Impermanence

In the middle of a rather busy day today, I had to head off to Southern Cape Town to drop off some goodies. I took the coastal road, which snakes across and between the dunes, sometimes mere metres away from the high tide waves breaking on shore.

Every dune is covered with flowers. Arum lilies in abundance, white and yellow daisies like snow, tiny pink clover-family ones. At this point in Spring the whites and yellows take over, fading later into pinks and purples. Yes - Namaqualand is stunning, but if you open your eyes there are flowers right on your doorstep.

Typical for the Cape, the south-easter wind was howling along at shore level, blowing grit and seamist across the roads. The only things that seems unperturbed where gigantic seagulls hovering into the gale, and a lone mongoose snuffling next to the road.

Just before Muizenberg traffic slowed to a crawl. With a few hours of wind, the beach was taking back the road, and cars crept over mini-dunes formed quicker than one can imagine. In parts the road sinks into potholes, never achieving a completely firm grip on the earth, always prone to the shifting sands and tides.

If we were to disappear - us humans - for a month, a year, a century... nature would march over us and entwine us in greenery. All trace of our attempts at taming her would vanish. We cannot build permanently against her forces. Every human struggles against an overwhelming flood of nature - the weeds in the veggie beds, the storms that flatten our flimsy homes, floods that sweep away roads.

On the grand scale of things, in the flow of time, we matter not at all.