the ego too, cools

15 Nov 2011

Dear Mother Nature, all is forgiven!

Late yesterday the temperature plunged more than 20 degrees in four hours, leaving everything fresh, cool and invigorated this morning after a quenching rain.

It started with a fierce wind that sprang up and glowing thunderheads that began to stack in the sunset. Throughout the evening the wind raged, straining trees and buffeting my tent with gusts that blew leaves and dust in through the ports. One particular blast even managed to get under the groundsheet and move my furniture.

At nine, when I went out to go and shut down the generator that powers my computer, the beam of my little torch wasn’t nearly enough comfort against the demons of such a dark, stormy night.

I woke later to great rips of thunder that tore the sky apart. As I lay in my bed listening to the savage slashes and their huge booming echo’s,  a sense of perspective came to me.

There’s a really big, big sky up there, I realised. It rules over a land that, although vast, consists of only a thin layer of precarious cover. Somewhere in those endless miles of bush, like a speck of dust hidden in the pile of a giant carpet, is my tent. And crawled under that little piece of flimsy fabric, am I.

Me, yes: Much less important than I thought.

View from the Lebombo range near my camp, looking northwest over Kruger National Park. Big Sky country, with the Shingwedzi river a landmark in the endless bush. The border between Moz and SA cuts across the river near the pools that can be seen near the centre of the pic.