Not the unexpected I expected

Exactly as unexpected as it was meant to be

Dateline: Wales

Population: 3.136 million

Distance from Cape Town: 13 162km

Arrival date: Some time in May

Temperature: Somewhere in the lower teens

Wild ponies on the ridge that forms the border between England and Wales. We are looking at England here. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

I spent three days walking in the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales with a friend from school days. In the spirit of ancient friendship, there were long periods where we didn’t say anything to one another.

PICTURE: Karin Schimke

An entry from my journal:

What was I walking after or into in those neons, down the corridors, around the rooms of those mountains, among the sheep, in the whipping breeze of late spring, all green green green like pain you press on for pleasure?

Bushes tufted with woolly sheddings and the edges of winds hooked in from across borders imagined by long ago. Meadows where we had to hop between the splashy pats of a thousand long-faced ruminants. Streams and gulleys and ruins and moss and lichen and hedges. Slopes of coppery heather and angles of hill and cloud. Valleys divided by hedge into a shimmering quilt.

Nothing was I walking after or into except my own feet finding their form on paths where I was glad to be a visitor in my own one short life.

PICTURE: Karin Schimke

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This is not the unexpected I expected

My IT guy in Cape Town – sweet, punctual, reliable, non-patronising, gentle, a man who reads books – can’t help himself but make this one personal comment every time he comes to my house: why so many books? Why? He was even more shocked when I said I did, in fact, have a Kindle.

I’ve been away from home exactly three months today.

I miss my books. I miss books. I miss my clothes. I miss my knives and my mixing bowls. I miss The Useless Assholes at my pottery class. I miss long catch-ups with friends over supper or short catch-ups over coffee.

I miss the wildness of the landscapes I know, the intensity of the storms, the sizzle of the heat on the path and the boulders when you started your hike on the front face of Table Mountain too late. The way streams turn to torrents in winter. The tall golden grass of the Free State in winter. The coppery haze of the Highveld when winter’s dryness makes the red dust rise off the earth as though it is evaporating.

I miss my children.

I miss my mother’s little flat on a koppie that overlooks Pretoria and the thundering giants called clouds that amass over the whole view in the late afternoons in summer. I miss chatting with her on her little patio and remembering things and people from long ago and laughing about those memories that always make us laugh again.

I miss talking to Kholwani and Natalie and Tokiti and Larriet and Charklas in their shops every time I go to do errands.

I miss my partner’s family and the long, argumentative, funny, intense meals we share while the smaller children play complicated imagination games in the background, and the older ones study for exams or sing and play together around the piano.

I find that I can miss all of these things intensely without wishing I wasn’t here.

John Steinbeck, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, asserts in his wonderful book Travels with Charley, that ‘(o)nce a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over.’

A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip.

The last six months of 2022 were taken up with building the ship of my vagabonding* year and every piece of the puzzle fell into place as though this puzzle had been done tens of times and the bits were so softened around the edges and so used to the fit of their partner pieces, that they hardly needed the eye of the builder.

There might have been odds stacked against me, but I hurdled them as though travel planning was in my blood, as though I am not, at heart, a house hen, with a fearful need to keep systems and rhythms predictable.

I wanted ‘different’ and I got different. My plans – which were to have no plans – have ‘dashed themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip’. I am still having a plan-less time, except not plan-less like I imagined.

This is both not as dramatic and exactly as dramatic as it sounds. There is no outer calamity. There’s no inner calamity either, come to think of it.

There’s just ‘Oh, so this is what happens when you’re expecting the unexpected’.

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Keep a straight face while you murder then maybe you won’t notice

On the way to a free lunch concert at the Berlin Philharmonie, we walked through Tiergarten, an enormous park more or less in the centre of the city. Enormous statues in one section of the park celebrate hunting through the ages. This makes sense because the forest was a hunting ground to begin with.

The statues enthralled me: their drama and the heroism the embody. The animals – whether hunted or hunting – are depicted as almost mad, while the human hunters have dead expressions: not triumphant, not fearful. They seem entirely unmoved by the killing business.

Even though the hunter in the first picture has a victorious stance, his face, like the other faces, reveals nothing. The hunters all seem a lot deader than their quarry. PICTURES: Karin Schimke

Later, I read that there used to be around 200 000 trees in Tiergarten. After Hitler’s interference and the lack of coal after World War II, the numbers had been reduced to 700. Last night I read this wonderful feature about trees.

Even if you haven’t been to the woods lately, you probably know that the forest is disappearing. In the past ten thousand years, the Earth has lost about a third of its forest, which wouldn’t be so worrying if it weren’t for the fact that almost all that loss has happened in the past three hundred years or so. As much forest has been lost in the past hundred years as in the nine thousand before. With the forest go the worlds within those woods, each habitat and dwelling place, a universe within each rotting log, a galaxy within a pine cone. And, unlike earlier losses of forests, owing to ice and fire, volcanoes, comets, and earthquakes—actuarially acts of God—nearly all the destruction in the past three centuries has been done deliberately, by people, actuarially at fault: cutting down trees to harvest wood, plant crops, and graze animals.

(‘What we owe our trees’ by Jill Lepore)

Maybe keeping a straight face is keeping a straight heart: let no destruction wrought by human hands register then maybe it won’t seem so gross.

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Doings and listenings and readings and wanderings

• Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck was the absolute highlight of the past week (when lots of other nice things happened too). You can read my review on Instagram or on Facebook.

• When you are staying in a new city for an extended time, it feels important to go to places where you can talk to people, not just walk by them, so I’m on a mission to find places where people gather. Sam and I met a bunch of great people last week at the opening of an exhibition called Play \ Ground Adult \ Play Power \ Play at Lite-Hause Galerie where we’d gone to see the political collages made by fellow South African Deon Maas (who incidentally wrote a fantastic book about living in Berlin).

• We also went to one of our favourite Berlin bookstores, Bücherbogen, to listen to a presentation about the future of museums. I thoroughly enjoyed it and scribbled a thousand notes as though I am a student of architecture and/or museum design and/museum curation. I came away with a great desire to visit the Bundanon Art Museum in Australia. If you’re interested in architecture, you might want to take a look here. The background provided by Kerstin Thompson, the architect, about the environmental consideration was very interesting.

• Turns out Berlin’s local council offers free exercise sessions in parks around the city, which means I can finally scratch my itch about Tai Chi. The first time I went to a Tai Chi class was in Cape Town. The instructor (I seem to remember him as being German, actually) ran through a full routine to demonstrate. It was mesmerising because it was so slow and because, despite his leanness and the hints of musculature visible beneath the neutrality of his Gi, he had sweat pouring off him as though he’d just run a half marathon in the baking midday sun. So when we headed for a park situated in a kind of triangle made by trains on three sides, I packed plenty of water and two little hand towels for all the sweat I was expecting. I didn’t pop a drop even as tiny as the droplet on the sweating emoji. But I loved it. Yesterday, in a bookshop, I saw a little notebook with a quote from Werner Herzog. I wonder how he would feel about Tai Chi:

‘I think there should be a holy war against yoga classes,’ is something the filmmaker Werner Herzog apparently said. I wonder what he would have thought of Tai Chi in the park. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

• We finished Season 3 of Ted Lasso and it was a dignified and mature ending to one of the best series ever. My son and I play this game where I recommend books, series, movies and music to him and he ignores my recommendations until someone his age recommends the exact same thing, at which point he comes back and says ‘Mom, you MUST watch/listen to/ whatever XYZ.’ Then I say, in a whiney voice, ‘But I told you to watch/listen to/whatever XYZ ages ago!’ I’ve been telling him to watch Ted Lasso for over a year. Can someone his age please tell him to watch the bloody thing already?

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Housekeeping

Extra Large Love Letter is almost a year old and is growing like a cheerful and fearless little toddler. I’m so happy about all the responses I get. Many reactions are private – my stories seem to elicit intimate contemplations and memories. I treasure that people are moved to respond to me with their own stories.

Last year, I offered Founder Members a chance to do my annual RESET course with me in January and that was such a huge success that I’ve decided to do the RESET again this year. In any case, due to how unexpectedly unexpected my vagabonding year has turned out to be, I can do with another RESET this year.

I’m exporting RESET to a site more suited for courses and will keep you updated. Here’s an (outdated) explanation of what it is in case it feels like something you might want to try but are unsure of, or you think someone else might find useful.

*’vagabonding’ is the adjective I’ve settled on for this year of not being in my own life. It is also the best verb for what I am doing. I owe this excellent word to my friend Seni, who I met in her own vagabonding year and about whom I wrote here. One of the definitions, apart from ‘wandering from place to place’ and ‘unsettled life’ includes the word ‘carefree’. I would definitely NOT call this year carefree, but the other descriptions work.

Lots of love,

K.

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