Tabula Rasa

Clean slates and blank pages hold great potential and excitement for me, but they can be terrifying. Especially if you don't know what you would like to start over with. Or where to begin.

Again, I think of the forest fires that hit South Africa's Garden Route every now and again. They take with them hundreds of years of plant and animal life, leaving nothing but scorched ground. Black, ugly, singed ground.

In 1996 I visited the Tsitsikamma region just after one of the big forest fires. Driving past these blackened areas I spotted sprigs of green coming up through the earth.

A clean slate, a new beginning is a bit like that black ground after a forest fire. At first glance, it reveals nothing but devastation, disaster and pain. But if you look closer, there is hope. That complete annihilation has made way for something new and beautiful.

At these point, my clean slate looks like the scorched ground. But this morning, I spotted the first sprig of something green and hopeful coming up out of the ground.