My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people. You are right in your … [Read more...]
A beautiful conversation with Ian McCallum
Ian McCallum talks about our profound connection to the wilderness, and our place in it – an instinct we have tuned out. A renowned doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, wilderness guide and poet; Ian uses his insight to connect the dots between human psychology and the role our environment plays in our internal make up. “We are intimately linked to wild places, wild animals, … [Read more...]
Ripening the Olive
A metaphor is a bridge between two situations or objects which at first glance seem not to be related... but actually have something in common. They abound in business: a wily old fox, slave driver, pick low hanging fruit, targets, drowning in paperwork, a psychic prison, etc. Our world is filled with archetypal imagery, powerful symbols that reflect the deepest layers of … [Read more...]
Winter solstice liberates new light
Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone and how it slides again out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the world, like a red flower streaming upward on its heavenly … [Read more...]
Blind faith (for Elma)
star nosed mole you work the world below in a network of passages. you recycle oxygen as a blood protein keeps you breathing in the CO2 dark. acrobat of tunnels, you somersault then reverse, push up mounds in the middle of lawns that sprawl across the moneyed world that drink all that water. some say you make the ground unpalatable for cattle and … [Read more...]
Rat lament
Where have you gone compost rats, scavengers of the heap unearthing the germ? Where have you gone with your furred brown backs and your furred buff fronts exposed as you climbed the mesh surround? There was a time when you'd grab and run if the threat to your world looked real, but the passage of time has brokered a calm more leisure to sample the fare with … [Read more...]
Bird hide
this hide, with this bench and window ledge where you kneel, to rest your elbows and cup your hands to the twilight, serves as a communion rail in the cathedral of lagoon and sea. the setting sun is choir master to the fluttering of a thousand wings. a flamingo in priest's robes blesses the wine-water and the bread mulch in the reeds. I ingest in silence the … [Read more...]
For the love of gravity (for Johann)
this soil scientist walks with us, early morning, mud cows grazing, in silence over stones of words quoting poems by heart. offers us new eyes to behold the land as a slow moving sea where mountains rise on an in and flatten on an out breath. scoops up a handful of soil shares there is more living matter in his palm than people on the planet and a myriad of decay … [Read more...]
Nature, melody and poetry
I am walking with John Roff up the slopes of a krans on the Hilton College Estate, some 600 hectares of wild land that lies between the school and the Umgeni River where giraffes, zebra, buck and blue wildebeest roam. John is the environmental education officer of the school. I have come to the College as writer in residence and John takes me into the wilderness so I can … [Read more...]
