A letter from the Mother City

The great Mother City meets one in their dreams long before she is ever seen in waking light. Those who are born here were summoned from another existence, and those who return hear her gentle whispers calling to them all through their lives, constantly seeking them until they’re softly guided back home. To these ones returning, there is a very strange feeling that you have before making your way here – you feel as if you need to be a certain person before being worthy of her loveliness, like you need to become the best version of yourself to meet her on the high pedestal that she seemingly sits on.

I suppose it’s understandable that one might assume she sits on some high, distant pedestal, for her beauty appears almost otherworldly to the viewer – but the opposite of this is true. There is no pedestal. She meets us exactly where we are, in our heights and in our depths, and she says, “You need not be afraid. Let me walk beside you as you become that person that you always thought you needed to be to feel worthy of me.”

How painfully wonderful that is – to be seen and accepted in one’s entirety regardless of one’s shortcomings. It’s something that only a mother can offer, and the Mother City offers it to all of her children without asking for anything in return. We are all her children. Even her mountains take the shape of a womb, offering man the chance to be reborn – reborn into a renewed state of being, reborn with strength to conquer the darkness of his own mind, reborn as a gladiator not of Rome but of a far older arena, an amphitheatre of ancient rocks so great and immense that it makes the Colosseum seem small and trivial.

Her streets are rivers that flow through time, and her howling wind is the fresh breath of air that fills our lungs with life. Her deep blue oceans are cold expanses that quench our thirsty souls. One doesn’t decide when one becomes a part of this place – the divine spirit brings one here, and here is where one stays forever.

A stroll down Long Street, Cape Town City Centre, photographed by Digitalphlomad.

This same divine spirit, a powerful feminine energy, is moving and rising in all parts of the world – a subtle yet unmistakable rise, almost like a gradual shift of humanity’s consciousness into a more awakened plane of existence. You can feel it in the air here. For most of human history, the relationship between the masculine and the feminine has been misunderstood and distorted into imbalance, but times are changing.

The Mother City stands as the vibrant centre of this shift. It is not foolish to believe that this place is where the revolution will begin – or has even begun already. She is a radiant woman who draws to her leaders, writers, healers, lovers, dreamers, wanderers, and travellers – all those ready to step into this new way of being that I think we all actually consciously and subconsciously crave.

In nature, there are always opposites: earth and wind, fire and water, dawn and dusk, and storm and stillness. We can see it in life too: yin and yang, suffering and euphoria, hell and heaven, longing and belonging, chaos and clarity, this city's icy Atlantic Ocean chill and her thunderous African sun. And although this powerful rise of humanity towards a highly-conscious heavenly state of existence is continually unfolding here, the opposite of this exists too – a strong feeling of death in the air, or a feeling like death is constantly near. Perhaps it's just the natural rawness of life that one feels.

I felt the same feeling when walking through the French Quarter in New Orleans – listening to the trumpeters and their bands on Bourbon Street, seeing the most peculiar and interesting and wonderful-looking people, learning about voodoo and magic, and seeing the terraces and the wrought-iron balconies on Royal Street. I see the same balconies and terraces here in the Mother City on Long Street.

But to the viewer who for the first time walks the Mother City’s streets, who for the first time feels the presence of past and present spirits, it will feel like every decision that you’ve ever made up until the point that you find yourself in has all been a ruse, a fabrication, some sort of cruel design that has led you into the lion’s den where your death is imminent, your death at the hands of someone or something that is meaner than you and who stares with a stare that is evil and dark.

You soon realise that the only way to survive in such a highly energetic place like this is if you become thoroughly attuned to and aware of the space that your physical body takes up in this reality.

Taking a break at Munro’s Antiques, Observatory, Cape Town, photographer unknown.

There are days when the air is loud and the colours are cold. Sometimes the colours are warm. Sometimes they’re hot, and sometimes the air is soft when the wind is hiding away in the caves, and it smells clean in your nostrils – that same smell that one smells when a large thunderstorm brings heavy raindrops that slap onto the hard and hot Earth, leaving a very distinct tinge of rejuvenation and cleansing.

The viewer can feel that same feeling of death on these days when they place their eyes on the mountain and feel for themselves what it’s like to have their breath taken away from the sheer force of pure beauty, to feel vibrations from their beating pulse dancing in their eardrums.

To this viewer, when death becomes clear to them, life becomes a canvas of bright colours, and their hearts are awakened to a love that pierces them deep within their breast – the love that makes one feel the pain of one’s ancestors and makes one hear the cries and laughter of yesterdays and tomorrows. For perhaps the very first time in the viewer’s entire life, they may truly feel alive and at home.

Table Mountain from Camps Bay Beach, Cape Town, photographed by Emily Grace.

There are days when the air is so clear that it feels like your eyes have been rinsed clean with holy water from the river Jordan, like your head has been rained on by clouds that descended from the heavens and came down through the highest peaks of the Himalayas. The colours are vivid and deep and saturated, and the sun dries up the wispy white clouds, leaving an ocean of blue painted above your head, and on these days the mountain hides nothing from the viewer.

The evening rays of the setting sun seep into the smallest cracks and gaps, every piece of the mountain’s soul is visible through the rough and weathered and sharp stone, and you can’t help but shed a tear from your washed-out eyes because it feels like the doors of perception have been cleansed and life is revealed to you as it always has been—infinite.

On these clear days, the sun often casts a hue of gold across all that the eyes can see, and the wispy clouds return and wash themselves across the sky in the afternoon hours when the good people of the city are out and about, moving their bodies.

The ocean’s water is an azure blue, and it’s sometimes so cold that it takes your breath away when you stroll in—like how placing your eyes on the mountain takes your breath away, except it’s more like the ocean stripping your breath away instead of simply taking it. And when you dive under, it feels like you’re experiencing the last moments of your life because the skin on your body is burning from the cold.

When the golden sun in the sky shines through the wispy white clouds, when it pours down onto you like honey once you’ve gotten out the water and you’re laying on the glittering sand, you remember what it’s like to be alive and death feels so far away even though it is a mere few paces from where you’re sitting that you felt like you were going to die under the crystal ripples, and a mere five breaths ago, and the golden warmth from the sun soon becomes too much for your body to handle and once again you’re forced to enter the deep blue of the icy waters and feel what it feels like to have your breath stripped away from you and to burn your skin and to fade away close to death – all in an attempt to find some kind of comfort in the discomfort.

The dance between life and death is a constant that he who lives in this city is very familiar with.

Bright colours, Bo-Kaap, Cape Town City Centre, photographed by Analogueoffic.

There are times when the air is so still that every time you move but an inch, you feel like there is movement all around you because the angle of your perspective shifts slightly and the way that the plants and bushes and trees are layered behind each other changes—from your focal point specifically. For a brief moment, it looks like the plants and bushes of the magical fynbos biome are dancing and swaying and waving at you, flowing like the Spanish flamenco dancers do in their long white dresses.

Although there is stillness, there seems to always be slight movement. We are, after all, never truly still – blood is always flowing through our veins. If we were completely still, then would we not be dead? Perhaps enlightenment is pure stillness. Who knows? But Christ, is it still on those hot days in the city? It’s mean too. The sun sucks up the water from the green but almost yellow grass, and the meanness rubs off on the people—it’s like the harshness of the sun brings out all of the lines and imperfections in our faces, and we’re presented in the physical in our most raw and stripped-back states.

Sometimes it’s terrifying to look at people on these still days. You can feel that feeling of death slithering in like a thick, dark-scaled puff adder, and you feel that same feeling you feel when your breath is stripped away under the cold ocean water.

Perhaps on one of these days you’ll find yourself walking down a narrow, closed-off street, and perhaps you’ll take note of a dark presence looming over your shoulder. Perhaps two men armed with knives come screaming at you, and once again it feels like every single decision that you’ve made in your entire life was a ruse, a fabrication, for you were always being lured into that very moment, down that very street and into the lion’s den.

That’s what the meanness can feel like – like something or someone is out to get you or to deceive you. But perhaps you find an internal strength, and you manage to fight them off, and you decide that this meanness and this constant presence of death are just different tools that the city utilises to encourage you to become the best and strongest version of yourself.

On the block, Bo-Kaap, Cape Town City Centre, photographed by Hafeez Floris.

Sometimes it’s wonderful to look at people on these still days. Everything seems to make sense. It feels like a transcending revelation is downloaded into your brain and body from some far, unknown place, and the random pieces of the puzzle inside your mind magically come together in a serene harmony. Christ, it is wonderful. It occurs to you that every single being is always exactly where they’re supposed to be. All of the faces that you see are the faces of your mother and of your father, of your brother and of your sister.

On these still days, it occurs to you too that the people of this place carry a beauty that is striking and unique and magnificently rare. The city calls the sons and daughters of Aphrodite from all corners of the Earth. The women are more stunning than the most splendid goddess of beauty that man could ever dream of, and the men are all strong and true and courageous, and they look after their women and treat them with love and respect.

I suppose the stillness and beauty in the air blinds your senses, and you end up perceiving things in the most optimal state that they can appear, forgetting that seeing something in its most optimal state is not necessarily the absolute truth of what said thing is. Not all of the men of this land are strong and true, and not all of the men treat their women with love and respect. Although the divine feminine energy is rising and unfolding here in the Mother City, it’s certainly clear that some women of this land and country face hardship that is devastatingly unjust.

Whichever face the people of this city decide to wear determines what kind of experience one has on these still, hot days, and when the people’s faces are beautiful, you get an idea of what life can be like if we all came together and loved one another.

The dreamy autumn charm of Sophia Street, Oranjezicht, Cape Town, photographer unknown.

There are nights when the wind screams and the heavens wail, and it feels like the ground is trembling beneath your feet. The southeaster blows draughts of up to 80 knots right through the city bowl – sometimes staying around for up to ten days at a time, and the wind quite literally does not stop blowing for these ten days. The buildings shake and the windows shudder. This specific wind is known as the Cape Doctor because it clears out all of the pollution and the parasites and the illness and the sickness and the disease from the entire bay – it crucifies and then purifies your mind.

You think about what it must be like for the man on the street to make it through a night like this – the man who sleeps outside the butchery a few blocks down from your apartment, hoping to be given a few scraps of leftover meat in the morning. Who will be his doctor and save him from his pain and misery?

The townsfolk don’t even bat an eye when they walk past him on their way to their stunning Victorian and Edwardian mansions in the charming old-world neighbourhoods where the leaders and politicians and artists from a century ago gathered to have dinner parties and speak of current affairs. The longer you stay here, the more desensitised you become to the injustices of the human race. It can be sad and disheartening. The cruelness of survival is clear – everyone has to fight for survival every single day.

And contrary to this fight, the leafy streets of these old neighbourhoods – the original old quarters of the city – display such elegant and timeless beauty that it makes your heart long for a love that’s sweet and youthful and pure, the love that two people share when they’re fearless and inexperienced, and sooner or later they’re exposed to the darkness that exists in this world, and a certain toughness eventually deprives them of their innocence.

The old streets with their old houses and their old-world charm and their old stories and their old money. I live the stories of these people in their houses, and I wander through time whenever I walk past.

Evening drinks at Roxy Late Night, Gardens, Cape Town, photographed by Christopher Bruce Williamson.

There are nights that are quiet and also warm. On these nights, the good people of the city spill out onto the terrace-lined avenues from the cafés and restaurants and bars that are all decorated with plants and framed paintings and film photographs – where the painters and writers and musicians and actors and sculptors and photographers all gather to share inspiration and to dance and laugh and sing.

The city on these warm nights seems to be to the modern artist what one can imagine 1920s Paris was to Hemingway and his contemporaries. There are hundreds of charming and architecturally marvellous buildings and homes, and within these buildings and homes lie hundreds of different rooms and little corners and spaces, and it feels like there is inspiration to be found in even these littlest of rooms or corners, let alone in the great mountain of this city that towers above our heads or the great oceans of this city that shimmer and shine in the sun.

Perhaps you’ll find yourself taking a stroll along these terrace-lined avenues on one of these nights – strolling and listening to the music, listening to the laughter of the ladies as the gentlemen entertain them with their fictional stories and their sharp wit. Perhaps you’ll find yourself in the corner of one of these cafés or bars or restaurants, among the plants and the framed paintings on the walls, watching the people coming and going, and perhaps you’ll catch the eye of a woman.

Perhaps you’ll meet and speak of art and love and beauty and spirituality, sinking into a conversation that makes your entire world shrink into only the space between yourself and her. Perhaps you’ll take her to bed that night and lie with her until the morning, existing with her as one, staring into the ocean of rain behind her mirrored eyes.

A spring afternoon in De Waal Park, Oranjezicht, Cape Town, photographed by Christopher Bruce Williamson.

And in the morning when you rise, perhaps you’ll walk her through the park and down the narrow alleyways towards the market in the square close to the city hall. You’ll watch her speaking with the gypsies and buying herbs from the witches.

And perhaps you’ll think to yourself how life is always wholly complete, how just that moment in time existed in your dreams before you were even there, and perhaps you’ll even think to yourself how that feeling of death that this city can sometimes give you could be in itself a ruse, a fabrication, for the moment you find yourself in is oh so wonderful that surely death has already taken place, and what you’re experiencing can only be heaven.

Perhaps you don’t even decide to go for a stroll on one of those fine, warm nights, and you don’t even end up in one of the cafés or restaurants or bars. Perhaps you lie under the gentle glow of the moon and slip into a slumber so deep that you’re not afraid of whether or not you’ll wake in the morning because you think to yourself how if your soul decides to leave this place, if death happens to not be a ruse or a fabrication, your body will become one with this land beneath your feet that you love so dearly, and that thought is not grim but good – it inspires you to pursue a death that is honest and honourable and true.

And if that time eventually does come – the time when your honest and honourable death is imminent – the great mountain of this city will transform into a flat, stone table, and a cloud of white haze will blow in from over the Atlantic and cover it like a ceremonial cloth, and the Gods and Goddesses of the sky will gather around to sit and dine and drink and laugh with each other. They’ll weigh your heart against a feather like the Ancient Egyptians to determine whether or not you’re worthy of eternal life. The sun will kiss the seas on the horizon and the orange evening will slowly turn into a deep purple night.