I
once owned a magnificent home in the Noordhoek Valley, outside of Cape Town, South Africa. It was a large, sprawling home on an acre and a half of land, perched on the hillside overlooking miles and miles of white, sandy beaches and excellent surf. (Riding the waves was a huge part of my lifestyle.) After impulsively selling the house, I experienced deep regret and a sense of futility, shame, loss, and self-reproach that no amount of cognitive rationalizing could shift . . . that is, until I saw things differently. This is my story of the illusion of gain and loss that exists in the relative world, and how a simple shift from a local to a cosmological point of view changed everything.I attended medical school at the University of Cape from 1977 through 1981. For most of those years, I lived up in the mountains around the Noordhoek Valley, on the outskirts of Cape Town. I used to hitchhike into medical school. When not studying, I surfed on the
beach breaks surrounding the idyllic valley. My home was an aban-doned church, with a cross embedded in the main wall. There I looked after my dogs, my chickens, and my pet goat, Big Lil. One of my dogs, Zana, was not quite trainable. He fought with all the other dogs, and he ran away on a regular basis. He often came down with tick bite fever, lying on the floor with a white tongue and panting in a search for more air. I would take him to the vet, who gave him injections, within a few days of which he recovered.
I loved his presence and took him to the university with me. He loved to sit in my car. I’d roll down the window, and he would jump in and out, as he wanted. At lunch, I would come down and sit with him, and we would look out over the hospital graveyard and just be together.
I loved being in Noordhoek with my chickens, my dog, and the shower at the bottom of the garden. Staying up late at night, I’d huddle over my gas lantern, read, and write long poetic pieces that emulated my heroes, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. I wanted to pull down the curtain on my daily life and sing in exaltation to the life of poetry I was not living.
In a half-altered state from drinking wine, I’d write to women I’d met who eluded me and taunted me with their beauty and unattainability, sirens beckoning from the gloom. I would also reluctantly study for my medical school exams, wishing all the while to answer only to the ecstatic poetic voices that I heard in my head.
The Noordhoek valley held us all together in its big mystery. Hip-pies, artists, farmers, schizophrenics, cows, surfers, dogs, and medical students — we all circled each other and looked to each other for support during our more vulnerable moments. My view from my small cottage swept over the Noordhoek beach and valley. To the right and perched on the cliff above the surf, was a long, sprawling ranch-type home belong-ing to a reclusive gay misanthrope. As a student, I visited his home once.
A friend of mine rented a room there. The house was spectacular, with its incredible view of a seven-mile beach and the Slangkop lighthouse in the distance. In the evening, the sun dropped past the horizon, and the whole valley lit up in smoky splendor. I could not imagine living in such a spectacular home — it was beyond my student dreams.
After graduating from medical school, I left the Noordhoek Valley and moved to Canada. I adjusted to life on the Canadian prairies, with
I Lost My Home and My Love . . . and Ended Up a Winner 189
their vast plains of wheat fields and their grain silos. I learned the art and craft of family medicine, taking it all quite seriously, and I accumulated a little money. Uneasily I adjusted to the father/husband archetypes. I dreamt of the sea every night and longed for the day I could move back to South Africa.
One winter, a number of years after I left the Noordhoek Valley for Canada, I visited Cape Town and surfed off the Noordhoek beach.
I passed the driveway to the ranch-type home and noticed a cardboard sign hammered onto a tree with one nail. It said “Auction tomorrow morning, 9:00 a.m.” I had nothing to lose and thought it worthwhile to show up. The auction took about three minutes. I found myself bid-ding at a ridiculously low figure of 80,000 Rand. I expected the price to reach R300,000. Another person bid R90,000 and I went to R100,000.
I heard the auctioneer announce, “The home is sold to the surfer gentle-man over there.” I signed the papers and went into the back garden to contemplate my unexpected fate. This was quite surreal. I had not planned this at all.
The home was large, sprawling on over an acre and a half, perched on a hillside overlooking a vast expanse of clean white sand. My favor-ite surf spot was visible from every room in the house. I could wake up in the morning and scan the swells, tune into the wind directions and the nuances of the changing seasons. Behind the house were huge obelisk-like granite rocks. I would sit on these rocks for hours on end, listening to the noises, dog barks, and children’s voices from the valley below. In the dusk and dawn moments of the changing light, I would vibrate at a slow harmonic, not believing my luck. I wanted to be buried on this land. I wanted generations of my family to know this grounding.
For the first five years, I didn’t live in the house. My good friend Bobby took up residence there, and my family and I would visit once a year and have large Christmas gatherings of the bloodlines, celebrating life and each other. Every morning, I would wake up and walk around the property, pulling out wayward weeds and watering the endless gar-dens. When it was hot at night, I would cool off in the swimming pool and delight in the comforts of the still night. I could not believe my luck and how good it made me feel.
Meanwhile, life happened: Back in Canada, I went through a divorce, and my family split up. I attempted to put my life together as a single person, but anxiety and stress got the better of me. I fell apart.
My psychiatrist said, “Either we admit you to the hospital, or you go back to South Africa for a break.” One day, after a year of trying to start again, I put my pen down on my desk at work. At the time, I was running the most successful integrative medical clinic in the city and had a long waiting list of people wanting to move beyond the drug and surgery solutions to their issues. My resolve was final. I booked a flight and flew back to my Noordhoek home the next day.
Walking up the driveway, I felt the burden of the divorce lift. I sat for days in the lounge with the vast windows looking over the endless beach and waves, and I knew this was where I could put my life back together again. It was an incredible experience: allowing the sea and the waves to soothe me. Instead of returning to Calgary after three weeks as I planned, I let my staff, ex-wife, and children know that I was never coming back. I walked away from it all. It was a reckless, irresponsible thing to do, but I couldn’t bear the thought of facing all the stress again.
My physiology had given in, and my mind had followed. I was home with the earth, the sea, and the sky, my ego crushed but my sense of soul returning. I walked away from my practice making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, my loyal and devoted staff, my incredible patients, my kids, my debts, and my life, as I knew it. Within weeks, the healing power of the view from the front lounge over the vast expanse of beach had moved me past my shrunken self.
Pablo Neruda (“Absense and Presence”):
I need the sea because it teaches me I don’t know if I learn music or awareness If it’s a single wave or its vast existence, or only its harsh voice or its shining one, a suggestion of fishes and ships.
The fact is that until I fall asleep, In some magnetic way I move in The university of the waves
I Lost My Home and My Love . . . and Ended Up a Winner 191
I don’t know what it was, but my bones seemed to rearrange them-selves, and my mind woke back up to itself. I sensed a self-returning.
Within weeks, I recovered sufficiently to be open to a new love. She walked up the same driveway to interview for a house-sitting job, and I was smitten. It was love at first sight. But she was twenty years younger than I was, and I felt out of my depth. Nonetheless, we became engaged and lived out our destiny with color within the walls of the house. We spoke of past loves, talked over wine, shared pasta in garlic sauce, and planned our fate. At times, friends would visit. We would stand on the porch and hold each other lightly, not quite sure of how best to reckon with the fragile night air . . . always with the sea wind on our faces and the moon on the roof.
After two years, at her insistence, we moved back to Canada. I wanted to sort out the mess I had left behind and see my children; she wanted to travel and see the world. After two years surrounded by this magnificent home and my being in love with this mystery being, we packed up and left the home, securing renters for the time being. Back in Canada, she became homesick and longed for her youthful lifestyle. I struggled to meet her needs, but it was no use. After one year, I drove her to the airport, and we said our goodbyes. I had never felt so inconsolable.
But it was done, and we slipped away from each other for good. There is no greater despondent feeling than knowing you are revisiting old behav-iors and old circumstances, just in a recycled form. I struggled to find a way to be in the world again.
By then I was having trouble with the renters, who never paid their bills. The garden was overrun with weeds, the wood rotted on the window frames, and the rental agency was unreliable. I could not find anyone to help me get through this tough patch. Trying to manage the problems from Canada without an intermediary proved insurmount-able. It was at this time that a Shaman trickster came to live in my basement. I met him at a country fair, sitting surrounded by his tarot cards. He convinced me of his ability to help me heal my broken heart.
It was decided one night that I could not realize my destiny if I held onto the past, and I needed to release my attachments to South Africa and the home. That meant selling. It seemed like a good idea, especially with the stress from managing the affairs from long distance. The house
went on sale and sold for R1.4 million — a profit of more than ten times what I paid for it. I took the money and, in the year 2000, rode the tech boom . . . for two weeks. I bought Intel, Microsoft, Cisco . . . the entire disastrous package. Within six months, my home and the money I had received for it disappeared. My fiancée and I split, my home sold, and my money lost. I had no idea what to do with my life.
I just knew that I did not feel very well. I revisited that dark place that was becoming familiar. There seemed no way I could reinvent myself and recreate some of the joy and meaning that the home and the rela-tionship had given me. I was deeply depressed and feeling hopeless.
Neruda (“Absense and Presence”):
There is no space wider than that of grief There is no universe like that which bleeds.
I plunged into therapy, visited as many healers as I could, went on a trip to Mexico with Deepak Chopra and his group, and visited gurus in India. I sat in Ramana Maharishi’s cave on Mt. Arunachala, and felt the aloneness and silence. I consulted with psychics and clairvoyants, and sat quietly in the suburbs collapsed in on myself . . . with no sense of recovery. I could not contemplate a life without love. I rationalized that by associating with the famous and visiting with saints who knew, I would see past the folly of the emotional self and glimpse the unseeing seer beyond. It was not to be. I remained distraught and empty.
One day, I came across a seminar flyer on my desk. I attended and was exposed to the work of John Demartini. I went to Houston, met him, and studied further. His work follows one central principle from which many other insights arise. There is a divine, hidden order, and everything that occurs in your life serves a purpose. This is a Platonic concept, discussed and written about by Emerson and Leibniz, and recently res-urrected by James Hillman and others. Your biography is dictated by your Daemon, your Soul, so to speak, and you are called from above, by your Daemon, to live the life you were destined to fulfill. Every event in your biography serves that intent, if you train your mind to investigate the law. The other insight was that nothing is missing from your life.