receptivity is affected by the heavenly bodies whose energy streamed into that mind, at the moment of her birth on the planet, offers a further, valid path of enquiry. There is, I posit, a measurable give-and-take between our consciousness and our – both organic as well as elemental – environment.

Certainly the sounds and rhythms used to explore these notions with you, dear reader, by means of the English language, have been chosen with the intention of effecting the greatest possible curiosity, not to say fascination, in you.

I trust that this article is a miniscule seed, gifted by a miniscule weed, assisting in the birth of a radically new order of seeing – a ‘miraculous’ order of infinitely various forms of influence. This order of seeing is, I think, already well under way.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour. – William Blake