Queen Of Thorns

Queen of thorns 

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“I lose my balance and stumble over small stones, neatly arranged by history on my so-called wanderer’s path – where I fall ambiguously in love with the microscopic moments of beauty and balance in the textures and colours that enfold and caress my incarnate being.” Karoo pilgrimage

 

This exhibition of photos of textures in the Karoo landscape explores a forever-changing awareness of emphatic interconnectedness.

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Have we forgotten that the Karoo?

Is not a place or space

But a pattern of the soul

That bows to the sun and the stars

 And the thousand things out there?

 

I wrote the following in Karoo Pilgrimage:

I stand at the foot of the Swartberg Mountains in a timeless landscape of space, silence, the sun, and stars. The mountain breeze carries a sense of peace and solitude, which caresses my inner being. I feel my anguish and the clawing hand in my solar plexus lifting. I wake up with a deep breath that drops to my feet. The sapphire blue dome of the sky and the distinctive landscapes merge into the shimmering horizon, and somehow, I sense a similarity between things ordinarily thought to be different. What appears to be separated are stacked together in transparencies of colour and textures, conducted by an underlying rich, rumbling baritone sound, falling between higher and lower registers – in a denizen of between spaces that swallows everything whole – an expanding and contracting universe – the continuous play of change, the mountain showing a way.

 

I wander alone through the landscape of the Karoo,

Following the whimsical trails of wafting, fusing light,

Playing with the folds and thrusts of the rolling mountains.

 

I touch the iron grey soil, blackened under the relentless sun

And hear the crackling of the brittle Karoo bushes as I brush against them,

Interspersed with a myriad of wildflowers.

 

I hear the rustlings of the tender, slender-tailed meerkat hiding,

Inside intriguing awe-inspiring rock formations,

Engraved with textures of layered sandstone and shale.

 

I see the clean-shaped hills capped in hard rock

In the distance, dotted here and there in hues

And shades of ochre-tinted blues.

 

I feel a sense of relatedness growing through my limbs,

A bubbling, vibrant diaphanous presence, fusing images, and words

Into a sphere, where all sides are visible.

 

It is an inexpressible space, an awareness of formlessness in form,

Where I am unborn, when form and formlessness fuse to one,

As I rise as the earth, the mountain, and the sun.