DANCING IN THE SAND STORM

Being in the middle of a land storm on safari is such an unreal yet earthly experience that for a handful of minutes, it leaves you alone with your soul.
You wouldn't have guessed it, but inside you have a calm so intimate and total that it cancels out any darker, fearful thoughts.
A savannah of stillness inside, while outside the cockpit and your nervous system, the furious wind throws swirls of red earth to cover the clouds and blend, as in a neo-realist painter's palette, with the blue of the sky.
Wind and clay dust.
Everything else is still: animals, vehicles, birds on the branches of the acacias.
Only the forgotten bushes dance, the less ornamental plants, the anodyne fronds that have always grown and dressed in green to be devoured by herbivores.
They dance in the storm, and remind you of the Africa of the wretched, derelict but humble people of the remote and sunny expanses of the continent, accustomed to the cyclical futility of living except for the functions nature has assigned you. Forced to endure wars, abuse, conflicts with animals for progress they never wanted that way. There, where taking shelter is a daily habit, there is probably no need for the wind to stun and the sky to bleed, to find inner stillness.
While we, the evolved, protected by our mental cockpits and a thousand decomposed barriers, now seek strong emotion and fear like junkies in withdrawal, to understand that we are alive.
We are, but we prove it by shouting, wiggling, protesting and choosing our enemies.
Calm down, know how to isolate ourselves from negativity, listen to our souls more often and consider every event as inevitable but fleeting, always keeping our goals in mind.
Only in this way can one smile at fate, in this way can one dance through the storm.