Encounters
And so I returned to Cape Town with a sense of urgency wanting to see J, to know he was alright. I spoke to him while he was in hospital, his mother at his bedside. In my mind, he was already in my life and I was in his. He had, as yet, little idea of this prospect and the events about to unfold. And about the events, neither did I.
Looking back, with hindsight, the Universe, my higher self or that part of me, which keeps ‘egoic me’ in check, had quite a time during the ensuing three months after my return from Egypt (Mid-March through end May 2009). I have a very strong will and would have spent more time talking with J if I could have, pursuing the exciting themes we had identified, greatly infringing on his healing time. It is clear to me now how much he needed that retreat. He had actually ‘lost’ his voice (it was put ‘on hold’, I suspect, by his higher self to ensure he would find the silence he needed) and withdrew from social contact. Being a very gregarious articulate and conversational person, this was the only means for keeping the length of his telephone conversations to a minimum.
I was surprised to find myself called back to Tanzania by the ILO, twice during this time. And I found myself wondering why? Since they did not appear to be ready or willing to embark on the process which I was being called in to facilitate as part of the UN’s new vision of ‘Delivering as One’, to ensure that gender was mainstreamed into this process from the start. The timing did not appear to me to be appropriate. I also had a third mission for the ILO to Mozambique for the same UN vision, still wondering why?
At another level of course, as I understand now, I was being kept away from contact with J, and from sabotaging what was in the early stages of unfolding.
But we did have a couple of encounters. The first was in early March, 10 days after his surgery, when I visited the house where he was recuperating with his son; the second when I had tea with him under an old tree in the garden of his ancient cottage and talked a lot since he had no voice but listened carefully. I found myself talking about many things which till then I had held inside and struggled with around my relationship to music. I talked at length about my upcoming fourth intensive with Wisdom University at Chartres which was to be ‘Musica’ (the Fourth Liberal Art from the original Chartres School of a thousand years ago[1]). He had no idea of course why I was feeling so passionate about the way the Chartres School Intensives were unfolding and my disappointment with Musica, even before it happened. I must have appeared quite an emotional and passionate being. He was behind his camera lens a lot of this time I seem to recall, following my hand movements and wild outbursts. I learnt later of his passion for detail and huge creative talent around photography as well as music. Light, color and sound frequencies were no strangers to this man, this stranger in front of me, to whom I was entrusting my story.
The third meeting was later in March, when on one of his first outings driving his car, we went to a show, ‘Handful of Keys’. There were two virtuoso pianists and much laughter in the audience, which resonated with neither of us, and at interval we left and went to have tea at the Mount Nelson hotel and talked some more.
There was one more occasion when we had tea with Rose at the Hohenhort and found mushrooms on the thick green lawn. Shaggy Ink caps. With difficulty he got down and harvested a box full, which he later cooked for me in my Kalk Bay kitchen. There was a warm feeling growing between us. Comfortable. Beginnings of complicity? I believe I hoped so. And of course the ‘cord cutting’ process I had undergone with the sangoma, which was to take three months, was proceeding accordingly. I could feel something loosening within me.
My final trip to Tanzania took place over ten days in the middle of May. I think I returned on 20 May. On the last day in Dar es Salaam, Ronald and I had a long Skype conversation, one of several over these months as he sensed something happening energetically between us. The bonds had loosened. I was drifting away, and he could feel it. Ronald had visited my old friend Caren in London during this time, and she later told me she found him in deep crisis as he accepted the reality that our oft-stated intention of growing old together was no longer viable. Almost fifty-nine, he was right in the middle of his second Saturn return and, having given up his visit to Cape Town in April, he had also missed his annual reading with Monica, his respected astrologer and a trusted friend.
Now, Ronald’s words to me and mine to him as I sat in my hotel room in Dar es Salaam, even years later as I write this, still echo clearly in my heart. Gently, he said
‘Marni… have you found somebody else? Someone… who can give you what I have been unable to give you?’
I paused. ‘It’s too soon to say, Ronald’
He continued ‘I hope you do… You deserve it’.
How powerful these couple of lines. How poignant.
I reflect on them now and ponder his question. What had Ronald been ‘unable’ to give me? The memoirs written in the preceding pages tell me that he gave me so much.
Perhaps it was the difficulty in finding ground for spiritual sharing. But now with hindsight I know that a mystical journey is a solitary experience, and it was immature of me to want to share this with him, or anyone else. He had once said to me ‘its lonely at the top of the mountain.’
So, it was more around fidelity in relationship, which had pushed me, nudged me, steered me into years of celibacy. And what was my feeling now about intimacy?
Very fragile in fact, as I stood on another threshold of a possible physical relationship with another man the ‘somebody else’. It was, in truth, ‘too soon to say’.
[1] I have written about several other Intensives and visits to Chartres in these memoirs: the first Intensive was ‘Gramatica’ in 2006 and the second was ‘Dialectica’ in 2007, which I had left early as my mother died; and ‘Rhetorica’ was after my first visit to Egypt in 2008.