#highveld

The Great Enclosure and adjacent ruins of Great Zimbabwe, looking south-east.

Surrounding myself with green and trees and the forest as I have been in Europe, I had not realized just how gorgeous the golds, yellows and browns of home are.

Returning to the highland grass veld of South Africa was returning home. Sleeping under the grass-thatched roof and breathing in its calming, heady smell as lightning rumbled and roared in waves over it - that was wrapping myself in my childhood blankets.

I knew that I missed the yellow and dry grassy plains. I just couldn't believe that I had ever thought that the grass was any color other than gold.

Whitman compared the grass to the handkerchief of the Lord, a romantically dropped remembrancer of God. Green grass is the flag my disposition, out of joyful calming stuff woven. But the grass of my home is like the vast richness of the Earth - wires of worked gold reaching to the sparking heavens, glowing in the warm embrace of the African sun.

Africa truly is rich, in ways I have never realized, and the Earth itself shouts it with ostentatious displays. The mountains I walked, situated between mining fields of gold and platinum, were adorned with dried bracken that glinted in the sunlight with metallic silver and bronze leaves. The soft underside of particular leaves, on the tips of dry, thin branches, glitter with gold. The tufts of grass were purest gold, and a field of it interrupted only by blue sky a sight to behold. The dry wind ripples across it, pushes at my clothes, whistles over rocks. The spirit of the wind sets a lone tuft of thigh-high grass to dancing so that a perfect circle is drawn around it in the sand, a sight as fae as moss and mushrooms.

The land is rich in wisdom and experience. Ancient stones rippling with the ages, carved tall and life-like from harmonious age-long friendships with water and wind. Peaceful plateus, stages for giants, towering over and separated by thick veins of deep, green, whispering river forests. The trees down there curl around each other, and themselves - wooden vines thicker than my arms. The water is cold, clear, and sweet, flowing through fairy alcoves that seem to capture moonlight in their sequestered ponds. And cupping it all in ancient hands is the stone of the Earth, knowingly stoic.

It is exhilarating to watch the hawks glide through the blue river overhead, and to halt at the echoing, human-like shouts of the baboons. It is liberating to answer with a wild, deep yawp of my own.

A journey truly is not so until one has returned. There and back again. The remembered image of the golden winter grass edged with hopeful young green emerging from the roots. It is a reminder of my own hopes for growth. It seems that growth has crept up on me, from roots I had not realized nourished me so deeply.