Not endurance alone — learning to live within the weather.
It’s that time of year again: drought, fires, and wind storms.
Last night, it was the wind.
The windows rattled, the roof groaned, and by morning branches lay scattered like bones across the fields.
A canoe was tossed deep into the bush, as if the storm meant to rearrange the landscape itself.
The air carried a restlessness, as though change itself was hunting through the fields.
I remembered an old story carried on the wind.
A farmer once asked a man why he should be hired.
The man’s reply was simple, almost ordinary: “Because I sleep through storms.”
The words stayed with me like a proverb, humming in my bones.
He could sleep not because he was careless, but because his labour was faithful: the fields tended, the doors latched, the roof beams set true.
Peace was not the absence of storms, but the fruit of preparation.
“Storms are honest in their disregard.
They strip what they strip.
They leave us standing in the dark
with only the question:
how will I live inside this?”
I’ve never been able to sleep like that.
Most of us haven’t.
We lie awake wondering what might tear loose, what might break, what might blow away.
We crave peace so deeply that we build — or are tempted to build — sterile, controlled lives, chasing comfort, certainty, and insulation above all else.
But storms still come.
And not every storm can be slept through.
Some winds tear off roofs.
Some illnesses batter the body.
Some losses strip us bare.
Life is not a farm where you can close the door and wait in safety until morning.
It asks us to rise each day, storm or no storm, and keep showing up to live.
Sometimes we are called to step into the storm itself — to feel its disregard, to witness its pruning, to learn that peace is not only found outside the storm, but sometimes in the very heart of it.
Out in the fields, the trees bore witness.
Storms never ask for permission.
They come, they take, they test.
- Some bent low but stayed rooted.
- Others twisted into strange, unrecognisable shapes.
- A few snapped, splintered through, or were torn from the ground entirely.
I wondered which would survive.
To my surprise, every one has.
And I saw it clearly: what matters is not whether you can avoid them — some storms cannot be avoided — but how you live inside them.
By bending without breaking, twisting into new forms, rooting again when torn up.
All survival is a kind of reshaping.
“Every tree tells its own story:
scarred, leaning sideways — yet alive.
There is no single way to endure.
Survival is whatever shape
life can still find.”
From broken trunks, new shoots pressed out soft against the splinters.
Bent, scarred, leaning sideways — yet alive.
There is no single way to endure.
Survival is not uniform.
It is whatever shape life can still find.
The storm pressed against me too.
Each gust shoved me sideways, each step a negotiation with the wind.
And then, the thorn in my shoe: small, sharp, insistent.
Pain that made every step harder until I stopped, broke off the tip, and carried on.
“Not everything can be removed or repaired.
But pain can be softened,
blunted just enough,
so it no longer holds us hostage —
even in a storm.”
Later, over coffee, I saw my tree of life circle swinging wildly in the gale.
I bought it years ago in Oudtshoorn, from an old man selling carvings and wire work from the baking hot tar.
Whenever Angel’s Kiss sales went well, I would stop and buy something from him — or someone like him.
We cheered each other through the dry days and celebrated in the good ones.
That circle now dances in every storm, reminding me that resilience is not only preparation or endurance.
It is also exchange.
The ways we steady each other.
The blessings we pass on.
What we share becomes part of what we carry through.
Standing in the aftermath — roots exposed, branches splintered, leaves scattered — I see again that storms do not only destroy.
They reveal.
They prune.
They teach.
Some trees stand.
Some fall.
Some begin again in ways we could never have imagined.
And so do we.
The Echo That Reaches Back
Last time I wrote about rain, about how the long wait for water taught patience and relief. Today the storm returned in another form — not as soft rain, but as a restless wind.
Storms carry their own language: some nourish, some strip, some scatter. Each reveals something different about what holds, what bends, and what breaks.
Reflection
The storm left me with these questions:
- What storms in me cannot be avoided, but must be lived through — and what wisdom must I find to walk them well?
- Where am I bending, twisting, or breaking — and how might I allow wisdom to grow in me through it?
- What pains in me cannot be removed, but need to be softened so I can keep walking?
- And what circles — what exchanges of blessing and endurance — are swinging beside me in the wind?
Storms strip us to the choice that matters: to endure only, or to become through the breaking.
That is the heart of Changing for Survival.
Closing Echo
Life does not ask permission.
It bends, it strips, it scatters.
Some storms can be prepared for.
Others must be lived awake, from the inside.
And still the trees bend.
And still the circle swings.
And still life insists on pushing living through the cracks.