Tour Guide, Khorixas, Namibia
| 4 mins read
Meet another guide on the Rim of Africa - Jess Tyrrell:
"Walking in mountains I find that ordinary sentences and writing no longer feels suitable. I've heard many a person say that they have been rendered a poet spending time out-of-doors. Poetry seems to be the only language that can speak about things that are older than words.
Indeed, the Cape fold mountains speaks in a language older than words. To hear it a slowing down is required. One cannot make this happen. There is no action to be taken. You simply have to be here.
I see that when we go back to living outside for a time it naturally begins to happen. Time slows with the rising and falling of the sun. The familiar faded green of my tent offers shelter if weather comes in, but if not I always sleep under the stars. These hieroglyphs are the origins of philosophy. I have my night-time ritual of waiting to see a shooting star until I let myself close my eyes. The nearby stream's melody of a thousand popping-song frogs, who sound like stars would if they could sing is a lullaby. The sky here has a special lens on the spring constellations. They are my time-piece. I wake up naturally when Orion is peaking above the eastern horizon and he signals the dragons breath of dawn, the first bird song and a new day of the Unknown. Oh that first cup of tea with sips of mountain air.
The rhythm of the simple ritual of walking stirs the echo of old memory. The days dependable rhythms re-calibrate my own. Here it is we who adapt to the rhythms of life that are around us. There is a deep relief in doing this. As if some internal balance is restored. It is like I place myself in the right proportion to life, in relationship. A participant of wider circles.
I let my eyes wander as I walk, eyes resting on real horizons, ears shed their city filters and the skin feeling subtler touches of sun and breeze. There's mystery that lives around the caves here. In this place the only traces of other humans are the records of those who called this land home, the Bushman who have etched and painted their knowledge of a way of living in relation to all of life on the surrounding red-orange rock.
Smells become vibrant. As the sun heats the day the mysterious purple-chappies-bubblegum-scented-mountain-pelargonium air delights my nose. Wild rosemary and bucchus of the afternoons. The luminous yellow inner glow of leucadendron days enliven my eyes and the clicking stream frogs as we pass small streams invite my hearing to tune in. A lemony evening and I am stopped in my tracks by the vibrant stillness. It is like the earth is holding her breath in wonder. There is a parliament of three owls holding long and important conversations in this quiet.
Guiding on the Rim of Africa has become for me an annual orange touchstone of sun-baked, honey coloured rock and the homecoming smell of its scented air.
A touchstone is a marker, a line in the sand, which, after the passing of time one can use to see what has changed in ones life, what has shifted, fallen away and been born. Whether walking the Rim of Africa for the first time, or the umpteenth time, this is one of the things that I always find here - personal clarity, I recognize growth in perspective, and I rediscover an appreciation of the graces that another year of life has bestowed on me.
These simple moments that could have gone unnoticed had I not slowed myself.
I have been reminded to trust my own human nature through nature; showing ways to mark the transitions through life. I have learned that if we pay attention to the natural world we have a dependable field guide for aliveness and living."