At first, your uncertain footing demands your attention. Your pack burdens your balance and your skin pinches between straps that are too tightly fastened – a precaution of your paranoid mind. Your feet are unfamiliar in your shoes, and your pack feels perilously heavy. The request for silence makes your thoughts even louder, and your breath crashes like waves in your ears. The melody of the bush is far away, unheard and unacknowledged by your preoccupied mind.

With your head down, your eyes scan the uneven ground in front of you, hurriedly choosing the safest places for your feet to land. Every firm footfall a success. Keep up, stick together, be awake, alert, and aware – that’s rule number one. Move in single file; don’t use your voice – your human sound doesn’t belong in a landscape inhabited by Verreaux’s eagles, ghostly elephants, and waterbuck that watch you fumble from the shadows.

Blend in, be quiet, and become it.

A mantra you repeat with the voice in your head – the same one begging you to be careful, yet urging you to look around and drink it in. Just look. Let the greatness of it fill your eyes and nudge a neglected part of your brain. Be here and now. The wash of a long-forgotten emotion arrives in a plume of nostalgia, flooding your conscience with joy, acceptance, wholeness. An empty prism inside your mind fills and warms, welding the break in the circuit. Suddenly, a light ignites in the dark.

Slowly now, your feet fall with confidence. Your steps contain a spring, a lightness underfoot, trust in the ground. The weight of your pack is a comfort – you carry your worldly belongings, your key to survival. The crashing in your ears, now, is the river. What was as distant as the whisper in a seashell is now the soundtrack to your course, and you follow it with your heart.

Details leap from the rocks beneath your feet, the cliffs that rise around you – they are shapeshifters at work, embodying different phases of their eternal lives, metamorphosising, like chrysalis to moth. Between their layers of sediment, long ago compressed, lie fragments of lives previously lived. A life like your own: finite. You hold between your fingers the relics of the Earth, the stuff of stories, of myth and legend.

With conviction now, you walk the path of your ancestors. Your eyes rest with recognition on the knotted anchors of trees, and on the thistle-coloured stones that have tumbled from mountaintops and washed down rivers. Whirlpools rush furiously as the water tries to escape, leaving grooves and dimples in the surface of boulders that you now touch with tenderness.

It’s with affection, now, that you feel yourself in this landscape. That you realise your humanness does belong. You are a primitive being in a phase of metamorphosis – part of you still connected to your cocoon, part of you drying your wings in the sun. You realise your fear and your joy are connected to your surroundings, reflected in it.

It’s with kindness, now, that you know you too are fighting a fierce battle for survival.

Written by Chloë Lindenberg