A Place Within

When you first step out onto the stoep, looking onto the scrubs and rock that peppers the landscape, you’re embraced by a symphony of noise that creates an audio landscape of the beauty surrounding you.

The wild doves greet you as they greet each other. You imagine them gossiping about the day ahead, making plans and calling to each other “it’s time, it’s time”. “Time for what?” you wonder, when the long day stretches ahead with a gentle emptiness that invites you softly into its arms.

You hear the nearby stream also rushing about its day, a gentle trickle and bubbles, dancing across pebbles and sand, with an urgency that betrays the peace above the water. You think of stepping into those cool waters, the mountain chill tickling your toes until they adjust to the chill that relieves a hot body. Those waters feel so un-tempting now in the morning cool, but you know will provide you a welcome home when the midday heat envelopes you.

The breeze adds its melody to the symphony you hear, rustling the pepper tree leaves that stand alert, ready to protest you under its arms from the heat of the sun that slowly starts to bake the earth around you, the already light casting dappled shadow amongst the morning rays.

The final layer of the orchestra around you is the chatter of the weaver birds, darting from branch to branch, blade to blade of long grass. A game of chase, narrated with their laughter and song, chattering about all the busy work that awaits them.

Around you, all this noise and movement set a pace to the natural world that contradicts this wilderness. Beneath the rush of daybreak, like a deep calm that has existed in these mountains since before human time. The solid stillness, untouched and unchanged for millennia, provides a safety for your soul that cannot be found, made or bought back in the city. Beneath the busy life of nature here, you feel a deep sense of rest; a connection to something more and at the same time, a reconnection to you.

You take your first steps off the stoep and walk down to the path that leads into the bush. Red dust beneath your feet releases its damp coating of dew, as you reach out to touch the deep green fynbos either side of the path. You meander without purpose along the narrow trail, breathing in the fresh morning air that is slowly starting to soften into the sun’s warmth. You look up ahead, to the distant mountains that create a wall of forts, seemingly impassable with the high crags and a sheer rock face. A wall of forts protecting a secret hinterland, even more precious and preserved than the wilderness you’re in now.

The final wisps of clouds, not yet burnt off by the sun, dance about the peaks, adding a mysticism to the depths of the beyond. You curious minds longs to explore there: a calling into the unknown; to discover; to be in unchartered places.

Above the rugged skyline, the bright blue expanse feels sharp and energising, a shift compared to the grounding greens and reds around you. The rustling breeze dances around you again, tickling your bare legs and playing chase with stray hairs that are still loose and unkempt from your deep nights sleep.

Overhead the wind, the forceful older cousin of the breeze you dance with, moves along the last few clouds that clutter the sky, pushing them aside like an unwelcome visitor, announcing “move along now, thank you, not today”.

You notice a single lonely rock to the side of the path, waiting to be summited. As you make your way there and start to scramble up, you notice the minutia of life crawling around you. The ants in their armies find their purpose in their never-ending teamwork, an unspoken mission that unites their masses. The lonely shongololo makes his way one curling inch at a time, to a destination unknown even to himself.

Atop the rock, you find a perch that looks out over the value stretching below, the sun now kissing the red rocks into a soft auburn glow. You breathe in all that is here. The beauty, the calm, the peace. Looking at the valley ahead of you, you see the timelessness of life, and the lessons that the natural world longs to teach you. You take another long, slow breath.

In the quiet stillness of this moment, amongst the hustle and bustle of this silent place, you feel a deeper sense of stillness. A deeper sense of who you are. You know you’ve found a place that lives in you as much as it does around you. A place you can return to anytime. A place within.