Clinging or Love?

The Southern vista from Barrowfield
Photo by Hanna Jacobs

 I have lived in many places throughout my life. The earliest home I can remember was when I was about four years old and we lived in a tiny hamlet called Mica, where my father took a job as electrician in a vermiculite mine. It was very remote and truly unspoilt. It was glorious for my sister and me but nerve wrecking for my mother. It being very much Africa, there were huge spiders and scorpions and green grasshoppers, not to mention deadly creatures like green mambas and malaria mosquitoes. On weekends my father would take us to the banks of the huge Olifants river and we would watch the hippos lazing in the muddy water.

We moved to a bigger mining town when we had to start school and from then on every few years my father would find a different job with better prospects and we would move again.

For some of the most memorable places we lived I don't have fond memories of. At one stage, when I was about ten years old and with another sister and brother added to the family, we lived in Cape St. Francis, on the Garden Route of the Western Cape. My father was working on the electrification of a new luxury hotel and we lived in a little cottage resembling a train wagon. Being raised up till then in the hot and dry region of the Bushveld, the cold Cape winter with its constant rain had us quite miserable. I remember having to catch the school bus in a downpour while it was still dark, dressed in a dark blue plastic rain coat. Often the bus would get stuck in muddy ditches on the way to the school in a nearby town and we would have to wait for it to be towed out.

After that stint, we lived on a missionary station, thankfully where it was hot and dry again, then moving to a town surrounded by rain forests (and fairies, I'm sure). We settled there for quite some time until  I left for university and exchanged my room with a view on faerie land for a room in the concrete jungle of Johannesburg.

As a young working adult I lived in a few boarding houses and bachelor flats the size of a horse box before getting married and moving in with my in-laws. Here, in a huge old family home housing four generations I would spend the next two decades, raising three children.

It seemed incredible when we at last moved into our own (separate) home on the homestead. I haven't had a garden for all those years and started avidly planting fruit trees and a herb garden. But three years later, we divorced and I moved out.

Fast forward another ten years and two further homes, I now find myself living in an old stone house on the farm Barrowfield in the mountains of  Northern Kwazulu Natal. Married to George and running a retreat centre in the most glorious of environments, I often walk from the house to my pottery studio and take deep breaths of fresh mountain air and say thank you, thank you, thank you.

Our very own mountain due West.
Photo by Matilda Angus

I know that nothing is permanent. And that to cling to anything, be it place or pet or person, is the source of much suffering. Somehow, life has taught me to not put down my roots too deeply and I can't remember feeling much sorrow for having to move from any of our many homes to the next as a child. Having to go to a different school each time was a different story. I dreaded that, but not the moving to a new place to call home. In a sense it was exciting.

But this here is getting to me. This soil has everything my roots have been longing for and I can feel them spreading deep and wide.

It is unnerving. In a few days we will be leaving for Albuquerque to attend our second Living School Symposium. It's a wonderful adventure and something I look forward to. But my heart already yearns to be back here. Or no, my heart doesn't want to leave here. I look at our cats and dogs and know I'll miss them and they will be dreadfully lonely without us.

Albuquerque and the Sandia mountain from the
Madonna Retreat Center. Photo by Matilda Angus

I see how winter is slowly losing her grip on the garden and how the cows are nearing calving time. I pack the kiln and know I won't be doing that again for at least a month or more. And I dread not being here for all of this.

Is all of this clinging? Or is it love? Maybe I am more present to life now than before. More aware of the present brilliance and of the chill in future's shadows. Maybe I'm simply in love and vulnerable in my desire to be more fully here where I feel so very much at home.

Someday we will have to say goodbye to Barrowfield. Hopefully it will be only when we grow too old and frail to manage everything this simple living requires of us. Like the love for a beloved person who passed away, I will not stop loving this place.

Also, I will look back and remember how we packed our bags to leave on these mammoth trips to  a place called Albuquerque where we rather uncannily felt that it could just as easily have been home. And I'll remember the amazing journey that brought us to Barrowfield and to the Living School and the US. And I'll remember the amazing journey that led up to the rest of our lives of which I know nothing of at this stage.

And I'll not be afraid. Because I'll by then maybe have realised that I have been home all along.

Matilda