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Personal Continued..... Zimbabwe is a beautiful country as are its rural people, but it's not a great place for a white Brit to stay for more than he is welcome as a tourist. So with no work permit granted I opted to cross the border into South Africa. Here I experienced a full range of life styles from a secluded and exclusive white community in the mountains near Stellenbosch to living on my own - first in a one room cottage in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg to later in an old bus for a year whilst building my own timber cabin overlooking the sea. In the community I was the maintenance man. In Johannesburg I employed two African guys and did welding and metal fabrication such as car ports and fancy architectural steelwork. During this time I started making the star tetrahedron sculptures. After completing the timber house I started restoring antique furniture and building drums and marimbas - also employing local guys. I ran free music and dance workshops in the townships nearby for school kids and helped instigate and run two Mind, Body Spirit type fairs. The next three year phase was attempting to set up and run a community and alternative conference center. Big learning curve that one and several burn outs later I departed South Africa for UK. However, UK had shrunk and all the roads were full of cars (I'd forgotten). Things did not open up for me as hoped. I soon learnt to appreciate all that I had left behind me in South Africa. So after 8 months I returned and settled in Hogsback. I was there 15 months and it took that long to gather together all the strands of my life and find a coherent way of marketing the various gifts that I have been blessed with. And there it was - Return To Magic! Secret Garden - but even magical Hogsback was not to be my final resting place! Due to ME (yuppie flue) I became unable to do anything! and was ready to leave the planet. However, I decided I had a few things I wanted to do first so in order to get well and survive financially I decided to sell and move to Bedford. (That is Bedford in the Eastern Cape, South Africa!) Life on Earth is a magical experience. We make it into such a mundane or painful thing - but when we realise the interconnectedness of all things and how we are just another part of LIFE manifesting itself we can logically see that our lives can literally be beautiful like the flowers, the birds and the trees. And if we so choose, we can spend our time with beautiful people doing creative and fun things.
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