Don't be a pain in the whatsit: Rule #3 of 5

Southern Kalahari - early morning, as we were leaving to tackle the long trek to the softer south. Yes - it's the famous hoodia. The diet industry's holy grail - suppresses appetite - makes you lose weight. And you will never need it, because as a fruitarian you don't have weight issues anymore...

OK - Rule #3: DON'T JUDGE
The surest way to sabotage your own journey is to start judging someone else’s. None of us has even the remotest clue about the soul-stuff being worked out in another life. We barely glimpse the truth about our own.

So, when thinking about, shall we say, those people who pin all their hopes on the humble hoodia (the 60%+ obese Americans for example), let go of that superior smirk. Try for a bit of humility & compassion. This may be more difficult than you'd care to admit. So go practise on yourself. And you might just be surprised to find that this is hardest of all. Do it anyway.

Go stand in front of the mirror – look at yourself in the full awareness of the courage it’s taken to assume the grown-up charge of your own health. Claim that. Now look at yourself in the full awareness of your vulnerability & fragility, and (might as well admit it) stupidity. Claim that too. Now cultivate compassion for yourself. For the brave, flawed, fearful, precious, real person you know yourself to be. From now on you don’t do Blame anymore, or Pity, or Victim-consciousness. You don’t do Denial anymore, or Fantasy. You don’t Judge. You are deserving of your own compassion – so is everyone else.

As a footnote to yesterday: in the shop today - fresh organic dates. Refrigerated & overpackaged - but still, a muted little echo from my childhood.

Deserts & dates

Remember that panicked late-night drive down the Nossob ? (The Man) Here, in the shade of a shaggy old camelthorn tree: one of the things that made us late.

I know, it was going to be Rule #3 - but I'm just not in the mood. I've been re-reading Freya Stark's travel writings - you know 1920s-30s, traipsing all over the Middle-East & dining with the Bedouin. We'll pass over the sheep's bits & the camel's unmentionables - but she writes about desert dates, and the figs & pomegranates in the suqs. Just imagine.

So, what with the Kalahari springbok & Dame Freya's dates... well, my mind is full of sun & faraway places.

Kyloe's two young date palms are nowhere near ready to bear - but they're getting there. Such a business as it was to get them too, years ago. Ornamental palms, of course - no problem. But the real dactylifera - well, I hope that's what we've got...

Is there someone else who remembers those beautiful little wooden boxes that used to arrive, once a year, from somewhere in the northern Cape ? Fresh sticky syrupy dates. A treasure from a desert place. Like Dame Freya's desert fruits. A fond & rather melancholy memory.

Seems I have unfinished business with the deserts... Hence, I suppose, the Kalahari-Augrabies thing - no matter how tough the training. And that is how I discovered the cruelest words in the English language: "Repeat whole sequence 3 times."