Monthly Archives

February 2020

Groundwork

At the end of the world: thoughts on friendship

- 4 min
The Moon Valley, near San Pedro De Atacama, the opposite end of Chile to the blog post…
Chile, January 2020.

Despite being the sort of person who is called towards hours solitarily reading or writing, who’s happy spending hours or even days with little company, who finds a large group of people delighting and exhausting, I’ve been blessed with many friends. Maybe because if you want to be my friend, I am likely to accept with very few conditions. I have an expectation of mutual kindness and interest; however, I do not measure the depth of friendship by contact hours.

For me, what matters is a meaningful intent to have an authentic relationship

It doesn’t have to be complex, just real. Some people mistakenly imagine that to be my friend requires a certain level of education or worldliness, mistaking values I cherish within myself as what I need from other people. Similarly, my concept of friendship is not limited to people of my age. Some of my most treasured conversations within any friendship have been with people decades older than myself. And, at the same time, there is a teenage girl who I am looking forward to having to visit as soon as I am back home. We are going to bake a cake together, and she, I know, will have me in fits of giggles.

One dear friend once remarked how lucky I was to meet so many interesting people. Yes, it is true I do have such luck, but, still, there is something also about having the willingness to be interested.

However, meeting an interesting person is not the same as a long-term friendship

When I meet people who are also travelling, they often have strong opinions regarding the difficulty of staying in contact with friends back home. I have been known to be like that. Sometimes there develops a feeling of obligation, the idea that a ‘true’ friend would behave in a certain way. And, to my cost, I have worried about the necessity of knowing the detail of what was going on with my friends’ lives. Nowadays, thankfully, my cares are less rooted in my own ego. I have changed my mind. Such a style of friendship might well work for other people, but it doesn’t really work for me. This change of attitude doesn’t stop me being a good friend, if anything, it leaves me the room to be a better friend because I am less worried about my own inadequacies and less frequently overwhelmed.

People often talk about the need to stay in better contact; sometimes less is better

I recently went away to a national park here in Chile, a place where there is zero phone signal. I was away for nine days which is a long time to go without touching the internet. When did you last spend nine days internet free?

On the bus home, my companion exclaimed at the number of messages on her phone. I looked and saw lists of lit up notifications. At first, I felt bad about my own lack of popularity. When I’d switched it on, my phone had no notifications showing and only, I believe, three quiet messages waiting to be read.

But once the initial emotion of comparison subsided, I smiled

One of the things I had to do during therapy was to take control of when I was receiving information. There was little coherence in the pattern of my emotions and everything that could send a sharp prod of emotion through me generally did. Whilst I’d still say it’s better than feeling numb, it’s not fun. To deal with it, I became very strict with how I used the internet and particularly my phone, habits that, with time, have strengthened to the extent that now in a nine-day period it seems not one notification gets through.

And yet, I have to admit that I enjoy my friendships now much more than I used to. Both those friendships that are many years old and those which are much newer.

And technology obviously still plays an important role in maintaining these friendships

One of my three quiet messages, by which I mean only visible when I opened a particular app, was a long thoughtful email, another was a friend marvelling at the fact that I’d bumped into his brother-in-law at the top of a mountain the day before. I laughed. How miraculous it is that on top of a mountain at the far end of Chile, a place where the road is called ‘the route to the end of the world’ I bump into a guy who once kindly walked me home.

It has not been an easy journey to change my way of thinking about friendship and switch from insecurity (which inevitably, regardless of the volume of contact, leads to a sense of loneliness) and towards a sense of general trust, yet I have to accept that I have done so. Knowing that I care for a number of people scattered across many countries who in one way or another also care for me feels like a miracle. It is freedom.

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By Catherine Oughtibridge
Travel

Someone else’s home (somewhere or other)

- 4 min
I don’t have my camera to hand here, so you will have to use your imagination and enjoy this picture from the north of Chile instead.
Near San Pedro de Atacama, Chile.
January 2020

I wake up at 07:30 as the white light comes through the curtain-less window. It’s white because outside hangs a thick mist, which hugs the landscape for much of the morning, although come afternoon there’ll be nothing but blue sky and scorching sun. Between the dark of the previous night, and the mist of this morning, I’m left with only a hazy idea of where I am. I know I’m not far from Santiago, although I feel knowing the village name and seeing the bob of my global positioning satellite assisted blue dot moving on a digital map doesn’t constitute knowing where I am. If there is a village here, I still can’t see it.

I get up and wander around the house

It’s an amateur build, a creative project, a mixture of a building site and a home. I cross the terrace and enter the open front door of its non-identical twin. The owner has gone to work already and I’ve been left here alone. I wander in and make myself a cup of tea. The part where I live lacks functionality.  

It takes time, but after rooting around this stranger’s cupboards, I start to understand where to find what I need. I take avena, an apple and a stick of cinnamon to make porridge. I load my clothes into the washing machine, switch a tap, prod around and hopeful water noises begin. A fluffball of a grey cat rubs against my leg affectionately.

I find some tools to remove the concrete floor

Concentrating on the area closest to the front door to begin. I work for a short while, trying to gauge the difficulty of the problem and then pause. It’s going to take some thinking. I step back outside. The mist directly above has developed a blue tinge and looking out I can see a small lake or rather, with this dry summer, a pond. There’s a suggestion of hill. In a neighbouring field stands a nonchalant piebald pony.

I figure it’s time to explore and so take the keys, hanging on a hook, and head down to the pyramid building below. Yesterday, it was just a glimmer of light, pointed out to me as the biblioteca, but now I discover that it’s a tower roof, missing the tower. By which I mean if you imagine a tall tower, with a triangular roof the colour of terracotta, then what I look down at from the terrace looks like the decapitated point. It slants up from the floor and in beautiful Egyptian form rises to a perspex skylight.

There is a door on one side

Inside is a small coffee table with a notebook lying atop, a few worn chairs, an old-style school desk and shelves with books: Oscar Wilde and The Little Prince, an English dictionary and the complete works of Dostoevsky – which is a coincidence as I am reading The Brothers Karamazov.

With the washing hanging, the sun appears and casts the garden in warm light

I marvel at the sudden appearance of hills, or mountains perhaps is the word. Now seems a sensible moment to start thinking about lunch, for I am going to have to eat. It’s a game of ready, steady, cook, which has me delving into the back of the fridge wondering if what I pull out is a courgette or a cucumber. There seem to be an endless supply of tomatoes and enough pasta to keep even me going a while. This though is a game I am quite adept at. I have practised many times before. Frustratingly there appears to be no evidence at all that anyone here drinks coffee.

Outside a horseback herdsman guides his cows to the lake

I watch him and his dogs and smile at the sound of an indignant cow before returning to scrambling in broken concrete. I whack a large hammer systematically at the weakest points of the floor trying to make it shatter, I prise it up slowly and occasionally tumble over. I’m surprised by my progress. I’m going to need wire cutters and a dustpan and brush, but soon the door will swing open freely and there will be space to begin my masterpiece. Meanwhile I place my tomatoes in boiling water to remove their skins and plan how I’m going to make a peach tart. There’s no need to rush anything here and nobody to rush me.

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By Catherine Oughtibridge
Exercise

Torres Del Paine

- 5 min
Glacier Grey, taken by my hiking buddy on her phone.
February, 2020.

When I was about fourteen, I cried my way up Snowdon

It was foggy at the top, and I could barely see my family as I wolfed down a pasty and with cold wet tears declared I was never hiking again. Why anyone would go through the ordeal of climbing a mountain, especially a mountain with a perfectly functional train going up it, I had no idea. At the bottom, we drank the most delicious hot chocolate and I satisfied myself with the thought that I would never have to do such a horrid thing again.

This last week I went on an 8-day hike around Torres Del Paine National Park

Not only does this park contain train-less snow-capped mountains, but a number of snow-queen-blue glaciers. There are two circuits to choose from, the W and the O and my hiking buddy decided on the O before I had the chance to stick the place name into a search engine and discover that it was definitely the more challenging route.

Furthermore, we did this hike not just carrying pasties, but all the necessary food

That’s eight days’ food, a tent, mats, sleeping bags, cooking equipment, coats, clothes, woolly hats, sun-cream, insect repellent and everything else you might need to survive out in the wilderness. Not only did we clamber up mountains and scramble down them, but we also camped beside glaciers and mosquito-infested ice-cold turquoise lakes and in the middle of a knobbly floored forest.

At twenty-nine, I am different than when I was fourteen

It’s not just that my hair is turning grey, but my body is more muscle and less squidge. I cried my way up Snowdon because it was a physical ordeal. My mind did not know how to process the work and I had no idea how to control my breathing or how to motivate myself to be cheerful. When I climbed up Snowdon all the agony was clearly the Father’s fault and the more I blamed him, and the more he refused to accept responsibility, the angrier I became.

Climbing up to the John Gardner pass this last week (which is higher than Snowdon), my legs certainly ached. I’d already done three days of hiking up to this point. What’s more, I’d risen at half five so that we could strike camp for seven and be on our way. The start of the trail closed at 8 am to avoid anyone trying to get over the pass during the afternoon when the wind has a trick of trying to throw people off the mountain.

I knew that there was a steep uphill followed by a steep downhill, both which threatened to be tricky. The previous night I’d slept badly, as we’d been camped close to the Los Perros glacier on a forest floor made of rocky gravel in a campsite where the shower only came in the cold variety.

Yet, there was nobody to blame for me being there other than myself and so I accepted responsibility for the situation without causing myself a fuss. There wasn’t any complaining – other than a grunt of hatred towards the sounding alarm clock. There was mud. There was clambering. My hands were dirty and my blue boots became a dusty brown. My legs ached. My feet ached. My bag was heavy and my clothes stuck to my body with sweat.

My legs ached, but they didn’t hurt

And it was the same with my feet. My boots are getting closer to worn out than worn in, but I love them dearly as with them on my feet I didn’t get a single blister.

Slowly but steadily throughout the morning, I nibbled at cereal bars and toffees, nuts and dried fruit. I sipped at my water, fresh from the glaciers above, and the hot coffee kindly prepared by my hiking buddy in my tiny thermos flask (me being too slow in the mornings for her general approval).

We’d been told to expect rain, but the sun shone bright, giving the mountain snow that crisp white look, and we had to pause when we left the forest to make the final craggy climb, as we needed to plaster on the sun-cream.

And my legs continued to ache, but the ache seemed irrelevant

They were working hard, and expected to ache. If they hadn’t had been aching after all that climbing, I’d have been surprised. Mentally, I’d prepared myself for much worse. The pass proved not to be as difficult as I’d once imagined. Sure, I was tired by the end of it, but taking it all one step after another, it didn’t seem so important. After all, there was sunshine, the wild Patagonian wind was sleeping and we had the sort of view that makes you giggle with exhilaration.

In no time at all we were stumbling into the campsite (which had no showers at all), removing out boots and boiling water for a cup of tea.

When I was about fourteen, I cried my way up Snowdon

I felt defeated by the mountain but I was being defeated by myself. At the time I had no idea of this, I could not see where the anger was coming from and I did not understand my own role in my emotions. It’s not just my body that’s changed, but the way I think has altered in a fashion so radical that I laugh at the thought that both that girl and I are one and the same.

Now, of course, I am greatly thankful for the father taking me up Snowdon. It’s put a marker in my brain identifying the person I don’t want to be. The person I keep on growing away from being. And yet, also it reminds me, whenever I hear someone’s ridiculous complaints, how real such complaints do feel. It makes it a little easier to forgive the stranger who can do nothing but complain about their situation. Every one of us has been there. We’ve all had those days.

It’s just some of us get the wild luck of being guided to grow beyond them.

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By Catherine Oughtibridge
Reflections on traumaTravel

On staying in Chile

- 4 min
Somewhere near the El Tatio geyser field near San Pedro de Atacama, Chile.
January 2020

I’m currently in the process of working out how I’m going to stay in Chile. Not forever, just for longer than my current visa allows. My Chilean friends think I’m mad. Why would I stay somewhere with such an unreliable social and political system? Why would I want to live here where the police are hostile and the government corrupt?

My family I think also struggle to understand why I would live somewhere that makes me so poor. We are living in different worlds, in more ways than one, and I’m like the squirrel Ratatoskr in the world tree, running up and down through the different places, only really belonging to the tree itself. Luxury hotel to shared dorm in a hostel, neither really fit me.

But why stay in Chile?

The truth is it being Chile doesn’t really matter. If the cards had fallen in a different pattern last year, it might have been a different country, but they fell as they did and I ended up here. I ended up beneath the military curfew in a house of Chileans and with friends who are Chileans and I watched as people began to speak about sadness in a way that I have rarely ever seen.

That squirrel in me that scurries around collecting stories, peering into other people’s lives, stopped and stared. Here there was something new, something as yet unseen but something incredibly familiar.

Deep sadness resides in all of us, even if we don’t often recognise it as being there

For me, recognising my own submerged sadness has been a battle of therapy and self-love. I do not always find it easy to identify sadness, but being resilient and strong depends on my willingness to put the effort to accept the sadness within.

Now the volume of my sadness has, I believe, reached a natural and healthy balance. Whilst I will never be ‘over’ my trauma, the event has been relegated to history. I have mourned that shattering of my being and I have rebuilt myself in a different fashion. Through that rebuilding, I have changed. Unsurprisingly perhaps, I now have a great curiosity about this post-trauma period of change that is necessary to rebalance the self.

Chile is a place of scars

Graffiti covers the walls in town, screaming the people’s pain. The fear and the hurt are real, the question for me is how do the people recover, redevelop their own sense of their own identity. Is it possible to do it in a healthy manner, or the more this goes on, is it to be more of the same, more of the ‘us and them’?

It’s not just Chile where such an attitude leaves scars behind, the whole world is bathed in a painful mixture of fear of the other. It gets more complex in Chile because of the history of the dictatorship and the current role of capitalism, which has a weird Stockholm syndrome like effect upon the people. Nurseries in my town are advertised with pictures of smiling girls with yellow pigtails when in the yard such children rarely exist. Similarly, the smiling faces on my university notebook have had the colour zapped from them, leaving a set of images behind which would not be accepted in England anymore – they would be considered unrepresentative of our genetic diversity. Pale skin is also associated with those who are better off. Those who wield power.

Chilean Flag
Praying for Llamas
Near San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, January 2020.
(Dear Mother – do you have the place name?)

When we were in the Atacama desert, an indigenous lady, in jeans and a t-shirt, showed us carvings in the stone walls of the craggy valley that ran beside her small town, pictures like llamas and birds. The engravings were done slowly, with rituals and deep meaning, focusing the people on what it was that they desired, focusing the community on the needs of the whole community. I asked if the people still make such images and she shook her head. Why not? Her face changed. She hesitated. Vergüenza. Because they were ashamed. They didn’t want to be laughed at.

But did she believe?

Undoubtedly. And as we drove back from the river I saw the flocks of sheep shuffling along together with feathers marking their woolly coats with signs of protection, protection that would spread from the sheep to the earth and to the environment and which would look after the people who depended upon the land.

In a world crumbling under climate change, I would suggest that such shame is dangerous. I listen to the stories and I hear about how much damage is being done to the wildlife through mining, or how taking sea-kelp from the ocean to give bathroom products that gel texture is destroying the wildlife beneath the waves, and I wonder who ought to be ashamed?

And I’m caught in my own curiosity

All this, the traumatised country trying to understand what it is, the fact that here there are people who really understand how to live with nature, the fear, the shame, the sadness. The contradiction of adulating and fearing the other. The continual struggle that goes on. All this adds up to a fixation on my part. A fixation that I cannot simply walk away from.

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By Catherine Oughtibridge
Groundwork

“Catherine, your life is chaos” – The Grump

- , 5 min
A local woman weaving in the Sacred Valley of the Incas.
Peru, January 2020.

[Written at the beginning of February.]

On the aeroplane between Lima and Cusco I tell my parents that I’m staying in Chile. I’ve asked my boss and he’s written the most wonderful recommendation letter and it’s confirmed, all I need to do is renew my documents and I’m sorted. I feel pretty chuffed with myself. As a dear South-African friend would say, I’ve got my ducks in a row.

It doesn’t last

A few days later whilst I’m on the plane from Lima to Santiago my boss sends me a message. Something in the bureaucracy has gone amiss. Perhaps funding’s been cut, perhaps there’s been some disagreement somewhere up the line, it’s not clear but either way, it’s nothing personal, but I don’t have a job.

This upsets me.

In the current jumble that is my life, the idea of some stability was soothing

I had a plan. I knew where I was going to live. Then reality struck.

Although I try to maintain a routine, reality doesn’t work that way. Ever since I arrived in Chile I’ve been battling to create a routine. I arrived in August. When we had a week of holiday in September, everyone else was overjoyed, I was frustrated and wanted to go to work because I’d finally begun to settle into a rhythm. A month later, when protestors took to the streets and the military curfew was placed upon us, I was the one who kept hoping that we’d soon get back to normal and I’d be able to go back to class.

It never happened.

Nope. We’ve gone from protests to online examinations to summer holidays

And I’ve felt like I’m spinning from one thing to another. Last week I was on holiday with my parents, then I was back in La Serena for the weekend and now I’m miles and miles and miles further south, wearing the most ridiculous pink woolly hat about to go hiking in the mountains.

It’s all proving quite a challenge.

This morning I was shaken awake by a bus conductor

In a friendly kind of fashion of course. I’d woken up in the bus station in Santiago which was where I was supposed to be, but disorientating all the same. Tonight, I’m in a hostel. Already this year I have slept in 12 different beds and home has not yet been one of them. By the time February ends it’s going to be twenty-something different places.

My poor body has no idea where it is or what it’s supposed to be doing next.

Despite all this, I am, more or less, managing it all

Me. The same woman who was only a few years ago struggling to manage simple tasks like cleaning one’s teeth is now juggling all this uncertainty. Tonight I am tired, but when I woke up this morning on the bus I knew what I needed to do. I knew how to look after myself.

I stepped off the bus and ate my banana and a cereal bar. I cannot make decisions on an empty stomach so don’t try to. It’s helpful to know one’s limits. Once I was thinking better I headed to the bathrooms to clean my teeth and get changed. I put on my make-up. It’s not that I wear make-up every day, but sometimes doing so makes me look more alive and therefore feel more alive.

There’s nothing elegant about doing your morning routine in the bus station’s toilets, but elegance is a luxury.

Then came the next bus, this one to the airport where I found myself squeezed into one of the few remaining seats. I didn’t head straight to check-in but stopped off first for coffee and a media-luna (croissant to you and me). Now I was feeling human.

Then came the first attempt at check-in where I found that I wasn’t on the passenger list

This led to a short debate with a woman at the (“this is not a”) help-desk to be reinserted on the passenger list, and a second more successful attempt at check-in. No surprise, I slept most of the flight down to Puerto Natales.

Nobody would have guessed that I nearly screwed up the whole thing by imagining that my flight was the day after it actually was. However, at the bus station back home in La Serena, the helpful man at a (“how can I help you”) help-desk came to my rescue and sorted out my wrong bus tickets without a fuss. So, in the end, there was no grand disaster.

What’s noteworthy here is that having made a mistake, I could have chastised myself. I could have played at criticism, but instead, I got myself a cup of tea and sorted out the problem. I dealt with what I could deal with and I did it whilst remaining calm.

For me, managing chaos comes down to not expending energy on the useless

Always, it’s a lack of energy that’s going to trip me up. Without energy my willpower is diminished and my decision making becomes disastrous. Amid chaos, there are so many decisions to be made. You need willpower to choose the helpful route rather than the easiest. This is why, in my experience, you should take a banana to your therapy session and eat it immediately afterwards, or consume a tower of marmalade sandwiches, just when your energy levels are crashing and you’re feeling rather raw.

Or before you head to the supermarket so that you have the willpower to choose the food you need over the food you want. Or when you wake up in a bus station and need to keep yourself from freaking out.

In fact, thinking about it, my management technique for chaos might come down to three ideas:

  1. When you’re tired prioritise sleep. If you can’t sleep, eat a banana. If you have to do something taxing, eat a banana. Don’t make decisions on an empty stomach. Bananas are great.
  2. If you have no idea what you’re doing or how you’re going to solve a problem, sit down and have a cup of tea. Don’t multitask here, simply have a cup of tea. If you’re so overwhelmed you can’t think straight to make a cup of tea – and it happens – simply sit down on the floor. If you have to sit down on the floor of the bus station, that’s okay too.
  3. This one is based on Rapunzel’s guide for intercontinental flights. Whenever you have a connection (maybe a metaphorical one rather than an airport style one), change your socks and knickers and don’t forget to brush your teeth. The father would add, wash and comb your hair. Clean hair helps a lot.

And it seems I have to throw the dice up in the air again, but the intention is still to stay in Chile a while longer…

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By Catherine Oughtibridge