Writing is a funny and powerful thing. It can heal and inspire. It can give new found resolve and strength. It can bring one to their knees too, if the writer is so inclined and passionate enough about their subject. Either way, it’s a funny and powerful thing. What writing has given me over the years is all of the aforementioned, but also the beautiful gift of being able to travel and even ‘experience’ my favourite authors or their protagonists. Take some of the Africana Great White Hunter texts of yesteryear for example. Never having the remote opportunity to hunt with some of those great men physically, I hunted with them through the pages of their books, or the authors who commemorated them. I hunted with Kittenberger and Roosevelt, as well as with the great Baron Bror Von Blixen-Finnecke et al – my personal favourite. Writing is a beautiful thing. Books and pages are the fruits of hours and hours of lived experiences as well as sitting at a desk finding the words to aptly do said experience enough justice. Or any justice at all.
When I’ve been hard at work laying the foundations and routes for my hunting operation, I’ve often seen one of these great hunters watching me atop a cliff or boulder, and other times one of my grandfathers. I know they’re all watching how honest I am, how hardworking I am, but mostly how passionate I am. This happens when you work mostly in solitude, I think. When it does come time to host groups, it is an all-consuming social whirlwind of an affair, but until the groups arrival, it is mostly a lot of lonesome, hard yards in the most breathtaking of offices. And it is in those moments that I see these great men around me. Passing a beady, judgmental eye – in the best of ways. Art is anything done for its own sake as I’ve read before, and I believe it can be anything so long as the individual pushes it into the realm of no man’s land, where there is nobody but you and your craft. That’s when you will know that it is art that you are now dealing with and not just some enjoyable past time. Not everyone realises this last bit, bar a few defiantly supercharged individuals.
Always chasing the horizon.