To the Edge of both the End and of the Beginning

The sun is shining today; it's the first full day of sun, not the thickly moistured low slung grey cloud of the past seven days, since I arrived in Johannesburg last Monday. Not that I'm complaining.

It's the last afternoon 2013.

I'm thankfully all alone at my dad's home; I've had an extremely intense year without much alone time (probably the least in the last eight years) so I'm very grateful to be ending and starting these two years alone, and with a clear head.

If 2012 was the year that I "underwent that inner reconstruction that most of us have to do at least once in a life" (Doris Lessing( - it was also the year that I believe was my life's halfway mark - then 2013 was the year of putting down the foundations for the second half.

I am content and at peace and my current world is one that, despite my excellent imagination, I could not have even remotely seen into life last year this time: How blessed am I!

I read this amazing piece in the first volume of Lessing's autobiography Under My Skin in the bath yesterday; it refers to her mother:

"Now I understand why she went to bed. In that year she underwent that inner reconstruction that most of us have to do at least once in a life. You relinquish what you believed you must have to live at all. Her bed was put into the front room, because of the windows and the view to the hills, under the stern gaze of her father, John William, and his cold dutiful wife.

"All around her were the signs and symbols of the respectable life she had believed was her right, her future, silver tea trays, English watercolours, Persian rugs, the classics in their red leather editions, the Liberty curtains. But she was living in what amounted to a mud hut, and all she could see from her high bed was the African bush, the farm 'compound' on its subsidiary hill."

That was me, at the end of my first life half, in Waterval Boven, Mpumalanga, in 2012.

Photos:
The photos I took in Hogsback on 18 December after spending some crucial time recuperating from the car accident.

If I could choose, I would have preferred to end 2013 walking the 1,4 km long Labyrinth at The Edge (second photo) in Hogsback at sunset. I would have then started the new year by enjoying the sunrise of 1st January literally at The Edge (the first photo) while praying for the following:

1. Wisdom and understanding,
2. Peace, and for
3. Enough.

This coming year, 2014, I seek to:

1. Embrace simplicity,
2. Eat well, and
3. Travel far.

Happy New Year to all of you. And thank you.