We’re building something. For years people asked “what’s new” as though new was the symbol of success. We would hold our breaths and be polite, biting back what we wanted to say. That sometimes enough is enough. Going deeper has always been our mission. We sit beside the river at sunset and contemplate it all. Sometimes we don’t think at all. We just laugh and chat and enjoy this earth we are blessed to walk on.
Sometimes people forget that the deep work is in the simple heart of things like soil and space, water and wind. How often is your soil deeply nourished, holding the great networks of trees and plants communicating with each other underground, providing home and food to the earthworms that help keep it fertile.
We try a pill or an injection to give us what we don’t have, without trying first to connect to what is here already. The rich tilapia and parrot fish, or sardines and pilchards that are full of the good stuff mentioned on labels in the health store. We forget that a layer of plastic or whatever shoes are made of these days keep us disconnected from the grounding touch of what was here long before us.
When we consider change, growth, we think about what we already have, what we inherited, and we work from there, not chasing something flashier and newsworthy. Beautiful things don’t ask for attention. We think about what our land and community need. Our team and our visitors. They don’t need more that takes them away from something as magnificent as a private stretch of the wild and free upper Zambezi.
Our river and island villas perch between the trees in wooden stilts, connected by walkways the birds and monkeys make their own. We cruise the river under infinite stars and watch the campfire crackle under ancient baobabs. What we have is not just enough. It’s everything. It’s a consumerist flaw, not essentially human, to want to add more to it all every month, every year, to appear relevant.
What can be more relevant than the great crashing curtain of Mosi-oa-Tunya, of riding rapids between the crocs and hippos that help keep the ecosystem is alive and well. What can be more appealing than watching the skies for African fish eagles and following their call to resting perches in the trees. Spotting kingfishers in all their different shapes and plumages camouflaging against leaves.
When we build, we look at repairing. Repair is constant, especially when you live with the elements as a part of your whole, not separate from. Restoring is necessary through the waves of nature. When we build we also think about what will help us be more sustainable, what will help us go deeper into our purpose, with the layers that no longer work for us slipping off like water off a nasturtium leaf.
We are working on something. Something you could consider new, although it’s been here all along. We’re working on deepening what we leave behind, through our larger school with its secure structure that provides shelter, learning, a safe and supportive space for our growing community of little learners. But also through our gardens, our chicken coop, our farm to table mission, our makers village.
A gardener’s work is never done. Nor is any artist’s work ever complete. But what drives us is not the search for new. It is necessity, depth and providing meaning and purpose for all who walk our land at Royal Chundu.
