The kettle was just starting to sing when I stepped onto the verandah this morning, the kind of soft gold light that only happens out here settling over the Karoo veld like it has all the time in the world.
In the distance the snow on the Swartberg is sprinkled like icing sugar along the highest peaks, white against blue, holding the early sun the way something sacred holds a secret.
Wisps of cloud drift low through the folds of the mountains, soft as breath, curling and releasing without any pattern I can name.
The aloes are standing tall and red at the edge of the veld, fierce little torches against all this cool white and green.
Somewhere a bokmakierie called out to no one in particular, and I stood there thinking about what an adventure this Karoo living has been, feeling grateful all over again for the choosing of it.
Because I could so easily have missed it. All of it.
There was that morning, 19 May 2022 , when Lance’s heart stopped giving him a choice in the matter. When our life and love adventure together nearly ended in a hospital room, with machines speaking a language far more urgent than any bokmakierie’s call.
I remember the enormous fear of that day the way you remember bad storms, something that moved through everything, that changed the colour of the sky for a long while after.
I remember thinking how strange it is, to nearly lose someone you adore in a moment that looks like any other moment, right up until it doesn’t.
He came through it.
His cardiologist with much earnest, told me I was so lucky as this type of heart attack is called the widow-maker.
After that event, something in both of us, changed. Because when life reminds you that closely how easily it can be taken, you stop treating tomorrow like a guarantee. You start asking different questions. Not what should we save for later, but what have we been saving that we should be living now.
That’s the adventure underneath the adventure, if I’m honest. Yes, we wanted something that would stretch us, something wild and remote and entirely our own. But underneath that wanting was a heart, his heart, that had already taught us both how fragile and how borrowed every single day truly is. So we chose the mountain. We chose off grid. We chose the stretchy, ropey, thrilling unknown of the Klein Karoo, because after nearly losing him, it felt unthinkable to keep choosing the safe and the small.
”You out of your minds, many said. He is a heart patient now, what if you need emergency medical care, you not spring chickens, you should be thinking of retirement villages, not impossible places to go live”
Life stretches out its hand and offers you the adventure, and then it steps back and waits.
It never forces you. It simply asks, and lets you decide. We had already been shown, in the harshest way possible, how short the asking might be.
Lance and I wanted something that would push us past every soft edge of comfort we’d built up around ourselves without even noticing. So we packed up sixteen hundred kilometers of a life we knew, and we moved into the remote hush of this mountain, into a way of living neither of us had ever practiced before.
It has been stretchy. I won’t pretend otherwise. There have been ropey days out here, days that have tested every soft place in us.
But underneath the stretch has been something thrilling too, something wildly alive, a beauty that keeps unfolding the longer we stay inside it, a beauty we no longer take for granted.
Nine months, we have been here now. Nine months, the very span it takes for a body to build a whole new life from nothing but breath and cells and time.
We have been busy with our own kind of birthing out here, Lance and I, shaping this new way of living out of raw land and quiet and everything we didn’t yet know how to do. And nine, in numerology, that is always speaking to me in its own language, is the number of completion and also fulfillment.
A full cycle closing so a new one can begin. It feels fitting somehow, that we have carried this new life inside us for exactly as long as it takes to carry any new life into the world.
Daily, this land reminds us how precious a single life is. It has shown me how easily I could spend my days worrying about a tomorrow that isn’t promised to anyone, while today sits right here in front of me, patient, asking only to be noticed.
The older I get, the more I understand that life is never asking me to do more. It is only ever asking me to notice more. To love with fewer conditions. To release my grip a little faster on the things that are never mine to hold so tightly anyway. To savor what matters and truly taste the moment already sitting in front of me, the moments that can so easily have looked entirely different.
I am learning, slowly, the way this snow on the Swartberg will soften and find its way into the rivers below when its season comes, that life is always only happening in the now.
It’s here in the spontaneous adventure, the hug that goes on a beat longer than it needs to, the conversation you let linger past the point of comfort, the sunset you almost missed because the dishes felt more urgent.
It’s here in the ordinary moment that quietly, without announcement, becomes the memory you return to for the rest of your life.
So take the trip. Stay for the sunset, even when the dishes are calling. Hug a little longer than feels necessary. Say “I love you” like it costs you nothing, because it never does, and because you know now how quickly the chance to say it can be taken.
Fill your ordinary days with the kind of moments you’ll look back on one day and you will realize my love, that those moments were the extraordinary ones, the entire time.
Because today is never just a stepping stone toward tomorrow. Today is your beautiful life itself. Lance’s heart taught us that. And out here, on this mountain, we do live, like we believe it.
Your heart is a blessing to this world.
SharynAnn
The kettle was just starting to sing when I stepped onto the verandah this morning, the kind of soft gold light that only happens out here settling over the Karoo veld like it has all the time in the world.
In the distance the snow on the Swartberg is sprinkled like icing sugar along the highest peaks, white against blue, holding the early sun the way something sacred holds a secret.
Wisps of cloud drift low through the folds of the mountains, soft as breath, curling and releasing without any pattern I can name.
The aloes are standing tall and red at the edge of the veld, fierce little torches against all this cool white and green.
Somewhere a bokmakierie called out to no one in particular, and I stood there thinking about what an adventure this Karoo living has been, feeling grateful all over again for the choosing of it.
Because I could so easily have missed it. All of it.
There was that morning, 19 May 2022 , when Lance’s heart stopped giving him a choice in the matter. When our life and love adventure together nearly ended in a hospital room, with machines speaking a language far more urgent than any bokmakierie’s call.
I remember the enormous fear of that day the way you remember bad storms, something that moved through everything, that changed the colour of the sky for a long while after.
I remember thinking how strange it is, to nearly lose someone you adore in a moment that looks like any other moment, right up until it doesn’t.
He came through it.
His cardiologist with much earnest, told me I was so lucky as this type of heart attack is called the widow-maker.
After that event, something in both of us, changed. Because when life reminds you that closely how easily it can be taken, you stop treating tomorrow like a guarantee. You start asking different questions. Not what should we save for later, but what have we been saving that we should be living now.
That’s the adventure underneath the adventure, if I’m honest. Yes, we wanted something that would stretch us, something wild and remote and entirely our own. But underneath that wanting was a heart, his heart, that had already taught us both how fragile and how borrowed every single day truly is. So we chose the mountain. We chose off grid. We chose the stretchy, ropey, thrilling unknown of the Klein Karoo, because after nearly losing him, it felt unthinkable to keep choosing the safe and the small.
”You out of your minds, many said. He is a heart patient now, what if you need emergency medical care, you not spring chickens, you should be thinking of retirement villages, not impossible places to go live”
Life stretches out its hand and offers you the adventure, and then it steps back and waits.
It never forces you. It simply asks, and lets you decide. We had already been shown, in the harshest way possible, how short the asking might be.
Lance and I wanted something that would push us past every soft edge of comfort we’d built up around ourselves without even noticing. So we packed up sixteen hundred kilometers of a life we knew, and we moved into the remote hush of this mountain, into a way of living neither of us had ever practiced before.
It has been stretchy. I won’t pretend otherwise. There have been ropey days out here, days that have tested every soft place in us.
But underneath the stretch has been something thrilling too, something wildly alive, a beauty that keeps unfolding the longer we stay inside it, a beauty we no longer take for granted.
Nine months, we have been here now. Nine months, the very span it takes for a body to build a whole new life from nothing but breath and cells and time.
We have been busy with our own kind of birthing out here, Lance and I, shaping this new way of living out of raw land and quiet and everything we didn’t yet know how to do. And nine, in numerology, that is always speaking to me in its own language, is the number of completion and also fulfillment.
A full cycle closing so a new one can begin. It feels fitting somehow, that we have carried this new life inside us for exactly as long as it takes to carry any new life into the world.
Daily, this land reminds us how precious a single life is. It has shown me how easily I could spend my days worrying about a tomorrow that isn’t promised to anyone, while today sits right here in front of me, patient, asking only to be noticed.
The older I get, the more I understand that life is never asking me to do more. It is only ever asking me to notice more. To love with fewer conditions. To release my grip a little faster on the things that are never mine to hold so tightly anyway. To savor what matters and truly taste the moment already sitting in front of me, the moments that can so easily have looked entirely different.
I am learning, slowly, the way this snow on the Swartberg will soften and find its way into the rivers below when its season comes, that life is always only happening in the now.
It’s here in the spontaneous adventure, the hug that goes on a beat longer than it needs to, the conversation you let linger past the point of comfort, the sunset you almost missed because the dishes felt more urgent.
It’s here in the ordinary moment that quietly, without announcement, becomes the memory you return to for the rest of your life.
So take the trip. Stay for the sunset, even when the dishes are calling. Hug a little longer than feels necessary. Say “I love you” like it costs you nothing, because it never does, and because you know now how quickly the chance to say it can be taken.
Fill your ordinary days with the kind of moments you’ll look back on one day and you will realize my love, that those moments were the extraordinary ones, the entire time.
Because today is never just a stepping stone toward tomorrow. Today is your beautiful life itself. Lance’s heart taught us that. And out here, on this mountain, we do live, like we believe it.
Your heart is a blessing to this world.
SharynAnn
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