Running Water
The sound of healing
The sun was already high when I crested that last ridge, my Groundcover boots scuffed with dust, lungs drinking the thin, rare air of the Highveld. I had come up here to outwalk something I could not name, tightness in the chest, noise in the head, the low hum of a life that had begun to feel borrowed. Then I heard it: water rushing over rocks.
Not the polite murmur of a garden fountain, but real water, quick, bright, alive, roaring its way down a narrow gully in the hillside. I followed the sound like a child seeking treasure and found the stream: no wider than a jeep track, yet fierce with purpose, sliding over granite boulders that had been polished over aeons of water wear, flashing sparks of silver where the light struck.
I knelt. The moment the water touched my ears everything else stopped.
The sound folded time the way wind folds grass. Suddenly I was young again, barefoot on Oakvilla farm in the Natal midlands, following the little streams that spilled off the Inyosi River after rain. Those streams were my secret kingdoms. I knew every pool where the Platanna frogs floated. I knew the places where Leonorus grew thick along the banks, with its orange claws of flower, and how, if you brushed past, the sunbirds would explode out of them in a whirr of emerald and crimson, dancing drunk on nectar.
I would lie on my stomach for hours, chin on my folded arms, watching tadpoles flick like black commas through the transparent water. The stream never hurried, yet it never waited. It simply carried everything downstream: sticks, leaves, worries, time.
Now, decades later, the same music played in a different key. I eased myself down onto a flat rock still warm from the morning sun and let the water have me. Each note of it rinsed something loose, deadlines, arguments, the dull ache of roads not taken—and sent it spinning away over the rocks and stones. The tightness in my chest loosened its fingers one by one. My shoulder pains dissipated. My breath slowed until it matched the rhythm of the stream: in, over, out, gone.
A kingfisher, beautiful, but there it was, flitted across the water, a streak of impossible colour, and for one heartbeat the years collapsed entirely. I was both the boy and the man, both the child lying spellbound on a Midland farm and the tired adult sitting on a rock in distant hills, and neither of us had anywhere else to be.
The water kept talking, soft and relentless, washing the dust from my soul the way it washed silt from the hill. When I finally stood, the light had shifted and the shadows were longer, but I carried no weight at all. Only the bright, running sound of the stream inside me, carrying me forward the way it always had, light, clean, and free.