Synopsis
SAFARI OF A PATCHWORK PILGRIM
The price of finding love? Nothing less than Everything.
For this Safari, Life chose a solitary character—one in search of…well, something to make sense of why she was here. A burden to her single mother and born in South Africa, a reviled country, in the middle of a war, she belonged nowhere exactly. A clean slate, she had to write her own life by living it.
This story about the growth of emotional intelligence is for those who have struggled with the sense that their own life has, or once had, unique intentions that they could deeply feel but not fully fathom
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‘Philippa’s artistry documents a rich adventure at the confluence of the sacred and the material… from an African childhood to the jungles of British academia. A wonderful life of discovery and enchantment.’ Jackie Bortoft
A pilgrimage in search of love. Its ‘patchwork’ stitches together lively, rich characters, some who love abundantly, some incapable of it, and some intent on its destruction. (Villains are necessary to all good stories). Through all these fractured mirrors, the pilgrimage is towards the transcendent lovingness of Creation. Its natural mysticism emerges like smoke from damp leaves.
Profound insights into spiritual and philosophical understanding are subtly woven throughout the beautifully written narrative. They will challenge your conventional beliefs and inspire recognition of the Perfection of the Commonplace.
It rides through the widest emotional landscapes of contrast: living through the Apartheid conflict between black and white, the disconnect between African and European cultures, the generosity of strangers, the betrayal of friends, rejection by family, all the way into what most called ‘madness’. Its blinding enlightenment forged both bow and shield, needed sources of resilience for the trials that followed..
After harrowing experiences that revealed the shallowness of Darwinian explanations, the author, at the age of 29, conceived and wrote a groundbreaking, skeletal theory called Involution, which offers a spiritual alternative to materialist science. Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel laureate, welcomed it, as did Arthur Koestler, but it was contemptuously dismissed by orthodox academia. Despite her destitution, youth, and lack of academic support, she persisted.
Her own double-slit life of perpetual synchronicity and entanglement validated the theory's truth, enriched its vocabulary, and fortified her against ridicule and rejection. Miracles intervened at critical junctures, compelling her to realise that her life was not entirely her own. Life is a web; we belong to one another. Every life is shaped as much by its future aspirations (the Breath of Life) as by its past limitations (fear and doubt).
George Eliot’s books and circumstances (she had trodden a similar path) spurred the author on to leave Africa for England, to leave her marriage for risky independence until Exile took everything except the need to understand and to repay. The Return was to write her own Book of Revelations for others. This is that Book.
We all have a lamp to trim for the coming of our bridegroom. This harrowing but often humorous chronicle (God tells good stories with both wit and parody) is one such Trimming.
This intricate epic reveals that nothing, no person, no book, no encounter, past or present, is irrelevant in the great library, the Akashic Field of Memory. It connects beyond time and space.
The patterns and people in your own life may look different when you dismount.
About the Author
About the Author's Life: Reconciliation of extremes could be said to be the overarching theme, both in this book and in the author's life. An only child in the conflicted world of apartheid South Africa, she had a grandfather fluent in both Zulu and Swahili and a grandmother who claimed to be related to Elizabeth Barrett Browning with an aunt who knew George Eliot. She did not believe either claim! That was the hybrid blood. Then other ingredients were enfolded: the languages that this book would draw upon: Theology and Metaphysical poetry at school, and almost every faculty at University, from Medicine through Architecture and Fine Art, until Classics gave way to Psychology and Zoology, studying under the seminal palaeontologist Raymond Dart and the father of embryology, B.I. Balinsky. Later, marriage to a marine biologist and photographer meant a nomadic life on deserted Mozambique islands with fiddler crabs and mangrove swamps. An association with Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, at the Max Planck Institute introduced the dynamic field of animal behaviour. Later, she lectured on Saints and Scientists at Bristol University. Safari of a Patchwork Pilgrim is her creative recovery of an extraordinary life. Through writing it, she discovered George Eliot 'seated' at her own family's fire in South Africa!
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
