I took my last dose of malaria muti last night, a process, getting better but could not sleep, many thoughts and memories rolling inside my head: bittersweet lost times with old friends, some evil times… hopeful new times with old friends, some good times, emerging to the surface of my consciousness and jumbling together in the parade of images that rolls through the gardens, the landscapes, within all our minds at times, especially in the witching hours just after midnight.

Staring out of the dark window I waited for the lions… and waited..

That video gripped me, the wind-stirred soft movements of the fine curtains seemed slithery, a slippery slope….that feeling of my brooding shadow on the curtain felt like a presage or an afterthought of my monoprint titled Emergence, a slow emergence from dark thoughts into a brighter space, not an easy transition…

But thankfully, warm and comforting as a mud hut, an earth abode, our Tsavene bush house nurtures a fireplace in our bedroom, a textured earth ochre space …a space to lift ones thoughts, take heart….

so while I waited for the lions, I stoked the bedroom fire and sipped hot chocolate, sitting under a 1995 self portrait that I painted on Vietnamese silk (that was another life….),

and mused on my treasured gift of old, a stone steel and wood sculpture…

and admired the peripheral abstractness of the layered books, the well-thumbed stacks in my bookcase…

And then, then the lions came…. the voices that I was waiting for started roaring, male and female combined in body and voice, a hopeful new alliance, right outside my bedroom window…

Good, and Evil… I know this young male has lost his male companion in this last month, have heard them both call their defiance and challenges around our Tsavene bush house and around our old guest room called, aptly “The Lion Hut”, for weeks, then sadly, ones voice was cut off, gone forever, and I have wept for the survivor when, bereft of his relative, he has called many nights all alone, lost and looking….

Now in a turn of hope and new life, a female has tracked his lonely roars and joins him nightly in a deep duet… and my oil sketch of a lioness seems to suit the song I heard from her last night, out there in the dark…

It pleased me to hear them sing, resonated deep in my body and uplifted my downward thoughts.

And so they came… and so, at midnight in the garden of good and evil, I printed the memory forever in my mind, to be pulled up, to emerge in years to come…

I recorded the lions calling outside my bedroom, a male and a female….so listen in, and remind yourself of the fragility of life, rejoice in the inevitability, the recycling of life….reminisce and remember with me…. #allthingsconnected