Farmhouse ruin at Minwater

Are you sad or happy when you see ruins like this from life of long ago? New life replaces old, none is designed to last forever. And decay is a natural art form. It offers continually shifting images, some grizzly, of beautiful colours and shapes. Imagination conjures stories of who had lived here, why and how.

Life in the mind is richer from relating better to what the environment presents. Observe and meet nature repackaging all and sundry. Witness the social and natural evolution by sharpening the powers of observation. As if social evolution is not part of nature!

Happiness, the joyous experience of life, like matter, is indestructible. It only morphs into new appearances after periods of invisible hibernation, awaiting new life to absorb and revive it.

Old buildings conjure mood swings as much as new ones. The ubiquitous farmyard Eucalyptus, the Australian improvement to South African living conditions sought by so many who started farms in times past, is surviving its little house. Some of these trees invade, but not all the kinds do and it is unlikely to happen in the harsh karoid conditions prevailing here.

Owl and raptor conservation objectives convince people not to remove all these tall trees from the countryside. The trees assuage human guilt, albeit just a smidgen: If some big birds breed and survive in the tall exotic trees already here, better than in the smaller indigenous ones that battle when far from water, a little dent is made in the humanity induced bird life reduction still continuing in South Africa.

Whoever built here had skill and took care. Building styles are copied; from memory, from glancing over the fence, studied for mass production economics and by architects who trust tradition more than imagination.

Clay plastering over deftly stacked stone lasts for a lifetime if done properly. Time takes its toll slowly as water and its mates among the elements recruit every redundant grain and molecule to new service in future growth and deployment.