Johannesburg - Like a ball of fire levitating, surreal, spellbinding to the senses and enchanting - I caught the most mesmerising of sunsets at Melville Koppies last week.
The grandeur when this majestic flying flame, inquisitive golden disc, peers through the horizon and how its rays undrape a cloak of darkness and glimmer into light - like birth, like the reincarnation of “let there be light”.
What brought me there on that chilly winter morning is as sacred as the deal I have made with God, or Allah, or whichever name your people refer to their maker.
What brought me there is LOVE, and a testament that even in pain, it exists.
I was brought there by a sacred testament embodying the laws of nature, and it came in human form; with wrinkles for smiles, thousands of sunrises in her eyes, and sunsets too. She has hair white as snow; a childish nostalgia of wisdom I associated with kung fu masters who wore hair and beards of the same shade. She came bearing a heart filled with joy and a gleam in her splendour, as though she was emitting an energy I recognised - what namaste is.
Her name is Wendy Casrterns, for 25 years she has been administering the Koppies.
She said she always looks forward to reading #PoeticLicence, and that there was a lot of pain in my words when she read the one about my grandmother having masterfully conquered selective memory, forgetting that her husband died, and it keeps her alive - a catch-22 of hanging on to every breath, waiting for her lover of over 70 years to return, or dying and seeing him again.
Wendy, who is as old as my grandparents had been in love, as benevolent as she is wise, had suggested to me an article on the mental healing properties of walking in pristine nature, to feel and see the vibes of nature, such as found at Melville Koppies.
Is it deja vu when childish nostalgia is relived, or is it manifestation?
I remember a kung fu movie I watched recently, The Yin Yan Master; Dreams Of Eternity, it opens with the text, “names are the shortest spells in the world”.
We have a similar proverb in my culture, bitso-lebe ke seromo (a bad name is an omen).
Wendy means friend, and I have found one in a testament, in her.
I didn't go to Melville Koppies alone to catch that transfixing, trancelike sunrise; I couldn't come empty-handed to watch the work of my maker - I went with LOVE, I suppose that is as good a name for a good omen.
I am enchanted by the element of her magic, she teaches me the meaning of her spell.
The learning I am doing is part of the deal that I made, a deal to learn how to love, and I am melting away my old ways, coming to terms with all the equal and opposite reactions to my every action, one sunrise at a time.