The dancing lowveld grasses had lost their colour and started to curl.  It was winter.  

I desperately wanted to linger on the path to examine them but my fellow hikers had turned their faces towards our destination on the pale blue horizon, following our guide who was kicking up red dust on a well-trodden trail.  I didn’t want to be left behind, so I spent the rest of the hike photographing the grasses as I crunched and swished through them at walking speed.  The monotonous sound of my feet hitting the trail, the warm sun on my bowed head, me within the grasses and the grasses within me, conjured a realisation.  I am only here for a limited amount of time and, like the winter grass, I have also started to curl.