It is the rainy season here in the mountains, but not enough rain is falling and already there are fears of drought for the coming summer. But the garden is hyperactive with birds — plovers, Spotted Eagle Owls, white eyes, orange-breasted sunbirds, button quail, protea seed eaters and mossies. Other wildlife too. Yesterday I rescued a small geometric mountain tortoise from the puppies. The sand lizards and geckos are proliferating, as are spiders and coppery butterflies. Snails waltz all over walls and tree trunks and the long strappy eaves of the agapanthus, leaving silver traces like choreography.
For six years now we have observed one another as I go about in the garden or sit reading on the stoep, the wildlife and myself. They know me as well as I know them, the successive generations, the babies each spring, the berry-lovers and seedeaters and those just passing through the garden. And in recent years they have begun to speak with me in dreams, something I have not cared to admit to many people.
Because the dreams are strange and powerful and unexpected. A lizard blinks that great glittering eye and I find myself entering a dark cave, guided by geckos that shine in the dim interior like glowing amulets. There is a pulsing as at the golden heart of a bee hive and I need to surrender, echo the pulse in my bloodstream.
There are fruit bats clinging to verdigris walls and when I get up courage to look past the folded wings there is the night sky all studded with the galaxies once destroyed in another eon. A small creature just behind me is telling galactic histories that are also about my lost family and the wonders of my home on the archipelago, the rocky islands in a sea of music, the whales and dolphins singing unforgotten histories, the moons like blue stones on the horizon.
All day as I walk around and sit at my desk, snatches of song and whispers come back to me — this is the immanent world, alive and calling and warning, recounting the myths I need to make my own. A birds who is also my feathered mother is scolding me from the bare branches of a catalpa, telling me I need to go back to the cave. The cave is a ruined grotto, a narrow womb, a place lit only by the moon.
Somewhere in those depths the oracle is waiting and sometimes she will be hyena and sometimes the quick-striking cobra. Wisdom has a price. But there is the descent and there is light down in the gloom, renewal and mystery and initiation. The cold bare branches are budding with scarlet and green tissue and nodal vigour. The creatures wait and watch me with unsentimental but loving eyes. I am dreaming in animal, dreaming desert and cave and ocean and wilderness.
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