experience
Where the rains falls,
life will follow.
With rain comes renewal: This is just one example, but the art of rainmaking lives on across much of Africa – in oral histories, folklore, and memory. In some places, it’s still being practised. In others, efforts are being made to preserve it, as with the Mamaala. These rituals, intricate and deliberate, are driven not only by desperation or drought, but by hope and respect for the inseparable link between people and place, water and life. With rain comes renewal. Wherever it falls, grasses surge, watering holes swell, and life follows in abundance. Over a few weeks, the landscape, dusty, brown and endlessly yellow, becomes overwhelmingly thick and green. Ferns unfurl, buds burst open, and creatures big and small emerge, singing their gratitude for the respite. Choruses of birds and frogs ring out through the crisp air, and if you look closely in trees and the bushes around pools, you’ll see them, clinging to dewy shoots and branches, waiting to mate. Herbivorous hermits emerge from their hiding places to graze on the abundant greenery and give birth, and predators follow
suit, hungry and ready to hunt. Leaves and flowers of every shade fill the veld with stipples of colour. With the worry of drought washed away, wildlife becomes more sociable, gathering around watering holes and rivers. One gets a true sense of Africa’s natural richness. The earthy smell of petrichor can make us feel alive – invigorated, even. On a biological and instinctual level, it’s meant to. As with most things, rain can be just rain. Beautiful and vague in function. But the closer we look at it, the more we think about it, the more we realise it isn’t just a necessity for life – it’s life itself. An act of return: In many ways, Spring is a season of return. Rain returning to earth. Nourishment returning to soil. Populations returning to balance. And with this, the wonder in everything – from a single raindrop to a thundering shower – shifts from being about magnitude to being about meaning. And we start to understand why our ancestors’ efforts to call for the rains were so elaborate.
Left Water, like a womb, holds possibility.
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