Birdy Ataraxic Blogging

I am less civilised today than I was yesterday.

And tomorrow I will be less civilised than I am today.

I spent the day at home yesterday after having contracted a stomach bug- something which is rampant in Joburg right now, and I don't know how one can expect to escape it if one works in an office environment.

I killed my cellphone years ago - the only one in the household is in the possession of my partner - and I no longer have a landline due entirely to Telkom's blithering incompetence, so the day was blissfully free of anyone calling to find out how I was or whether or not I was in fact coming in to the office.

In addition to this absence of telephonic interruptions, I had no Internet access since Warren took the modem (with my full encouragement) to work with him as an appendage to his laptop.

The neighbourhood is quieter in the week than on the weekends. All the drones have gone to work and all the kids have gone to school.

My pack of dogs were ecstatic to have free access to the house as well as the yard all day, and spent a lot of time moving from bedroom carpet to living room tiles to sunbaked grass, trying out now one texture and temperature combination, now another.

While I slept, and awoke to grind fresh incense and burn it upon coals, or grind dried coltsfoot and raspberry and liquorice and juniper into a tea with ginger and lemon and honey.

The silence was broken only by the municipality's mowers chugging away at our verges in their annual cutting of the grass ritual - soon gone into the distance.


In our garden we are host to glossy starlings and red wing starlings; great crested barbets (and their tree-trunk holes) and hoopoes; olive thrushes and weavers (and their nests); pied crows and bulbuls;lesser striped swallows and sparrows.

Also earthworms in the soil, preying manti and rain spiders, midges and moths and trillions of ants.

My sacred ground, which returns to me the glee of living, of being a part of the universe conscious of all the other parts -or maybe, conscious of just some of the other parts, but that's enough for now.

Birdies in order: Olive Thrush, Weaver, Red Wing Starling, Pied Crow, Lesser Striped Swallow, Bulbul, Glossy Starling, Crested Barbet,Hoopoe.

Not forgetting the engaging, messy Mossie(Sparrow):