Wanda Hennig

‘EVERY success story is a tale of constant adaptation, revision and change,” according to entrepreneur-adventurer Richard Branson.

He could have been talking about Ray Vogel, business executive-turned-chef (for seven months now) at the Buddhist Retreat Centre (BRC) near Ixopo.

Vogel’s work history includes accepting “an offer I couldn’t refuse” that led to “seven great years spent as the Industrial Development Corporation’s (IDC) brand manager, absorbed in corporate life and the political environment”.

Before that, Vogel had moved to Joburg from Port Elizabeth – he graduated top of his textile design diploma course after high school – via Grahamstown, where he spent two years as a scientific illustrator at the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology, famous for its findings on the “previously extinct” coelacanth. He initially worked for a publishing house, doing public relations and promotions.

Stifled by the non-creative nature of the job, Vogel then joined an independent management consultancy that specialised in company realignments and restructuring.

While there, he co-ordinated large-scale projects for the IDC, Eskom, Telkom and some non-parastatals. His speciality areas included communications, logistics and staff mobilisation.

“Life really isn’t the straight and narrow,” he laughs, clearly comfortable with the twists and turns. “It’s more like following the motorneural pathways of the brain that branch up and down, in and out.

There are junctures where you have to make decisions, only to reach another juncture where you might go right or left,” he tells me.

We’re sitting in the BRC dining room. There’s a vervet monkey peering through the window, I expect it hopes to fathom a way to get at the mini-mountain of fruit piled into a giant bowl.

Resigning from the IDC the day after he celebrated his 40th birthday wasn’t the first time Vogel left a secure job “with full clarity of mind, without necessarily having a back-up plan or clear way forward” and because “sometimes life tells you to be honest about where you are at the moment. It wasn’t about taking a leap of faith, but rather about standing in good faith.”

His seven-year full-time stint at the IDC came after striking out on his own the first time. He was snapped up.

This time, he felt he’d reached saturation in the intense bureaucratic and political environment and “needed to be more than a cog in the corporate wheel”.

“I’d recently ended a 10-year relationship and considered: is this a mid-life crisis? But I didn’t feel in crisis. I felt liberated.”

Photography had long been his passion and he thought he could, perhaps, split his focus between photography and brand consultancy. “I jumped into action getting in clients and found some – small, medium and large – in a haphazard fashion” relying on his network and recommendations.

One of the larger was Alexander Forbes, for whom he directed corporate videos with a film crew.

“Interesting work,” he says. He also started writing strategy for ad agencies and developing creative concepts for launches. “A multitude of things.”

But he found the constantly busy, high-demand, intermittent nature of things stressful.

He had sold his house and put his “stuff” in storage. And in what he calls “a moment of wisdom”, he decided that instead of jumping from one thing to another, or going back into the corporate world, he would extract himself for a period.

Hence, while considering volunteering in Bhutan, Nepal or Tibet, he dropped a line to Chrisi van Loon, director at the BRC, to ask about volunteer jobs there.

Vogel, brought up a fundamentalist Christian, had learned about Buddhism when a travelling friend stored a box of Buddhist books with him. He now describes himself as a secular humanist.

He had first been to the BRC 17 years before. He knew they had a few opportunities (that come with a small stipend), but often a waiting list.

He was in luck. “Chrisi got back and said they were looking for a chef. Well, she couldn’t have offered me anything better.”

Vogel sees his time at the BRC – he gave himself a year with an option to extend – as “a time-out, in a sense, to give myself the space to look at who I am, what my needs are and to ground myself enough to know: where to next?

“The past three years (he’s now 43) have become this collection of leaps of faith. When you look at all the little leaps combined, it becomes a quantum leap, in a sense, from suits to saffron,” the saffron being both the colour of the robes provided for meditation at the BRC and the kitchen spice.

“I didn’t really know till I got here that I could cook, much as I had an amazing army of aunts, sisters, mother and grandmother to teach me, growing up,” he says, and, at the BRC, “the amazing, hard-working, good-humoured Zulu women who are permanents in the kitchen”.

Proof that he can cook? He’s experimenting with recipes and there’s already talk of a fourth BRC cookbook with Vogel as titled chef. The BRC’S third cookbook, Plentiful (Jacana), was released in November.

But right now, he’s doing what’s in front of him. “And that’s more than okay,” he says.

“The next step will present itself, if not by opportunity, by my own creation.” More adaptation, revision and change.

wandahennig@comcast.net