Speaking with Elephants
by Deena Metzger
I never expected to enter into an alliance with elephants and it has only been a few years since I have begun to imagine what an alliance with an animal might mean. One cannot enter into such a relationship unless one's entire world of assumptions and beliefs has changed radically. One does not seek this out. The task is rather to avoid refusing it when it is offered. Such experiences, which shatter the known world, are familiar to each of us even though, for the most part, we enter these ordeals alone carrying the burden of having to make private meaning of them.
Entering into an alliance with elephants, or with any other animal, was not what was difficult. Becoming the person who could engage with the natural world in such a way was another matter. It took place over a long period of time and only in retrospect do I recognize that this occurred: Now that I am here, how did I get here?
This story is about a meeting. An unexpected meeting. An unprecedented meeting. I had prepared for it and I had been prepared for it. But when the elephants entered my imagination and my life they called me forth to meet them in ways I do not yet fully understand. Some of what came before the meeting was part of the event, which cannot be limited to a single moment, and so will be told here briefly. I don't intend this as either an apocalyptic text nor an exotic narrative about strange experiences, signs, omens and portents; I tell this story so that we may probe it together.
I traveled to Zimbabwe in December 1998, as I had the year before, to live within the community there, the daré, and to do mutual initiatory work with a renowned traditional healer, a nganga working in the ways of the Shona and Ndebele people, Augustine Kandemwa. My husband, Michael Ortiz Hill had first gone to Africa in 1996 where he had met and begun working alongside Augustine. Michael and I were traveling with Amanda Foulger, a shamanic practitioner and a Jungian therapist, Michele PapenDaniel.
Initiation, the core activity of spiritual healing work, is dishonored and trivialized in contemporary western culture. Rituals have become a social event, rarely pursued with the deep rigor and purpose required to prepare someone to meet sacred obligations. In more traditional societies, one purpose of initiation is to prepare individuals to live in direct contact with the spirits. Though some rites are communal, coming of age ceremonies, for example, like the Apache Sunrise ceremony recognizing the healing power of girls entering menarche, there are also moments when a particular person is spontaneously called by spirit to initiation. In such a situation, the consequences of refusing are dire. Other times one does not hear a call so much as one simply knows that it is time to step toward a spiritual life. Once initiated, one finds that the barriers and obstacles between self and spirit are removed and one may receive powers or abilities, which are to be used on behalf of the community. Accordingly, one must shape one's life appropriately and devote oneself to suitable practices in order to walk with compassion in the world and to carry the responsibilities of healing and vision.
Daré, in Shona means Council. In this tradition, when people gather to seek each other's counsel, they seek the counsel of the spirits as well. Native Americans and Buddhists are but two of many peoples who have traditions of gathering the elders or wise ones to meditate on issues of great concerns. For several years I had been thinking about Council as a means for all of us to examine and wrestle with the global issues that are so pressing now, urging individuals to meet with ëthe otherí, as diversity and deep respect for different ways of knowing are the very essence of the council process. Just before I left for Africa, I sent out the third in a series of Council of Elders letters advocating the formation of communities of diverse, intelligent and aware people willing to listen to and yield to each other's wisdom in order to live and act in ways that are in the interest of the planet. In that letter, I had also written:
We must find ways to sit in council with the animals and the natural world, with those other intelligences who are so deeply threatened by imprisonment, slavery, consumption and extinction.
"What do you want from this trip to Africa?" my husband asked me as we landed in Bulawyao.
"I want to sit in council with Augustine and his people and I want to sit Council with the elephants."
Is there anything else that I want? I asked myself. There was nothing else I wanted.
"How does one sit in council with elephants?" my husband asked.
"I don't know," I answered. "I do not even know how to imagine it."
continued... ♥♥♥
To read the complete article select Animals on Deena's website: http://www.deenametzger.com/
Copyright © 2009 Deena Metzger All rights reserved
The Zebra Foal and the Gentle Giant
by a friend at Meno A Kwena
The bull elephant, reluctantly at first, moved back a few feet
as the desperately thirsty zebra foal limped to what little water was
left in the water hole at Meno A Kwena.
The bull brooded as he watched the foal drink for a minute or two. The
bleeding lion wound on the zebra’s leg got the bull’s attention,
he seemed quite concerned about that and blew dust onto the deep gashes. The
very young, not yet weaned, foal had escaped the lions but was starving
to death.
The foal finished drinking and too weak to move started to doze
off, head hanging over the meagre muddy water. The bull lost
his patience, swinging his dripping mud trunk gently at the foal. Not
a flinch. The bull swung his trunk again, and again, until he
took a big step forward towering over the shaking foal. The bull
once more got distracted by the lion saliva scented bloodied leg, examining
it carefully with deep sucking breaths
Another bull elephant arrived at the water hole and so it was time
for the first bull to assert his dominance of the water, he moved
the little zebra away from harm’s way, a little nudge of his
trunk, in case a fight breaks out over the water. The bull’s
gentleness and compassion was incredible to watch. Especially
in such a harsh and stressful environment as we are experiencing at
the water holes now in this dry season.
I found the intact body of the baby zebra the next morning, lying
close to where it had its last drink the day before. I was surprised
nothing had killed the foal during the night as we have a lot of predator
activity in close proximity to the water holes at night. Three
bull elephants were feeding close by watching my every move as I got
out of the car to inspect the foal’s lion wounds. I saw
that the whole area around the zebra’s body was covered with
elephant footprints…they were those of the gentle giant guardians
feeding over there… ♥♥♥
Excerpt From Elephantoms
by Lyall Watson
It was fine to be in a place where “as far as the eye can see” means
something. It is no idle boast here, but a confident statement of fact.
You can see almost forever….
Looking inland, I saw where fynbos and forest had been cleared to
plant martial rows of alien pines and thought it a poor exchange. All
that was left of the patch of forest out of which we had run in panic
from a ghostly elephant was the great yellowwood that had been the
focus of our attention. It was intact but, deprived of the forest around
it, showed more than a hint of nervousness, like someone caught unawares,
unclothed. The sea was just the same, rolling in almost in slow motion,
leaving, even on this fine day, a haze over the rocky coastline. I
closed my eyes and enjoyed the white noise of all this from the cliff
top, letting it lap over me, evolving other oceans, other times spent
whale watching—and when I opened my eyes, there was a whale right
there.
Southern right whales are common here in the winter months, coming
in to calve in sheltered bays, but this was summer, and I looked again.
Out beyond the breakers in deep blue water a long dark back rose gently
to the surface once more and blew, or rather blasted, a single thin
column of condensation forty feet high. There was only one whale capable
of such a spout. A blue whale, the largest animal the world has ever
known. A hundred tons of sleek grace, belying its great size, sliding
slowly over until it showed just a hint of fin before the tail flukes
touched the surface. Definitely a blue whale, one of a population gradually
bouncing back from the slaughter of the 1930s, beginning to be seen
more often again.
I waited for her – female baleen whales are often larger than
their mates – to surface again, knowing from experience that
she would blow at least one more time before flicking her tail up on
the last breath before a dive, enjoying a sight that is rare from the
land. I wondered what would bring her here, so close to the coast,
during her tropical fast. Not just the scenery, surely? Then up she
came once more, another great vertical spout as she surfaced almost
horizontally, and as I watched her, I was aware of something else,
of a throbbing in the air, of what Katy Payne calls “silent thunder’.
It is a sound that sneaks up on you, something you feel rather than
hear, a rumble which is more visceral than cerebral, threatening to
addle your mind. I rose to my feet and stared out at the whale in amazement.
I knew that blue whales can make high-energy, low-frequency moans that
last for thirty seconds or more, but I had never heard one before when
watching blue whales off Baja California or Peru. I supposed that the
sound of ship engines and generators might have masked it, but I hadn’t
imagined that the calls would fall within our range of hearing anyway…
The sensation I was feeling on the clifftop was some sort of reverberation
in the air itself. Perhaps an interference pattern set up between the
whale call and its echo from the rocks below? That too seemed unlikely,
and I was still puzzling over it when I realized that the whale had
submerged and I was still feeling something. The strange rhythm seemed
now to be coming from behind me, from the land, so I turned to look
across the gorge, sweeping my gaze across the cliffs, over the great
milkwood tree – and then swiftly back to the tree again, where
my heart stopped.
I was twelve again, barefoot, sunburned, carefree, and riveted to
the rock once again, because standing there in the shade of the tree
was an elephant. A fully-grown African elephant, facing left, staring
out to sea! A big elephant, but this time not white or male. A female
with a left tusk broken off near the base, looking for all the world
like the stub of a large cigar. I had never seen this elephant
before, but I knew who she was, who she had to be. I recognized her
from a colour photograph put out by the Department of Water Affairs
and Forestry under the title ‘The Last Remaining Knysna Elephant’.
This was the Matriarch herself. But what was she doing here?
The thunder was gone. I could no longer feel it in my bones. I was
awestruck, however, both by her and by the circumstances. She hadn’t
been seen for months, but here she was where and when I needed her
to be! That moment of hubris quickly passed as I began to understand.
She was here because she no longer had anyone to talk to in the forest.
She was standing here on the edge of the ocean because it was the next,
nearest, and most powerful source of infrasound. The underrumble of
the surf would have been well within her range, a soothing balm for
an animal used to being surrounded, submerged, by low and comforting
frequencies, by the lifesounds of a herd, and now this was the next-best
thing!
My heart went out to her. The whole idea of the grandmother of many
being alone for the first time in her life was tragic, conjuring up
the vision of countless other old and lonely souls. But just as I was
about to be consumed by helpless sorrow, something even more extraordinary
took place …
The throbbing was back in the air. I could feel it, and I began to
understand why. The blue whale was on the surface again, pointed inshore,
resting, her blowhole clearly visible. The Matriarch was here for the
whale! The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land
animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced
that they were communicating. In infrasound, in concert, sharing big
brains and long lives, understanding the pain of high investment in
a few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure
of complex sociality, these rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating
over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore, woman to woman, matriarch
to matriarch, almost the last of their kind.
I turned, blinking away the tears, and left them to it. This was no
place for a mere man.♥♥♥
Lyall Watson is a naturalist and author of over 20 books, including
most recently Jacobson’s Organ. He is based in a cottage
on the West coast of Ireland. As a child in South Africa, spending
summers exploring the wild with his boyhood friends, Lyall Watson came
face to face with his first elephant. From that moment on Watson’s
fascination grew into a lifelong obsession with understanding the nature
and behavior of this impressive creature.
|
|
