Behind the nearest range of granite mountains, veld fires are raging, driven across fields, orchards and vineyards by a strong north wind. We go out to help throw wet sacks onto pallets of fruit stacked outside packing sheds and watch helicopters tip massive buckets of sea water onto lines of flame. The only real drama this festive season, outranking all the petty stuff. Wild animals in flight, so many small tortoises incinerated, fledgling birds choked on the thick smoke. The land alight, lines of fire licking at the edges of squatter camps from which people flee with cardboard boxes of bedding and pots, fire crawling deep into thickets amidst the mountain ravines, leaping the dry river beds.
You cannot live on this continent without learning to live with cruelty and extremes, with fire and floods, with a paucity of resources, with suffering and indifference, with myriad powerless places.
And the morning light is phosphorescent: I sit up in a yellow-eyed dawn writing and drafting out new sentences, finding my way to a new voice. The need for growth and change, this too, as so often when the solstice pauses and the season turns. Just say what it is like, just tell the story without shying from the rougher truths, let the ugliness in along with the beauty. Hope sometimes is found only in broken places.
It was a celebratory time, a quiet and lovely time, not an easy time but good. Another year of coming through, another year touched by invisible grace in unexpected places.
Your last sentence says it all for me. I find this to be true in my own life as well.
Thinking so much of you Pam and all you and your daughter are going through.
Somehow–for me–this post reaches far above all the “Happy New Years” I will hear. And read. Thank you, L.
happy new year.
Thank you Steve and a very good New Year to you too.
nice to hear your lovely story
yep.. just a few meetings and peaceful nothing much for me.. was okay.. Think I managed to swerve lots of the less appealing obligations which suits me 
Well, there were several ‘service’ opportunities and those enrich connectedness — people struggle so out here with even the most basic of amenities. The newly sober guests were jittery and uncertain on the day but hugely grateful to have had a first sober Christmas — nobody ever regrets sobriety in hindsight!
But I ‘swerved’ — a wonderful word — spending time with drunks and chaos.
Just stopping by to say hello and to tell you that I appreciate your blog. I take something away every time I read you.
Kristin, ditto — hope you are getting over that horrible break-in
I have come to respect the awesome power of fire.
Hope sometimes is found only in broken places – and maybe grace too.
Yes, grace too — when I look back, some of the hardest times have given me the most. And these fires are a way of life out here.
I feel for those animals. Natural fires though are necessary and part of a whole ecology in itself. I appreciate that nature has a way of healing what is scorched. And new growth will come from the bleakest of places.
Syd I agree about natural fires and the fynbos out here is a phoenix that needs fire smoke for seed germination. But I am talking here about arson not lightning, careless cigarettes thrown out of car windows and picnic fires unattended, malice in setting crops alight. The fires are worsened because of alien invasive species such as acacia and eucalyptus that burn like crazy — both are from Australia and account for the severity of Australian bus fires.
I agree though that new growth does come from the bleakest of places — I have found that.
It seems to me that the times that are “not an easy time, but good”, are the things that life is really made of…easy is easy, and often forgotten.
Thanks Marcia — yes, a little struggle is needed for change, the impetus to change.
Thanks for the beautiful post.
Thank you Susan and best wishes for the coming year –