11th April 2011
I can’t remember which Sixties pop group made “Monday Morning Coming Down” a hit, but it has been reverberating in my head all day. I wrote late into the night – not Pulitzer stuff, just catching up on this Blog – so awoke to find Jeff hanging about outside the cabin, remarkably un-hung-over for a Monday. Had some coffee together, then gave him the day off when he started telling me stories I’d heard before. I had a bunch of final administration reports to collate and e-mail, which took all morning and sapped my already low energy levels.
Since I haven’t had a chance to do laundry for a week, that was next, by which time the day was more than half-spent. Doing laundry by hand is dangerous – it gives one too much time to think. A while back, someone from St. Luke’s parish in Johannesburg, who hardly knows me at, all said after a five-minute conversation: “Gosh, you really live inside your head, don’t you!”
I don’t know whether it was meant to be judgemental or not, but I realised that it was certainly true. This morning was the first time in three weeks that I was really able to be “here”, facing the world outside my head.
Here, the world outside my head is daunting and lonely. Ideas inside my head for the biogas digester, harvesting water from the winter rain and mists, clearing the ground and so forth happens in an instant. In the real world it all has to happen one nail, one shovel, one pick-stroke at a time in temperatures of 30 deg, or even higher in the cabin during the day. It also has to happen One Rand at a time…
I think what has happened is that I have been forced outside my head. Facts I knew intellectually in my head have become an emotional reality outside my head – if that makes sense to anybody not Irish!
For the first time since my hormonal Youth, I have also come to know loneliness. For various reasons, I have always been a “loner” – emotionally independent, even isolated. (“Inside my own head” again?)
Then, in 1993, after seven years in an emotional wilderness, I was Blessed – read that any way you like – with an incredible life partner. I occasionally call her “Mpho” – meaning “Gift”, and a true gift she has been, by being everything I am not; Practical, stoic, just-get-on-with-it kind of person – all the traits one would expect Christa to have inherited from her German-Swiss father and Sudwes-Deutsch mother who dealt with The Great Depression as part of their childhood.
We’ve worked together almost all of our married life, building the Studio and her professional reputation along with it. On the one hand that has been wonderful, working very day with the person I love, but it has had a down-side. At some point our dedication to a rather fickle industry has “Cuckoo-ed” itself into our private life. In a way this flight of fancy called “Boggy Pond” was my attempt to reclaim an area for us as a couple, but I think what I am facing now is the reality that I can’t do this alone, coupled with the reality that I am also essential to the running of the studio that is our livelihood, and which will have to finance this hare-brained venture.
Sorting out the opposing demands of each will be…. well, interesting, to say the least.