Close your eyes.
And when you're ready.
You're standing.
On a path.
A path made of bricks.
The warm clay.
Brings comfort beneath your feet.
Each brick laid one beside the other.
And smooth.
Where others have stood.
Exactly as you are standing now.
Just.
Feel it.
Feel what a path made of bricks feels like.
The solidness of it.
The way the ground pushes up and holds you.
Without requesting or requiring or needing.
Anything at all in return.
There's nowhere that you need to go.
There's no phone call to make,
No email to send.
A person to respond to.
You're already here.
Now let your eyes fall.
Whether they're open or closed,
Let them fall down to what is closest to you in this image.
The Fane Boss.
The natural indigenous vegetation of South Africa.
The colours feel a fraternal link with the bricks.
Fanebros grows right up to the edge of the path.
Low,
Dense,
Wild.
They grow the way things grow when nobody is.
Has tried to control them.
Pick out the white blooms.
Small delicate.
Nine times out of ten you'd miss them,
But today is the one out of ten.
Clustered at the tips of dark stems like tiny stars that decided to stay close to the ground.
And the silver green shrubs beside them.
Dusty.
Soft looking.
Their leaves holding that morning light the way velvet holds color.
From the inside out.
And then there's the grasses.
And the grasses.
Will speak.
Tool.
Colour of pale pink and wheat and winter leaning very slightly,
Just slightly in whatever breath of air is moving through there.
Here there's a smell.
Something resinous,
Something that belongs entirely.
To just this place.
To nowhere else on earth.
Let that reach you.
And now let your eyes travel to the left.
To the water.
Pond.
Still.
Completely still.
Not the stillness of something waiting to move,
But the stillness of something that is forgotten.
What movement costs.
It's dark,
Almost black at the center.
Deep hurled darkness of water that goes down further than the eye can follow.
And at the edges.
Where the reeds begin a softening.
The colors of brown,
The colors of amber.
Grass is leaning in as if listening to the sounds and the songs of the water.
Listening to stories and news that they tell.
Hearing things that they've always wanted to know.
At the water's edge.
Is a tree.
A bear tree.
Winter beer.
Every branch visible.
The whole architecture of it exposed to the sky and it stands there completely unashamed.
Of its emptiness.
See its reflection in the water.
The same tree,
Reaching downward now,
Its bare branches extending into the dark as though it has roots.
In both worlds.
The water holds the tree,
The tree holds the water and neither one is try.
And allow your gaze to move through the pond across the far bank to where the tree line begins.
Tall trees,
Dense pine,
Eucalyptus pressing together their canopy on even dark green.
With darker green.
Against.
An open sky.
Listen to the sounds.
Thank you.
What do you hear?
Duck in the distance.
Gentle chorus.
Of a late morning birdsong.
A small plane.
Circling in the sky.
And those looking on the plane can look down now.
What crests that tree line.
The mountain.
The Rock Face.
Blue.
Grey.
Shadows.
Contours.
Rock,
Granite,
Sand,
Soil,
History.
Peace.
The way it rises without hurrying,
Ridge by ridge,
Until it meets the sky at a point so sharp it looks like it was placed there by someone who wanted you to know exactly.
Where the Earth ends.
And everything else begins.
It has been there.
Your entire life.
It was there before your earliest memory and it'll be there long after every worry you have carried.
Has dissolved into something you can no longer name.
Yet.
Here it is.
Right now.
With you.
This moment,
On this morning,
Not asking anything.
Not offering you anything.
No solutions,
No distractions,
No coping,
Just simply presence.
Peace.
Now bring your eyes back slowly.
Across the tree line,
Across the pond,
Across the bare tree and its reflection,
Across the reeds,
Across the silver shrubs and the white blooms and the pale grasses,
Back to the path.
Beneath your feet.
You haven't gone anywhere.
Nothing.
Has changed.
And yet.
.
.
And you.
Something is quieter.
Quieter than when you arrived.
Stay here.
Come back here.
As long.
And as often as you need.
