14. Reflecting Matobo

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - 

an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe.

I had a dog during a period of my life when I really needed a good friend. Although he died young, he helped me through the turbulent teenage phase, and he helped me well. Jack had an incredible and uncanny way to sense my mood. On those vibrant exuberant spring days so characteristic of the lowveld where I grew up, he would adjust his behavior either to complement or to accommodate mine. When I was happy Jack would bounce alongside me, panting in anticipation. When I was sad or lonely he would simply walk next to me, watching me, to be there for me, strong and powerful, the rock against which I could lean. When I sat at a waterhole watching a herd of impala drink, he would push his body right up against mine and lean his head on my shoulder with a wet nose in my neck, breathing gently onto my skin. That would have its magic effect on me and soon my mood would improve, and invariably Jack would run ahead in the footpath, towards home, happy with his personal achievement, wagging his tail because his master was in a better mood.

 Many years have past since I spent a real thought on Jack, that is until I got to know Matobo better. As with my dog, Matobo senses my moods and, more importantly, my needs. My mood is reflected in the atmosphere as I move through this incredible landscape. How is it possible that this place can easily mold itself around the emotional needs of a man, in fact of all the people there?

I go to Matobo as an escape from the sadness in me… and Matobo accepts me and reacts in a gentle way, offering me comfort and guiding me through the rough parts in my heart. He accepts me as I am without rejecting my negative emotions. Instead, he works with them and gently, gently makes me understand, accept and handle those emotions. Subtly, he shows me the blue sky and the new fresh leaves, a gust of wind may bring new smells and who can remain sad when you smell the first rain on dry soil?

I once went to Matobo to seek peace, cause I was angry at life, angry at what happened to my mother, angry that life is unfair and walked long and hard through the rocky landscape, and this time Matobo reflected my anger. Again my feelings were not rejected, simply accepted and dealt with. The thorns of the acacias ripped through my skin, bit into, and tore bits of leather from my shoes. The granite rocks, hot in the midday sun, reflected my own anger in heat, and where I had to lean against the rocks to regain my breath it burnt like the fury in me. The place was angry and he was not afraid to show me his anger. I sensed his immense anger and it shocked me into silence. I stopped to think. Was Matobo angry for my own reasons? Or was he angry because of his own reasons? Perhaps the grass that was burnt, the rhino that were poached or the gold panning in the rural areas, scarring its surface? No matter the reasons for his fury, I could feel it in the trees and rocks and boulders. I could hear it in his angry roars. The incessant cicadas were screaming it out in frequencies and decibels that befit the anger of the behemoth.

I thought about my own anger. I tried to justify it, fight it out, even screamed it out but my own human voice faded in the rocks and did not carry like the roar of a lion or the call of the fish eagle. It faded into insignificance and fell limp at my feet. I was defeated. Defeated by anger.

Matobo understood and allowed me space. Allow does not mean pamper. It does not mean he agreed and supported my anger. He only reflected it, showing me what it is, showing me the futility - the lion does not roar its anger, nor does the fish eagle call his anger over the echoing valleys. They communicate in peace and harmony, and therefore the valleys are prepared to perpetuate those good sounds, amplify them and echo them. But my anger was simply absorbed and muffled in the thick vegetation. There is no harmony in the voice of human anger!

Just as my dog many years ago coached me out of my anger, Matobo did it too. Once you vented your anger, fought the fury of it and the blood on your arms and legs dry up and can be scratched off, exposing the torn skin, then all you have from your blind fury is the burning sensation of thorns and nettles and abrasions from sharp unforgiving granite. The rage of fury at least brings some understanding, even if it is only the understanding of defeat.

Humbled by this experience I lay on my stomach amongst the ever-present lichens and let their brilliant colors permeate my heart and mind. Matobo, is like a great big mirror, a channel of vision straight into your heart and mind. In its wisdom it allows you to see yourself the way you are. It reflects the real you, and many times that is not what you want to see. For it is this image we have within us that we want to hide from the rest of the world.

Matobo however has a way to help you deal with it. At first it will show you who you are, what you look like, then it will allow you to go through your motions and tantrums… but slowly it will reel you in. You will walk out on top of a large rock/dwala, into the breeze. The anger will suddenly drain out of you, induced by the cool breeze in your face. You will breathe in deeply, perhaps for the first time today. Your mood will changes as you allow this place to guide you and mold you back into the shape you ought to be. Just allow it. Don’t fight it for longer than you need to. Bend your ways like the water bends the reflections of the reeds in the early morning. It will slowly bring you around the way the wind flows through the valleys, then it will show you the other side, the better side. The beauty within.

13. Matopos Symphony

Really good music is characterized by the story it tells and the depth of the story is often created by the punctuation - the silences between the important parts in which there is time for your imagination to color in the extra spaces. At first glance the boulders in Matopos seem to be randomly distributed but when you look carefully there is rhythm, rhythm in their distribution and placement. The huge stones provide the overall rhythm, while the smaller components, the clumps of trees and thicker vegetation along the drainage lines, provide the support music. Individual trees and grasses are the backstage singers and minor instruments and all of them contribute to an immense symphony…

Early morning, the orchestra members clean their instruments, gently tune them, and find their place on stage. When you wake up early, and perhaps go scratch amongst the embers to blow a little warmth into the fire, you hear them slowly, almost self consciously, initiating their role as young members of the cast. The other morning I was looking over the lake as the first light struck a chord on the still water. Almost at once a group of firefinches cleaned their tiny instruments and after a few haphazard attempts got their act together and were engaged in a predawn ensemble of soft melodious sounds, almost as soothing as the first warm coffee over my own hoarse voice. As their endeavors intensified and they became more bold, they seemed to trigger a series of other feathered musicians who either reluctantly started talking amongst each other like the guinea fowl or contributed more boldly like the early morning black colored barbet duet. And then the light on the black water reflects the sky and suddenly it is day and everybody contributes with great vigor.

It is an amazing time, when the orchestra is all settled and the conductor has that lovely expectant expression. He raises his hands and all is quiet. You know what is about to happen. The babblers have fallen from their midnight perches and drop to the ground in a great joyous chorus. The conductor’s hair fall over his face and he closes his eyes. On cue, a fish eagle calls and the trumpeters bring a earthly melancholy to the tune - this is the music of life! 

I walk down to the water and the mood changes. The sounds from the water birds are soft like the feathers of the cattle egret. The rhythmic wingbeats of some white-faced ducks sweep past in unison. They circle around as the conductor coordinates their flight and then a burst of whistles mixes with the sound of gently parting water as their aerial course transitions into the new medium. The music itself slowly changes. It becomes the gentle stuff you often hear in really good restaurants. Its there and it is good, but it does not penetrate the mind, only the heart.

Very little is out of place here. Even the barks of a distant troop of baboons are welcomed.  The piano man looks up and sensing the new mood produces a new gutsy rhythm and the young baboons climber over their rheumatism-ridden grandmothers who are searching for a spot of limelight to warm their old bony hips. An almost inaudible buzz draws my attention closer and a brightly dressed dragonfly warms his thorax muscles and prepares for his early morning aerial assault on some unsuspecting insect.

I realize my intense connection with this world. Each and every one of these sounds, like the love songs of our younger days, reminds me of an important phase or event of my life. The memories of a lifetime can be wrapped up in the sounds of a single day. The guinea fowl’s song belongs in the same place in my heart as my grandfather’s big hands, his smoky beard and the gentle laugh in his eyes as he used to guide me on my first hunts as a child. The rhapsody of frogs near the water takes me back to nighttime fishing with my father, quietly being together and satisfied with each other’s presence. The cattle egrets tell me of the not-so-distant Ndebele farmers, their cattle still safely in the wooden kraals. I see the steam being blown from their noses, their bells will begin to toll soon. Later today the cicadas will take me back to my days in the southern Kalahari, the incessantly hot and endless desert. I smiled deeply inside the first time a barking gecko announced its presence here in Matobo too. The high cry of the eagles takes me back to my days at university and my ornithologist friends with their falcons and eagles. Tonight the owls will take me back to my young boy-man days, alone in my own private outside room, a simple place with a corrugated iron roof, where I became a man listening to the owls and the nightjars, the air often punctuated with the calls of jackal or the lonely whoop of a hyena. That is the best part of my day, the night, when the large groups of musicians have gone to bed, and only the smaller quartet of owls and crickets play their chamber music while we sip deep red wine and let the stars keep score of the day’s events.

12. The scale of life.

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - 

an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe.

As I sit in my son’s sailboat on Mtshelele dam in Matopos, a tiny insect reminiscent of a mayfly perches on the clear water amongst the lilies near me. It does not even create the tiniest of ripples on the surface of the water. I watch this little critter for an instant or two before it shoots off into its own vast world. Instinctively I lift my gaze to take in the entire scene around me. I look up at the massive granite rocks on the other side backed up by an almost endless rolling landscape of hills and mountains and once again I am struck by the scale of this place. Go up one more level from this tiny insect fulfilling her life on a tiny part of this relatively small reservoir of water and this little dam becomes as small as my mayfly. Above a fish-eagle calls and I look up at his world spanning an area that would probably make Matopos itself seem limited. At his level my mayfly is insignificant… or is it?

Scale is often a very difficult concept to integrate or grasp when challenged with a large variation of dimensions or distances, heights and depths. Although we see very well in three dimensions, that capacity often gets distorted in complex environments and visual confusion may set in. We easily loose our ability to judge the size of exceptionally large things, such as a vast expanse of dunes, or a massive mountain range… Sometimes I think most people just give up, and focus simply on the surface, because the deeper layers make the world too complex to comprehend. Matopos itself is not nearly as vast as the Kalahari or Namib deserts, or the Drakensberg. In terms of geographical phenomena Matopos is relatively small. But the vast array of dimensional variety one has to deal with in a short period of time or over a very short distance is astounding. This multidimensionality is probably one of the main reasons it has been declared a world heritage site! It’s simply amazing the way the place is put together.

Not only is the scale of the structural components enormous, the scale at which things happens here is immense! From minute, microscopic to massive mountain sized repetitions of the same general theme… There are only so many ways in which granite can be formed and only so many in which it can be eroded, and only so many ways in which it can be stacked or ordered. However, add to this the continuous scale from millimeters to centimeters all the way up to kilometers in pretty much all the combinations possible, then you have many things going on at the same time. And that is only when you contemplate the rocks! Add to this the multitude of insects, other invertebrates, small vertebrates, the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals from smaller than my little mayfly friend on his patch of lilies all the way to white and black rhinos that you may see from time to time… All of these can be seen in context when you place them into their little boxes on the food chain and tied together by their roles in the complex ecology of the natural world. Add to this the plant life from the lower forms (such as my beloved lichen and mosses, sticking it out in the harshest of environments in this place but contributing massively by pioneering new habitats and painting this enigmatic place with brilliant colors millimeter by millimeter per year) to the grasses and the more advanced plants all the way to the large trees. Some acacias bind life-giving nitrogen while others increase the structural world by supporting eagles’ nests and even the tiny flycatchers and the ever audible babblers. Just like the lichen, but much more noisily, they paint my mind with beautiful colors… All of these are incredibly interconnected and in my mind if you change something here, the effects can be seen elsewhere, if not today or tomorrow then somewhere in the future in the complex interactions that make up this incredible beast. Thus, the structural scale also determines the scale of the dynamics and processes at play here.

Then, as I begin to think that I have a vague hold on the construct of this place - from the tiny organisms that make up a single lichen to the rock they established themselves on to the hill itself, the valley between them and the subsequent valleys - just then in the distance the thunder announces another dimension to this world. I lie in my tent and watch as the immense lightning bolts crash through the rocks and echo in the valleys. I sit up and watch as the world braces itself for the next thunderous attack. I think of my delicate mayfly and I think of my vibrant lichens holding on to those rocks and those rocks holding on to larger ones! We have to keep this place safe, all places like these… from the lichens and the mayflies to the rhinos, the rocks and the little dam all the way up to the lightning, as well as the processes that renders these incredible components a functional system.

Just then a bolt of light floods the plains in glorious light and for a moment I see my world as if in the light of day. For that fleeting moment, like the flash of my own camera, this world is etched into my mind - a still image of my life. The clouds, where the lightning originated, the earth accepting it, exchanging their electric loads and I think of my soil science professor and the nitrogen released by the bolt of energy. I think of the role of the fresh water finding its way into the soil with the vital nutrients it contains. I think of them finding their ways into the stream and into the dam in which we will sail again tomorrow.

11. Matobo’s complex mind.

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - 

an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe.

Matobo’s complex mind.

Often when I sit on a high vantage point overlooking Matobo, I look at the complex geomorphology and I think that this is what the human mind looks like… A multidimensional space in which magic happens all the time. With ‘looks like’ I am actually referring to the interplay between form and function.  This is where structure defines function at many scales or levels. Cast a lazy eye over Matobo from a high vantage point, then squint so as to blur the scene, get it all out of focus and you will begin to see the patterns, the larger structure, repeating itself over the landscape into a pleasant predictability like good music. Within this structure, lies its function. But you will only see the function when you engage with it at a lower level… and over a longer period or time. In science we have learnt a lot about structure and function… the two concepts teaching us about the other. Look at structure and you may be able to predict function. Understand the function and you may be able to predict the structure. The brain probably functions like Matobo because the structure and the function of these complex environments are closely linked.

The clouds and the rocks playing their games.

Let's look at memory for instance… those streams have been there for eons… they may not channel water all the time, but the structure is there and the structure defines the function.  So, with or without the precious water, we still define and recognize the specific structure as a “stream” or “dry river bed”, although there is no stream of water flowing. Although the structure may actually change over the time, it is relatively stable, but the point is, it is always visible. Function may only be evident periodically when we see the water flow. Yet the water which so obediently flows within the boundaries of those streams have probably never been there before… they don’t necessarily know the way,  yet they obey, they observe the rules and the water will always flow within the same defined system of channels…. Over and over, season after season the rules of the system will be followed.  Such are the thoughts in the human mind… the neurons and the millions interconnection between them establishes the structure, through learning and then knowing the thoughts are channeled through known pathways, strengthening them, reinforcing the interplay between structure and function… they flow through channels carved from the memory of your mind, flowing in known patterns and generating predictable feelings, actions and reactions… The way it should be, the way it has always been.

Tiny gullies in granite rocks...
millions of years of chemical and physical change.

Similarly, the cycles of annual grasses reminds me of my own thoughts. Seeds lie dormant and then they germinate all at once, triggered by some stimulus.  Some die young, but others establish and grow, produce luscious green biomass, then set seed and senesce, mimicking the cyclic nature of our thoughts and even our lives, at a much higher level.  Some knowledge or information may not be upfront in our conscious minds, they may not be on the surface all the time, but when needed they can be brought back, they can germinate from deep within the subconscious mind.  Like riding a bicycle after many years, or remembering a poem or a song from a long time, suddenly it''s all there again… they have been there all the time. From the dark rich soil of the valleys the grass will grow when the rains fall upon them. Similarly, our minds will dig up the old answers and emotions… When triggered, the structure of our brain will illicit the response, and perform its function… the thoughts will be channeled from small trickles of water, into little streams and rivulets and when they all come together, they merge into raging torrents. The power of the mind is almost unlimited and collectively it can change the world!

Tiny streams converge, just as the branches of trees
split up into smaller ones... 

From my vantage point I also see something else. In many places and at many scales you can clearly see how the ecosystem heals itself. Often the structure is altered, from small scars where an eland raked his horns against a tree, gum is secreted to cover and heal the wounds in the bark, or after larger scale and major calamities; through fire or drought, the ox drawn plough or small scale mining, what ever is the structure, and together with it, the function is compromised. Eventually, the veld will recover itself, literally and figuratively.  The first layer consists of annual grasses and soft forbs, pioneers, like those people who first settled here… opening up the place for the next generation to settle and establish themselves. While it is far clearer to see in the real world where bark heals, where moss and lichens covers vehicle tracks on rock surfaces, it's less visible in the mind, but it is just as important, if not more - the process of healing and recovering… the functioning of one's mind. As the mind is controlled by neurons and impulses, millions of them, independently they synchronize their efforts following known courses, to ease the pain, dilute anxiety and soothe sadness, to bring back balance and eventually re-establishing happiness and expected functionality. 

Placing yourself on top of these rocks is an amazing feeling,
leaving you feeling small, yet its exhilarating beyond comprehension.

As I look over Matobo with a squinted blurry eye, I try to decipher the relationship between form and function and using it to analyze my own confused mind I learn a lot. I’ve learnt that you need to understand that the water will find the little streams, they will adhere to the laws of this world and if you don’t interfere too much they will find their way to the greater rivers and will serve their purpose.  I have learnt that the functional ecosystem can heal itself from the leaves picked off by the giraffe or even the elaborate middens of the white rhinos may impact locally but heal in general through the increased cycling of dung and nutrients. The pioneers will come and prepare the land for the next generation of vegetation which will increase the functionality and productivity of the system. These things happen because it is the way of nature if we’ve not knocked it out of its orbit too far. So I actively use Matobo as the ecological inspiration to the spiritual maintenance of my own mind. The most important lesson is a simple one, trust - just trust that the normal processes will take a hold of itself and it will accrue like the water in the streams and the smallest of seeds germinating together to create new life from the rich dark soils. Trust that the scale at which the small things accrue into wide landscape scale processes will control the negative and the unhealthy. Trust that where it can not correct the wrong or rebalance the system, it will at least heal the wounds.

Soft light on the rocks and vegetation in the late afternoon makes for a lovely soft mood....

The different layers in this photograph reminds me
of the pages of  a book, they are all similar,
but tells different parts of the same story.

The colors of these rocks are water stained patterns
displaying Matobo's passion for art! ,-) 

Each rock placed where they belong -
like pieces on a chess board.

Layers upon layers... like thoughts in the human mind,
they fade with distance.

Squint your eyes on this little scene and it becomes a massive
landscape with ridges and valleys and clumps of forest...

The patterns in the distance makes me think of the patterns
you find in music or poetry or song... 

Its almost impossible to capture the complexity of this place,
and its totally impossible to capture the scale of the place. 

I have posted this photo in the last blog too - here is a different rendition.
(I am not posting it again 'cause I think its good photo,
its more cause this is a particularly special place.)

I love the way the paper thin bark peals off
the stems of these trees. It reminds me of
the layers of thoughts and memories of the past...