Of shifting sand and memories

Kolmanskop, Namibia
January 7, 2008

Driven by relentless winds, the Namib Desert was quick to reclaim the German mining town of Kolmanskop after its last inhabitants left in 1956. All that remains now, with some buildings half submerged in dunes, are the husks that tell of the grandeur of a past that is sinking beneath tons of shifting sand. When the diamonds became scarce, so did the dreams.

Few can walk between these ruinous buildings without hearing the echoes of the past. Was that a child’s laugh in the other room? What caused the boards to squeak upstairs just a moment ago?  Did someone just walk past that empty doorframe?

In the absence of entirety, your mind fills in the blanks, seeking to complete a picture. People once lived here, eating, sleeping, laughing and talking. These were people like you and me, the only difference is that more than 60 years have passed and the continuity has been broken. Kolmanskop stopped moving forward. The ornate wallpaper has peeled off the walls, revealing a layer of coloured paint laid down by someone long dead. Signs written in German inform visitors that this is the accountant’s house or that that is the doctor’s residence or that the shopkeeper lived in this modest, two-bedroom home.

You can stand in the remains of a dining room and you can almost feel the swish of air as someone dressed in long skirts brushes by you. Or you could say it’s just the wind, nothing more and that for it to be something else is pure fancy.

You can close your eyes and imagine the men standing around a baby grand, laughing, as one of their party plays a Kurt Weill tune and they join in to sing along to a favourite tune from Die Dreigroschenoper, evoking old Weimar.

Now you hear the wind, that never-ending wind, that lifts rusted sheets of corrugated roofing to bang them in a mockery of the time that was. You lick your lips and your tongue comes away with a thin film of sand. Sand is everywhere. You can almost imagine the grains trickling now through cracks in the wall where the structure of the house trembles against the howl of air. You can’t escape the sand. It will find you no matter where you go.

I stood, alone, in the engineer’s house, or so I think it was, if my memory serves me correctly. I listened and identified the song of the wind playing on the slow crumbling of this building. I smelt old wallpaper, the dry decay. I controlled my breathing and went through the motions of a standard meditation. I allowed the silence between the spaces to speak to me, to tell me of the place that was.

I finished the meditation, suddenly afraid to be so alone, for my husband had gone to recharge his camera while I’d elected to stay here, silly and brave but insistent that this was the experience I had driven many thousands of kilometres to have.

I was overwhelmed by my need to surround myself with living, breathing company, to hear real voices.

As we continued our exploration, I came to the realisation of the why of my meditation. Any temple or structure that we build out of brick, stone, wood, cement or any material that is available means very little in the greater scheme of things.

Unless there are others to share your understanding of a building’s function, it is quickly reduced to the state of a thing, an object, a pile of rubble or a heap of stones that someone excavating will attach their own meaning.

This makes me think about one of the groups that I work with, why it exists and how it exists. It is not constructed using brick, stone, wood or cement yet it exists as a school, a living oral tradition. It has form, yet you cannot visit it at a location. It is its members. It still faces the ravages of time and, although its environment does leave an imprint on it, the attrition the group faces is not that of a slow crumble of matter. Not having a physical structure allows us to mould around our environment and gives us more flexibility.

Yes, this is dangerous, being intangible but it is, also, a strength to be as water that flows rather than a mountain of rubble slowly subsumed by a vast desert.

When I am told to build my temple, I must build its learning, give it meaning and add to its understanding in such a way that there will always be a legacy for those that follow in my footsteps. For, in forgetting, we allow the sands to sift and choke out our learning and all that we’ve done in our great work as we evolve.

Without passing on our wealth of knowledge and understanding, everything that we build becomes dumb stone scattered, left to explorers to discover and attach their own meanings.