"It's holiday-time, marking the border between my fifth and sixth years at university. Summer is inching closer and that hotness is returning to the air. New leaves are coming out everywhere and everything is the bright, new green that I love. The feeling of Summer approaching is unmistakable. It seems almost especially significant that the time of year which sees most exhausted and hopeless people coincides with the season change at which it finally stops raining, at which the sun warms up the air, the colours come out and the work-load seems to relent. You are given physical evidence that the end of the year is in sight, that the beaches and outdoors and summer nights await you with some chance of childlike, care-free relaxation and adventure.
It must be chance that I associate the hot air, the bare skin, the late nights, the adventure and the feeling of utter contentedness with one another, but somehow I can't imagine the slow-down coupled with the coming of winter as I do with the coming of summer. So thank you, South Africa. Thank you, Western Cape and Stellenbosch! Right here, right now, everything feels just right.
The thrill that runs through me because of this is truly a strange feeling: indeed, one I have consistently conditioned myself never to expect to experience. This conditioning is an absolute discipline: reminding and training myself in the firm belief that it's Hollywood stuff. It's the stuff of imagination, senseless media propagation of irrational societal ideals - a fairy tale. For years, I firmly believed, with every ounce of my being, that this unequivocal, pure hapiness does not exist. Lurking in my soul, in the home of my heart, in the very grammar of my being, was the knowledge that in my every smile there is a secret tear; in my every laugh there is a cry of anguish; in every hope there is a fear; in every love, a vicious hate; in every kind act, anger. Wasn't it proof enough that I should experience, almost as real as if someone twisted a sword into my ribs, such a stab of darkness in every would-be perfect moment? There it was: an intense distrust of life, stubbornly lodged inside me somewhere. It would not be soon that I lay bare once again the fabric of my soul before the jaws of the world. Can one avoid being bitten? No. But it's possible to get by expecting a good mauling now and again, simply learning to get up and get cleaned up again, scavenging for scraps of happiness and meaningfulness during the in-betweens.
I remember one such incident: it was Christmas eve, about three years ago. My father had been dead almost three years. The family was gathered on the farm, the christmas tree was up, heaps of presents under the tree, all the doors and windows of the house wide open and inviting in the friendly chirrups of the crickets and night-animals outside. My uncle, my father's younger brother, was just in remission from lung-cancer. His manner of speaking, of telling jokes and making facial expressions reminded me so much of my father. There was a dull aching, a longing I could feel physically, in my chest. Our large family was congregated about the living room, some watching TV, some reading, most engaged in the animate conversation. When my uncle put his head back and laughed, I couldn't help but smile. I was with my family and though we were many, we were one. I looked at his face and felt such overwhelming love for him. And then, almost at once, a dread came over me that I could barely comprehend. He was going to die anyway. We all were.
Such a sad way to live, and yet my happy moments had been peppered by such darknesses.
Recently, however, I've had this strange sense of waking up coming over me, of coming to from deep and numbing sleep.
When I was still a child, before my father was ill, I remember having the distinct feeling of never being quite where I wanted to be. I don't think I knew exactly where I did want to be, but somehow I just knew that I wasn't there. In my final year of school, a year after my father had died my urge to leave home was overwhelming. I needed to escape as much as I needed air to breathe. The moment came and I was out of there like a racehorse bounding out of his box on the tracks - I intended to leave behind the city where I grew up, all the people in our little home-schooler-and-church community, the house of my childhood which at the time bore only terrible memories of my father's illness. I could just sense it: instinctively, I knew I was getting closer to what I needed. It was to be long journey, though. My first and second year at varsity were coloured with religious experiences that were repeats of every horrible, degrading experience I'd had all through my adolescence, affirming that I hadn't run far enough. Third year came and I'd finally ditched all of the old: the geographical restraints of a poluted city, the complicated, co-dependant relationship I'd dragged to varsity from high-school, the fundamental, religious framework, the guilt and the fear of being judged.
Now, looking through a branch of newly-green leaves, out to the purple mountains beyond - right from my balcony... listening to the coo-ing turtle doves that take me back to Oupa and Ouma's slate porch of their house in Wellington, the air sweltering hot, but the shade of the massive oaks somehow cool and their smell distinctly sweet... the rich blue sky... the reds, yellows, light-and-dark greens of the trees and vineyards... feels just right. For me, Coldplay's new song expresses this story so beautifully:
When she was just a girl
She expected the world
But it flew away from her reach so
She ran away in her sleep and dreamed of
Para-para-paradise
Every time she closed her eyes
When she was just a girl
She expected the world
But it flew away from her reach and the bullets catch in her teeth
Life goes on, it gets so heavy
The wheel breaks the butterfly
Every tear a waterfall
In the night the stormy night she'll close her eyes
In the night the stormy night away she'd fly and dream of
Para-para-paradise
And so lying underneath those stormy skies
She'd say, "oh, ohohohoh I know the sun must set to rise"
This could be Para-para-paradise
Heaven...
My beautiful Stellenbosch, embraced by the mountains, painted streets hemmed with trees, gabled houses, people on foot and bike, cafes and resturaunts - run by their owners - serving the kind of food that makes you aware of the fact that you're happy to be alive, reminds you that there are yet flavours and combinations of flavours to be tried... a community of thinking, wondering, discovering individuals... finally, a community for me: a place I go willingly and eagerly to meet my peers - whether they are the age of my grandparents, parents or siblings, whether they are ministers, students, pensioners - to talk about life in all its wonderful strangeness, and just to be.
A place that has finally welcomed me in for what I am and pretends to be no other than it is. And finally, life feels just how it should, how I somehow knew it could - I feel the way I'd been waiting all my adolescent life to feel and I am utterly amazed that I have indeed found the space to feel this way, when it could so easily have slipped by me. I am becoming more myself everyday. I daresay I am growing to fill the space that I am. Or perhaps it's better to say that I've finally been given the space to be what I've always longed to be: unashamedly and unhinderedly myself. And I am loved for that.
I am no longer captive to sorrow, to ridiculous social and religious expectations, and to fear. Indeed, when you come into a place where there is vibrant, natural life all around you, where there is growing and learning and openness, where these qualities are not only present, but valued as a lifestyle and a culture, the dead cannot but come back to life.
There's this one song by Mae of which some of the words are as follows:
"I can feel something different for the first time.
Heaven made sense, and all the words rhymed.
And now I'm cuaght in the air, it's a good life..."
This time of year, you're generally so tired, you feel you couldn't go on another day and the cold, the rain and the clouds seem to have soaked into your very soul. But then, suddenly, you wake up one morning and the chill is gone out of the air and a green leaf is budding on an otherwise dry branch right outside your window...
Then, almost despite yourself, you feel energised and happy. Your mind is filled with thoughts that are simultaneously memories and hopes: anticipation of things made new, based on all the years preceding; a reminder; a knowing that there is something good on its way.
And suddenly, the long winter falls from your body like a dead skin and you can hardly recall it. The world says "yes" to you, just as you are. For the summer, along with the renewal that it brings, comes to you, whoever and whatever you may be - indiscriminately, it kisses you, embraces you, loves you, and blesses you with every promise of things made new: another year, another chance.
And suddenly, you know what grace must be. You've never quite understood it, but suddenly you comprehend altogether what it feels like. And then you want to fall on your knees and cry and cry and cry because the power of the revelation is just too much.
How could something that I've spent nearly my entire life trying to understand be so incredibly simple and comprehended in but a moment of sunshine? - That is a mystery; that must be heaven.
And so, you see, it doesn't matter that I no longer believe in heaven as a place I will go after I die. For I believe in heaven on earth, and I have tasted the grace of God:
It is life"
