A doorway of light in the darkness. The instruments found their way home.
After the fire, I was camping in my van.
A friend had offered me space on their farmland outside Scarborough, on the Cape Peninsula, where a festival was taking shape, something they were calling the “Summer of Love”. I had my tent, and outside it, I was carving a wooden stump into my first djembé drum. It was slow, absorbing work. The kind of work that keeps your hands busy while the rest of you tries to find its feet again. I had lost my studio. I had lost the version of myself that lived inside it. I was, in the most literal sense, starting from scratch.
At the festival, I met a man named Paul Henderson.
He invited me to come and see his home. So the next day I went.
What I found was not what I expected. Paul and his wife lived in a small room emptied almost entirely of furniture. A few possessions. Some sleeping mats. And in the corner, drums, didgeridoos, and the quiet dignity of people who had chosen to live close to the bone. There was nothing spare about them in the spiritual sense, but nothing excessive either. They had stripped life back to what mattered.
They invited me to sit down. Paul told me he was a shaman. I didn’t know what that was. Not really. The word existed somewhere in my vocabulary but it had no weight yet, no meaning.
He took some smudge, dried herbs bound together, and walked the room slowly, letting the smoke move into the corners, along the walls, across the mats we would lie on chanting as he did so. He didn’t explain this.
We lay down. Paul began.
He sang. He played bowls and chimes and flutes. He played the didgeridoo. The sounds layered and shifted and after a while, I stopped being able to tell where one instrument ended and another began, or where the music ended and something else started. What happened inside that journey I cannot fully tell you, not because I am withholding, but because I was not entirely there to witness it. I left. Where I went, I don’t know. Three hours passed like a breath.
When I opened my eyes the room was dim. My friend lay beside me. The mats were warm. The drums and didgeridoos were still in their corner. Paul and his wife were gone.
They had left us in their home. Door unlocked. Every possession within reach. Just gone, to visit someone, to do whatever the rest of their day required, with the trust of people who do not organise their lives around suspicion. I lay there for a moment trying to understand what kind of person does that. What kind of faith in the world is required?
A year and a half later I saw Paul again at a festival at Rustlers Valley, over Easter. We didn’t speak at length. But I saw him. A few weeks after that, Paul Henderson fell from the side of Table Mountain and died. I don’t know the details of how it happened. I’m not sure they matter. What matters is what came next.
His wife reached out. She was giving away some of his tools, the instruments he had used to make drums and didgeridoos, the things his hands had known. She gave me one of his didgeridoos. She gave me his djembé drum.
There was no clear reason for this. Paul and I had not been close. We had spent one afternoon together in a near-empty room while he took me somewhere I couldn’t explain. But she looked at me and she knew. She said it was very auspicious that I played the didgeridoo very much like Paul used to before his death. The instruments needed to go somewhere they would be understood. She recognised something in me, or perhaps she recognised something in the instruments themselves, a direction they were already pointing.
I held those tools for many, many years. They became the beginning of my own sound journeys. My own shamanic work. The thread that ran from that dim room in Scarborough, through a death on a mountain, into everything that followed.
I still didn’t know what a shaman was, not properly. But I am learning more in every moment on this red road.