And so I returned to Cape Town with a sense of urgency wanting to see J, to know he was alright.\u00a0 I spoke to him while he was in hospital, his mother at his bedside.\u00a0 In my mind, he was already in my life and I was in his.\u00a0 He had, as yet, little idea of this prospect and the events about to unfold.\u00a0 And about the events, neither did I.<\/p>\n
Looking back, with hindsight, the Universe, my higher self or that part of me, which keeps \u2018egoic me\u2019 in check, had quite a time during the ensuing three months after my return from Egypt (Mid-March through end May 2009).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is clear to me now how much he needed that retreat.\u00a0 He had actually \u2018lost\u2019 his voice (it was put \u2018on hold\u2019, I suspect, by his higher self to ensure he would find the silence he needed) and withdrew from social contact.\u00a0 Being a very gregarious articulate and conversational person, this was the only means for keeping the length of his telephone conversations to a minimum.<\/p>\n
I was surprised to find myself called back to Tanzania by the ILO, twice during this time.\u00a0 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\u2019s new vision of \u2018Delivering as One\u2019, to ensure\u00a0 that gender was mainstreamed into this process from the start.\u00a0 The timing did not appear to me to be appropriate.\u00a0 I also had a third mission for the ILO to Mozambique for the same UN vision, still wondering why?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I found myself talking about many things which till then I had held inside and struggled with around my relationship to music.\u00a0 I talked at length about my upcoming fourth intensive with Wisdom University at Chartres which was to be \u2018Musica\u2019 (the Fourth Liberal Art from the original Chartres School of a thousand years ago[1]<\/sup><\/a>).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I must have appeared quite an emotional and passionate being.\u00a0 He was behind his camera lens a lot of this time I seem to recall, following my hand movements and wild outbursts.\u00a0 I learnt later of his passion for detail and huge creative talent around photography as well as music.\u00a0 Light, color and sound frequencies were no strangers to this man, this stranger in front of me, to whom I was entrusting my story.<\/p>\n The third meeting was later in March, when on one of his first outings driving his car, we went to a show, \u2018Handful of Keys\u2019.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n There was one more occasion when we had tea with Rose at the Hohenhort and found mushrooms on the thick green lawn.\u00a0 Shaggy Ink caps.\u00a0 With difficulty he got down and harvested a box full, which he later cooked for me in my Kalk Bay kitchen.\u00a0 There was a warm feeling growing between us.\u00a0 Comfortable.\u00a0 Beginnings of complicity? I believe I hoped so.\u00a0 And of course the \u2018cord cutting\u2019 process I had undergone with the sangoma, which was to take three months, was proceeding accordingly.\u00a0 I could feel something loosening within me.<\/p>\n My final trip to Tanzania took place over ten days in the middle of May.\u00a0 I think I returned on 20 May.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The bonds had loosened.\u00a0 I was drifting away, and he could feel it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Almost fifty-nine,\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Now, Ronald\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Gently, he said<\/p>\n \u2018Marni… have you found somebody else?\u00a0\u00a0 Someone… who can give you what I have been unable to give you?\u2019<\/p>\n I paused.\u00a0 \u2018It\u2019s too soon to say, Ronald\u2019<\/p>\n He continued\u00a0 \u2018I hope you do…\u00a0 You deserve it\u2019.<\/p>\n How powerful these couple of lines.\u00a0 How poignant.<\/p>\n I reflect on them now and ponder his question.\u00a0 What had Ronald been \u2018unable\u2019 to give me?\u00a0 The memoirs written in the preceding pages tell me that he gave me so much.<\/p>\n Perhaps it was the difficulty in finding ground for spiritual sharing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He had once said to me \u2018its lonely at the top of the mountain.\u2019<\/p>\n So, it was more around fidelity in relationship, which had pushed me, nudged me, steered me into years of celibacy.\u00a0 And what was my feeling now about intimacy?<\/p>\n Very fragile in fact, as I stood on another threshold of a possible physical relationship with another man the \u2018somebody else\u2019.\u00a0 It was, in truth, \u2018too soon to say\u2019.<\/p>\n