While writing what follows, I was sitting at Nourish’d in Kloof Street, Cape Town, indulging in a Naughty Nutter smoothie bowl (you are what you eat, so they say) with their deck of Herbal Astrology cards. I was once more astounded by (what my son refers to as) the ‘Universe’s Algorithms’ when I drew first a tree from South America where I travel from Monday and next the Indian Holy Basil which is the tea my son has been drinking for almost his entire 21 years.

Feeling into being irrelevant and redundant, I grieve who I once was, the innumerable errors of judgment in life choices; the surreal parallel portals into lives I didn’t get to live as a consequence; the dimensions of my personality I both unwittingly and intentionally chose to traverse. The only way I can enter the next phase is if I can garner the libido to provide the flames to transmute a new becoming. It is in these moments that people literally lie down and die, like a fire that burns out of embers and can’t find a new spark.

Mostly this phase is saturated in moments of nothingness, stifled by uncomfortable unknowing and heavy with heart-crumpling introversion and foetal floating in my own tearfulness.

Healing requires energy. Change takes energy. Life cycles draw on all reserves. If the fuel runs dry before transition kicks, the engine dies. So, in this phase, there is fear of not having the resources … the libido … the flint of creativity … to reinvent myself once again.

And also …

Fear brings us back to ourselves, adversity reveals character, and isolation makes us brave enough to face it all and find what it is that supports us within when we can no longer support ourselves. I have moments of wanting to close my eyes and drift into the realm of perpetual dreaming. I have moments of stilted activity, of vacillating between activism and apathy. I have surges of fierce warrior energy that propels me … for brief moments.

I want to be the warrior. I also want to be the roadkill. I don’t want to do anything. Equally … I want to do everything.