A whoosh moment

Coffee Gets Milky

The wind lifts the leaves and sends them dancing. What a thing it is to feel that sea breeze against your face, salt-sharp and bracing. This is Cape Town in all its contradictions: the water we adore from a distance, too dreadfully cold to ever step into, lapping at shores of the beach we walk but never wade.

Morning breaks, and somewhere in a sanctuary, someone reaches for their second cup before the first is fully drowned. Here, beneath vaulted ceilings that will echo with songs, the beans speak their own benediction, at hands one mirroring another.

The milk froths to an airy resurrection, poured into waiting darkness until the black turns cloudy with grace. It's communion of a different sort, but no less sacred for its secularity.

Notes Get Windy

In the dreaming hours, when consciousness drifts between waking and sleep, a figure moves through half-lit streets. From her handbag tumbles a scatter of notes, and in that suspended moment before she reaches down, the wind stirs with intention. You call out, to warn of the loss she's about to suffer, as dream-logic speaks in your voice.

Then the child appears, whimsical and wild as wind itself. From his lips comes a sound, a playful whoosh that blurs the line between breath and breeze. The notes lift, caught between gravity and air, between currency and sound, everything suddenly, impossibly airborne.

It's the kind of moment that clings to you after waking, vivid and strange, the sort of thing that makes you wonder if wind has always been this mischievous, this alive.

Pirates from beyond the Cape

Curfews and crews

Last night we were out on the balcony playing Scrabble well after we were under curfew around 23:00 hours and looking towards the Cape Town Stadium on the Bay Road footpath there were three people involved in a racket before they moved on. Whether they might have been members of the public involved in essential services and exempt from the restrictions.

Meanwhile, the wind was boisterous, almost blowing the Scrabble board away, the clothes horse leaning on the wall fell on my foot and we had to close the doors to limit the effects of the wind.

Then out at sea was a well-lit ship, more like a galleon by its shape or promisingly a pirate ship apparently moving at speeds you will not expect at that time of the night close to the legendary shipwreck coasts of Cape Town. I did not think twice before I suggested it had to be a ghost ship.

Floating a ghost

From the comfort and safety of my balcony, I was not ready to scream in terror, but it soon disappeared from sight, obviously behind an obscuring building to be seen by others who could be more predisposed to fright.

However, maybe we were just a bit excited, the wind gusts from the historic weather charts of yesterday suggest it was just 29 km/h which on the Beaufort Scale just passes for a Fresh Breeze, any mariner and even Long John Silver will not have had any problems with a breeze. To the uninitiated, at the best of times, we had our own story of a ghost ship, any other logical explanation is curmudgeonly and boring.

We are destined for great things

Let it rain with life

There are days and quite a few when I have walked into the rainfall, pelted by heavy showers and buffeted by the wind. You wrap up warm and face the elements to fulfil your walking quota for the day. Sometimes, you wonder why you do it, then you realise determination is the stuff getting done what needs doing regardless of the prevailing circumstances.

For the ease of many things that I dream of and quite desire, I wish for a windfall, more substantial that the rain that falls upon my barely weathered brow by which I can touch many and bring ease to burdens that weigh down and aspirations that remain the stuff of thoughts limited by ability or resource. You believe that the heavens will open and bring forth blessings like the floods of Noah, but what is a world where only you and yours exist in an ark?

Then we reign with plenty

Beyond those near heavens that brings forth the rain and gives life to the trees that presage the windfall of bountiful fruit. The universe offers a greater spectacle of awe and wonder, a meteor shower. The glow and glitter, the experience like once in a lifetime markedly giving you a memory never to be forgotten.

This is the stuff of stories, what we view of the world and beyond, the reach which is given provenance as the seeds of stories that blow your mind. It is more than rain, it helped by the wind, and when all that is gone, we behold a universe so distant brought near by the light it possesses. Neither the moon, the sun nor the stars can rival the coming of the meteor.

It becomes the sign of the times, a marker in the eternal spectrum of time, that is the blessing that fills our lives and makes a wonder of our very own stories. Let the writing begin, for we are here to tell better stories.

Born to tell a better story

Airing the mind in the wind

Some days come as if they will end with nothing really done, a spirit of despair hovering like a cloud, ready to settle on you like the morning dew that will not dissipate of the heat of the day does not come soon enough.

In the midst of this, you must find a hold, the grasp that you have reached for not to be drenched with the acid rain of discomfiture because some niggling thought suggests you are running out of ideas. I must trust that I can find inspiration in the unconventional, that sudden lighting up in the mind that is so original, it spurs and yields the unexpected.

The walls of circumstance finding they obey the laws of gravity seek to cave in, a virus unseen like the wind we do not see, but its effects too consequential to ignore. Such that I sequester myself in the hermit’s abode, for the tools to fight that battle are not as weaponised as those many others can find to defeat a marauding enemy.

I have a light that shines from within me, that the dark can try but never succeed in overwhelming me. From a source that neither affliction nor adversity can touch, I rise unbound to always tell another and better story.