Author Archives: Steve

The Tropical Reef

At dawn, I sit cross-legged on an Indonesian beach, preparing to explore a coral reef. This is more than free-diving, it is a spiritual ritual that has become my unique practice. I come to consciously enter into communion with the sacred intelligence of the living world. The reef is a teacher; the ocean, a mirror. These immersions have become my path showing up, again and again, at the foot of the teacher. And the teacher is elemental nature.

I sit still, close my eyes, take 100 slow breaths, and wait for my mind to dissolve into the stillness of my heart. As my breath slows, each exhalation blurs the edges of the world and I enter into a deepening entrainment with the heartbeat of the earth: the gentle ocean breeze, the receding tide, the soft dawn light gently spilling onto pearlesque coral beach sand. 

Mind becomes sunrise, flesh turns to surging ocean, the veils recede.

As an offering, I create a serpentine mandala of urchins, shells, and flowers, honouring the beach as a sacred threshold where ocean meets land. The shells and petals become fragile constellations, blooming for a heartbeat before dissolving back into the beach sand, into the oneness of earth. Along its meandering spine, I place the sun-bleached urchins, a mirror of the reef itself, eternally braiding light across the meeting place of sea and shore.

In this deepening immersion, I listen to the messengers of nature: the wind, the dawn light, the breeze stirring the palm leaves. Each feels like a thread in the mysterious language of the earth. Today, I wonder who will speak for the sea.

I take up my notebook and begin to transcribe their harmonics in haiku, inking words to paper for what cannot be held. Haiku captures my immersion in brief phrases that weave the subtle song of the earth to the present moment. Like the peg beneath a Sufi dancer, each verse draws the turning to my centre.

Rhythmic rolling waves,
touching crest to sandy shore
an infinite arc.

The coral shoreline,
sunlight makes dappled shadows
under dancing leaves.

A man rows his boat,
drifting gently to the beach
the waves roll him home.

Diving

I enter the water.
Beneath me, a billion porcelain shells dance in the current. A school of fish flash silver, drifting in unison prayer, in songs of silence. Their eyes observe me. I tell them I come in peace, swimming through their stillness.

This is a world of turquoise, illuminated. A sacred chasm of blues and shadows, scattered across the ocean floor in the dawn light.

Look, the seagrass dances like trees in the wind, bending to the ocean’s song. A lullaby of sway and drift, a living pulse of oneness.

Now a thousand fish flash and flicker, circling. Mirroring sunlight, like fine jewellers crafting the dawn light.

Below, a white coral canvas waits, refracting light into rainbows. Shadows of fish dance across the reef sand, circling, twisting, murmuring like forest starlings. The coral sand glimmers pearlescent, shimmering like fresh snow as it receives the suns light.

My breathing slows. I sink my legs beneath me, barely taking air. I empty my lungs so that my body drifts below the surface, only the snorkel tip bobbing, a castaway log adrift on the sea, moving where the current leads.

I drift, as if entering hibernation, the body awake, the mind half-asleep.
The fish move closer, circling me in recognition, as though we share one body, one living flesh.

In this watery sleep, this floating meditation, I merge deeper into the mind of the sea.

Insight

The secret is breath.
Each time I slow it down, the rhythm of my lungs merges with the drifting pulse of the sea. The boundary between body and water begins to dissolve; I am no longer swimming through the ocean but within it, a cell rejoining its source.

In this stillness, something ancient awakens. The body remembers what the mind forgot. An ancestral reflex slows the heartbeat, gathers the blood inward, and teaches the body how to belong to water. The sea welcomes us when we stop resisting its rhythm. A slow unwinding of the senses begins to entrain with the heartbeat of the reef, the ocean itself. A living wildness awakens in me.

Light, too, begins to speak. The surface above ripples with sunlight, weaving itself across the coral sand below. Water bends light into braided ribbons of gold and blue, rainbow hues refracted and multiplied until the whole reef becomes a living kaleidoscope. The coral sand gleams like crushed pearl, a canvas and a mirror, the luminous residue of billions of coral lives layered over thousands of years. Their skeletons, once vibrant and alive, now hold the memory of the ocean’s evolution, reflecting the story of creation itself in this dawn light.

Then a turtle appears, gliding past me with unhurried grace, a winged bird of the sea. I watch her from within this trancelike state as she moves like an old, wise soul who knows the currents by heart. I feel no separation between us. Her gaze passes through me like the tide moves through seagrass. She is the bridge between worlds, ocean and shore, watery depths and sky. A guardian of the threshold.

And in her passing, I understand at once: the reef itself is the messenger.

Synaesthesia

That night, I dream of the sea, still steeped in the morning’s meditative dive, an immersion into the very heart of the coral reef. It feels as though the sea herself continues the teaching through dream:
A man stands before me, a Javanese sailor, weathered and stoic. When I greet him, he turns and begins to rise, expanding far beyond human scale. His body unfurls into a being of light and geometry, twenty feet tall, his skin rippling with the colours of the reef. Fractals shimmer through him like scales of living coral. His eyes burn with luminescent green fire.
He looks at me with a stern compassion.
“What do you want here?”
His voice carries the pull of the ocean’s undertow.

“I come in peace,” I answer. “I seek permission to see, to learn the reef’s wisdom, the ocean’s wisdom.”

He studies me for a while, the currents of his being pulsing with blue and violet light. Then he nods once, and the dream dissolves into a fractal bloom, the entire reef unfolding before me, infinite and alive.

When I wake, the vision is still alive, lingering in crystal-clear inner sight. My eyes remain closed, yet I still see it: the coral, the fish, the currents, all woven into a single, breathing geometry. Colour hums as tone. Light tastes of salt. Movement becomes sound. This is not hallucination. It is synaesthesia, living revelation, a vast, unified sense field where perception and reality dissolve into the oneness of a single shared consciousness.

The reef reveals itself as a living intelligence, a communicating wholeness that speaks beyond time and space. Its every motion, the flicker of a fin, the bending of seagrass, is a syllable in a language older than speech. This is how the Earth speaks: in patterns, in pulses, in entrainment.

Science, too, speaks of this pattern. The reef is a fractal system, self-similar across scale, endlessly recursive, each coral colony mirroring the structure of the whole. But the vision reveals what no data can capture: this pattern is conscious. It knows itself through every creature that moves within it and shares a reciprocal awareness with humanity.

The reef is not just a habitat but a threshold, the flickering edge where land, sea, light, and breath converge. It is a liminal body, belonging to both worlds, a symphony of life composed of light and matter, spirit and form.

The turtle returns to mind, the bridge between shore and deep. Like the crow of the air, she moves between realms, observer of the threshold. And through her gaze I understand again: the reef is not speaking to us. It is speaking through us, collectively, in all the living beings of its composition.

Union

At dawn, meditating in a mountain temple, I saw the elements in their eternal dance: earth, air, water, and fire, endlessly opposed, yet wholly one. Their relational conversation revealed the alchemy of the physical realm: forces that can never fully merge, yet whose tension gives birth to all form.

Then the image shifted. I saw the reef again, that shimmering threshold between earth and sea, and understood that life flourishes where the four elements converge most intimately. Here, water meets air, light touches matter, fire refracts through salty water and surface ripple. Biological life is the alchemical transmutation of these elements, their endless mingling and separation. The reef is their song made visible, a living manuscript written in colour and motion.

Every coral branch, every fin, every grain of sand participates in this vast choreography. Life proliferates like a Mandelbrot fractal, infinitely diverse, infinitely self-similar, unfolding into spectrums of hue and scent and sound, personalities and forms, each a unique articulation of the same divine pattern. 

Above it all, the sky rests upon the sea, the two lovers of creation. They touch but never fuse, surfaces kissing in eternal reflection. The sky spills downward, painting its temper on the sea, swirling storms across her blue canvas. The sea gazes upward, mirroring the vastness of the sky-god, holding the moon in her deep heart. They are like Layla and Majnun, bound in their unfulfilled devotion, their ache feeding the poetry of clouds and tides across the slow march of time.

This yearning between sky and sea descends through every stratum of life. It becomes coral and fish, anemone and tidepool, flowering ecosystems that breathe the pulse of their celestial lovers. It is the same longing that stirs in us, the soul’s desire to reunite with its source.

All the reef, I realise, is this ache made visible: the art of love, endlessly seeking itself, endlessly becoming whole.

Copyright 2025 Steven Hurt

The Circle of the Crow 

Above me, a crow circles, tracing invisible thermals through the morning forest air. She draws graceful arcs across a soundscape of birdsong, her black feather tips brushing the sacred chorus of their dawn prayers. I had called to her before I came, asking her to show me her ways, to share her vision of the world. And as I summited this peak, she was there in the sky within minutes of my arrival. Her feathers shrilled as she brushed overhead, within meters of where I now sit to write. Then, she glided into the chasm of river pools and canopy shadows, toward the hidden perch where I’ve returned, year after year, to remember the wholeness that waits in the peace of nature. 

She swoops and soars, gliding above the forest canopy, her eyes gathering the world into herself like reflections on black water. She turns in another arc, slicing through the still morning air, and our eyes catch each other’s as she passes again. In that moment, there is a recognition, of our shared flesh, our entwined psyche, the unity between the seer and the seen. 

The sun rises steadily, filling the cauldron of this forest valley. Birdsong pours from the canopy, punctuating the silence that gathers below. Soft clouds drift across the sky, tempering the new light. There is stillness here, and that stillness settles within me. I look again at the crow, silently sailing across her domain, and I wonder what it must be like to see the world through her eyes. She is a mirror of the world, a keeper of its breath from her lofty view. It feels as though she is always watching, observing, weaving the invisible fabric of this place inside herself. A resonant symbiosis: life looking back upon itself, a breathing wholeness traveling within its own body. The crow is the vision of Mother Nature, the eyes by which she gazes upon her own wholeness. This is her role: to be the seer, the watcher, to carry the whole world inside her belly, and to breathe life back into it through her vision. 

In the old days, it was the seer who entered the crow’s vision to glimpse beyond this world. Entire cultures were attuned to the wholeness of nature, to the living mind of Mother Earth. Through the crow’s eyes, the seer could journey across realms, fetching sight from places both real and mystical. It is said that all crows still carry this ancient relationship in their memory. And I wonder how much we have lost, now that this bond has been forgotten. 

She watches in silence, cawing now and then in a language we no longer understand. She knows every tree, every rocky outcrop, the valley floor, the bend of the river. She sees the world and holds it as her own body, an inseparable wholeness of this place. She is a single note in the song of creation: in the chorus of forest birds, the hum of insects, the meandering stream that winds its way to the ocean. 

Around me, echoing the crow’s mirroring, I settle into the connective tissue of this place and observe. A sunbird flashes vermilion feathers, sparkling in the morning light as it dips its long beak into a waiting flower. A bumblebee buzzes awkwardly past, pollen baskets heavy with golden treasure. Beneath a stone I turned over, a black scorpion sits motionless, incubating in the shadow of daylight, waiting for its chance at a meal. The first signs of spring flowers colour the green forest in pink, red, purple, yellow, and orange. Overhead, noisy Egyptian geese erupt in their clanking flight. This place is a meditation of rhythms and cycles, of life’s unfolding wholeness. 

Beyond what I see are the forest calls: a troupe of baboons barking orders and chatter far away, the subtle hum of the stream falling over rocks below, and, further still, the raw bite of a chainsaw. Yet the crow continues circling, gliding, cawing to the trees below. She watches the day unfold, the flowers opening to the sun, the leaves drinking in the light. And nowhere in her bearing is there boredom, nor any search for meaning. Her whole body embraces the totality of simply being alive: a living testament to sentient wholeness. She is free from the burdens humans have made for themselves. Her secret is simple and profound, she does not do in order to be. She is simply the crow. She does not need meaning. She is already within it. 

By contrast, we carry the weight of self-awareness, gift and burden both. It leaves us feeling apart from what we are, and so we make the world an adverse place by believing ourselves separate from it. This is our human lot: to bear the sense of estrangement from nature, even while our bones and blood know we are her body. We have been imbued with the mysterious power to create whole worlds within this world, a psyche of separation. And yet, those who descend into the depths of self-discovery, into individuation, reclaim their wholeness again. 

We are a journey: from wholeness, into separation, and back again. We leave the circle only to experience the confusion and agony of separation, so that one day we may rediscover and return. This, perhaps, is our greatest gift, our unique presence in the world. The birds remind us of it constantly: that creation needs our consciousness, a certain quality of being, to be present within the song of life. Perhaps the greatest offering a person can make is to return their wholeness to the world. 

The seers of old seemed to know this mystery. Through initiation into the depths of their own psyche, they uncovered an innate wholeness where ecology and psyche mirrored one another. In this chiasmic crossing, the barrier between species dissolved. They learned the language of birds, of trees, of rivers and skies. They could enter the crow’s eyes, become the budding medicinal flower, call down rain in conversation with clouds. They knew the Earth to be a living, reciprocal entanglement of consciousness, a fractal touched at any point to reveal the whole. Her body is the holy sacrament, the medicine returning us into her embrace. 

So when we sit in nature and enter into her mind, the Tao, we become the conscious wholeness of her being. That is the gift of human consciousness: a wholeness given back to the Earth, for the sake of the whole. We leave the centre only to discover it again, in the work of participatory restoration. 

The breeze stirs gently as the wind off the southern ocean sighs onto the land, carrying a new fragrance through the forest and shifting the day. Ocean and wind begin their chorus, as if nature herself takes a deep breath and the morning rituals draw to a close. The air shifts; the mood shifts. The sun burns brighter, my shirt comes off, the page I write on seems whiter. The birds pause their singing, listening now to the wind’s music in the leaves, absorbing its scents, attuning to the stories it carries. 

Only the chainsaw misses this stillness, oblivious to the symphony. Its grinding roar enslaves the day to time, tempo, and labour, detonating the silence with its single-minded intent. 

After a while, the birds begin to sing again, this time with the wind. Their song rises as a respectful gesture, welcoming the ocean’s breath into the forest. The air swirls with fragrance and music, leaves and branches moving in chorus. And then the crow glides past once more, tracing her circle of dominion. Watching. Present. Unbroken. Here. In her steady circling I glimpse our own return: a reminder that separation is not the end of the story, but the path by which we rediscover the wholeness we never lost. 

And as she circles, I realize she is not only watching the valley, but watching me. Watching us. The crow does not ask for meaning, and yet she offers it freely, her flight a reminder that life itself is the circle, whole and unbroken. Perhaps our task is not to escape the burden of self-awareness, but to bring it home: to remember that we, too, belong to the song of the earth. The crow carries the world in her belly; we carry the gift of knowing. And when the two meet, in silence, in stillness, in the breath between bird and human, wholeness returns again. 

Copyright 2025 Steve Hurt

At the centre of my garden stands a Bodhi tree. It was grown from a pinch of seed and soil I gathered at a Buddhist temple in Asia. This was no ordinary tree, but a direct descendant of the original Bhodi tree beneath which Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha. Back in South Africa, a green-fingered friend took great care to nurture the seeds for me, and a few months later presented me with a beautiful new sapling whose two leaves were the shape of tiny hearts. I have cared for the tree for nearly 5 years, transferring it to increasingly larger pots until recently I felt it was time to give her a permanent home in my garden. Now that sacred tree grows and spreads its branches more every day. She takes centre stage in my garden, marking how precious she is to me, this sacred friend.

All creatures great and small, physical and subtle, are welcome in this space, and I speak to the garden every day, asking them to some closer to me. They are the body of this living temple of greenery and I make daily offerings of sweet hibiscus tea, fruit, and seeds as gifts. Together, the tree and these offerings form a sacred temple of peaceful contemplation, alive with birdsong and the joyful presence of the subtle world. 

There is quiet magic in listening to their conversations, a silent crescendo of communion with the Earth Mother. I tend to this garden as a sacred sanctuary, and it brings me a simple peace. This is the place where I can watch the seasons unfolding and reflect on how they mirror the seasons within me: summer, winter, spring, and autumn each a turning of the wheel in the greater dance of my own life path. It is a place where nature is placed on a pedestal, where she is invited to thrive, to unfold, to offer her living sutras in the cycles of the seasons.

In contrast to this garden space of remembrance is the outside world, where we live in an era of collective forgetfulness. Our eyes, which were once so finely attuned to the presence of the living Mother, have become dulled into seeing the earth as an objective thing. We have removed the sacred from the earth, forgotten the nature spirits, lost touch with the natural rhythms of life, and it is evident in our collective ecological crisis. To me it is important, now more than ever, to return to the natural sacredness of nature, to look towards Her as the teacher and to surrender our relentless pursuit of spiritual awakening to acts of service to the great Mother. This is not a time for the outward evolution of humanity, but a time to step inside and hold a space of love for the Mother earth who has been so damaged by an era of masculine domination over her body. This is why the garden itself is my temple. It is a temple made of her flesh, in service to her unfolding, a place where I can intentionally hold a space of love for Mother earth. And so the Bhodi tree is a symbol of this anchoring, of this rooting of the spiritual path in her flesh, of making a place where she is simply allowed to be, without expectation. 

Nature is a teacher. She is the embodiment of the Tao, she is the silent feminine who initiates us into the deeper, unseen aspects of the spiritual path. This garden is a place of in-scendence rather than transcendence, a place where our spiritual life is taken back, deep into the source of creation beyond the words, teachings and beliefs of the masculine spiritual path that seeks always to reach outward, upward. But she turns ever inward, she is life force expressed as a circle, concentric spirals of rising and descending energies that weave a magic between soil and sky. And in some way, the planting of the Bhodi tree in a temple dedicated to the earth Mother is a ritual act of giving the Bhodi tree history back into the earth, back to its source, returning the masculine tradition to the depths of the feminine, to reach downward and inward where it can be renewed.

I imagine the roots of this Bodhi tree reaching deeper into the soil, as the energy wrought from the sun is imbibed into its growing. It is the feminine wisdom that gently weaves connections through mycelium, subtly and silently communicating, sharing wisdom from the older trees. In the soil, she invokes the wisdom of interconnectedness, the silent dance of light through the cycles of time. She stands as a living mnemonic of the Buddha, embracing the teachings of one of the great masters of this world, but her roots are now like prayers reaching into the earth and weaving the golden thread that binds all of life in the slow, turning spiral of creation. She is the embodiment of this grand mystery of life playing itself out.

And as summer concedes to winter’s downward pull, so her leaves fall down into the dark soil and her life force retreats inward. I imagine her reaching back through the layers of time, her roots entwining with those of the mother tree from which she descended, and then further back in time to the origins of all life. This is an ancient thread, a Silsila of nature’s wisdom that precedes humanity, a living thread that is alive and sentient, a holy return to the source of what is sacred and pure. 

Sitting in silence with this living green being I watch with the eye of the heart how this young tree teaches in the quiet language of nature, her sutras written in roots and leaves, in the gentle meandering touching of branch to sky. And as she ventures into the dark depths of the soil I see with the inner eye how she reclaims the ancient light, the long-stored breath of the sun, absorbed by the soil over centuries. She sinks her roots deeper every day, drawing this living sunlight from the underworld and bringing it back into the leaves, returning the light to the sky. And now, as the bright god of the sun begins its northern journey, leaving our southern skies to the long shadows of winter, I sit in quiet reverence, watching his retreat, and the slow, rising breath of winter. Like the tree, it is a time for me to reach deeper, into silence, into my own roots, to retrieve the light that is hidden in my own fertile depths, to return to the depths of the feminine.

The tree points me to the goddess of winter who is a teacher too. I watch her slow, imperceptible dancing in an ancient ritual that has unfolded in nature since time began. That patch of garden grows colder each day, as she claims the shadows, her reach stretching ever broader, reclaiming the fruits of summer and drawing them back into the depths. She opens the doorway, revealing the underworld closer, inviting us to peer into the fertile darkness from which all life arises, weaving the outer with the inner. She shows me how the return of winter is the same journey of the soul, rejoicing in its own slow descent into the depths, and how this is a transformation that we can deeply witness through her stillness and darkness. She carries the memory of countless aeons, her wisdom written in the dark weave of forest soil. She knows that sometimes the way forward is first to fall down — that growth is not only an upward reach toward the sky, but also a deep, anchoring descent into the body of the Earth. There is deep wisdom in the earth. 

The Bodhi tree knows this ancient dance of growth and retreat that the goddess of winter brings. She is intimately woven into the lineage of generations of trees from which she descended, a living thread in the forest of deep, dreaming roots that have made their way into the soil for millennia. She was witness to the flowering of consciousness beneath her great grandmother’s branches and in some way I believe that she held this space for the process of his transmutation. Sharing her wisdom with Gautama, holding the space in which he was taken to that perfect unfolding of the Golden Flower of consciousness inside his own depths. The Bodhi tree whispers her invitation to turn inward. ‘Come in,’ she gestures. “It’s time to surrender to the ancient feminine source, for without this letting go, there can be no renewal”. 

Then the rain begins to fall again— a soft, misty autumn rain, saturating the earth. This beautiful tree becomes the empty chalice that seeks His nourishment, an empty vessel for the sky’s long exhale. She knows what to do, graciously succumbing to the downward pull, her roots spreading into the dark, fertile underworld. Everything is a holy balancing of restoration, a testament to the cyclical nature of life, a reminder to always surrender to the silence within, to reach deeper, to go to the source where the light enters the world and consciousness blooms.

I sit here, watching the majesty of creation unfolding and seeing how, in this autumn garden the Bhodi tree turns the suns light inward. I see how this is the ancient Taoist turning of the light, turning the eye of the heart inward with the descending breath. The tree reminds me of the quiet living stream of feminine wisdom that is always hidden within. And it always points back to the heart. Then I see it. Beyond the form of this tree, this garden, beyond the constructs, there is an even deeper stillness pointing to a perfectly still mind. I see how it is Her mind reflected in every unfolding leaf, every spiralling root. I see how it is Her mind that shapes all of creation. This is the unity, the sacred blossoming of the Golden Flower and it is her gift on this drizzling Autumn day.

I am sitting alone in the mountains of Utah, where the canyons of Zion unfold below me, carving majestic passageways through sandstone mountains. This is a place I have always wanted to visit, a land that evokes my imagination about the beauty of the natural world. As Edward Abbey once declared, “This is the most beautiful place on earth.”

I came here in the predawn darkness, as if pulled toward this place. The whole mountain calls; every part of it is a holy voice beckoning to the seeker. The ground seems to hold the threads of an ancient spirit, a living presence that is everywhere, a holy presence that makes me want to bow my head. And so I sit as a witness to this holy work, breathing in whole mountains, canyons and the ever-unfurling wildness of nature. This is holy ground.

I came here when it was still dark, wanting to sense more deeply into what had always been an imaginary landscape I had come to know through books and stories. There is a familiarity etched in my heart, a land that, many years ago, was imbued with the passing of knowledge from ancient Tibet across the world to the West for safeguarding. In my heart, I knew this place; I felt its living presence inside me, connected to the thread that binds all life in a sacred tapestry of love.

This was a pilgrimage, to sit here among these temples of the gods, to feel how the dust itself tells stories of mountains carved by time, of rivers that sprung from the ground when the world was still Eden. It is saturated with the spirit of the Puebloans and their generations of sacred worship. With cupped hands, palms turned to the sky, I could feel how this place held the imprint of a story far more ancient than us. I open my hands in supplication to the spirit of the land and pray for my soul to return home. And with my inner ear, I could hear the Puebloan songlines echoing in chorus with the song of the earth, weaving threads of love and connection from hearts directly into the natural world. Everywhere I felt the spirit of these people of the earth, so familiar and yet so forgotten, their story alive in the air, always calling us home.

It was here that I felt the presence of something more than my own inner dialogue: The unmistakable presence of an ancient spirit grandmother who walked in these mountains. I recognised this presence, her familiar gait, her weathered face with an otherworldly smile and the kinship of ancestral eyes watching over humanity beyond this mortal coil.

In those early hours of the morning when I came up here, I could see only the faint trace of cliff faces and trees. The voice of the grandmother was everywhere in the mountains, calling amid these temples of the gods, these colossal stone patriarchs. The stars were above me, swimming in the deepest, darkest black sky. Bitterly cold air cut into my warm chest, the icy breath of snow-capped peaks. She called with an aching pain in my chest, in air so cold it was hard to breathe without clenching my jaw.

Compelled by the call, I walked deeper into those mountains, into the dark blackness of the night. This was an act of trust and surrender to a sentience that pulled at my core. And as the sky turned its majestic star-encrusted palette, I called inwardly for a path to be shown that led toward her. But sometimes the journey outward is a necessary ritual to enact the inner journey. Taking one step at a time in the darkness, without knowing where we are going, trusting each step, I embarked on an inward perambulation into the soul’s wild labyrinth, wondering if such an act could ever be taken except in the darkness.

First, she led me down to the white sand riverbed and we walked in silence. The sand was like ice, cold and crisp. We laughed at how dark it was, how even my feet disappeared below me. Then she turned my head upward toward the rising canyon walls and there above me I saw a ledge. “Come,” she said, “climb up.”

So I ascended, climbing upwards and inwards toward her in what had now become the faintest light of an imminent sunrise, pulling my body up a steep rock face, clambering higher up the smooth sandstone wall until my arms and legs grew tired. As the light grew faintly brighter, I looked around and saw that I was halfway up a mountain in the early morning dusk and there she was, sitting on the plateau, the grandmother tree. She was thousands of years old, a bristlecone pine, ancient and sentient in her presence. I knew in that moment that this was the place to sit and be silent. This was the plateau.

There we sat together and I felt that she was lending me her vision. I plummeted into that other world and saw how, for thousands of years, she had watched over this rock, greeting the pink dawn. She showed me how every living thing was an eye through which she watched the world and witnessed the manifestation of God in her being, every part of nature an ear, a touchpoint witnessing the unfolding song of creation; the oneness of life, the continuity of spiritual light through aeons. I sat with her, an enraptured participant, seeing, hearing, feeling the earth through the eyes of creation.

Then she showed me how I have been here too, on this hill, inside my heart, over many lives. She revealed that it was she who taught me to watch with the eye of eternity, who taught me stillness, who showed me the living of many lifetimes and the great circle of time, time like a river. She showed me how I have sat with her in every forest, every mountain peak, in the ocean, in the flowering spring Karoo. Always it has been her; always her presence has shown me the way, wherever I found myself.

Ritual is the way we enact this sacred experience in the world. It is how we imbibe wisdom and bring it back into the earth. The inner journey requires the act of sacred ritual to draw forth that wisdom from the depths and offer it to the earth herself. So when I stood and saw the empty canvas of white sand before me, I felt compelled to record this meeting in the sand for us both to see. I drew circles that spoke of wholeness, of union, of time like a river winding its way endlessly to the sea. I offered these circles to the ground, to the sky, to the water below, to the rising sun, symbols of recognition to this sentient earth that gives so freely of herself – a gift etched into her flesh, a love note for the gift of her presence.

And then the sun started to rise and I knew that the moment had passed, so I sat in silent witness to her majesty. In that moment, she became both the tree and the light that touched it; she was wholeness, she was every living thing. She was there in the canyons, flowing in the clear waters, dancing in the darkness of the earth. She was nourisher, bringer of life, midwife to new life. She was the sky and the ground and everything in between. She was the grandmother who watched endlessly over the world and had loved the earth so deeply that her heart now carried the world within it.

We continued this visionary journey as I descended the mountain in the fullness of sunrise, watching her light touch the rocks. It was like the mother greeting the mother, from heart to heart, inseparably entwined. Each rock came alive, turning its face to the sun in monolithic prayer, a gaze most ancient, the eternal worship between earth and God. And as I stepped down, the light filled the spaces where I had offered prayers with her. My searching for her had become her answering voice, and it was light touching light. The sun painted the mountaintops, the sky turned pink; I looked up to her on that high mesa of pine, now lit by the sun, and inside my heart I saw that sacred place clearly resting within me. This was the answer to my prayer: to find that thread which is always alive, that exists everywhere within us and in the world around us, the holy thread, the one spirit that binds us all from heart to heart, the holy mandala of creation.

These were the words given to me this morning, from the silence of the mountain dawn.

---

Steve Hurt, copyright 2025

The Wind and the Way

Note to reader on the style of this essay: The Wind and the Way is an experiential piece, first written as haiku while sitting in nature, and later unfolded into paragraphs.

I sit on top of a rocky outcrop, a lone rock penetrating the forest canopy, surrounded by a vista of mountain, forest and a perfectly lit dusk sky. This is a magical, quiet place I come to find peace. Here in the spring afternoon, with birdsong saturating the air, the wind whispers its secret. So, I listen.

It carries scents of fynbos and wild flowering, a warm fragrant story of the love affair between the sun and the earth and its lovemaking. And when a living god presents itself like this I do not grasp, do not try to cling tightly. Sitting in silence I go to the breath. Breathing it in… out. And there, in this breath, a heaven scent, a fragrance of the centuries, an ancient sentient perfume. The presence of a living god.

The gods smell like rain, freshly fallen on hot earth. The crickets rejoice in their knowing.  My nostrils expand, take in this scent deeply, saturate this soul. The wind carries these gifts, of gods, of rainmaking, of a billion-year love affair and its depth and its vastness. Gifts of a god whose names we have forgotten, but who remember us and give us our every breath. And when the wind howls wild, penetrating lamentations of hollowness, of longing, we stand and feel her pain. This reed flute, hauntingly telling her tale, of wise old souls who walked the earth without trace, leaving scents of remembrance.

I call a prayer to this wind that still carries the old way to fill this open sail. “Take me there, homewards to those furthest shores of love, carry me back to that place. And as the storm grows and the sky darkens, and the stars reveal the journey to shore, let me read your signs to navigate this ship to that love from which you emanate. Let this sailor’s heart breathe you in and fill his sails. Beloved, ancient one, we are bound in our yearning. Bring your winds of change, your scent of remembrance that guides the wayfarer to the deepest place of love. Let me surrender this vessel to your mercy, to your wisdom. Show me the way home again.”

Look there: murmuring starlings. A swirling, diving unison swimming through the air. Like a school of fish but with wind as their water. They are one and the same. An elemental dance of water and air, right here before me. I see the elements endlessly seeking union. A divine, living fractal of creation. It is the dance of life. The air is the same, it moves the same as water. Starlings, fish, the same. See how the air moves. The starlings show us secrets, invisible truths. A sea of blackness with their invisible love hidden in plain sight. Is it not a gift to watch dancers in love, moving for His sake? It is God’s unfolding. It’s an infinite embrace. It’s the Path, the Way.

But now the air is dead still, as though absent, but alive in its stillness. At its source, silence. See how when it moves in that bird’s chest, the rainbird calls rain. From inside those lungs the air forms words to tell us, making songs that human ears no longer understand. But not with the sage, she speaks from that other place. Her voice, the wind’s words. When she is speaking it is as though the words come alive, veiled in magic. Watch as the air moves, use the eye of the heart to see it. You will see that soul is breath. The sage knows this, she and the wind are one breath. This is magic, pure and true.

Look at how the wind now churns, turning the forest to dancing, making even giants sway. And when it recedes that ocean becomes like glass. A clear mirror-self. Now switch off the mind and compare a white capping sea to still glass. The wind points delicately to this magic. The wind rouses us, the wind turns us to stillness. But soul is neither of these states. This is the magic of wind, pointing to non-existence, revealing absence and presence.

The fish eagle’s cry, carried on the wings of wind. The wind a fetcher.  The scent of flowers, erased from this sacred mount. The wind a sweeper. Clouds covering sun, then revealing its brightness. The wind an artist. I soar with this wind, sky-high above the forest. The wind an eagle. Gentle melodies, leaves rustling, branches swaying. A musician too. Wind shakes the branches, causing berries to fall to the soil below. Look, the wind provides. Seeds buried beneath leaves, blown from branches above. The wind weaves new growth. Sapling piercing sky, the wind makes its branches strong. The wind a caregiver. Many beings in one, ancient travelling gypsy, seer of the sky.

The wind is not wind, rather it is sentience, it is a weaver. And yet it is not. The wind blows through us, but it does not define us. So, we sit in silence with the breath and look to where it points, without looking.

Beloved wind, if we pray to you and ask for your protection, do you heed our call? Or did we forget those sacred words of the heart that invoke your care. It seems that these days our tongues forgot how to speak your true names. To you we are mutes. Six hundred thousand words to speak this ancient art, but few true words we remember.

So, show us the old ways that call wind and sky and billowing cloud. We long to commune again. We are gods, like you, true cardinal points on earth. We gave you the names. We know how to love, but without you we are dead. So breathe on these hearts. Show us the million ways to bow our heads to the wind and sing our prayers. We wait for your voice to teach us what we forgot, teach us how to care for a god, teach us how to breathe as we call your name. Humbly we ask you to reveal yourself here again, because this soul loves, it loves you and all your mystery. This soul longs to find the Way. God of the old world, hear these mortal words that cry out, lamenting your absence. Fill this evening with your sweet murmuring soul so that each atom sings. So that I can touch this invisible presence and imprint this heart with the signature of a living, ancient God. Come rest in this heart. This is my call to you today and always. Beloved Friend, sweep this place clean with your art, blow these jinn elsewhere and bring fresh, new life that sparkles with infant joy and comes alive. Bring those messages, bring those precious gifts of your art, bring inspiration. Bring us your birdsong, paint this evening horizon, blow on this dust and watch these sweepers return the dust to the earth. Watch as we polish the ground with our prayers so that the light you reveal is reflected perfectly, and with precision. We know your artworks, yes, the great bringer of change, the sweeper, the voice of the saint. The birds remember. Their songs are your voice speaking. So, make me a songbird too.

And there, you answer. The song of the sea, carried on the breath of wind. You are the messenger. Everywhere you speak; sky, clouds, every song, stillness. You are the voice of God. This whole valley rings with the sweet presence of God. Yes, you are the bringer. We swim in your soup, ever immersed in prayer, always listening.

And through your signs you show us how your form is an unfolding fractal. Responsive, engaged. You feel our prayers. They make reverberations, touching the whole sky. Our prayers feed you, nurturing and sustaining, weaving harmony. I see how these words, the ones that flow from my pen, are your signature. Is it because these words are prayers spoken from a place of love. Beloved wind, father sky, they are offerings, and they come alive with the signature of love. Living offerings. Take them, they belong to you.

This afternoon I am a witness to how prayer brings new life to the air we breathe. And when you respond I witness how the whole hilltop comes alive, as light touches light. This silent merging union of souls. This sacred substance, it incubates our prayers and sends them back home. You are the weaver that takes our prayers to God and does our bidding. But not a god beyond, no, you are a god who is here, embedded inside this dark soil. Your breath gives it life. And from this love-act comes the magnificent gift of life emerging. You marry our prayers with the earth, merge Her with water and fire. And then new life is sparked. Life that is waiting to be born in this world. You are God’s breath, the bringer, the weaver and the lover, making soil come alive with possibility, with the substance of the future. You are the breath that gives form to the earth’s own song. So let us sing with your holy breath and remember your ways once more.

Slowly, with soft eyes, I see the. wind in the old way, like we see the light in a child’s eyes. It is soft and full and present in some other place where life is still pure. There is no preconception, and I surrender to this simple presence in nature. We are in conversation. Me and my elder, this wise invisible soul, this ancient being, this many-faced god of sky, my teacher and friend. I look to the sky, see the last light of day and the moon rising. It is full tonight, both in the sky and inside this disciple’s heart.

Steven Hurt, Copyright 2025

There is no love affair greater than the love between a river and a mountain. Theirs is the closest of all unions.

In their sojourn from mountain to ocean their love lights the world with fertility and wild greenery. A love like this lasts a lifetime. The river has a wild mind and it says to the wild earth: “Show me the way home.” And as the river journeys homewards to the ocean it sings, celebrating its merging union with the furthest shores.

Witnessing this love in the river is an act of remembrance that takes us back to the sacred source, where the primordial nature of life is present. This source of creation is a vital wellspring of renewal, an ever-present stream of unfolding life that cascades into the world in every moment and permeates all of creation. It is this source I was seeking when I went to sit at the river on this day:

I am sitting in the forest at a bend in the river where the canopy has opened. The sun streams down on this fertile nook of dappled green forest floor and the river tumbles over steppingstones into a still pool below. Even amid this endlessly busy soundscape of a sentient forest, there is a stillness and peace in the air. Here in the heart of the forest my entire somatic existence is permeated by the endless chatter of the non-human world; the birds sing, the wind whistles in the leaves and the river gurgles with uninterrupted joy as it makes its way to the lagoon.

Listen to that trickling sound of water tumbling and dancing over the river stones. The sound is mesmerising. It pulls on the inside of your stomach and subdues a restless mind. I came here for a deeper reason today, looking to connect to the sacred voice of this river, to connect with the spirit of this living being. I had seen the spirit of this river before in a meditation a few years back, quite by surprise, a nature deva. It felt like time to go back to her and to see if there was a possibility of speaking to her.

I make myself comfortable, sinking into the riverbank’s lush fernery. Take one deep breath and exhale, focussing on just one breath at a time. The in-breath, the out-breath. Slowly the busy mind is drawn into the heart and the volume turned down. Here I am, feeling the oneness of the body of the earth. The oneness of our shared body. There is a remembrance between us, a familiarity, like my mother’s hands feel on my cheek.

It is the voice of the river I seek, so I allow the sound of the river to envelop me. I feel the sounds in the air like a soft blanket pulled over me, slipping deeper inside, into a zinging, humming inner spaciousness. By now I have buried myself in the riverbank, covered my body with ferns, hidden myself from sight, merged into the forest cathedral of this living landscape. “This is that place,” I think to myself. It’s a timeless place inside, a familiar place of shared biology, shared flesh. Even the couple walking the isolated trail don’t see me when they stop at the bridge to stare into the river below. I feel as if I have become invisible, absorbed by the place. The sounds of the forest and the river become me, the tendrils of the ferns extend from the ground and into the air where they cover my body, as though holding me closer to the ground I will return to one day. Yes, one day soon these ferns will consume my ashes and draw me back into the fertile depths of the earth so that all sense of ‘I’ will be gone forever. And then it strikes me that this river, this forest scene, somehow exists inside me. With my eyes closed and my body cradled in the greenery, I have a palpable sense that all of this exists inside me, literally in the dark and fertile depths of my self. It seems so obvious in this moment, unquestionably true, like a mystery revealed to my forgetful self.

How easily I forget this place inside me, where the river is already present, where all the forest is continuously unfolding from inside me. This eternal place where consciousness spills forth. And oh, how beautifully the river remembers this continuously.

The sounds of the river have a life of their own, they are a portal to the mind of the river, telling a story about its journeying. The riversong takes me on a journey too, takes me somewhere else, to another place, a deep place where the mind is still and the heart is infinite. It is a place that is both here at the riverbend and deep in the infinite timelessness of life. This sentient embrace with the riverbend weaves the past and future in a single unfolding moment. It is as though the whole river stems from this place where consciousness enters the world, where creation originates, like a sacred fountain from which life continuously spills forth into this world.

The singing river is like a skilled weaver, pulling on my heart and teasing out the long threads of connection. I surrender to the deep love I have for the natural world, let go of tensions twisted like a vine in my solar plexus, imagine my flesh melting again into the fabric of this place. A holy decomposition.

The water in front of me is glistening with light as it dances its way toward the ocean. It looks like both water and fire, as the sunlight dances in the rapids. It’s a freefall into one single breathing, living, thinking wild mind, an immersion into the fabric of nature. The light inside this water is the source of creation, the non-physical body of the devic realm, the substrate from which water manifests in this world. I see it clearly, how this light is present everywhere inside the water and how this light is present in everything in existence.

I remember feeling this as a child, slipping effortlessly into and out of the imaginal world, conversing with the non-human realm. It was so natural to let go into one’s imagination and converse with nature. We really do live in a culture of doing, forgetting the wonderful potency of being.

Listen to the river with me: it tumbles over rocks, splashes through the reeds, makes a deep and silent hum of its slow journey to the sea. The sounds of this river are a journey of sensory delights. The tones tumble through my body, like they tumble over the steppingstones. The fall of water over rocks, the hollowness of the waterfall, the deep surging of the channel, the still silence of a pool, the soft tinkling sounds of a trickle. But listen closely, it is also the heavy silence of mist in the air, the raindrops falling through the leaves, the silent depths of the aquifer below. It is the slow rising of floodwaters, the gentle receding of the dry season. It is the rain falling in the mountain, the earth gathering the droplets, the plants drinking from their roots. These sounds are the utterances of the sacred voice of creation. They are a sacred symphony composed by a divine intelligence, weaving endless threads of connection throughout the living world.

The sounds of this scene also contain the collective auditory memory of the river’s ancient lifespan, which is both magically here now, just as much as it leads us back in time to the primordial moments of creation.

Imagine the plethora of sound waves as a magical path, a thread that is connected to this moment where life began, to that place from which it draws its endless renewal, the primordial fountain of youth. This ancient watery melody, older than birdsong, older than the meandering trails of bushbuck, older than this misty forest breath. It takes us back, in the distant past, far away in time. Long before creatures appeared, long before trees reached skywards, the river was here singing. That is the sound of the infant gurgling earth. These were some of its first words, the sounds of its infancy. This is the most ancient language, the language of our origins.

This sound, this magical primordial sound, weaves its way inside you. It has the same sensory similarity as breath in meditation, the familiarity of the flow of blood in our veins. It invokes the familiarity of kinship, shared life, shared soul, the signature of a living heartbeat of a living earth. Look closely and you will see it too, written in the signature of our veins, mapped in our blood vessels, carved in our hearts, the story of the river.

It was this ancient river which gave birth to the cell, which evolved into the forest and eventually into human beings. And our bodies are its mirror. The same story is there in that intelligent genetic code, that divine pattern that shaped and formed the earth and that became a human being. The river speaks of this oneness, this quintessential kinship. It is one body, and we are bodies within this body. This is the divine Julia set fractal of creation.

And just like our spirit rests inside a human body and the human body rests in the earth, so the spirit of a river rests in the body of a mountain, from its high peaks to its alluvial plains. The river’s spiritual birthplace is high in the mountaintops. Its lifespan is a sprightly sojourn from those lonely silent peaks to the endless blue ocean. Sweet trickles, rejoicing song, lighthearted melodies. The deep chanting of serpentine bends. The lilting, surging, cascading and crashing. It is these holiest of songs that take it back home. And in the sparkling melodies of water tumbling over stones there is embedded a voice that is singing the original song of creation, celebrating its aliveness, exclaiming its deep love for the earth. Water loves the ridges of this earth and longs to travel inside the folds of this rocky skin. The sound of this running stream tumbling and surging towards the shore is a love song, a celebration of belonging, of coming together, as close as can be.

And when the river reaches the plains it meanders – because it has all the time in the world – and it makes long oxbows of its spaciousness, carves canyons with infinite patience, turns mountains into vast alluvial plains. And finally, when it merges with the ocean, it has come home. And yet it is always coming into being and coming home, endlessly pouring from the vast creative surging of the river of life.

The young poet Whitney Hanson wishes for love like a river, that twists and turns, changes and flows, is powerful and free but consistently makes its way back to the sea. Life is a river, and we are simply making our way back to the ocean.

Looking out into a garden where impossibly tall palm trees draw long stripes into the sky, as though sketched with delicate cross-hatchings for leaves. The sky above looks like a visible skin gilded with the humidity of the tropics. How does one speak of the fullness of the sky?

My neck stretches to take in the sight of the gigantic clouds that billow upwards. These accumulating forces of heat and moisture, convective sky gods, pregnant with the promise of rain. This sight makes a gasp of my breath.

The wind too makes herself known. She is persistent, always warm, filled with island scents, caressing the cliffs that rise in front of me.

This mountain in front of me feels like it carries the freshness of a newly birthed volcanic earth. These are nothing like the mountains I know from South Africa made of an ancient sea floor and twisted plate tectonics. Here there is the sense of the earth being new, still in a state of emerging from the crust of the growing skin.

Forest creeps and climbs up the steep slopes. Flowers, bougainvillea and frangipani, adorn the view, praising the mountain and sky. Behind me the ocean, a warm tropical sea and a breeze washing over me. It is dusk and the clouds catch alight with fiery hues. A man with a terrible voice sings karaoke, performing Balinese folk songs filled with innocence and joy. The waves join in with his melody, whispering “shh” to the shore. And with that the rain comes. Finally. Feels like it’s been waiting days to fall. The thunder rumbles, warm drops of rain fall on my sunburned skin, my bare chest.

The earth speaks a different language here altogether. A language of being in all places at once, of holding this entire underwater world, this volcanic birthing, these billowing clouds and the voice of the beloved mother ocean. This island holds a certain note of softness that I cannot help but just fall in love with, allowing myself to be seduced by her beauty. I want to point it out to everyone; show them this love that is right here in the center of creation. I want to write words that exclaim Her beauty. Here I feel what many feel when they come to Bali; this cascading fountain of love that permeates everything. Here there is a deeper connection to the act of creation, the act of the world coming into being. 

I feel it like a continuous unfolding of love that both obliterates and constellates in the same moment. A little fragment of this love, even just a scent of it, is enough to whisk away the heart into the greatest of seductions. You have not ever fallen in love until She has turned Her gaze upon you. Just one look and you become nothing, reduced to a fragrant dust, brought to the ground. There is no other state to contain this love other than deep prayer. But sometimes there are words that come, and these are how I help myself to small, bite sized portions of this cascading eruption of magic. 

“Ready my ears to feel your voice
Let your whispers roll over my skin 
I want you. Want your voice inside of me
Let your rolling thunder stretch my throat, 
so that unspoken words gush out
As I praise you with my breathlessness
And when the sky opens
And the clouds recede into stars
And the moon makes dappled shadows
And my heart reaches out
And my breath breathes in
And we touch in this vastness
Then, take me even deeper
I’ll get lost in you with no map 
Let these hands read the braille of your body
Finding paths that take me home”

In these states of falling in love with the Earth, the beauty of this outer world meets my inner world. It is a chiasmic connection. Seeing, feeling, sensing, my body reciprocates. There is a conversation between this beauty outside and this beauty that reflects it in me. And I become the meeting point of this potency. 

Places all have their own magic. Each with its own note of love. And the fragrance of love is present everywhere. To write about Her is the only way I know how to love Her. And as I feel this closeness, this primal bond, the inseparable wholeness, the whole world disappears inside of me. The infinitely big embraced inside the infinitely small.

There is sensuality in this moment. The touch of Her skin and the billion unfolding worlds that dance off the surface of this goddess. Her skin, a magical substance that dances and swirls, a fabric that responds to each word we speak, each state we feel. She is a living goddess of reciprocal entanglement, and we are Her billion eyes looking back upon Herself.

A few nights prior, in the deepening stillness of meditation at Tirtagangga water palace, I sensed a distinct presence of this deep fragrance of the gods. Like nectar that fills the air. A palpable presence. It leaves me feeling emptied and hungry. Every cell inside me calls out with an aching to be filled. My senses feel intoxicated, as though a cloud of sacred hallucinogen has come to rest in the valley of my inner landscape. The world dissolves into white, this sacred mist dissolves the mind. Then I see clearly how the gods are alive and watching us. There the gods show me this cloth made of their spirit. It is the fabric of their world, and I am shown how it has been woven into this world. They show me how those threads are the living substance of everything we know in this world. The threads of this cloth are the source of this earth, the substrate of this mysterious world. They show me how prayers are threads that are woven into this fabric that permeates the material world.  The island is awash with this scent from another realm. I see how it is their prayers that saturate this place. Every household with a temple, every person offering daily prayers. This is love, manifest. And it has the scent of the extraordinary.

And now, looking out to sea in a tropical haze, my attention turns to the wind and I disappear into that other world, the veils of separation drawn back.

The wind washes through me and blows on the embers of my heart. It carries the fragrance of the gods, wafts of stories that capture you, make you yearn to explore. These drifting fragrances from distant places. The wind is free. It tells stories of what it has seen; prayers told at the graveside sharing half a secret, of a life lived in this place. That scent, the smoke it carries, of frangipani, incense and fire wood. It carries the tears from the funeral pyre and it is the story of a soul returning to the ocean of oneness. That scent, it is prayer, it is heartache, it is the end of living and the beginning of being. That scent is the dried tears of the lovers who lament the absence of their beloved. It is the thanksgiving of morning prayer, the sweat of hard work, the sigh of the seasons, the aftertaste of rain. Each particle in that holy wind is a story of praise for creation. 

As the eye of the heart opens, the world comes more alive, each particle in the air is a word being spoken in this love story of creation. Without our prayers uttered in love it would freeze over, all this swirling storytelling of the wind would cease and these words would become meaningless. It is said somewhere that when the mountain looks at god, eyes appear on every stone. So it is with us, when we look upon the earth with this eye of the heart, we become the flesh that reciprocates this seeing and feeling of the world around us. And in seeing with the soul, we merge with the soul, we become this creation, we become the sweet smelling dust of the world. 

And so too it is with longing. When presented with such beauty in this place, every sense becomes a hungry lover, longing for satiety, wanting more of this holy wholeness that is the essence of creation, made so alive by the prayers and offerings. Then, as Rumi says, you “feel your lips becoming infinite and sweet like a moon in a sky” and a spaciousness inside that holds all this beauty. Then you sense your spirit and how it is ancient, how it existed before this world, before this body, how before this ocean lapped to shore your heart was already in love, enraptured, drowning in holy water.

Before the earth became trapped in matter, she too was this scent. She too was the dark, empty night which this love impregnated to form the billion stars. Then the open sky held her, before she was born, and her love made all this place holy. This soil, this tree, this lapping shore are the signs of this great love affair. This is how it is in this place, there is a magical substance in the air of this island that tells the story of Her love affair.

To reflect on Rumi: On this beautiful island the heart learns to love and the hand learns poetry. It is her fragrance that makes the soul want to dance, that sweet dance inside the heart that nobody sees. And when that dance erupts, it become the art of writing love letters.  The birds remember this secret, they sing it in their morning prayers. They know how when one is in love with the earth, anything we utter is really just the longing for Her return. Look, the beautiful flower, the waves rolling in, that forest shade, it is Her we seek, it is Her presence we crave, Her absence we lament. So this is where I find myself now. On the island of love, in love and forlorn, awaiting union, suffering separation, calling Her home. She has made a weeping lover of me.

This morning, I walked a winding trail inside a dense coastal forest. I am fortunate to live right here, so near to this primal natural world, to feel the wildness of nature so close at all times. This place is sacred, it is a verdant unfolding of dappled greenery nestled alongside a narrow stretch of coastline that is home to some of the last remaining primary indigenous forests of South Africa. These forests provide safe retreats for the abundant biodiversity protected by our national parks. Here, you might find the spoor of a leopard and hear stories of the rare sighting of the last remaining forest elephants. The birdlife is extraordinary, almost deafening at dawn. In this wilderness, one feels the touch of primeval earth, the cradle to the heartbeat of ancient life.

The pulse of this forest ushers me into a familiar place inside, where there is a deeper recognition of my own inner wildness. In recognizing our shared wildness, there is a remembrance that we are both made of the same fabric of consciousness. There is a deep kinship with the forest and all living things in this landscape, punctuated by trees, mountains, rivers, and creatures big and small. These woods are soaked in our shared soul, woven throughout everything before me. This kinship always brings me back to love—a deep love for the earth and all living things, a sense of connection to everything that I hold dear in this living world. It is also here in these delicately woven natural spaces that I sense how the forest is like a clear mind holding an original vision of creation. I love how this place is filled with potency and presence. I love the tryst between its fragility and resilience. I love how the forest breathes and then leaves me with the pulsating presence of a pregnant stillness between its breaths. The forest embodies wholeness, connectedness, presence and a burning heart turned by the fingers of God. 

And yet, even though this place is pure wilderness and a place of deep connection, I cannot walk here without a vivid sense of what has been lost. I am surrounded by utter beauty but I feel such a deep missing.

In the forest are the echoes of absent voices; there is a hollow imprint of wild animals that once were part of the fabric of this place. Even in the fullness of this avian orchestra, there is a chorus of emptiness, a palpable void of silence that speaks of what was once here; songs filled with the silent ululations of the missing choir members. Only 200 years ago, this land was an undulating coastal forest, a labyrinthine mass of towering trees. Giant yellowwoods, some up to 1000 years old, punctuated every part of this canopy, perfecting the architecture of a dense understory. Not long ago, the uncharted forest floor stretched for hundreds of kilometers, spilling over into vast thickets and rolling hills. Thousands of antelope ventured out from the thick forest to graze, then disappeared back into this deep green sanctuary of wildness. The Knysna forest elephants once flourished here. But the arrival of the woodcutter and the hunter irrevocably changed this landscape. They set up camps, the trees fell to their axes, and roads were forged through the heart of the forest. And within a heartbeat, the woodcutters’ camps turned into suburbs, and their dirt roads into highways, reaching ever deeper into an ever-growing spillage of urbanization and suburbia.

What man wants, he takes. And if there is an insatiable need to forge a path into the sacred heart of the wilderness, then that path will be made. And in the dust of this path, there is the distinct smell of all the friends of this vast wilderness who are now absent. Their absence now fills the world.

We lose our kinship with nature when we destroy it. The relationship turns sour; the bitter aftertaste of desecration lingers insidiously. We suffer the desecration inside of ourselves and in the outer world because we are actually one and the same being. We are but the earth looking back upon herself.

As humanity encroaches ever forward upon the edge of the wilderness, not only does the footprint of the forest diminish, but the essence of this living being recedes more into her sacred core. There is an essential presence in this untouched wildness that cannot bear the face of man, tarnished by his naming and claiming. And so this wildness perambulates back into herself, withdraws her presence in this physical world. She coils herself into the inner sanctum of her wild heart and fades from the spaces that materialistic man seeks to claim, protecting a sanctuary that his gaze cannot pierce. This withdrawal into herself is a safeguarding of what remains behind, a careful cushioning of the inner essence of her wild heart.

She is the greatest of lovers, and every retraction of her heart shatters the heart of her lovers. We live in the agony of her absence, not knowing why or how we suffer this deep longing for something we inherently know is missing but cannot place. It is this ecologically lovestruck heart that fuels the cry of our souls in the night, this longing for that which is absent, which we know should be here but no longer have the words or memories to describe. That is an ache that the forest carries. That is the ache present in this cathedral of greenery with its myriad singing voices of creatures great and small.

Whilst walking along the sun-dappled path and feeling this deep missing and longing for the return of the wildness, I was touched by the life of the smallest of creatures in this forest: the humble spider. It was as though the spider, the smallest and most delicate of creatures, was telling me a story. It was a story about the ephemeral nature of life, resilience, and love.

I had been cognisant of how my lumbering strides were tearing apart the webs between the trees that had been woven overnight by the spiders. The forest is filled with these gossamer threads, near-invisible lines cast across the path. Each thread is painstakingly crafted across the gaps between trees and I cannot walk forwards without tearing them down. I am reminded that all creatures great and small are equally valued, from the ancient forest soil strata below me with their billion microorganisms to the towering yellowwood architects of this canopy. And, while the forest is so often a story of the trees that grow to be a thousand years old and the wild animals that inhabit this space, paradoxically, the spider’s story is one of tininess and impermanence. The life of these spiders is fleeting, yet their presence is continuous, and their labour consistent. They inhabit this dynamic space in creation where their world of webs is made anew again each night and day. As I walk I watch this story unfold in my minds eye and it dawns on me that these webs are both temporal creations that last only a few hours but are also the very silky fabric of a family lineage that stretches back millions of years. These spiders have always woven their threads and will continue doing so forever. They will never retreat, will not stop this relentless pursuit of being embedded in their God-given territory and performing their innate role in this ecosystem. For me this resilience is the signifier of a wild heart that is simply true to itself without compromise. It is a beautiful testament to the power of the heart, the power of being embedded in one’s true nature where there is no possibility of being anything other than what you are.

I see parallels between our lives and those of spiders, a deep kinship woven into our shared soul. It feels as though, much like the spiders’ webs torn down daily by passers-by, we too face a similar fate: our culture has ceased to respect the ancient forests of mystical wisdom and the intricate webs humanity has meticulously crafted through spiritual practices that nurture love and connection in this world. These gossamer threads, spun from human hearts, are the narratives we have created by living true to the soul’s deeper reality. They are stories of our hearts, interwoven into the fabric of this world, brought forth with the silk of our spirits.

But like the spider webs strung across the path, the love we weave into the world holds no guarantee of permanence. Yet, we can draw lessons from paying attention to the earth and her expressions of love: Nature, embodied here by a spider, persists in living from a place of profound love—unwavering love for all of creation. This deep, true love, undeterred by challenges, emanates from its very essence and purpose. Nature embodies love incarnate. Mother Nature continues, unabated, to love and give herself freely to all life, completely surrendered to her heart, which is steered by the Great Spirit—the thread that unites us all.

Eventually, I reach a bench on top of the peak. I sit down and stare across the most breath-taking landscape, looking out over the national parks onto the lakes of Wilderness below. From this perch I can hear all the birds of the forest below me and as their song unfolds it becomes a conduit to love’s secret hiding place. These are the moments I cherish. I catch my breath and relax into a waking meditation, counting my breaths and drawing my attention into my heart. I feel the need to simply acknowledge how deeply in love with this place I am. My heart is swollen with awe and reverence for this beautiful forest, and it cascades into a love that opens it even wider, stretching it, pulling me deeper into love.

I open my notebook to write haiku:

Opened like a rose, petals unfurling from this bud, soaked in the dawn of love. Love dawns inside and my heart is a waiting rosebud, surrendered open.

In this moment of falling in love with the Earth I invite Her to find a home inside my heart and offer my life work to be surrendered to Her needs. But what is more, for the first time ever I am conscious of a deeper surrendering in my heart to allow myself to be loved and held in return by the Earth herself. 

Dawn birdsong, soft heart
This is Love and I am yours
My heart enraptured.

Heavy rains have descended into the dry Karoo desert in recent months.
The ground has been saturated, caressed by the touch of the clouds, a rare tryst in this arid land where the sky is selfish with gifts of water. The sweet drink served to the body of the earth has momentarily quenched her insatiable thirst. The quintessential scent of a saturated earth now envelops everything in a blissful haze. She feels full and pregnant, her senses heightened and her soul lifted with a fertile euphoria. The beautiful body of the earth seems to have transcended the dry ache of drought and entered into a realm of ecstasy. It is as if the sky has whispered its secrets to her and all she can now do is rejoice. 

The heavy rains have left a blanket of moist fertility stretching across this sentient biosphere, feeding and sustaining a delicate balance of fertile potentiality. The water is a lover that finds its way into her skin, nestling in her undulating folds and saturating her flesh with sweet sustenance. Her hunger for the water seems to have been laying dormant in the multitude of seeds which now come to life.  And as with the uniting of great lovers, this union of rain and earth unfolds in a celebratory kaleidoscope of liveliness, a surge in the creative pulse of the colours of creation. 

After experiencing such abundant rainfall at the cusp of spring an unimaginable number of flowers have taken to blooming. The beauty is immense. It feels like the earth stretches herself open to release every possible potential of her secret inner beauty. And it is the same feeling inside of me. It feels like I am prying this bodily frame open so that I can fit more of this floral blossoming inside of me.

There is so much beauty in the wildflowers. They carry the signature of something deeply sacred and holy, a primordial spiritual essence beyond the concentrated light of the sun. And as I witness this majestic unfolding of blooms all I want is to be more deeply immersed in them, remove all obstacles between myself and their beauty, tear open my chest and place them inside of me. It is not enough to glance at the flowers in passing and remark at their prettiness, I want to consume them wholly. 

This springtime bloom of flowers are a visual beacon, a symbolic signifier that draw me into the mystical language of a conversation with this living earth. This language of the earth points to that same place inside myself that reflects this beautiful outer scene. It is as though there is a place inside of me where I am alive like this blossoming karoo veld. 

I walk a kilometre through the wild open spaces of the karoo scrub gently treading along the paths made by wild creatures, meandering through patches of colour and stopping to admire the beauty in the details beneath my feet or to catch the feeling of a particular place. The feeling of this landscape is like an indigenous songline where the whole world is alive and in conversation with us. My beacon is an impossibly bright patch of sunshine-yellow daisies that have bloomed like a giant oil-painted brush of yellow smeared over the land.  Have you ever seen beauty that pulls you open, that stretches your insides and makes you want more? This day is like that. It feels like there is a veil between my eyes and this beauty and I want to strip it away and be over-exposed to the imprint of this wild canvas of colour. The beauty touches all our senses and then aches inside. The more I look at it the more I need it. Yes, I want this aching beauty to consume me wholly. 

In this field of yellow, mesmerized by the sights, sounds and feelings of being so impossibly alive, there is not a sense of peace and completion but rather a longing, a yearning, a feeling of deep missing. I ask myself how can I be so close to these flowers and yet feel this deep missing? So I lie down inside this dense patch of brightness to meditate on the question buzzing inside of me. I immerse my body into the land, surrender my senses to this place with eyes closed and breathe it in, feel the meadow around me, immerse my mind deeper into my heart which is the only thing big enough to contain this scene of the fertile land. But now there is only more longing inside of me. So there I lie inside this patch of unfurling blooms and yet long to be even closer. It is ecstatic and agonizing, this pain of being pulled open by the beauty and never being satiated.

This agony takes me beyond my body, beyond mind and into the realm of the spiritual. The aching is too much to bear and so one goes beyond this world, this aching flesh, this frail sense of self and into something bigger. I melt into this essence beyond that flower, the state of being that that precedes its form, an essence that rings true in the heart like when you witness a sunrise and hear the dawn chorus of birdsong. 

I think you need to be a lover to really take in the beauty of the wilderness. You see the face of God in the body of the earth. You see Her beauty, Her insatiable attractiveness, Her allure, Her ability to absolutely seduce and you are drawn in, spellbound, in love, in a heartbeat. Only with the eyes of a lover, the appreciation of the lover, do we really see the divine smile of the earth inside a wildflower. She gives to us endlessly, this love that spills out from inside the earth, this divine feminine secret mystery that spills out of her heart and into the world. 

Opening my eyes and returning to the present moment, I am here in the middle of what appears to be an ecstatic orgy of buzzing insects drinking the nectar of these flowers. This feels nothing like the pollination described in a biology textbook. It is intensely alive, filled with ecstasy, an intense feeding, drinking, procreating mess! This pulse of life, this surge of procreation, floods the air as the plants thrust their floral bouquets into the sky searching for pollination, fertilization and the continuation of their kind. The flowers drip with nectar and pollen, saturated in the banquet of sweet things that the birds and insects seek out. It drives the insects into a frenzy. They are entirely consumed in their drinking and eating, rushing about from one flower to another, utterly absorbed in their activity. The nectar of these flowers is irresistible to the insects and birds who become intoxicated in their love for more and more sweetness.

There, look at that yellow daisy with a beetle stuck so far inside you can only see his back legs kicking about. Here, a bee fully laden with its prize, body covered in the golden dust, legs carrying heavy bags of pollen. Look at that bumblebee: the vibrating wings unlock the pollen from that flower. This buzzing sonication is a secret floral password, the key to a lock, a Kamasutra of pollination.  And there: that high pitch buzz in the midday sun, that almost imperceptible silent ringing of these vast empty spaces of the wilderness, carrying the sounds of banqueting and a longing for fullness. 

Now turn your head and witness this audacious orange splash of an aloe in full bloom. One cannot do anything other than be gob smacked at how potent and phallic and wonderfully erotic this inflorescence of a thousand nectar dripping blooms can be. The whole stem soaked in nectar like a fountain of sweet wine. The birds land in the flower and thrust their beaks deep inside, drinking the sweet syrup of the vermillion orange blossoms. Their beaks, their faces, saturated in pollen, the result of their lively dance on the phallus bloom. One can imagine the saturation of colour, nectar and pollen as a magnificent mating ritual, no, a passionate love-making act between bird, insect and flower. Each beak plunged inside the flower bringing a fertile phallus loaded with ripe pollen that fertilizes the waiting ovum.  And I wonder whether they are drunkards, lost completely in their intoxicated states with eyes only for the one thing they want more, more, more of. It is the great seduction and they are powerless against Her charms.

I lie here wondering about the flower, thinking that maybe this plant feels it too, the orgasmic ecstasy of having the birds and bees tongues prying out its sweet nectar, knowing that soon it will be impregnated with seed that will fall to the ground and continue this great cycle of life. This is the intimate dance of the plant’s love lives. They are separated from each other, lacking legs to visit their lovers and so they get the insects to do the bidding of their seduction and lovemaking. There is a oneness between flowers, birds and insects in this moment, utterly inseparable, like they are an extension of the collective will of the flora to procreate. This is the face of God, not some disembodied deity in heaven, but a living, breathing, feeling, creative and passionate goddess that we call earth. This is He, this is Her. 

In this liminal space I feel the innate creative energies of procreation laid bare in the floral kingdom. I realize that if one can dismiss the scientific courtesy of botanical nomenclature and imagine the flowers with the eye of the erotic, and with the lens of a living oneness, then these flowers become the living, breathing Kamasutra of creation. I start to understand that seeing without witnessing the sentience of our Earth and her erotic dance of procreation is to miss a vital way of seeing and to erase the feminine mysteries.

And as the day wears on and the flowers open and close, the night reveals its own sweetness. The frenzied hive of activity of the daytime has passed but it has left a sweetness in the air. The insects and birds will rest tonight, safely in their homes provided in an infinite abundance of places inside the folds of the earth. The fire outside crackles, sparks rise like stars being released from creation, floating back up into the sky. And above me there is a planetarium like no other. The air is crisp, clean, there is no light pollution for miles and the stars drift and float and wink in the sky. This work that I witnessed in the flowers today, it has left this whole place spent, and yet fresh and vibrant and whole. The fabric of the air held together with mystery, with satisfaction, with the lively potency of the dark black of night. Even here in the blackness, one feels the pulse of the flowers around us, as though all the insects and birds are dreaming of them and filling the night with the scent of their remembrance.

Set aside your thoughts and bring your attention to this page. Sit for a moment and be still with me. I want to share with you a story of the birdsong at dawn and the secrets it tells:

It is barely light outside—the crack of dawn. First light reveals the faint outline of the distant mountains as the emergent sun draws a masterful stroke across their monolithic forms. Everything is still, and the lake below is a perfect mirror of the dawn sky. This moment feels freshly squeezed with the potency of a new day, a rebirth of light after a long winter night. I love these moments, poised at the cusp between dreamtime and waking—an enchanted moment where the magical nature of the symbolic world has not yet closed the doorway between our world and the next.

There is a growing anticipation in this empty pre-dawn stillness. I know that any minute now, I will hear the first call of my beloved Cape Robin-chat permeating the air, proclaiming the arrival of a new day. I love this bird more than any other because she is the first to awaken. I feel like she and I are secretly allied in our love for the dawn stillness, both enchanted by the fertile potential that the new day holds.

My home is perched above a lake, which is a bird sanctuary on the edge of a national park, nestled between the ocean, mountains, and virgin forest. Outside my window, there is a tree with a bird-feeding station filled with chopped fruits, seeds, sweet red hibiscus tea, and cheese. These are my offerings to the small, feathered characters and choristers who decorate this garden with their presence. The small gathering of birds has turned into a veritable morning conference of birds since I first arrived here a few months ago. I love their company, and they love my gifts of food.

The Cape Robin Chat begins her song prompted by the mounting infusion of dawn light. Of all the birds here, she is the first to sing, rousing the hearts of every other bird to partake in the daily song of creation. She sings so sweetly and clearly: first, a steady low tone that resonates with the still dawn sky, and then a variety of notes masterfully woven into a mesmerizing tapestry of sounds that mimic the calls of other birds. I lie in bed imagining that she is performing the roll-call of the other birds who should be present in the garden, waking them from their slumber to join her in song. It doesn’t take long before she is joined by a variety of other performers. I don’t know them all by their songs, but I recognize the gentle, surging symphony. Like snowflakes, no two mornings are the same. Each performance is like a different poem expressing gratitude for the new day. I have seen them: the hoopoe, butcher bird, weaver birds, the rain bird, wagtail, boubou, doves, mousebirds, forest canaries, the bokmakierie. But in the darkness of dawn, it is only their voices that I hear, and the names don’t matter because the symphony is so sweet.

My morning ritual is simple: I listen to the birdsong chorus with my eyes closed, taking one hundred deep breaths and repeating a silent mantra. This breathing practice is designed to take the energy of the mind into the heart, dissolving the mind in love, which is the most powerful force in the universe. This simple morning ritual, forged over years of practice, has become like a thread entwined with the dawn’s birdsong. This thread is what I seek out to find my way back, to return to the root of my existence. With each breath, there is a practice of tending to the garden of the soul, making myself present at the place where my soul enters this world, weaving the birdsong of the world into this place, finding that still center where there is no past or future, no mind remembering or imagining. It feels like the birdsong is resident there, inseparable, woven like a fabric into the space of my heart, like a sunbird’s nest with down feathers, moss, and gossamer threads.

From this still center, I imagine the birds’ breath in the morning air, carrying these notes from the inside of their being out into the cold morning air. Their misty morning breath feeds into the air like ink drops in a glass of water. I look inward at the fertile black screen of my imagination and fall into a visual banquet of birdsong imagery. There I see with the inner eye how the tapestry of birdsong spills out of them into the substance of life, across the globe as the dawn light penetrates the darkness. This image is of a living chorus of birdsong, of ancient song lines that are alchemically potent as they transmute the fertile darkness into new forms. It feels as though the very sound of birdsong awakens the whole world anew each moment. I see how the sun’s light touches the birds and how they erupt, spilling this magical light into song and bird breath, awakening the magic in the air, singing the light of creation into this world of material form.

This is somehow a truly hopeful and life-affirming image of the world awakening anew in every moment of the day as the sun rises. It is a reminder that the song of creation is a continuously unfolding symphony of an ever-evolving choir made up of billions of birds.

Imagine it with me: As the light touches the horizon across the globe, bringing the dawn to each dark square foot of earth, the birds erupt in a wave of song. This song begins with the appearance of the light and travels across the entire earth every day. Like a tidal wave of dawn light, this wave of birdsong circumnavigates the globe perpetually. For millennia, this dawn chorus has never ceased—an endless choir song of celebration and remembrance that seems to have a magical ability to wash the world anew.

These are the mystical song lines that bring the world into existence in every moment, that rebirth the world into this present time. The songs are the morning prayers of creation that the birds dutifully perform every day, the prayers of Mother Earth dutifully performed through the voices of the birds. And perhaps this is why the simple birdsong is a music that pours through us, watering the garden of our hearts, leaving the ground and sky dancing. It is the primal remembrance that life is fundamentally holy and sacred, sentient and precious, ancient and wise, filled with the ability to renew itself again and again.