Circa 2016
Mopane Grove, wearing a coat of summer-green, two standing stones of granite mark the footpath entrance, and the daybed on the stoep against the wall of the rondawel.
Deep in the heart of the Greater Kruger National Park, nestled in amongst gnarled and ele-beaten Mopaneveld, sits a half-century-old Rondawel. Its peaked, thatched roof is crowned by a Zambian soapstone elephant, trunk up to the East in anticipation of each day that the Scarab rolls the sun across an endless African sky.
This is My Home. My world. My little Patch of Nature’s Paradise.
The colours of changing mopane leaves frame a friend, an ele bull, dusted in red, pauses mid-stride to contemplate, the sunset shining through the deck in the background.
While elephants have been a very dominant feature in my life, the natural world is filled with multitudes of wonders that are all so fascinatingly intricate and intertwined. There are the delicate blossoms that emerge from the dusty dryness of winter, the intense, sometimes iridescent colours of the insects that make them inter-dependent and the scents and sounds that fill the senses in this world that surrounds me.
I have been drawn to, and obsessed with, the natural world for all of my life, but for over three decades, I have been able to immerse myself in it, live in it and be a part of every day of it.
I have made it a life’s quest to do this very thing in as many parts of Africa as time will allow, and this self-discovery and exploration of Africa’s wildlife has filled me with a driven passion and a head filled with awe at a planet that we are neglecting, life we are ignoring and nature we are destroying.
This is my portrayal of this little piece of the world, living with them: the animals and trees, the open skies and timeless days.
This is my insight into this world, living within the territories of so many animals and under ancient trees, vast open skies and having hardened bare feet, walking in the footsteps of the giants. A living world that sustains me and makes me want to see another day.
Circa 2019
Life, however, has a way of disrupting utopia. In 2017, in a very short time span, I endured several severe medical setbacks that forced me to leave my beloved paradise and seek life-saving treatment abroad. The country that I had loved so deeply, promoted wholeheartedly and bled for, refused me life-saving dialysis after my transplanted kidney failed, and were it not for my Jewish heritage, in which Israel’s welcome was, in itself, a gift of life and life-saving treatment, my days would have ended with the end of that year.
I CURRENTLY RESIDE IN A DIFFERENT AND VERY FOREIGN ENVIRONMENT….
Here are some of life’s experiences. Some from my life, living from elemoment to elemoment.
And I’ll be continuing to write about more recent times and my life in a strange country, with whatever of nature I can find here.
