Searching for stoke

I haven’t posted anything for a long time. Things change. I have less hair and greyer stubble. From where I write, I look due east over rooftops and then the sprawl of twinkling city lights to the distant line of mountains, etched hard and clear by the dawn. They are the mountains in which we used to live. For twenty-five years. Until the unrelenting tide of change swept that all away, with the force and violence of which it is perfectly capable.

But this is not about that. It is not about big stories. For it is often not the big stories that are important, but the little ones.

I awake, on my fifty-third birthday, in the most beautiful place on earth. The first of the pure white sandbanks are already exposed, with the tide still running out. The wind is from the north-west, the winter wind that brings rain and cold. But today it is soft and gentle, yet chilly. The dawn is silver-grey and unremarkable. None of the showy, warm tones of a typically African sunrise. Simpler. Cleaner. So that you have to look more intently to see the perfection.

Only the wind

This is a story about Hendrik Mathys and how I came to meet him. Like all stories it relies on the unfolding of events in a particular sequence. Like all stories, it requires all of the events in that sequence to happen. None can be left out, neither the ones we might think of as good or lucky, nor the ones we might think of as bad or unlucky. They are all integral to the story, and to its particular end.

If the events, those two days, had unfolded differently, if any one of them had taken a different trajectory, I may never have met him. Would he have been worse off? Would I have been worse off? One cannot really say.

Homecoming

It is a good story, worth writing down, I think, even after all these years. And maybe it has taken all these years for me to discover the voice with which I want to tell it. I am thinking of the story because I am driving the road along which it draws to an end, twenty six years ago. It was a road then, that lead home, but no longer does, a road that I have travelled thousands of times throughout my life, but then was travelling for the first time in two years. I was returning home. I was twenty two years old. Twenty two seemed older, then.

Happy New Year

Is it the here and now that matters? Is it what we bring back? Is it both? If it's what we bring back, then it's this: two skulls from leopard kills – one a klipspringer, one a dassie; a rough, hand-carved piece of donkey cart from along the hundred year old road; half a rusted horse shoe; a luminous, moon-like, pebble; a hexagonal quartz crystal; a pressed disa. Also photographs and memories, a tired body, a re-kindled desire to spend more time in places of beauty, and an inspiration to save mockingbirds.

Sandra and I are much more strategic about the ending of this year's family trip into the mountains, than we are about the beginning. By the end we are more in tune.

Resolutions from paradise

The beginning of each new year offers a natural, little pause in which it is common to think about the coming year. We can make resolutions. We can set intentions. We can re-consider how we want to live, what we want to hope for, what we want to strive for.

Sometimes more significant events come along that break the everyday unfolding of daily routines, to bring clarity and a changed perspective. A near-death experience is said to be one such event. If that is so, then going beyond near-death, and all the way to paradise, like we did at the beginning of this year, must surely offer an amazing opportunity for renewing how we want to live into the rest of our lives.

A tribute to Mike

On the 17^th of January my uncle, Mike Mamacos, died. He was in his late eighties and had lived out the last 10 or more years of his life as something of a hermit in his beautiful, simple dwelling, deep in the Du Toits Kloof mountains, that has no electricity or communication connections with the outside world. Although a loner, he was also a quiet but welcoming host to visitors. In his day, Mike was one of the best rock climbers in the world. At a memorial gathering held at the mountain club I paid tribute to this unusual man. Composing what I wanted to say was a valuable, meaning-making process of realising and appreciating what his influence means for me:

Things that went growl in the night

A kind-of sequel to a previous post: Things that go growl in the night
 

There is something satisfactory in returning to a wild place that you know well, a place beyond your everyday life, yet that is familiar because it holds a piece of your own history. If you are drawn back to such places, for whatever reasons, you may find that the combination of their wildness, their beauty and their familiarity invites you both backwards and forwards into your life in a mix that is compelling.

Yellowwood is such a place for me, a place that is within the geographical proximity of my everyday experience and yet far beyond it. Today the higher ground, everything above the foot slopes, is hidden in a cloud that has been stripped away from the plains over which I drove this morning, but still shrouds these mountains.