The Restory Retreat Centre

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 ye...

Drawing by Kirstin Noelle We spend a long time wishing we were elsewhere and otherwise.  - Robert Farrar Capon The aim of the Mindfulness retreat is to explore ways to get to the “more” our souls yearn for. For us, the key lies in living with awareness or to coin the popular term; to live mindfully. Simply put this means to not live on “auto pilot” or as if you are sleepwalking. To become fully alive and to experience the present moment to the full. More than that: To experience the moment without judging it. Allowing it to be simply what it is. This sounds nonsensical to the rational, modern brain but it is paramount if it is a meaningful life you’re after. To live with such awareness from moment to moment is possible through the mindful implementation of elements as natural as breathing and silence. After all, we are equipped with a body with senses and a respiratory system with which to experience, stay alive and savour the world and our environment. W...

 The regal Crowned Eagle photographed by Erich Lamprecht. Ever since the Sunbirds* I take birds seriously. Especially if they pay me a surprise visit. So when a Crowned Eagle granted us a fifteen minute audience by settling in a tree no more than a 150m from us, I intuited that it was of some importance. As is often the case, I didn’t immediately know what to make of it. I was aware only of feeling noticed and nurtured by the mere presence of this magnificent bird sitting quite peacefully in full sight. Last week we were on a short and belated honeymoon in as near a perfect setting as we could ever hope for: we spent it at the holiday cottage of our friends Pieter and Linda in a lush nature reserve close to Groblersdal. All through the week we were treated to sounds and sightings of the abundant bird life we are familiar with in this area with its unique eco-environment of  high cliffs, streams and indigenous forest. A pair of Paradise flycatchers e...

Every now and again George remembers his duties as my personal muse and assigns me a writing exercise with themes that range from truly mediocre, like to write about who lives in my street, to spectacularly bizarre: the Queen's handbag being one I distinctly remember. Of course, he knows that I will find out, as I write along, that no theme is ever mediocre, but the writing makes it so. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, mediocrity is often the shades we wear looking at the world around us. "Write about what you don't think about." I ignored the assignment for a bit. I usually do when I know it will take me places I might not find comfortable. In any case, writing about what I'm not thinking about will have me thinking about it, won't it? But yes, I know what he means. So let's see where this leads me. It really depends on the season, but in these glorious, golden, autumn days, and again in late spring, I don't think about climatic temp...

I don’t LIVE enough.  Alive, but missing.  Missing in action. Missing out. Missing the point. The moment. Sunlight is wasted on me. I walk oblivious of the gold in my hair. Of the glowing in my skin I know only when the chill of nightfall replaces it. Why do we know better through loss? Why not stand and feel that one simple golden thread of breath that links the sky, birdsong, the sun, the incense of Spring flaming in purple petals? So much goes on while we draw air and dispense of it. In that small unconscious act of survival a world stands at attention to witness it. Breathing cannot be solely for this. We are made exquisitely sensuous. To go through a day and not be able to recall a scent, a colour, a touch, a feeling, a sound, a taste, is to be dead. The door to life  nailed shut. Each breath one closer to the last I’ll take. How often do I think this? When I write the date in my journal. One day closer.  I panic...

I love trying new recipes. Especially those that call for unusual ingredients or combinations of ingredients. And so I buy limes because they have exactly that –a hint of otherness. They seem somehow loftier than their relatives- oranges and lemons being so ordinary. Not l imes. Their subtle taste and fragrance satisfies my yearning for the unusual, the exceptional. I find it exhilarating that there exists such a thing as a lime.      I put them in a pretty bowl and pass by them day by day thinking that I must use them for something special. Simply juicing it like some common orange and drinking the fresh juice just won’t do. And so a week passes, and then two. And the limes in my bowl become withered and dry while the apples and bananas come and go in quick succession to nourish me at breakfast time.      Why do I do this? I seem to have a tendency to treat anything special this way. Fresh cherries, strawberries or gooseberries. Tender asparagus ...