The Spirit of man is nomad, his blood Bedouin,
and love is the aboriginal
tracker on the spoor of his lost self:
and so I came to live my life not by
conscious plan or prearranged design
but as someone following the flight of a bird.

– Sir Laurens van der Post

Looking back it is easy to see patterns in events of your life that at the time had no pattern; they just happened. Looking back at my life it does seem that strangely, mysteriously, I too, like Van der Post, have been following the flight of a bird.

It has taken me from Eastern Canada to the West (Calgary and Vancouver and an island in the Pacific, offshore Vancouver); it has led me to journalism, free-lance radio (nine years as business columnist on Peter Gzowski's CBC Morningside program) financial analysis, specialty money management and, perhaps most mysteriously of all, back to a first love, lost early, poetry; and along the way it has taken me back to vibrant, suffering Africa, first introduced to me in a meaningful way in the many books of Laurens van der Post, mentor and friend.

Van der Post's Africa was larger than life, colourful, and even in its late-colonial days, full of passion for life that we in the West might only marvel at and envy. Today, the dire scenario in Africa that Van der Post foresaw but hoped could be forestalled, has happened with a devastating ferocity that even he could not have imagined through war, drought and disease.

Written out of the deepest poem that might be that bird, my life speaks no longer, primarily, out of a business world but out of a world of language that has married loves of Africa and poetry in a way that I never expected. But looking back, the journey that bird has taken me on has been one of exquisite, symmetry and coherence. Even though the events and scattered parts of it seemed, at the time, so different and disconnected.