I find one of the most helpful ways of coping with a sense of spiritual aridity is to find a desert and reflect.

It helps me to match my environment to my mood. I have meditated on my lack of creativity next to dried river beds and on rocky passes in mountains with no vegetation. I have re-lived Ezekiel’s visions gazing out across arid Namaqualand valleys. I have reflected on rebuilding my life from ruins amongst desert ruins. When the air is so dry that the salt stains your shirt without a memory of sweat…that is where you can find out what is really going on inside your troubled mind.

It’s also a place to get away from people. People bend us and shape us in various ways. This is good, because we are meant to be in community; and of course we bend and shape others ourselves! But the dessert offers us a place of freedom, and a place of humility. Try and influence a stone or a termite mound! As our environment is stripped of houses, trees and people, so our soul gets stripped down to its true shape.

This is not an enterprise for the fainthearted!

I cannot invite you to join me in the desert – that is not what you need, anyway! But I can urge you to go there. In Cape Town there are various options, even in our notoriously wet winters: the controlled climate glasshouse at Kirstenbosch gardens has a genuine baobab that I have often sat under. Beaches are dry and sandy. City roof-tops are shimmering expanses of concrete and asphalt. And we have our own little glasshouse which we keep as a succulent garden, with a Namaqualand kokerboom. Catherine de Heuck-Doherty Has written a book about the Russian dessert hermits, and she has really helped us to see how to re-create desert places in the most frenetic of environments

[Back to top]

2. STONES: THE HARD LIFE: the issue of wonder

I remember standing against 600-year-old trees on a canopy tour in the Knysna forest. It was an incredible experience of connectedness with history…what was happening 600 years ago? Etc.

Now why am I not totally stricken with awe by this pebble in my hand?

It was compacted by the weight of ancient oceans, pressed together from the remnants of earlier stone, abraded to sand…as the pressure of water and the weight of driving continents drove it down, down into the crust of the earth, this little rock was part of a sheet of hardening sandstone. Then the forces changed. Millions of years of compression eased, as the downwards force was changed to uplift. Tectonic plates ground and the huge restless furnace of the earth started to thrust billions of tons of new rock up and up. The mountains crinkled and rose from the sea. Dinosaurs flickered and faded. Then these new mountains grew old and weathered, and eventually this little fragment of ancient geology was cracked off some long since leveled cliff-face…and rolled down some dried and diverted stream bed, rolled and rolled and smoothed and smoothed…

Now after billions of years I hold it in my hand, and it is “only a stone”. Only a stone?

And we human beings dare to take these messengers of the unimagined past and throw them at each other?

[Back to top]

3. FATHERS IN CHILDBIRTH: the issue of focus

It is (relatively) easy to become a father; but it is truly difficult to be a father.

My first child was born on Easter Saturday 19 years ago, by caesarean section. I remember running to take off my theatre scrubs and sprinting along to the post-birth room, and being desperately concerned. A nurse was there, quietly washing her hands at a tap, but no baby. The room was silent and empty, a sterile landscape of stainless steel with only a blanket left on a silver-steel table to highlight its utter emptiness. It had not been a busy morning for babies, and now even my child wasn’t there.

The nurse half turned and smiled a slow smile that many agitated young fathers had seen. No doubt.

My baby was in the towel. Impossibly small; incredibly perfect; totally present; and fast asleep.

It has been an important point to meditate on, over 19 years. As a father I can totally miss my child, even though she is right there in the same room, in plain view. Because she is so important to me, I can imagine her to be more than she is, and end up by not appreciating her for who she is. Children need reality, and they desperately need to not be overlooked.

One of my hardest tasks as a father is to not live in a fantasy world.

[Back to top]

4. THE ZEN OF CHILD REARING: the issue of using our powers

Children are small, slippery, quick and evasive. The art of parenting is not to lose one of them

At first they just lie where you put them. The art is not to lose them in the bath. Then they start to wriggle and rotate. The art is not to lose them over the edge of the bed.

After that they start to crawl. The art is to not lose them down the stairs.

They soon hold onto things and cruise. The art is not to lose them to collapsing furniture.

Then they toddle, walk, run. The art is not to lose them in airports

That’s why parents are big, abrasive, fast and obstructive.

5. PROMISE-KEEPING FAITH: the issue of integrity

People talk a lot of nonsense about “faith”, and do a lot of mystical wishful thinking. We tend to see faith as a sort of concentration, a determined ignoring of impossibilities, an iron-willed intention that something should be so. Faith in Bafana Bafana would be in that category. Alternately we see “faith” as a sort of jihad-crusade mentality, the using of religion as an edged weapon or bar-stool to ensure that when everyone else in the pub is groaning on the floor, I at least, am still standing. Or else we see it as a sort of other-worldly saintliness, obviously beyond any ordinary human being’s powers, and therefore irrelevant. Mother Teresa and Gandhi and the Dalai Lama have it, I don’t; and I don’t need it. So we have this emotional focus-blur on the concept, and we miss one of the most important aspects of the idea…

Half of the ancient concept of “faith” is “keeping faith” – it’s even the same word, (p?st??), in the Cape Flats Greek that the Bible was written in.
Faith is keeping your promises
Faith is standing by your friends
Faith is standing by your principles
Faith is reliability
Faith is integrity
Faith is steadiness and courage

Which means that some atheists I know might perhaps have more faith than they think they do. Perhaps in all categories of the word.

6. ARCHITECTURE AS SPIRTUALITY: the issue of simplicity

Feng Shui is all about harmonious placement of the elements of our built environment. Whatever the philosophy behind the careful positioning of various items, almost everyone realizes that to order your environment means to experience a measure of peace. Things are in the place I intend them to be, and that means I am in control. In my case, I intend the mess in my study to be 25 cm deep, and that’s the way it is, so am I in control?

I suppose I have a different route that I should be considering – the displacement of elements in my environment. My daughter is a good example of this…she is now 15, and she has decided to turn her room into a minimalist zone. She has got rid of her wooden bed and now sleeps on a mattress on the floor. She has bundled all her soft toys into baskets and removed them from her room. Her room is much simpler, now…and the rest of the house just a touch more complex.

Although I roll my eyes, I do realise that what she is doing is a signpost – as we find our identity in ourselves we need to shed our possession-related identity. Simplicity cuts away the husk and exposes the core…and we find out who we really are.

[Back to top]