White River musings

In between farmsitting George is reading a book by Peggy Noonan, called, What I Saw at the Revolution. He reads bits out loud to me and I add her to my list of heroes. I admire people who have a clear view of exactly what it is they are meant for in life. Peggy Noonan, a journalist in the 1980’s, had a very definite dream. She wanted to be a speech writer for President Ronald Reagan. She writes:

I had no connections in Washington, knew no one in the Republican Party, no one who’d worked for Reagan. But I was right for the job, I knew it. So I did a number of things, from telling everyone I knew what I wanted to do to praying that God would open a door. (I know now I was asking for a small miracle, but I believe in miracles. The way I see it, life isn’t flat and thin and “realistic,” it’s rich and full of mystery and surprise.)  I think miracles exist and happen every day, form the baby’s perfect shoulder in the sonogram to saints performing wonders. I think saints are with us, watching and taking part, every day.

She got her miracle.

For me the dream is less clear. A little like the blurred view through a sheet of rain of the opposite side of the valley from where I'm sitting and writing. It’s been pouring with rain since first light and the sun had not been able to penetrate the grey blanket covering White River.

I love this. It reminds me of my teenage days in Tzaneen, a town not too very far from where we are at the moment. Nothing suited me better, those days, than a rainy afternoon in which I could lie on my bed, reading, with the sound of rain and the accompanying fragrance and freshness mingling and floating around me.

A summer’s day in the Lowveld can go either way: it’s either unbearably hot and humid, or it’s wet and then mercifully a little cooler. Not being the sportive type, I always opted for the wet.

But now I know it was more than that. I love this tropical region we call the Lowveld of South Africa with its high annual rainfall. With its vegetation, green and growing for most of the year, with scarcely a winter season to mention. A region that still shows what once must have been one large rain forest with wild tangles of ferns, shrubs, mosses, lichen covered trees and climbers with vines so thick and strong monkeys use them to swing from tree to tree. Waterfalls and wildlife abounds and this beautiful area draws thousands of tourists every year.

I spent much of my early childhood playing in the rain, happily splashing in puddles, barefoot and wet to the skin, building dams in the streams, floating leaf boats, making mud cakes. On hot, dry days we would have the sprinkler on and would run shrieking to and fro through rainbows of droplets.

Water seemed to play a big part in my life.

For the whole of my adult life, though, I have been living on the Highveld. This too, is a summer rainfall region, as is the Lowveld, with huge and spectacular thunderstorms, but with a much lower annual rainfall, resulting in vast grasslands with few natural trees and shrubs. To boot the winters here are extremely cold and dry, with trees going bare and frost bleaching the veld into a blonde sea of waving grass.

It took me many years to adapt to the otherness of the Highveld. And even more years to come to appreciate the beauty of a crystal blue winter sky above the bleached veld. It is truly beautiful.

But I've been homesick for the wet and wildness of the green tangled growth, always. I go to these regions as often as I can. It's become a ritual to roll down the car window at the edge of the first pine wood or rain forest and to breathe in deep the green mountain air. Home, my soul whispers.

Even just to eat fruit coming from the valleys of the Lowveld: mangoes, bananas, pineapples, oranges, avocados and papayas feels like small homecomings. 

Lately however, things are starting to fall into place for me. The veil seems to be lifting gradually. I have to live this. I have to be part of where growth is happening. Where there is a yield of fruit, be it vegetables from my back garden, a tree laden with peaches, flowers for a vase, a handful of clay to be shaped, a spread of words across paper, a friendship kindled, a person blossoming .

It has to do with being close to the earth, in tune with the seasons, in touch with nature, sensitive to life and the living. Aware of the language of water coursing through sap and blood, via cloud and stream, crashing onto beaches, falling in flakes.

There are wayfarers that I‘m only now starting to recognize as such. Emoto’s work on the capacity of water to hold emotions astounds me. If this is true, then everything we say, or even think, has an effect on the cells in my body, and the cells of the recipient of my words.

Then this, that I am writing, is lifegiving because I intend it so. The resonance that I feel with that which is wet and wild and growing, is my soul’s equivalent to clouds touching earth with rain.

There are others who have gone before: Francis of Asissi, Hildegard of Bingen, Thoreau, John Ruskin, Annie Dillard. And I’m finding contemporaries every day. To name but a few: the old rain harvester, MaTshepo Kumbhane; Lyanda Lynn Haupt ( http://thetanglednest.com/ );  Allison Leigh Lilly and Jeff Lilly (http://faithferncompass.com/ ); a young artist living in Cape Town, Janet Botes, http://www.janetbotes.co.za/. Every one of them living soulfully, consciously, each in the way that they know best.

It seems there isn’t a right and a wrong way. It has to do with intention. With love. With being who we are and where we are. It has to do with learning our soul language, which for me finds its voice through my hands, creating. And my eyes seem to be the ears of my soul. Nature speaks my mother tongue.     

I’m not so clear yet as to what the miracle is that I am asking for. But that I may be of service in the growing business.

Matilda

Written on 15 Oct. 2012 on the farm 25 Fountains in White River, South Africa.