June 1st marks six months, and I want to tell you how it began.
We arrived December first, last year. In Summer in the Little Karoo which is not the polite, golden summer of postcards. It is the full, uncompromising, heat-pressing-down-on-everything summer of a land that does not soften itself for newcomers.
We had boxes. We had furniture. We had five furkids bewildered by the vastness of a place that smelled of nothing they had ever known.
And we had no water. For seven weeks – no water. Not a drop from a tap. No bathing. No cooking. No cleaning. No ordinary mercy of water running when you turn a tap. Not even rain from the sky. Our 4 big 5000 litre water storage tanks had run dry.
We drove an hour to Ladismith every third or fourth day- container by container – and carried water back to the mountain the way people carried it before pipes existed and convenience became invisible.
I will not pretend it was romantic. It was hard. It was hot.
And Lance and I – two people who love each other very much – with a Karoo dream in our hearts, discovered that love, in forty-five degree heat with no water and a mountain of unpacked boxes, has a frequency that nobody warns you about.
We flared. Hot moods in a hot land.
Learning each other in ways that city life, with its easy running water and its manageable distances, had never required from us.
Then there’s the electricity story! We live so remotely that the grid does not reach us. Candlelight dinners cooked on a primus , felt like camping out at first, but we quickly began to learn solar talk.
Well now, Solar is a different type of ”energy language” that I am familiar with. I work in the realms of energy, have done so for years I read fields of energy for people, I speak frequency and vibration all day long, energy healing has been my thing! I have lived long enough to know that Life and Living is always about energy isn’t it, no matter the form it arrives in! Solar energy became a whole different language to learn.
And here we are!
Nine panels now — tilted toward the Karoo sun, harvesting what falls freely from the sky, storing it in batteries for the dark. Nine panels. Nine in the language of numerology is the number of completion. Of the full cycle. Of enough.
Of course it is nine. The Karoo has a sense of humour.
We have enough power now to run a kettle and a WIFI modem and on sunny days, a washing machine. Which turns out, after seven weeks of no water to be an almost indecent luxury.
This morning the wind is quiet. I have named her Moriah. She does not ask permission when she arrives -she moves through the karee trees and the dry grass and the karoo bossies and the spaces between things, with the authority of someone who was here long before we came and will be here long after. But this morning she is still. Moriah is resting. Two weeks ago she gave us a run for our money with hurricane winds at 100 knots an hour. But that’s a story for another day. And in her stillness this morning , my Karoo Autumn settled onto the verandah like something deliberate.
A golden hue, soft and specific the particular warmth of early June light on the mountain , that is different from every other light I have ever known. Not the sharp gold of midday. Nor the dramatic gold of sunset. The gentle gold of a morning that has not yet decided what it will become.
I sit here every morning now. Before the day begins. Before the demands of remote living arrives. Before anything is required of me.
I face the sun and I let it find me. There is a practice called sungazing, the receiving of the early light directly, softly, letting it move through the eyes and into the body, the way warmth moves through stone. I did not know this practice before the mountain. The forest where I lived before, did not leave space for greeting the sun. There was no ritual of invitation , no standing at the threshold of the day and saying, I am here. I am present. Begin.
Here, there just IS. Here, the day will not be rushed into. Here, in Karoo – It must be greeted.
But dear friend, know this, I am not alone, in this greeting of the sun. Molly Joy and Daisy Moon , my two long dogs, my dachshunds, black & tan and blonde & golden ,vie for position on my lap the moment I sit down. They arrange themselves with the confidence of creatures who have decided that the verandah in the morning sun belongs to them and that I am simply the warm thing they have chosen to share it with.
Like lizards, they warm up. Like small, stubborn, infinitely confident lizards who happen to have very long bodies and very strong opinions about lap real estate.
I let them.
The three of us facing the Swartberg together. In front of us always, the mountains.
This morning the clouds had settled into the peaks in slow swirls, lit from within by the early light, moving with the unhurried authority of something that has been doing this for millennia and sees no reason to alter its pace for observers. I sat with it for a long time. Just feeling grateful. There are mornings when the “Swartberg” looks like mountains. And then there are mornings when it looks like something for which I do not yet have the language for. This was one of the second kind.
The wild birds are always waiting for me when I open the door. I have been feeding them since we arrived, wild bird seed scattered on the ground each morning
and somewhere in the last few months, without my noticing exactly when, the arrangement changed. They began to arrive before me. Waiting. I do not know all their names yet. I am still in the ”learning-them” stage which is its own kind of beautiful. The stage before naming, when you are simply watching. Paying attention. Letting the personality of each one reveal itself in its own time. There is the timid one. The brave one. The small bully who insists on first dibs at the seed this one reminds me, every morning, of kids on a playground, jostling for the first slide or first swing.
These wild birds make my heart very happy. Happy sigh. The chirping of them, in the Karoo silence, is the sound of a morning being fully itself.
Thirty years in the city. We knew no one when we arrived here. We still know almost no one the remoteness of this life makes ordinary socializing a different kind of effort than we were used to.
Here, It is only us, Lance and I, the fur-kids, Moriah, the Mountain and the birds.
And the Karoo.
Which was here long before we arrived.
Which was, I am increasingly certain, waiting for us.
Six months ago we came to this mountain. We had no water. No power. No knowledge of how to live this slowly, this precisely, this close to the bone of things.
We had boxes and furniture and five bewildered fur-kids and each other.
It was enough.
It is still enough.
More than enough.
Nine solar panels of ”more than enough”.
I did not know, when we drove up this mountain in that December heat, that I was driving toward the place where everything we had been building would finally find its ground. That the Karoo Dream we had been dreaming, been writing about, speaking about, living inside, in theory was here. Literally, 16000 hectares of it. Waiting for us to arrive and be still enough to hear what it had to say.
I am still learning to be that still.
Moriah helps ,when she is quiet, she teaches me what quiet actually is.
The birds help, they will not come if I am in a hurry.
Molly Joy and Daisy Moon help, they have never once rushed a morning in their entire long-bodied lives.
And the Swartbergs patient, ancient, cloud-swirled, painted in colours I still have no language for, the Swartberg simply IS.
Every morning. Whether I am paying attention or not. An invitation arrives. To pay attention. Six months on the mountain. I am paying attention. I am learning to.
Walk with me, there is so much still to tell.
SharynAnn
June 1st marks six months, and I want to tell you how it began.
We arrived December first, last year. In Summer in the Little Karoo which is not the polite, golden summer of postcards. It is the full, uncompromising, heat-pressing-down-on-everything summer of a land that does not soften itself for newcomers.
We had boxes. We had furniture. We had five furkids bewildered by the vastness of a place that smelled of nothing they had ever known.
And we had no water. For seven weeks – no water. Not a drop from a tap. No bathing. No cooking. No cleaning. No ordinary mercy of water running when you turn a tap. Not even rain from the sky. Our 4 big 5000 litre water storage tanks had run dry.
We drove an hour to Ladismith every third or fourth day- container by container – and carried water back to the mountain the way people carried it before pipes existed and convenience became invisible.
I will not pretend it was romantic. It was hard. It was hot.
And Lance and I – two people who love each other very much – with a Karoo dream in our hearts, discovered that love, in forty-five degree heat with no water and a mountain of unpacked boxes, has a frequency that nobody warns you about.
We flared. Hot moods in a hot land.
Learning each other in ways that city life, with its easy running water and its manageable distances, had never required from us.
Then there’s the electricity story! We live so remotely that the grid does not reach us. Candlelight dinners cooked on a primus , felt like camping out at first, but we quickly began to learn solar talk.
Well now, Solar is a different type of ”energy language” that I am familiar with. I work in the realms of energy, have done so for years I read fields of energy for people, I speak frequency and vibration all day long, energy healing has been my thing! I have lived long enough to know that Life and Living is always about energy isn’t it, no matter the form it arrives in! Solar energy became a whole different language to learn.
And here we are!
Nine panels now — tilted toward the Karoo sun, harvesting what falls freely from the sky, storing it in batteries for the dark. Nine panels. Nine in the language of numerology is the number of completion. Of the full cycle. Of enough.
Of course it is nine. The Karoo has a sense of humour.
We have enough power now to run a kettle and a WIFI modem and on sunny days, a washing machine. Which turns out, after seven weeks of no water to be an almost indecent luxury.
This morning the wind is quiet. I have named her Moriah. She does not ask permission when she arrives -she moves through the karee trees and the dry grass and the karoo bossies and the spaces between things, with the authority of someone who was here long before we came and will be here long after. But this morning she is still. Moriah is resting. Two weeks ago she gave us a run for our money with hurricane winds at 100 knots an hour. But that’s a story for another day. And in her stillness this morning , my Karoo Autumn settled onto the verandah like something deliberate.
A golden hue, soft and specific the particular warmth of early June light on the mountain , that is different from every other light I have ever known. Not the sharp gold of midday. Nor the dramatic gold of sunset. The gentle gold of a morning that has not yet decided what it will become.
I sit here every morning now. Before the day begins. Before the demands of remote living arrives. Before anything is required of me.
I face the sun and I let it find me. There is a practice called sungazing, the receiving of the early light directly, softly, letting it move through the eyes and into the body, the way warmth moves through stone. I did not know this practice before the mountain. The forest where I lived before, did not leave space for greeting the sun. There was no ritual of invitation , no standing at the threshold of the day and saying, I am here. I am present. Begin.
Here, there just IS. Here, the day will not be rushed into. Here, in Karoo – It must be greeted.
But dear friend, know this, I am not alone, in this greeting of the sun. Molly Joy and Daisy Moon , my two long dogs, my dachshunds, black & tan and blonde & golden ,vie for position on my lap the moment I sit down. They arrange themselves with the confidence of creatures who have decided that the verandah in the morning sun belongs to them and that I am simply the warm thing they have chosen to share it with.
Like lizards, they warm up. Like small, stubborn, infinitely confident lizards who happen to have very long bodies and very strong opinions about lap real estate.
I let them.
The three of us facing the Swartberg together. In front of us always, the mountains.
This morning the clouds had settled into the peaks in slow swirls, lit from within by the early light, moving with the unhurried authority of something that has been doing this for millennia and sees no reason to alter its pace for observers. I sat with it for a long time. Just feeling grateful. There are mornings when the “Swartberg” looks like mountains. And then there are mornings when it looks like something for which I do not yet have the language for. This was one of the second kind.
The wild birds are always waiting for me when I open the door. I have been feeding them since we arrived, wild bird seed scattered on the ground each morning
and somewhere in the last few months, without my noticing exactly when, the arrangement changed. They began to arrive before me. Waiting. I do not know all their names yet. I am still in the ”learning-them” stage which is its own kind of beautiful. The stage before naming, when you are simply watching. Paying attention. Letting the personality of each one reveal itself in its own time. There is the timid one. The brave one. The small bully who insists on first dibs at the seed this one reminds me, every morning, of kids on a playground, jostling for the first slide or first swing.
These wild birds make my heart very happy. Happy sigh. The chirping of them, in the Karoo silence, is the sound of a morning being fully itself.
Thirty years in the city. We knew no one when we arrived here. We still know almost no one the remoteness of this life makes ordinary socializing a different kind of effort than we were used to.
Here, It is only us, Lance and I, the fur-kids, Moriah, the Mountain and the birds.
And the Karoo.
Which was here long before we arrived.
Which was, I am increasingly certain, waiting for us.
Six months ago we came to this mountain. We had no water. No power. No knowledge of how to live this slowly, this precisely, this close to the bone of things.
We had boxes and furniture and five bewildered fur-kids and each other.
It was enough.
It is still enough.
More than enough.
Nine solar panels of ”more than enough”.
I did not know, when we drove up this mountain in that December heat, that I was driving toward the place where everything we had been building would finally find its ground. That the Karoo Dream we had been dreaming, been writing about, speaking about, living inside, in theory was here. Literally, 16000 hectares of it. Waiting for us to arrive and be still enough to hear what it had to say.
I am still learning to be that still.
Moriah helps ,when she is quiet, she teaches me what quiet actually is.
The birds help, they will not come if I am in a hurry.
Molly Joy and Daisy Moon help, they have never once rushed a morning in their entire long-bodied lives.
And the Swartbergs patient, ancient, cloud-swirled, painted in colours I still have no language for, the Swartberg simply IS.
Every morning. Whether I am paying attention or not. An invitation arrives. To pay attention. Six months on the mountain. I am paying attention. I am learning to.
Walk with me, there is so much still to tell.
SharynAnn
