Pulling Up Roots

​Back in 2013, almost a decade ago, I wrote a poem:

"There will come a time
When I can no longer stare at these soft hills,
When I can no longer brush
The head of this grass across my wrist,
When I can no longer rest
My ears against this peaceful silence,
And caress my cheek
Against this sweet breeze,
Perfumed by grass
and moist soil.

There will come a time
When I can no longer open this veranda door,
Inhaling the contentment of coffee and dew,
And the gentle note of my mother’s voice:
“Good morning!”
When I can no longer sink
Into this symphony of rustling birch leaves,
Faint grasshoppers and repeating turtle doves,
And touch this sun, warm on my back.

Then, I will be cast adrift
In a cry of neon signs and sirens,
A face at every turn,
Concrete under every footstep,
I will float away
In a shouting world,
That never could understand
The joy of solitude,
The companionship of nature.
Then, my familiarity will be artificial,
My home will be a raft
In a stormy sea.

…But that time is not now.

So I will take a minute
To gather up these quiet moments,
Like Lego bricks,
And build them,
Piece by piece,
Into a soundproof room.
And there I will live,
In the moments before I fall asleep,
And the noises outside my window then
Will become those of this true home."

The words were the expression of an unsettling feeling which had come over me as I sat, six thousand miles away, on a scruffy DLR train, worming its way through the east-end of London. A strange, wistful emotion. A future echo - a sense of loss for something which wasn't, in fact, actually lost.
  As is often the case in these situations, my mind had been wandering far from my body - at this moment losing itself in the soft beauty of my home, back in Boston, Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa.
  Sitamani. My parents' 20-hectare property, where I lived with them for roughly a third of my childhood, then continued to return to every year for two decades thereafter.

Those who have been to Sitamani will have some idea of the magic I was attempting to describe. It's a gentle, quiet magic, unique to the Natal Midlands in which it resides. Peaceful, tranquil, but brimming with sound and texture. 
  An orchestra of wind dancing in leaves and tall grass heads. Delicately wittering birdsong, piercing cicadas, chirruping grasshoppers. Gentle yellows, greens, browns and blues. Delicious warm sunshine in pure air. The heady scents of rich damp earth, sweet grass, aromatic pine, sharp creosote and linseed oil. And the ever-familiar and friendly "cuck currr-oo" of ring-necked doves - the background essence of Southern Africa.
  It's a place where it's often necessary to stop for a few moments, just to draw everything in like a sponge. The playful breeze brushing across your arm as you take in a view across to Bulwer mountain and the Drakensberg, or down into the Boston valley. A Red Chested Cuckoo calling "Piet My Vrou" - echoing damply off distant trees on a misty dawn. Crickets piercing a still night, as countless stars glisten across fathomless distances overhead. 
  And once you do bring yourself to a halt, and your internal monologue finally falters, you suddenly become aware of an entire spectacle taking place right in front of you. Small insects wriggling, hovering and scuttling on urgent business, birds flitting across branches and gliding open-winged to distant trees. Lizards basking on sunny surfaces and slithering into cracks. A wide stereo soundtrack of clicks, ticks, whispers, sighs, twitters and flitters. And behind it all, an artfully illustrated backdrop of green-brown grasses, delicate wildflowers and pastel, lichen-covered rocks.

​I think much of the reason why Sitamani resonates so deeply is because it's a rare example of a place where humans have not yet imposed themselves completely on nature.
​  In most areas of the world, man rules supreme and nature is squashed into the margins, beaten back or forced into servitude. 
  But on Sitamani, there is still a balance. There are some buildings, planted trees, a few fences and other evidence of human existence, but the natural world is included with them rather than impeded by them. Wires become bird perches, walls become lizard sunning spots, outbuildings become nest sites and eves become bat roosts. Small buck graze on the fringes of the lawn, weaver birds attach baskets to tree branches, and social insects set up thriving residences in the corners of roof timbers. 
  Here, you are the guest of nature, not her overlord. And you are at her mercy too, when thunder and lightning dance jaggedly around you and torrential rain hammers down over your head. When dry Berg winds shake the walls and buffet you menacingly, the threat and scent of wildfire hot in the air. And when snow falls silently and drapes the world in a soft blank carpet, trapping you and everything else temporarily in place.

Sitamani was a unique place to grow up, privileged and wonderful in its own way. But it was also not without its downsides. As a teenager I craved social interaction with others my age, and since the nearest sizable town was an hour's drive away, this was difficult to satisfy. 
  I envied friends who could walk to each other's houses, and attend social gatherings where they could meet girls. Any such endeavours on my part involved complex planning for lifts and sleep-overs, any youthful spontaneity obliterated by unyielding dependence on pre-arranged pick-up and drop-off times - the complete antithesis of cool.
  This was also the dawning of the internet age - a portal to a fascinating new world opening tantalisingly from beneath our fingertips. But given Sitamani's remote location, on the bitter end of a long and unreliable copper cable, internet access was something I could only dream of. Simply sending or receiving an email through our shrieking 10kbps dial-up modem took half an hour. Accessing any kind of website was simply out of the question. 

So it was not surprising that, as I began to approach adulthood, I also began to lean away from my home on Sitamani. I wanted parties, loud music and connection; not nature, peace and solitude.
  It was almost inevitable therefore that I would find myself transposed to essentially the exact inverse of my childhood home: A crowded, noisy, concrete metropolis, on the opposite end of the earth, where I could soak up all the interaction, infatuation and experience I felt was deficient in my bones.
  And yet, even during those loud, hedonistic days, I still felt the pull of Sitamani. My anchor remained lodged in those soft hills, their essence sealed under my skin like a tattoo, irrespective of the number of nights I spent losing myself to pounding Trance music in smokey, laser-pierced nightclubs. 
  Throughout those early years in London, I carried a small photo album containing a handful of carefully selected pictures from home, which I would often stare at wistfully in the quiet moments before I fell asleep. At the time, I don't believe I consciously understood exactly what it was I was holding on to. I thought it was just regular homesickness - the product of finding oneself in a new culture, far from the familiarity of the life I'd known before. 
  But the photos themselves reveal the truth. Their subject matter is varied - my parents, my cat, our house, my car - but all of them are set within the wider context of Sitamani itself. The property is the backdrop to my entire life contained within that album. And when I flicked through it, I was yearning just as much for the background as for the subject matter.

Sitamani has a permanence in my psychology which is difficult to describe. Although we only moved there fully when I was 13, my parents had already owned the property since I was a preschooler. Essentially, as long as I can remember. 
  Initially it was just a simple patch of grassland, set about a kilometre north-east along the same ridgeline as my grandparents property Shamba Yetu, where we would often spend our holidays. 
  In the early days, we would drive across to the property to plant or water trees, like the avenue of pin oaks running up the driveway from the gate to the future house site. The young saplings were frail and isolated in the comparative vastness of the open land, tiny fluttering leaves on spindly stems, rendered almost invisible in grass almost as tall as they were. 
  But these were the first tentative steps towards a future life that my parents were adamant we would one day return to claim. And, with exceptional determination on their part, around 8 years later we had not only shifted our lives from Johannesburg to Boston, but also turned the empty grassland into a habitable home. 
  First, my dad dug a well (by hand, I might add) to provide water, and set up a system to pump it up into storage tanks on the hillside. Next, we assembled a little wooden hut in which we camped over weekends, while work then progressed with building the main house and outbuildings.

​We moved as soon as it was physically possible to live in the house, still far from complete at this point. There were no internal doors or ceilings, the walls still unpainted. During thunderstorms, the rain hammering on the exposed tin roof was often so deafening that we couldn't talk. 
  Initially, there was no plumbing either - just a single standpipe in the garden from which we filled plastic buckets, and an outdoor 'long-drop' privy, which we drolly nicknamed The Shateau. In the evenings we would drive over to my grandparents house where we would take it in turns to have a bath. 
  But rather than it being an inconvenience or a hardship, we considered it a privilege to finally be able to live on our own land, in our own house. For my parents particularly, it was the fulfilment of a dream conceived a decade earlier.
  My mum and dad's perseverent work continued, and presently we had flushing toilets, baths, tongue-and-groove ceilings and white painted walls. Plants began to fill out the garden, and the tiny trees, planted all those years earlier, began to flourish, punctuating the grassland with colour and texture. 
  A subtle, almost imperceptible shift was occuring. Without even realising, we had quietly progressed from squatting on the landscape to living within it, accepted by it just as much as we accepted it ourselves - a mutual agreement between our little family and the nature around us. Sitamani was no longer just 'the property', it was our home.

It was really only a few years later that I moved to London, the most seismic upheaval of my entire life. And yet, despite the physical distance and my often meagre finances, I was still privileged enough to be able to return to Sitamani at least once a year.
  It's a rather clichéd aphorism that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and yet, there is truth there. It's during these last 20 years, when I returned annually to Sitamani, that I truly fell in love with it. When I finally learned to understand the language of its magic, watching and listening as it grew and matured, just as I did. 
  It was the juxtaposition of its peacefulness and permanence against the chaos of my Northern Hemisphere life that brought it fully into focus, and made me realise that a regular pilgrimage such as this, to a place of quiet natural beauty, is necessary to reset one's soul. 
  Sitamani had become the base of my root chakra, my grounding force, keeping me anchored and resilient even in the face of massive gales of upheaval and change. It was the power brought by the underlying knowledge that I had a permanent place of belonging, even if it was far away on the other side of the world.

…And it was the truth of all of this which had just struck me as I sat on that DLR train in 2013, watery afternoon sunlight sliding obliquely across grubby floor panels, the muffled screeching of wheels on steel tracks. 
  A voice from the future had just whispered in my ear, reminding me with kindness that nothing in life is permanent. Every chapter must eventually come to a close. Even the dreams we are lucky enough to fulfil must eventually be put to rest, and recycled back into the earth.
  So I resolved then to scrape up every moment I could, suck in every last drop of experience. To spend every second of my future time at Sitamani living in the moment, actively recording as much as possible to memory, photo, video and sound recording, so that I could continue to cling to it like a life-bouy, when it was inevitably time to let go.

And now, that eventuality has finally arrived. It's time to draw these roots up through a lifetime of memories, feeling them desperately trying to cling on as I extricate them. I don't know quite what will happen once I do, or where I will find my solace in the future. 
  But I must remind myself that there is no use in holding onto things, that we should instead celebrate that we ever had them in our lives in the first place. 
Above all, I must remember the ultimate truth: We, as human beings, never in fact own anything at all. Some of us are fortunate enough to become the custodians of wonderful things, but we must eventually pass them on to someone else. 
  And so, the stewardship of Sitamani must pass to its new keepers. And they too, with any hope, will now also have the priceless opportunity to experience and understand the gentle magic that it radiates. 

  And, as much as I will mourn for them, the Piet My Vrou will still continue to echo across the dawn, the lizards will keep sunning themselves on bronze rocks, the cicadas will sing in the Ouhout trees, the grass heads will dance lightly in the fragrant breeze, and the ring-necked doves will continue to purr "cuck-currr-oo" in the morning sunlight. Just as they did for aeons before we ever arrived there, and called that place 'Sitamani'.