Karoo Nights
It’s barely 8am and a hot, sticky, wet ooze is pouring out of the air. We retreat into the shade of her generous open lounge and she turns on the rattan leafed fans. The air begins to slur, a barely perceptible rustle of the hair on our arms. The middle fan croaks out of synch while it’s neighbours quietly whoosh around. She glances up towards the errant fan, her neck seemingly extending, muscles and veins clearly visible. It only adds to her allure, the shimmer of sweat mixed with the salty remains of the morning swim. Her hair a tousled lump sitting atop the striking face, all chiselled lines and, parked quietly in all that tanned beauty, a pair of the palest blue eyes. She turns her face towards me, rising neatly from the couch and says, ‘a dried leaf, I’ll get the ladder.’ I just nod, not really sure what she’s said, lost in the perfection of the moment. She wafts off, in her train an aroma of the sea, wet kikoy and the faint traces of the frangipani tucked in behind her ear. I say a silent prayer for a dervish that is as much a masterpiece of creation itself as she is an ardent student and prophet of some of its deepest meanings. A being, being unabashedly and entirely immersed in being a fragment of Life’s heart. As Gibran would say, I am in the heart of G-d.
Eventually the ladder gets opened up, but only after having to move some furniture around and the dried leaves are gently removed and end up crushed into a nearby flowerpot hosting a bougainvillaea. We resettle ourselves into the oversized couches in the cool shade of the covered patio, the fans now swooshing the calming grace of moving air onto our gently cooling skin. In a bit, I go into the kitchen and concoct some water, mint, cucumber and ice and bring it out. I serve it with a flourish and she sees my flourish and raises me a garnish of yellow and orange nasturtiums picked out the nearby bed. We sip in the silence of a steamy hot summer morning in a little village on the periphery of Durban. I think to myself that the hallmark of a dervish and in fact, likely of a prophet too, is that they have a tendency to bring something otherworldly to even the simplest of thoughts, words, feelings and deeds. They not so much hold space as occupy it with effortless ease and such grace, you might be forgiven for thinking they have manifested this special moment just for you.
Of course there’s no such thing, the moment is the moment itself, happening right now and for however long you can sustain it. In fact, some believe that a moment is the same as a lifetime. And of course you co-create the moment by your being too, positively, apathetically or negatively. What a dervish does is sprinkle the magic dust on the cupcake to make it not just a cupcake but a feast for the senses, your being, the space and time, illuminating the moment. The cupcake is transformed from a collection of ingredients into Life’s sacred bread. The water into ambrosia itself. Her company becomes an invitation to sit at the feet of the Master herself. Your being is raised by the grandness of the moment — even a tarnished soul and a jaded heart are sparked into a renewed beating as you witness manifest the moment you have yearned for. Yourself present, as you never even dared to dream. You are being grown into yourself before your very eyes and deep into your closed off heart and beyond into the neatly partitioned-off bits of your mind. You are being unmade and reconstituted into what you not just wished to be, but what you are in fact and have always been. A dervish will do all this and more unto you. Silently and with a smile.
Being unmade in order to be remade into what you were always intended to be. Like a survivor classic car, with wear and evidence that it has been enjoyed. With patina that comes from being put to use to do what it was designed for, for what it was made for. To be packed with a few bags, the bare essentials to live beautifully, loads of water and a pair of souls enamoured with each other and by the offer to spend a few nights out on a kopjie, somewhere in the vast Karoo. Alone and with the air, soil and sky. With the stars and the summer desert blooms. With dry, baking hot days and the stillness of the perfectly cool evenings. With the blazing sun shimmering the horizon into a mirage of camel trains and herds of buck migrating. Into a pride of desert lions crossing and whole herds of elephants stretched out in front of you. Of quiver forests marching towards an oasis. To laze in the shade of a shepherd’s tree and feel the crunch of sweet thorns as you walk through low bush. To inhale deeply of the natural aromatics. To breathe in dust and breathe out peace.
In the depth of night, to lie still and quiet under the blazing canopy of the Milky Way, words lost to the magnificence of seeing all of a fraction of creation laid out in the vast sky. To see the fizzing, popping energy of the universe shoot past your eyes in a dying star. Carrying in its blazing, glorious end the deepest, most tender hopes of every pair of eyes its final journey takes it past. To hear in the distance the howls and other sounds of a whole host of animals, insects and birds that this space is home to. To listen and be present in the entire cacophony of a silent Karoo evening. To be again and again drawn into the night, and tossed about in its mystery and magic until you’re floating peacefully on your back in this ocean of a desert. Gently accepting your infinitesimally small self in this unbelievably vast being of the Earth that pulses and resonates with that which is alive within your very being. Your umbilical cord reattached. You’re once again gently cradled in Life itself.
That’s kinda like what a dervish does; they take you from this sticky humid moment into another, different moment with effortless ease and hold you there with gentle grace. Indeed, it is a thing to be ‘in the heart of G-d.’
Maybe that’s what Simone Biles meant when she said: “There’s more to life than gymnastics.”
Karoo Nights is based on a chance morning encounter and, it’s endlessly radiating ripples on the placid calm of a glassy ocean.
© Jesh Baker, 2021
