Writing Myself Home
Foreword by Joanne Fedler
What I remember from a writing retreat in Bali 2011, is Sandy Geyer reading a version of her chapter ‘Double Blink.’ What an astonishing piece of writing, I thought. Neither of us knew back then how it would shape the narrative that has become Writing Myself Home, this remarkable book you hold in your hands. I remember our one-on-one mentoring session on that retreat in sweltering humidity, in which I asked Sandy about her life, and she told me she played the bagpipes and not just as some weird little hobby. The what?? I tried to picture this glamorous Amazonian woman with her lips pressed to … I don’t know… the bag? The pipes? Human beings are endlessly fascinating. Yet we often don’t see what is right in front of us as the most interesting material to work with. This book is a living example of a deep and engaged curiosity turned in on itself. It is the labour of someone with an array of both extraordinary and ordinary life experiences, distilled into a quiet reflection on leadership, intuition, self-mastery and ‘success’ both in traditional and unusual forms. This book is situated in that underwritten space between midlife and old age – what Jung called ‘metanoia,’ or Jane Pretat writes about in Coming to Age: the Croning years and Late-Life Transformation. For this reason alone, it is valuable and a generous contribution to other women navigating that time of our lives. Sandy’s wealth of experiences in different roles as a businesswoman, mother, daughter, wife, sister, immigrant and musician combined with her brilliant 1 + 1 = 11 mind, and leadership expertise, creates a rich tapestry for the reader in which she weaves her insights and reflections through moments each of us can recognise in our own lives. This is surely the best of what memoir offers a reader. Sandy is more than a thinker, she is, as she reminds us, a person of action, a do-er. She shows us what personal accountability and responsibility look like in midlife while a marriage struggles, alongside the journeys of motherhood, immigration, building a life and taking full responsibility for that life. Through a series of key moments in her life, she exposes the misogyny in the piping world, which stands as a microcosm for gender inequality everywhere. Sandy models a form of authority that seeps up from within, and brims with irony and quiet power. She does not shirk from sharing the ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’ that are the deep mycelial compost of all insight and growth – the hallmark of true humility and leadership. And as she finds her voice, and fights to belong in places where she was regarded as ‘the token,’ she does it almost mythologically, for each of us who have felt silenced and excluded. This book belongs in many genres and will be read in different ways by readers who find themselves at crossroads and thresholds. At one level, it is about self-authorship, personal responsibility and the lifelong challenge of recovering personal autonomy. But for me, this is also a book about loss and sorrow, and their role in our journeys of individuation. It is an anthem of the self, reaching and reflecting, grieving and growing beyond grief. As Sandy navigates intergenerational dynamics and cultural displacement, she shows how spiritual consciousness is a reliable compass; and when one quietens, the voice we need to carry us into the future is never far from our grasp. When Sandy writes about what it's like to play the bagpipes we feel the resonance, ‘both joyous and healing… the sound waves, the low, earthy drones and soaring melodies – ‘they don’t just move through the air, they move through the body. Through bone and blood and memory. You don’t just hear them. You feel them. And sometimes, they feel you back.’ A book arrives for our attention as a finished product. But what we seldom see is the process that it belongs to. Writing Myself Home is a testament to the commitment to a practice – not only of playing the bagpipes, but the act of writing itself. What you hold in your hands is the hard-won, careful work of more than a decade and a half. It is the distillation of one woman’s struggles to belong – to her marriage, her country, her music and finally herself. ‘And now, I tap my chest and whisper: ‘I live here.’ If I can come home to myself, I can belong anywhere. And that, truly, is the point of this book.’ I am honoured to have walked in the margins of this unfolding, and to witness the book’s completion.
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Path of the Lion
A Note from Sandy
Entrepreneurship is a lot like diving off a cliff with no parachute. Entrepreneurial Intelligence (EnQ) becomes the wings you grow on the way down. In August 1996, six months pregnant with my second child, I resigned from a secure corporate position to start my own business. I remember standing in my kitchen telling my husband, “We’ve just dived off a cliff.” What followed was not six months of testing an idea. It was six years of learning how to survive. From swinging a carry cot in one hand and typing proposals with the other, to navigating cash flow, staff, and the constant weight of responsibility - it was messy, exhausting, and deeply uncertain. And then, after six years, we became profitable. Exponentially profitable. What I came to understand is this: entrepreneurship is not a talent - it is a way of thinking. A way of seeing. A way of becoming. Most entrepreneurs don’t fail because they lack ability. They fail because they are left to learn the hardest lessons alone, slowly, and often too late. EnQ and Path of the Lion was born from this reality. It is not about how clever you are. It is about how aware you are - of yourself, your thinking, your patterns, and your choices. Because in the end, building a business is not just about what you do. It is about who you become in the process.
My Long Flight From Freedom
A Note from Sandy
This is not a politically motivated novel. It isn’t an attempt to push one political view over another but rather to give my own first-hand account of being a white South African female, born into a middle class society from the early 1970’s to the mid 2000’s within the political background of South Africa. The political background is loosely provided and is historically as accurate as my sources of information and my memory. I was largely unaware of the political storms brewing around the protected environment in which I was raised. Many whites rush to claim ignorance of the harsh inequalities of the ruling ideology of apartheid in the 60’s to 90’s in South Africa and these claims must surely be viewed with disbelief and outrage by the many races affected by these inequalities. However, as apartheid began to fall away in the 1990’s it became more and more apparent to me that our ruling party had herded us into a way of thinking. Lack of freedom of the press also affected our perceptions of the political maneuverings constructed by this party. Essentially we were told what they wanted us to know. It was easier to believe what we were told than to look more deeply into the inequalities against others. As the new South Africa began to emerge we embraced the changes, eager to work with others, to face and rectify previous inequalities, and to build new futures of our own. By 2006 however we had come to a place where we needed to face the fact that we could no longer guarantee our family’s safety and needed to look squarely at their likely future if we were to stay in the land of our birth. I do not suggest that emigration is the only solution and that South Africa is doomed. Ideally we would all like to stay in the country of our birth and face the consequences of previous inequalities whilst working together to rectify those as well as build futures of our own. For anyone to run to greener pastures with only selfish motives would be wrong. Those who do emigrate learn quickly that there are many new challenges that quickly replace the ones they left behind. The grief one experiences in leaving ones country is intense and recovery is a long and painful process. Many of the deeper issues, blamed on exterior influences, are often personal and internal ones, which many emigrants realise are sitting on the plane right next to them when they land in another country. The harsh reality though is that there is little regard for personal rights and life in South Africa and by all indications in 2006 it wasn’t getting any better. This we cannot claim as a race against a race. All ages and races are implicated from the top organisers of the crimes that are carried out on the streets to the innocent victims of these crimes. What we found most distressing was to be in the position where we felt that we needed to make a choice between our children and our parents by walking away from South Africa’s new found freedom. Yet this was the reality that we faced in order to allow our children and future generations the opportunity to prosper, away from a place where violence and fear had become normalised. This is not a complaint about the unequal opportunities for whites since the introduction of the Black Empowerment Policies. There are surely enough professional victims still standing in the line of the “hard done by’s” and I believe that economic opportunities can be made anywhere with the right amount of hard work and dedication. However, the effect of these BEE policies and the brain drain were starting to show as deep cracks in our structures and we could no longer ignore our need to cautiously yet actively select our future path through the emerging chaos. This is my story. I have enjoyed reliving my experiences and am now ready to experience what is still to come. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I did.