When it is already light, I wake up from the concert of the birds. I doze some more and then get up. Nature is awakening. Together with weed I do some yoga exercises that he suggests to me. I still have a lot to learn. Everyone is waking up a little now. What time would it be, an hour or six?
As we sit together on the edge of the rocky plateau, overlooking the river, Wiet suggests doing a meditation. We close our eyes and concentrate completely on breathing. I manage to be a single time when I feel my breath going down my spine. I follow the way in and consciously go along my body, starting from my feet, ankles, calves and so on to my crown and back again. Yet again and again those thoughts, those voices in my head that distract me. I keep practicing. When I put my hands open on my knees, I feel the emotion surging inside me. I let it go, tears running down my cheeks. It frees me. Take a deep breath, over and over again and I can smile.
After tea in the afternoon we go solo. Wayne puts us far apart facing the river alone on a boulder. I am alone with nature for over an hour and a half. When the sun goes down, Wayne will pick me and the others up. Slowly dusk sets in. I hear the soft rippling of the water beneath me. There is the sound of the birds and the stillness engulfs me. I am alert with all my senses open, I perceive every change .I have no anxiety, time does not exist. I feel more and more open to it.
Now suppose that the Leopard that we heard loud and clear last night and was then supposed to be at about this place, comes along again. Even that thought doesn't scare me. The cosmos will then have intended it that way, so it is good. After all, the cosmos also meant that two years ago I listened to the signals in my body. I breathe, so I am. I experience, so I am. I'm enjoying this special moment. There is only here and now.
Diagonally across the road, two buffaloes are grazing peacefully. The birds are now sitting closer to me in the bushes, a small salamander sits on a boulder next to me and looks at me. I feel at one with nature. Nature is one with me. I feel happy and at the same time humble and grateful in this surrender to nature. I fully realize the great love I have for straws. She has asked me so many times to enjoy in silence when we were in the bush, while I was busy with an even bigger telephoto lens, Click, Click, Click, disturbing the silence, disturbing the peace. I am glad that I see it now, from the authenticity, moving myself into the inside of the other, which reveals itself with love to fully meet. Don't look at what the outside world thinks. Turning myself inside out.
The two buffaloes slowly cross the river. A little later, a Rhino with a cub emerges from the bush. Then two elephants appear directly opposite on the opposite side. All in peace and I can be there. I am connected to it, I feel the connection field. This is something of my inner-Self.
The twilight has now almost completely set in, I can still sit for hours. I hear flik-flik, the sound Wayne makes with his fingers, he's coming for me. It's over. We walk quietly, in stillness back to our camp.
Boy Van Droffelaar, PhD
