Swakopmund is a town of diverse cultures and very welcoming to all visitors. Many of its unique buildings are reminiscent of German architecture and its propensity for wide streets are a tangible reminder of bygone days when wagons required a wide arc to accomplish an easy turn around.
We have been here several times. Malcolm and I always enjoy walking from Alte Brucke Resort, where we camped, to the town centre. We revisited our favourite cafés and restaurant and even rekindled a friendship of some 43 years. Travelling is enriching in so many ways and is always enhanced when one’s senses are prickled.
Many of the Namibians who live inland, have second homes in and around Swakopmund, which provide them with a means to escape the unbearable dry, heat of the summer months. However, during winter, the cool Atlantic currents make this town misty, damp and cool and that certainly created the right mood for me to re-examine my feelings around my own mortality.
On the day we left Swakopmund, and headed towards the Spitzkoppe Community Campsite, the heavy rolling mist and rain kept Malcolm’s attention focussed on his driving – as did the gravel, secondary road which was again bumpy and corrugated. We still arrived at our destination around 11 o’clock, to find our favourite site unoccupied.
This area is largely flat and level, but is also dominated by sharp masculine mountains with towering peaks, contrasting rounded and smoother feminine-like domes and many tumbled rocks that take on the shape of animals, birds, sphynxes and skyward-facing stone gods. There are also Bushman paintings to be seen; a relic of a time when clans came here to heal and gather strength. For me, their art imbues this place with an aura of sacredness.
I love returning to this campsite and watching how the sun paints the rocks and mountains with colour and shadows. As the evening descended on our first night there, I became aware that something subtle had changed within me.
But with any deep transformative process, it is never easy and it seldom has a direct path to the light of day.
On awakening the next morning, we noticed that a heavy mist had silently shrouded the mountains and it did not take long before we were enveloped in a drizzly rain; it was very cold. Malcolm and I donned thick layers of clothing and sheltered under the awnings that now had some of the side-attachments, which provided us some extra comfort and protection. It was heartening, though, to see the desert sand absorbing the moisture and I imagined how the dormant seeds that were hidden below the pebbled soil would be responding to these conditions. This mist was an unmistakable metaphor for my own process. Nature truly has a way of speaking to me, but transformation is a three-pronged process that requires some deep introspection.
Firstly, you need to be cognisant of what needs to change. Next you are required, to receive the new revelation and to know, without a doubt, that it is a truth that resonates within you and then comes the preparedness to finally accept the new insight and to experience a ‘resurrection’, or what the Gnostics called, a change of heart, to settle within you and alter your way of being and doing.
My own change of heart was about to reveal its story. During our second day at Spitzkoppe a memory popped into my mind. Almost thirty years ago, I had visited an Intuitive Healer, who had told me that there was a ‘foot’ that was blocking my link with God. She said that it was not my own ‘foot’, but an aspect of me, another version of myself, that was preventing me from forming a dynamic relationship with my Source.
I have explored many religious and spiritual teachings. I internalised some and rejected many, however, the Gnostic Sophia Myth had become one of my lodestars.
Sophia together with her twin soul, the Christed One, was the last emanation of the True God, (The Divine Masculine and The Divine Feminine/Holy Spirit). Being last, Sophia, felt alone in the vastness of the Cosmos and opted to rectify her feeling of aloneness by creating her own world. She filled it with a secondary force, called the Creator God.
Soon, she forgot that her true home was in the dazzling blackness of the Cosmos with God. She tumbled into an illusionary world of her own making. Sophia, experienced untold hardships which worsened her feelings of loss an emptiness. She tried seeking love in a world that proved to be abusive and uncaring. Sophia’s lived reality was strewn with suffering: she knew poverty, prostitutions, illness and despair.
Eventually, this Child of God, decided that she had taken all the abuse that she was prepared to experience and commanded her will to help her change her way of being. Sofia, cleansed her body and readied herself, through various rituals, for the marriage of the Divine Grail: the reunification of her Divine Masculine and her Divine Feminine and to reclaim her holy heritage.
The True God had watched Sophia’s descent into the world of illusion. Father/Mother God saw her suffering but had never interfered in the choices that she had made. God observed and when she ascended back to the Cosmos, He/She God was enriched and expanded through the knowledge, wisdom and compassion that Sophia brought back to heaven with her.
