I went through all the vowels, but nothing ever sounds like wind and grass.

The Glen Lynden churches are a shy audience to the intermittent livestock and bakkie drivers on the nondescript dirt road that links Bedford to Tarkastad. The Presbyterian was born first, built in 1828 for the surrounding community, a family of the faithful fated to split. One half sired the second church in 1874. Built larger and more majestic, to cater to the Dutch reformed flock, the Presbyterians would continue to congregate in the smaller building, a literal stone’s throw away.

Years have passed, and the souls who attended morning prayers there would fade, relocate, disperse. Memory, it seems, was less resistant to time’s embrace than the stone of the churches and the shy hiss of wind in the uninvited grass.

Today, the Glen Lynden churches sit quietly in the warmth of the sun and orange sandstone dust. The cold breath of the wind from the mountains sings the hymns that no human voices have in years. Inside, the smell of old wood and cold preserves the pulpit and pews as they must have looked the day the last of the faithful left and locked up, leaving the interior to the spiders and those they trap in the window frames, the rafters and the backs of benches. One dusty day this year, little brother will celebrate his 172nd birthday in silence; with only the wind to come inside and blow out the memory of candles.

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Before my awakening, when I was an unawakened Bodhisatta, being subject myself to birth, sought what was likewise subject to birth. Being subject myself to aging… illness… death… sorrow… defilement, I sought happiness in what was likewise subject to illness… death… sorrow… defilement.

I am looking out the window of a car. Parked like countless others in a hot part of Johannesburg on a warm day in November. I’m waiting.

Waiting for my brother, John, to be released from invigilating an exam. “International Political Economy”, he explained when I asked what the students were writing. I think I’ve asked him half a dozen times what Political Economy means and on each occasion felt the answer slip through the cracks of my attention. Too quickly diverted to other matters. Recently,  I’ve been dropping more catches in life on account of this restlessness, this inattention.

I greeted that map every morning, wishing it goodnight to it in the evenings. It seemed so far away from reality.

‘Bodhisatta’ was a word I had come across recently. Unlike International Political Economy, it stuck. Remembered, brightly and resonant. It’s someone undertaking the journey to Buddha-hood. Or if eastern-flavoured religion isn’t your thing, it’s someone looking for that thing in their life that they believe will put their restlessness to peace. It’s trying to find that fundamentally different manner of seeing the world, and a new better reason for being a part of it. Some element in me has been a Bohissata since a time before I even realised I was searching. I had been wrestling an impulse to push the life I had organised for myself somewhere new – wanting to see more and learn more than I ever seemed to be able to. Some months ago, I resolved to let that impulse free.

Which was how I found myself waiting this hot November morning.

In an hour, I am off to the airport. Then Cape Town and the beginning of a journey of almost two months between the poles of Africa. Excitement and terror have passed equally through my mind this last week. Nights spent awake, fantasising and fearing a hundred faceless locations ahead. I’d re-imagined a thousand times how today – how setting off – might feel. How tomorrow might. And the next day. And beyond.

My state of mind? Calm. A sense of alert stillness. It’s the most unexpected part of today, after so much fear in the days of planning. I’d had a floor to ceiling map of Africa in my lounge since February, with the route marked in fat pins and string. I greeted that map every morning, wishing it goodnight to it in the evenings. It seemed so far away from reality. Swathes of green and yellow a thousand miles from forest, desert, sky and dust.

The fear, I suspect had grown in the space between that map and confronting the reality of where that string led. As of this morning, that space is closed now. I have nowhere left to be scared. Inevitability, it seems, makes us face up to ourselves.

I watch the trees at the end of the parking lot swaying in a breeze that’s passing me by. The leaves sparkle in a Johannesburg summer morning. I’d never watch tree leaves on any other day. There’d have been no time. Or something more important to do. Today, I realise, I have nowhere better to be, and it’s liberating. It’s a deep, satisfying freedom born from checking out of the self-involved human race. I woke up, picked up my backpack and left my life behind.

In the days to come, I have all I need with me in these two bags. It’s enough to cross a continent, and a sad indictment of the excesses of a world confused.

I’ll not be rushing today to earn money. To accrue the baubles that the world demands I obtain for their respect. until acquiring them became my purpose. Everything my life requires fitted into a backpack and a little black day bag last night. The rest lies behind, to greet me again as a stranger when I return. The thought of the life I am leaving behind draws into memory the words of a writer I had read somewhere in my months of planning and staring at that fat-pin map. “We are eating ourselves alive, and we are still hungry.” No more this morning.

In the days to come, I have all I need with me in these two bags. It’s enough to cross a continent, and a sad indictment of the excesses of a world confused. We lash out for ever more stuff when all we really want, deep down, are new ways of living. I think to myself, waiting, that perhaps I am trying to find some simpler, wiser, more fundamental truth. About myself. About the world. About how I answer the simplest questions asked of that space between it and I. Or perhaps to come to some new meeting with my soul. Watching the sparkling leaves, it seems unnecessary to be an apart-thing from the world, to profit from it. Why not share in the joy that it provides, step into the dancing air and the sparkling leaves and just revel for a single childlike moment again. And if for a moment, why not a life?

“I wonder”, he said
And because he did, he went.
Embracing his fear, turning it to the wind
Bringing the scent of tomorrow
Of the just beyond
“I wonder”, he said
“I wonder where the road goes”
And because he did, he went.

There was a time that I laughed at thoughts like these. I studied science at university. Worked with computers. Was going to earn money and be powerful. I would be important. And because of this, my life would matter.

It took years for that illusion to erode, but erode it did. It lacked the steel of an explanation to myself as to how my life mattered to the world. How, for that matter, it even mattered to me. Absent some fundamental good, it was a matter of time until too much of the structure washed away. I think I began to see too much somewhere, think too much, find too many questions about this place I call my life.

The world gave me no ready answers. It challenged me instead to create stories, find my own way , seek and discover for myself why I  think I matter. Doing so means stepping out. Means seeing the thing I am trying to understand in as much of its contradiction as possible. That is about as well as I will ever be able to articulate why I am in this car. I am waiting to begin.

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This shall be a writing book. Neither a journal, nor the essential notes and lists off which an efficient world feeds. This shall be a space for narrative. The forest in which the metaphors run, play, and sleep. No responsibility for order – that straightjacket of linearity. Stream of consciousness is welcome here. Its dirty little paws can run the length of the clean, crisp pages.

I hadn’t ever done that before – used a pen until the ink ran dry.  I’d known it was possible, but had never been that loyal to my writing instruments before

These paws have run before. Hard and long. Ninety thousand wordprints in the silent white once – until the pen finally ran out. Exhausted, spent, unable to weave another memory. To capture imperfectly in that black ink another thought, another moment. I hadn’t ever done that before – used a pen until the ink ran dry.  I’d known it was possible, but had never been that loyal to my writing instruments before. I’d take their best and leave them lost for others to finish. Or I would chew, chew them until they died. Plastic bones broken and expiring in a pool of oily black stories that might have been told. Now lost in a thick, black cacophony.

That pen was different. Beyond an empty plastic cartridge, grew my affection for its tribe.  Writing would just not feel the same after all those pages shared, were it not for the way you teased and pushed my fingers. So for this book, these pages, I sought out its descendants back in the craft shop from which it hailed. Once a nation of hundreds, six remaining souls looked back at me. For much time has passed since I first pressed their grandfather to paper.

And so, I took them all. A last family of ink and hand, to hold still on these new pages the soft pitter patter of the things that matter. Those skittish creatures that scamper through this thing we call life. Pen and hand, we chase them down together.

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Bullet the donkey has been carting families of visitors across town during the Festival.

This weasel thing was on display in an exhibition titled 'Relaas' at the Festival. In profile, it looks rather angry.

A herd of giraffe stare out from the market savanah. Their gaze colourful, if wooden.

Not all of the artworks are kept in galleries. Some stand outside for passers-by to ooh and aah over as they... erm... pass by.

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Played by Bevan Cullinan, Gary the Tooth Fairy is a comedy play on at Festival in which Gary discusses life as a tooth fairy in modern South Africa. What was meant to be a simple photo shoot for an interview turned into an hour of running up and down the garden outside the Journalism building. Fairies are fickle creatures to tie down for an interview, you see.

Gary the Tooth Fairy was difficult to pin down for his interview with Cue. Cue/Richard Stupart

Sometimes journalists need to be quite persistent.

Na. Pff. I mean, Really. I'm good. Pff. What? Come on. I might chow a tooth every now and then to keep me going but I'm good. It's fine.

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The Festival breaks over the quiet town of Grahamstown from Sunday morning, saturating its streets with a downpour of strange characters presenting artwork and theatre ranging from disturbing Japanese butoh dancers and audience-created plays in Raiders of the Lost Aardvark, to outdoor performance, gallery exhibitions and a thousand bizarre pieces in between. I’m working on the Festival newspaper for the next fortnight as a photographer and occasional writer. In between catching up on sleep, or finding Red Bull to keep it at bay, expect some daily images from the day to pop up in this space for the bext fortnight. If you can’t attend the festival in person (and let’s face it – from the diverse and adventuresome parts of the world that you come from, that is to be expected), I’ll bring a little of the proceedings into your daily interwebs.

Richard Antrobus performs in the Grahamstown city dump

Tyres and waste make for a compelling, if bizarre, backdrop to Richard's antics

Richard kept admirable in character throughout the early morning

Morning light is an absolute photographic delight. In case you didn't know that already.

Despite being briefly stuck in the mud, Richard maintained admirable poise.

Fourth year television students from Rhodes University will be turning the morning stilt walk into a one-minute documentary, one of twenty four being produced over the course of the Festival.

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Travel is, and I suspect shall always remain, an itch under my skin. A restlessness of soul that visits in the night. Carried on thin strings of incense, or the wind sweeping in from the world on the other side of the dark night beyond. Though at peace, challenged and pushed by the life I have here, I can’t turn away from the fact that I know how large the world might be. Know is perhaps the wrong term. Have a feeling of how large the world might be is better. I feel how far the night extends. How many beds in how many strange hostels, hotels and places that should never be licensed for human habitation lie in that silence.

It is becoming, once more, that time of year when the restless spirit demands to be addressed, to be given a fantasy, a dream to believe in. Who am I to ever refuse a travel fantasy?

But it’s a big world. There is so much. So many places. The world’s longest train pulls through the Mauritanian desert. Cities in northern Mozambique sleep gently under the warm sky. A bus leaves Johannesburg, on its way to the Democratic Republic of Congo. These, and more. So many more. Out there in the night, in the dark. The scent of each carries in it the restlessness of the night wind. The tragedy, the most terrible truth, is that I could never in a dozen lifetimes see and do and be and act all of the adventures out there. There can only be one at a time – though doomed to wonder about, to imagine, many others.

The end of the year will come. Its course is inevitable. And with it, I shall explore once more. Reach into the night and pick a single star to follow.

The only question I have. The only direction the restless spirit cannot give, is which that star shall be.

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I’ve learned my hegemony and my ideology, my news values and my theories of democratic media. I’ve checked the past paper and gone to the learning groups. So, as any good student whose exam has not quite yet arrived (it’s on Friday afternoon if you’re curious), I have taken to procrastinating instead. The internet makes a fabulous collaborator in such crimes.

But in a fantasy, I can imagine a world one day where I can and do apply.

It was in the middle of such work avoidance tonight, that Katherine of blogless (and therefore unlinkable) fame sent me a link to a post on ReliefWeb advertising for a short stint as a photographer for the United Nations Development Programme in Juba, Southern Sudan.In a nutshell, because the link will likely expire into the ether in time, the UNDP was essentially looking for a photojournalist to go on assignment to cover their activities in and around Southern Sudan and create a portfolio that can be used for their advocacy work.

Reading over the details of the contract, it struck me that this, one day, is what I would dearly love to be able to do. This is precisely the kind of place whose stories need telling. Whose light should be captured and shared deeply with the rest of the world. For now, the timing is wrong. And I don’t have the skills or gear required. Not yet.

But in a fantasy, I can imagine a world one day where I can and do apply. Where I am a little more qualified, experienced and well equipped. Where I go for that fortnight and weave the most incredible stories of place and person, head and heart. It’ll happen one day, and remembering that reminds me why I came here. Why I must learn my hegemony and my ideology, my news values and my theories of democratic media.

They are the subtle thread that links Richard in Grahamstown to Richard who can tell the stories from the places we never see. And as far as my future self has value, so too does every inch of that thread.

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It’s silver, from Aswan and has a pharaoh and papyrus motif that has probably been stamped out a thousand times and sold to travelers, tourists and every shade between. It’s an unremarkable ring. Unremarkable in every respect but circumstance. I bought it on the first of January. My second night in Aswan as a long-dreamed, planned and feared journey was drawing to a close. That ring represents something. It always will.

They are a world not simply of stories, but of places and ways of being. Reminders of different people in different corners of this place I call my life.

Sometimes it’s in good company. Near my bedside is a box with dozens of tangled, dust-scented bracelets. There are some whose stories I can no longer recall. Others whose stories I will never forget. One fashioned from twisted brass and steel. It’s uncomfortable sometimes and steel doesn’t bend well. It never flexes, though I continually try. The first time I held it, I was climbing atop a cattle truck in Northern Kenya. I would not be the same person climbing down two days later.

There is a bracelet of brown string, securing a carved whalebone button and held together by a bead at the bottom. I’ve almost lost it more times than I can remember. I’ve found it that many times too. It was a gift from my brother when he returned from Hokkaido and I’ve worn it on every journey of mine since.

I have a worn leather bracelet from Laos. Old-book brown with a dirty green string and a token with a question mark in its center. That question mark answered so much. So it came with and has ever since. It’s grown tatty as the string becomes dirtier and the leather softer. But the question mark shines. As demanding as it has always been.

I have a necklace. Or rather a thin  piece of leather on which lie a ring and a key. The ring was fashioned by hand in Senegal and has atop it a sealed metal bubble whose contents I’ll probably never know. “Protective magic” it was explained to me – and it’s done a pretty good job over the years. The key – now smooth, tiny and caked in polished rust – found me. I was outside the sleeping, abandoned sanctuary of the oldest Presbyterian church in South Africa. I think I might have been looking for something and received a key instead.

These and more forged, found and crafted memories live in that box. They are a world not simply of stories, but of places and ways of being. Reminders of different people in different corners of this place I call my life. Ways of remembering them and myself in the noise and tumult that each new day brings. Each is a story worn with love, brought a little into the new story I write each day and the grand story I’ll be writing for years. Some are magic, others have stories.

All remind me that sometimes a spell is right atop your breathing. The truth of what you are capable of gently brushing a spacebar.

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