This Easter weekend I was prostrate at the foot of a millennium old Milkwood in Platbos, the vulnerable southern most forest in Africa. We were there to plant trees for Greenpop’s Reforest Fest. Upon arrival I was so wiped out that I could only gaze up at her branches for long stretches of time. They looked like brain tissue against the sky, which was at first grey, like the skies in George where the CAW license plates (my dad always jokes) stand for Cold And Wet.
In the corner of my dad’s brain scan it reads: “Manufacturer’s Model Name: Emotion 16.” Is this the emotion one has when looking at a black hole where grey matter should be? The scan shows the tissue and bone as blue, the blood is black. I sat in his hospital room having cancelled everything and jumped the first flight and last seat available from Cape Town at 5am on Tuesday morning. But I had just missed him. He was already in surgery. Haven’t we mostly just missed one another?
Post-op, I was the first to see him, high as a kite, gentle. It was a side of him I’ve never known. He held my hand and looked at me dreamily, amazed. He was alive.
After a restless night, sharing a small room near the hospital with my frazzled mom, his constant companion of 54 years, I walked into the forest and up the mountain nearby. The horror dissipated like the mist around the base of George Peak.
I breathed in the peaty air, trailed my fingers over fiddle head ferns coiled tight, wondered at the light on golden lichen. I caught myself singing, laughing out loud…when last did I feel joyful? The buzz of anxiety that has occupied my headspace for much of this year subsided.
On Good Friday they let him return home. He needs another scan in a couple of days to see whether further intervention is necessary. The holes from the “decompression surgery” remain in his cranium forever. Imagine future archaeologists coming upon a skull with two large holes drilled in it. To let out the bad blood. No one knows what caused it.
As we returned to the Platbos sanctuary from a day of planting baby trees and celebrating what we can do as humans on this earth when we put our heads, hands and hearts together for good, the thought crossed my mind “Look up, you might see the Black Genet.” I had read in the information booklet at our Forest Camp that one had been spotted by a guest, though none have ever been recorded in South Africa.
As I looked up, there he was, looking directly at me. Just for a moment, before darting away. A few days before the shock of the news of my dad’s brain bleed, I dreamed it.
My mom and I sat in the jacuzzi at the AirBnB giggling in spite or because of it all. My daughter and I sat in the hot tub at Platbos gazing up at the ancient stars, quiet, connected. I feel less and less mother, daughter, wife, sister, woman, human. But to touch someone, in this body, on this earth. To feel what it is to be alive now, just for a moment. Here in the midst of the mystery. Confused and tired. Careworn and trembling with nervous exhaustion. In awe. Even when its awful. Isn’t that all there is?
My son and I walked this morning to pay our respects to the mother Milkwood. There are “nurse trees” in this forest that are uniquely adapted for the dry environment. They have fallen, but they provide sustenance for seedlings to sprout from their decomposing bodies. Underground fungi connect the mother trees to the entire forest community. They allow for the whole.
💕
Love ❤️