Journal entry. Intuitive is defined as: using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive I think this is why I have always liked sacred sites because when you are at one “you are beyond conscious reasoning” you sense something in the air. and I like it there because for me there has always been more life beyond conscious reasoning. You only need to fall in love to understand the truth in that. There are different ways of knowing. On native medicine wheels there was always body, mind , heart , spirit. It was understood the mind was only one way of relating to or experiencing life. Plaque rock is a beautiful dome of granite that sits logged deep into the river bank. You can walk up onto it easily from the bank and then it falls in perfect smooth rock down to a pool below with a few young crocodiles and a lazy terrapin that live in it. Beyond that is a second band of rock and then the thick green phragmites reeds of the river. As a child when I would go there it may as well have been another planet. Running and playing on the large dome we could have landed on mars. The rock is warm in the late evening having absorbed the sun's heat and if you lay with your back on it will share that warmth with you. the whole rock feels alive. Like it has its own intelligence. Like the rock itself is a living presence. As I sit there on a winter's day I am the centre of a small universe that spins around it. Creatures slowly appear. A kudu in the midst of the far bank. A herd of nyala Herons kingfishers flying past. A lizard scuttles out from under a rock to bask. There's something you don’t do enough of….basking My grandfather who I never met used to sit on this rock. When I am there I can intuit his ancestral presence. I am a part of what came before, I am a part of what will come after. I am not self made. I do not think of myself as a life apart. I am a part of life. Inside of this understanding I see a bigger picture. For a moment I am set free from the innate narcissism that my life is in some way the most important thing that’s happening. I am part of a chain of unfolding life. My grandfather flew planes in the second world war. From north africa him and a rogue captain called hayward would fly to warsaw to drop supplies for the polish resistance. Hayward knew that if they flew high over the city they would be a slow moving target for the anti aircraft guns. so when he saw the city which was on fire he would fly low down the river, dodging bridges moving too fast for gunners then drop his cargo and go. flying home with barely enough fuel. After the war my grandfather took up lion hunting as a way to keep himself feeling alive. Only later when I came to understand trauma did it occur to me that the lion hunting was a common behaviour for someone with severe combat experience and ptsd. The need to seek out dangerous extremes to try and get the sound back on in your life. When my grandfather died suddenly at 54 the war was long over. Hayward loaded my 15 year old father in a plane and flew him from Johannesburg to the place where I now sat in the wild . flying over the rock hayward ever the renegade opened the window and tipped my grandfather's ashes out into the river. That’s how plague rock became an ancestral place for my family. When I was born my mother named me craig…..I cried and cried until the shangaans people told my mother I was crying for my ancestral name. they started calling me body and I became a quiet child. As I sit here this morning I can look down across the pool at the base of the rock to the second ridge where a plague with my grandfather's name on it….a name that is also my name. boyd varty it reads he loved the bushveld. I'm telling you this because your ancestry makes you close to your infinity and your mortality. When I am her