1. The universe is unfolding as it should ..

WRITE, CLICK, RECOVER.

All through my childhood, we had a copy of Desiderata on the back of the toilet door. 

I'd papered the walls in a Laura Ashley pink floral print, and the Desiderata was the final flourish. Reading the sage words as I sat ruminating, (I said ruminating!) I was guided through the anguish of growing up through the phrase "no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should".  

I had to believe in something through the confusion of an Apartheid anguished South African world, a chain smoking barrister father who'd been deported for anti-apartheid activities, and a mother who was a toxic combination of a nymphomaniac, anorexic, sometimes psychopath, a blonde bombshell-fox fur-cladded socialite, who was utterly disinterested in her smart, red haired daughter. Never mind the younger brother despatched to England to live on the streets; and a later-on stepbrother and sister who turned out not to be the fruit of my father's loins. 

My salvation and security in all this was my beloved African nanny, Lina, who lived away from her own family in a "maid's room" at the end of our garden.  I'd curl up in her wide soft lap, against her soft amble bosoms, safe from the world and its terrors.  She'd wrap her satiny arms around me and sing, sweet and heavenly.  "Tula, tula, tula, tula, mama ... " She smelled of Nivea creams, and Vinolia soaps, and sometimes crushed fennel, which she hoped would keep the tokoloshes away.  But she also sometimes smelled sour and damp, especially after the heavy African rains that snaked under her wooden door and through rusty holes in the pattering corrugated iron roof.  The windows still rattled through the newspapers she'd wedged between the panes.  Buckets caught some of the deluge, but more dripped onto her coir mattress, and onto her neatly folded uniforms.  Her one Best Dress was for Sundays - it hung on a wire hook on the back of her door.  Lina's iron bed tottered on four piles of bricks, high enough for her to see those terrifying tokoloshes when they chose, in her mind,  to hide under her bed.  When the startling sun reappeared, Lina's paltry possessions hung like prayer flags out to dry, between the starched table cloths and silk shirts that she'd iron later, with the rest of the avalanche of washing that belonged to the White People in the Big House. 

Lina's mantra when another of my childhood worlds upended was "Hakuna Matata" It's a Swahili phrase for No Worries. or Everything will be OK.   She taught me to Xhosa "click" with my tongue tight against my palate when I was upset, and simultaneously exhale "Ai Chona Wena", :No, that won't do.  I learned to crochet beaded doilies to cover the sugar bowl.  She taught me to make newspaper fringes to line her shelves,  she taught me how to thread beads, and she could soothe a broken heart with one caress of her wide calloused hand on my cheek.

On one of the worst days of my tumbleweed childhood, I returned from school to find that Lina had been dispatched back to her shantytown.  I rushed to her empty of everything room, except a trailing wisp of Nivea.  The space that had been occupied for most of my young life by unconditional love and security, was a dank, concrete cave where newspaper fringes now fluttered miserably in the shadows.

I was desolate, inconsolable, devastated.  I cried for weeks.  I refused to speak to my mother.  "You're too old for a nanny," she'd said, possibly correct.   However, Lina wasn't just my nanny.  She was my earth mother  and I'd been ripped from her arms.  She was sent home, with a month's wages, to the homelands, a dusty, dispossessed place where she probably hadn't been able to have a husband or children because she'd spent a decade looking after me.    Every day Lina had packed my school lunches and hugged me when I returned, plonking me next to her in the yard so we could scoop pap with our Bobotie, and have boiling tea in a chipped tin cup from her blackened kettle.  If the Madam and Master were still at work, we'd turn Lina's transistor radio full blast and we'd rumba in the long grass, or bang tin pots so I'd learn the rhythm of djembe drums.  

She was gone.  I hadn't even known her surname. So I never found her, and the grief lay like a broken doll under my skin until .. well, until now.

But I did I remember her mantra:  no matter how heavy the s*** falls on your fan, hakuna matata.  I've remembered this,  and lived by it, all my life.

Sometimes, though, mantras have a way of being submerged in the general horribleness of what we have to endure.  Universes do unfold as they should, but sometimes, also, they need a kick in the butt start.

So I'm going to start this story somewhere in the middle:  stick with me, because sometimes stories can't be told in one direction.   I'm an experienced multitasker. 

I'd returned to Cape Town to visit my mother in 2009 on my annual pilgrimage to her displeasure. "Oh, it's you!" she sighed, as she raised her messy head from yet another deathbed to find me standing, wilted from jet lag, in her clinic room in the brooding shadow of Table Mountain.  Heavy clouds poured down and engulfed the city in winds that swept people off their feet and flung flotsam in their faces ferociously enough to cause black eyes.  Rumpled, exhausted, hungry and dizzy with international travel,  I'd come straight to her bedside, to where I'd been summonsed a few days previously from Australia.  She glanced at me, shut her eyes and lay back on her white pillow.  Oh, it's you.  She sighed again.  "Why don't you Just. Fuck. Off."

Thus this story truly begins.

She had terminal rectal cancer;  she had 12 weeks to live.  I  nursed her to her death and found her own African Nanny for her last weeks, who probably helped her ingest more morphine than was legal. I dispatched this mother to the flames during a Buddhist cremation. I recited poems, played Albinoni's Adagio in G, and bawled like a baby.  Before, during and after, in the process of taking her to various disease riddled public hospitals for treatment, I was exposed to A Mysterious African Virus and had to return to Sydney for my own medical care. 

I was very sick indeed. My pancreas had been knocked out, I lost a lot of hair, 7 kilos, landed up with "brittle diabetes" and discovered that David, the man I'd been living with for many years, had scooped hundreds of thousands of dollars from our bead business. And then my thyroid packed up, making me sound like Leonard Cohen after a chain smoking, whisky drinking binge weekend. 

I was motherless.  I was lover-less.   I was in financial ruins.  And I couldn't even console myself with cake.  Or whisky.

My mother had effectively erased me from her will;  and the stash of secrets and lies I'd found in her posthumous Pandora's box made me beseech the skies in floods of panic, sobbing "WHY?" 

The landlord wanted me to renew my 6 six year lease. No substantial reward for guessing my decision.

While I was lying on various CT scan tables wondering what to do if I survived this nightmare, I knew Morocco was on the list.  And Bali.  And Kathmandu.  And Istanbul.  Before my bead incarnation, I was a fabulously well travelled travel writer and photographer, travelling the world's wild and wonderful places, first class.  I'd segued into retail as an std - a sexually transmitted decision:   I loved the man, was prepared to do anything he asked or wanted. You know the drill.   I hope so; if not, do some seriously important reading about pulling your head out of the sand.  You don't need a young handsome lover to validate you.

Obviously I did.  I had abandoned journalism when David and I began our bead and cultural artefacts business with some silver I'd found in Africa right after 9/11. We made money, we travelled, we had fun.  Until the evening I came home early:  he was wearing my pink dressing gown, and ironing my Brigit Jones undies into origami while he watched the Simpsons.  David also finally decided he didn't love me "That Way" and fled back to Perth with his golf clubs and David Bowie T Shirt to lick his wounds after a recent Brokeback Mountain Bromance. He also fled with hundreds of thousands of dollars he'd taken from our business, while I was busy with the business of watching my mother edge closer to her death in Africa.

How the hell had I come to this?

My misery stirred under under the CT scanner: it fluttered, it took some tottering steps, it looked down the ravine, trembling. 

My journalism had given me wings.  I felt them twitching, shaking off the mildew, wondering if I could still fly.  I was alone in hospital, alone in retail, alone at home, "empty as a pocket with nothing to lose". 

I would find ME again, I wouldn't care if I died in the process.

Various people fell from the glorious giving skies into my life.  Luda, who speaks Bahasa, suggested we go to Bali.  I sobbed into my Thai green curry while she sketched a mud map on the white butcher-paper tablecloth of potential travels.  We toasted with our green tea and she told me she would join me on whatever adventures happened to happen.  We both signed it. 

I had a friend in Kathmandu, a handsome Australian engineer, who offered me a garret in which to write.   Kathmandu is the source of amazing, incredible and antique Tibetan and Nepalese jewellery; and much from Nagaland, in East India.   It's at the foothills of the Himalayas and I couldn't think of a better place to breathe deep and dry my wings. My Naga collection of antique and historical ethnic jewellery began there, and I intend to add to it.

Luda told me about Sarah, an English woman who leads bead and jewellery tours through Morocco. Links, skype and emails, and synchronicity, and folded universes thus unfolded. Sarah and I were immediate Best Friends Forever.  I asked my English brother if he could tolerate  a sibling visit.  I want to go to Mali.  Sarah is heading that way, too. 

The universe is indeed unfolding as it should. And I'm calling this year of adventures Write, Click, Recover.  At yer, Liz Gilbert!