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On my first day of school, there was a snake in my bag. Being a young girl recently emigrated from the snow-laden ‘Bible-Belt’ of Alberta Canada, this was a shock, to say the least. While my South African peers could identify the Appelblaar tree from the sound the leaves made as they turned to dust in your hand, and knew how to use a blade of grass to tease an ant lion out from its lair in the sand, I was learning (the hard way) to always check shoes and sheets for spiders and insects. But slowly, I learnt more. I learnt not to panic when a snake would invariably be amongst my things, I helped relocate Baboon spiders who were displaced by building projects, I chased warthogs off the only patch of green grass the bushveld-school kept. In short I fell desperately in love with the dry herby aroma of the bush on a sweltering summer’s day - the way it stung your nose on every inward breath. The incessant song of the cicadas, guttural calls of lions, the song of night jars, the croak of toads – and how the noises spoke to and through one another as they bounced off the Blyde River Canyon - an amphitheatre of life. Then I was raped. Of course a naïve girl from the Bible-belt hadn’t a name to put to it– there was no “me too” for me. Nothing but the black and white of sin, the torment I felt but had no words to express. I started to dress in bulky clothing, I didn’t go out anymore, I didn’t feel the desire to live. My body was a stranger, and I a dissociated spectre viewing it from above. Eventually, I moved into the gritty city of Johannesburg, where the heady smell of the bush was replaced by the stench of car exhaust fumes. I saw the beggars - the gross inequality staring back at me through their dull eyes and open palms, and I learnt that what had been done to me was more commonplace than the post being delivered (every 36 seconds to be precise). All I saw was despair, and all I felt was its crushing, breathless, weight. I wanted to leave the country – flee back to my small town where there were no bars on the windows and no fear of the men you pass on the street. Then I went on a trip. Behind the wheel of my car I caressed the jawline of the coast –traversing winding mountain passes to reach a place I knew only by name, Nature’s Valley. The feel of cool sand pushing up between my toes, walking through forests buzzing with life, and on mountain passes overlooking the infinite ocean - the salty air settled on my soul like a snug blanket – and I felt, like I, could almost, breathe, again. On my final night, I went to the beach… Stars crowded the skies, they jostled each other for space on that dark fabric, so dense it seemed the sky would simply crumple and collapse to the earth. And then, as I stirred the warm water with curious limbs, I was stunned to see it light up in brilliant green specs of light. Bioluminescence bloomed up all around me, clinging to my body. The incandescent universe had indeed fallen to rest upon earth that day, and I could finally see myself in it. I could see my body again, I could feel it. Unbidden, my mind slipped to that snake, how his vivid green scales had gleamed as he snake-eased his shoulders out of my bag– and I lamented that I had been too seized by my fear to notice his beauty. The voice of my education too loud in my head. The danger was real, but so was his splendor, and as I stood in the ocean, gently swaying with the give and take of the waves, I found something I never expected to find, not hope, not yet healing, but acceptance - of the terrifying, glorious, unknowingness of life. I was shaking the day I boarded the plane to China. I fastened my seatbelt.