Ceremonial Frame

We set off early, you at the wheel, me with my feet on the dashboard. My legs were scratched and battered. How lovely it was that you found them so beautiful. The sun crept glaringly over the horizon. You held the steering wheel with one hand, the other resting on my knee. We had an inexhaustible supply of shared topics. That too was how I recognized our love. We loved talking, and there was always a spark in some corner of our conversation.

Between termite mounds, gnarled Camel Thorn Trees (Vachellia erioloba) rose. A Martial Eagle circled above us, astonishingly long, majestic, wings fully spread.

We counted the colors of the landscape: ochre, cinnamon, mahogany, copper, rusty pink. The dirt track stretched like a glowing ribbon through the shimmering nowhere. We passed Askham, a harsh roadside station at the edge of the Kalahari. A few kilometers farther, an abandoned petrol station. In front of it, a rusted cooler lay discarded. I got out to stretch my legs. The wind was warm, heavy as exhaled air, swirling red sand around the wheels. On the corrugated roofs, heat waves danced.

Time in the desert has its own rhythm. The deep silence speaks of a world without humans. I met people who seemed to have stepped out of novels. I realized how little is needed to simply be: water. Shade. Orientation.

In a thirsty landscape, where each thing is only what it needs to be, nature presents itself in its most radical form: bare, austere, relentlessly beautiful. Where the land dreams of water, life exists in a mode of restraint, sparse and pared-down. Here, merciless beauty unfolds, admitting no excess.

Words of an elder:
"You seek a word. But you hear only a sound."
"You walk upon the earth, but you do not hear it. Stay still until you notice that it carries you."

I don’t know if it was an initiation. There was no ceremonial frame, no moment when an experience clearly began or ended. Yet there was this sense of something passing through me. No knowledge. Nothing to claim. I associated it with permeability. The image of a door, no longer closing fully.

In the desert, my awe before creation took on its own colors. At the same time, I wrestled with the bizarre feeling of responding inappropriately to what I saw. Inappropriately, in the sense of claiming or possessing. As if I could claim even the tiniest thing in the desert. Everything in me was organized European-style: thinking in lines, concepts as tools, fully analytical. The bush seemed like a mentor who did not argue with me but simply stood beside me and said: You cannot grasp it, but you can let it be.

I know much of what I felt skirted dangerously close to kitsch. My gaze did not lose its precision in the guided and supervised encounters with beings of archaic proportions. Like all tourists, I had to be careful not to take what did not belong to me. I remained a guest. Still, I felt touched by something older than language, older than my doubts, older than my notions of how understanding works. Perhaps it was the desert colors that told me this. Nuances of sand, dust, heat, and shadow. Colors that need not prove anything. They reminded me of something I had never seen before, yet recognized. And perhaps it is not about understanding. Perhaps it is enough that it transformed me.