Daré, in Shona, means Council. In this African tradition, when people gather to seek each other’s counsel, they seek the counsel of the spirits as well. “We must find ways to sit in council with the animals and the natural world, with those other intelligences who are so deeply threatened.”
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Elephants possess enormous intelligence and are able to communicate across vast distances and maintain the complexity of their kinship networks and mourning rituals.
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Several nights ago I dreamed an elephant, the sensuousness of her stride, her lustiness and passion, the glory of her sense of her own beauty, the weight of her age, her subtle and intricate relationships with her daughters, sons, grandchildren, members of her tribe, her fears for the savanna, and her humiliation and rage for her kin who had been hunted and killed. When I awakened inside my relatively puny body, remembering the knowledge I had briefly held, I felt bereft but strangely comforted by the final image of the dream. As I separated from her, I was confronted by a great unblinking elephant eye, which transmitted everything I had experienced in a wink.
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I traveled to the Chobe National Park with three Americans and Mandaza Kandemwa a Shona ngnaga [medicine man]. Each of us had had a compelling reason for making this journey. I had come to sit in council with the elephants. I didn’t know what this meant or how it could be accomplished, but the intention had brought me to Zimbabwe and then to Botswana. We have been here several days; this is our last afternoon and it has been designated as mine to engage as I wish. I have been waiting for this moment for months.
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We are in the presence of original beauty. I let myself fold into the beauty of the evening and the camaraderie of the presences around me and the company of my companions. It is summer in Africa and the rainy season and everything is overgrown. What we notice is the camaraderie of the animals. There is a great longing in me for the restoration of the natural world. There is a great longing for reconciliation between the human and the natural world and the spirit world. Lives that are respectful of each other.
Mandaza is driving. There is so much beauty here, to ask for more would be unconscionable. We have seen many elephants during the last days, and, nevertheless, I am still longing to be with an elephant. We see a water buffalo fully immersed in the mud so that only his head is visible. He is so patient, I say, and someone corrects me. Patience is such a human quality. He has presence. Yes.
The road opens to a vista with a large bull elephant around three-fourths of a mile away, eating grasses alongside the river. There is something compelling about him. Mandaza begins driving toward him, but a fisher eagle, Mandaza’s totem bird, flies over the car and lands on a branch of a neighboring tree, so Mandaza parks beside the tree.
I begin chanting aloud, an ancient kabbalistic chant that has been my prayer and meditation for two years; now it bursts out of me. I know the elephant can hear it. Slowly he lifts his head from the grasses and begins walking along the river. He walks with clear determination and intention. The words carry focused, deliberate, determined, conscious, aware intention. He stops directly in front of the truck. I and my husband, Michael Ortiz Hill, are in the back. I put my hands out so that the elephant will know that I have no weapons.
The elephant has raised his trunk and is curving it over itself and under itself and up and over again. That is, he ties his trunk into an impossible knot. I am on my knees and I am completely taken by the elephant.
Then the elephant bows his head. There is no other way of describing it. He bows his head and unfurls his trunk. In my mind, I am speaking to him. And this is approximately what I say: “I know who you are and what kind of beings your people are. I have some sense of the extent and depth of your intelligence and develop-ment. And I know that you are a holocausted people. I know something of what this means because I also come from a holocausted people and I have studied other holocausts on the planet. I apologize to you for my species and that we are doing this to you. I cannot tell you the extent of my shame and grief. If there is any way for you to imprint me with your wisdom so that we can form an alliance, so that we can, together, accomplish something on behalf of the earth, I am here and I am not afraid.”
Then, I silence my mind. I have said enough. Humans have said enough. I want to be empty and to listen. The elephant moves toward me with grace and determination. He is less than a trunk’s distance from me. Four feet perhaps. He can, if he wishes, wrap his trunk about me without moving closer. Later Mandaza will tell me that his hand moved twice to start the car but each time he stopped. He decided even if it came to it to allow me my chosen death.
The elephant stops at this distance and looks me in the eye. We stay this way a long time. Ten minutes perhaps. At least ten minutes. He is a great bull. He is one of the old ones.
Then he turns and moves to the back of the truck and faces it. I turn to him and put my empty hands out again. We look at each other eye to eye. There is a meditation practice called trespasso where people look into each other’s eyes. The task is to be as naked as possible, to allow oneself to be seen as well as to try to see the other. We are doing trespasso.
Another ten minutes or so pass. Just before the elephant turns again, I realize that I am in my dream. This is the moment in the dream when the old matriarch looked into my eye and I was altered forever. And this is the moment in a later dream when a bull elephant wrapped his trunk about me and I was not afraid. I recognize that I am not afraid.
I hear words in my mind and I let them be spoken silently. ”I promise you...” is what I hear myself say. He turns and goes behind the truck as if to disappear up the hill into the brush, but turns again and faces the truck and so I turn also and on my knees again acknowledge him. I place my hands together before my heart, the way one does to bow and honor a holy person. It occurs to me that I am in the presence of God.
Another ten minutes pass. You cannot imagine the silence that has descended. The elephant departs, climbing slowly up the hill, and disappears into the trees. We all leap out of the car and throw ourselves on the ground in full prostration. Mandaza makes an offering of snuff and prays.
When I have words, I ask what must be asked. Did you see this? Did this happen? Recounting the moments, verifying them, remaining astonished. Then we quiet down. We do not explain or understand anything except that Amanda Foulger says: ”You are an ambassador and they sent their ambassador and you have made a covenant with each other.”
It is getting late and we must be out of the park by 7:00. We make our way slowly, stopping to watch the sunset and the different creatures. The secretive hippos and their little ones are coming out of the water, small birds are landing on their heads and backs to eat the parasites. We watch them but time tugs at us.
But now we cannot believe our eyes. Elephants are coming down the hill and crossing the road to the river. At first only a few females and their babies, but now more of them are coming. Waves of elephants.
Waves upon waves. Mandaza stops the car and we jump out and kneel again. I can hear Amanda sobbing behind me. Even now as I write these words, I am crying. The elephants continue to come. We watch for about ten minutes. There are dozens of them lined up alongside the river and still more are coming. Bulls and cows, old ones and young ones, babies and adolescents. It is like ... I do not know... I think... it is like the world ended and then it was saved and the animals are coming forth into the new dawn. That is what it is like. There are no other words for it.
Now we have no choice but to get back into the car again. Someone suggests that we find another road back so that we won’t have to cross between the elephants descending the hill and those on the river; we do not want to come between a mother and her calf. But I know that we must go along the road. They know we are here. We must show up for whatever it is they are calling us to do. And so Mandaza drives very slowly and very carefully along the river. The elephants are lined up for at least a quarter of a mile, as if for a parade. We are passing by them. They are bowing their heads and flapping their ears at us. And we are bowing and waving and saying, “Thank you. And bless you. And thank you. And bless you.”
I am aware of the date. It is January sixth. It is Epiphany, the festival commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the persons of the Magi. Thankfully, we had the wisdom to recognize and so do gasho before the sacred.
I promise you I will do what I can for your people. I promise you that your people are my people. I promise you.
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It is not only that the issues we face require that we address them in council; it is that in council we see our on-going and essential interdependence.
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Because we don’t know what to do, we turned to the animals and asked them to sit in council with us. Then the elephants came.
I will try to speak of it here even though there can be no words for this advent.
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The Ambassador had come twice, once in 2000 and once in 2001. If he were to come again, I wanted it to be witnessed by others who would recognize the implications of such an event for the future of the earth. I also wanted to learn, in community, how we might make real and active alliances with the animals on behalf of the planet. Over the years, the spirits training me to think or see in the old ways required of me the constant undoing of self, of western mind, science, scripture and of will in order to yield to other ways of knowing and to recognize other intelligences than the human in the world. I traveled to Chobe again, this time with a group composed of North Americans, Liberians, Bushmen, and a South African.
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The first day, September 16, 2005, we went out by boat.
There was a bull elephant standing on a tiny island in the river. A white egret was poised at his feet. We stayed with him a long time. He was still, the bird was still, and we were stilled. We thought this might be a first sighting.
The second day, now without a guide and in our rented 4x4s, we went to the place where we had first sighted the Ambassador. We stopped, as we had then, at what we since have called the Chipungo tree.
This time the bull elephant was waiting for us at the tree. We stopped and greeted him the way we had before. We stayed in meditation together for a long time. Suddenly, he trumpeted loudly and the camera people scampered quickly back into the closed cab of the truck as I remained with a few others in the open back. An answering trumpet startled us further. I could sense the fear of some of those with me in the open. It was essential not to be afraid. No matter what happens, I thought, do not be afraid. This is a time when we have to enact trust. Then a small herd of cows and calves came down directly alongside our trucks to the river that we understood as a gesture of trust on the part of the elephants. We also agreed that if we didn’t see the Ambassador again, we would be entirely satisfied and confirmed with this visit.
Each day, we went to the park and stopped at the Chipungo tree at 5 pm.
One morning, we came upon a long single file of fifty elephants or more, the matriarch in the lead and the littlest elephant, only several months old, behind. They looked exactly like the line on the billboard outside the Preserve that said, “Follow our lead.”
On the last day, we went toward the Chipungo tree when Michael noticed a white eagle flying toward another tree and we followed it, stopping where it landed not too far away. It was 5 p.m. and this was our last hour in the park. The bull elephant, the Ambassador, was at the river’s edge, seemingly oblivious to us. The four of us who were there then, Valerie, Michael, Cyndie and myself, meditated and prayed. Then a female with three calves of different ages came down to him at the river. The young ones frolicked while she and he turned toward each other and rubbed their trunks in gestures of greeting and affection. Then the female, without grazing or drinking, turned to leave but the littlest elephant, a bull wanted to stay. In a most unusual gesture of parental affection and sweet discipline, the bull approached the little one and nudged gently on his buttocks until he followed after his mother.
I began to understand something inexplicable. All the time that I was in Botswana, and for years earlier, I had been praying for alliance with the animals and the other beings of the natural world because of my horror that human beings are devastating the natural world. These ambassadors responded by showing us the sweetness and intelligence of their communal lives. So we become the ambassadors to a great people; I think of them now as Speakers for the Wild.
Then the bull turned from us and walked the short distance to the Chipungo tree. We followed and stopped at a safe and unobtrusive distance. He was seemingly preoccupied with the grasses alongside him but he didn’t take any to eat. Then we saw that he was swinging his trunk over a large object, a stone probably, but what we could not quite discern. And then he picked it up and threw it toward us in an unmistakable gesture of offering us a gift. He moved further along the river, deliberately stepped into a small declivity, went down on his knees as one does in prayer, then rose up, twisted his trunk into the impossible knot that Michael and I had first seen in 2000 when he came toward us, then trumpeted one last time and disappeared into the brush. It was exactly 6 pm. The time we had to leave the preserve. I ran out of the car to pick up the gift … an old and weathered thighbone of an elephant.
As Barbara Gowdy had written in her novel about elephants The White Bone: “None of the humans who passed the boulders ever spotted it, even though, over the years, it bleached to a blinding whiteness. Meanwhile it radiated toward all living creatures a quality of forgiveness and hope. But the hearts of humans were hard, and would not be pierced. Not then.”
And as I wrote at the end of my letter to her: “It was not a rib bone. It is a femur. It is not blinding white. Still it was thrown in the air by a he-one.”
Humans will heal nothing in themselves or between themselves, they will not heal the world in any form if they do not fully re-integrate themselves into the natural world. Humans will heal nothing if they persist in seeing themselves outside the natural order, whether for reasons of their putative development or frailty. Arrogance and fear is a dreadful admixture, and humans are possessed by it. Only by entering into the network of interconnection and alliance, into the natural order, yielding to the implicit law, is healing even remotely possible.
This essay combines passages from Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing and From Grief into Vision: A Council. A longer edited version can be found on www.deenametzger.com.
Deena Metzger will be leading a workshop on September 26-28. Click for details.
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