Snapshot
17 July 2023
CAPE TOWN, South Africa—When you start calling yourself a writer there is the imagined expectation that each word you write will be an alchemical mixture of, at the least, sunlight and gold. Sometimes that is the case, but writing is as much about the glittering nuggets made of sunlight and gold as the words that surround those nuggets, in the way that silence is an essential part of the notes that make music. It is like when you see that a flower that you love cannot exist without the dark soil that is at first invisible to you, but when you understand the soil’s role your love for what was just the flower starts to spill into places you never thought it could reach.
My eyes opened today before dawn, and I looked outside at Cape Town’s Devil’s Peak and I watched as mist, sitting at the peak’s base, slowly rose and covered most of the peak save for the summit. The mist swirled around Table Mountain like a puppy hopping happily around a stoic old dog.
I just returned from a 100-mile trek around Mont Blanc in the Alps, and I’ve been struggling to cast the hike and how it made me feel into words.
I left my home for a walk, and by the time I left the misty puppy, perhaps tired of Table Mountain’s still stoicism, had gone off somewhere else, and now it was just the mountain and blue skies.
Then I bumped into someone I know walking their dog.
“I heard you climbed Mount Everest or something,” they said.
“Kind of. Mont Blanc in the French, Italian and Swiss Alps.”
“How was it?”
“I’ve been showing pictures to people, but the pictures are useless. Telling them about it is useless, too.”
“Well, I’m in a rush, but you must come to supper so you can try to tell how it was.”
They left and I realized that I’m struggling because all I feel I’m getting across to people is the soil part and not the flower part of Mont Blanc. But they’re the same thing. 