The Deadvlei Collection.
A pictorial collection of stillness, intentional movement and mindfulness.
Behold, Deadvlei. A surreal alien-like landscape located in the Namib Desert. Close to a millennia ago, a river flowed through this desert, creating an ecosystem that housed numerous trees and plant life. Surrounded by dunes that tower to the heights of the Empire State Building, it is now a barren forest, save for some shrubs and Nara Melons.
I found myself here, in this otherworldly landscape in June of 2018. Having run down to the deadpan from the top of Big Daddy, the largest dune at Sossusvlei, my travel partner and photographer Kevin, suggested we take some images of me in a garment he had brought from a designer in Windhoek.
The sun was unforgiving, we had no water left and we were both exhausted. But somehow we found the energy to create and shoot. After all, if the trees around us could “survive” hundreds of years without water, we certainly could push through for another hour or so and create some desert visuals surrounded by rusted sand dunes.
Parched and out of water,
he stood there amongst the skeleton trees
They, having died hundreds of years ago still stood under the unrelenting sun. Left to a climate too dry now for them to pass on, to decompose, they just scorched into blackness, forming their own barren forest.
Here, where the skies were most clear, with no clouds to provide refuge from the suns torridness, he stood in relative stillness, making only the slightest of movements .
A thought; would his being meet the same fate as the trees, now having lost what was essential to grow, to live.
Enjoy the photos, short film and poetry.
Peace. Love. Travel.
There were no tears left,
not here in the dead marsh.
Waterless like the terrain they found themselves in, their lacrimal glands had ceased to create, nothing flowed from those ducts anymore.
Unknown was the cause of their barrenness. In a more infant time they had once produced-their ducts cascading for numerous reasons in time, releasing healing leucine-enkephalins.
Something, like the rusted dunes that cut off water to Deadvlei, was blocking the flow from the upper lids.
Perhaps it was a change in their inner climate- combined years of unreached aspirations, heartbreak, feelings of failure and inadequacy, the weight of expectations serving as a barrier.
Here in this arid “place of no return”, where time means nothing, they remained anhydrous.