Contrasts

The subject of my work is very often one of contrasts - water in a dry place, torrential rain and a bowl waiting to be filled, a small house in a vast landscape. It is the dynamic relationship between these opposites that I love - both the place where they meet and also the place where the scales which measure them find balance. 

The dry-season landscape of Botswana is one of extreme contrasts with Eden-like idylls of lush green and intermingling animals along a rivers edge which quickly drops off to dry sandy earth with hardy shrubs and then a little further away, the landscape becomes one of barren, parched earth where no water has been seen for months and no animals are found.

Water holes are now cracked-earth reminders of what was and what will be once again when the rain returns. For now they are silent and waiting.

Grass that was tall and green is now golden and stretches like a sea to the horizon. Where vast herds flock in the rains, one now sees only the odd giraffe or elephant. This seen whilst driving a road usually impassably muddy in the wet months, now caked and bumpy with rock hard potholes.

Amidst the vast dryness of Savute we found a small bit of wonder - a channel that seems to open and close due to tectonic shifts and who knows what else - which meant that a marshland which had been dry for months had started to fill again. This return of water magically appearing at at the height of the dry season.

 Driving across the surface of the still mostly dry marsh bed, we found rivulets and streams flowing in and dispersing - seeping in to the parched earth, filing it with water until the soil could hold no more and pools formed. Well away from the pools were green shoots coming up beneath the dry grasses, as if the grasses could sense the water coming or maybe they were tapping into minuscule seepage below the still dry surface. 

Minutes away from this returning life were  bone dry pans that would have to wait for the rains to see a return of life. 

Fine white dust with an almost impossible dryness.

(Small boy making the most of a sign posted on the tree designating this as a "stretching point".)