The Way Is Open
“Dissolve the old self.”
Successful poachers in South Africa are trained to kill huge, beautiful things by killing small, beautiful things. They start with a rabbit, a fox, a baby antelope. Then they practice killing medium-sized beautiful things: a gazelle, a hyena. They keep going until they can kill a rhino and feel nothing.
It wasn’t always this way. When the British arrived, in the late 1800’s, East Africa was in the grip of famine and drought. As in the American colonies, Indigenous people were also decimated by infectious diseases brought from Europe. Then, in 1887, Italian traders in Ethiopia accidentally introduced rinderpest, a parasite that infects ungulates, both wild and domestic. Within ten years, a garland of bloated bodies traced the curves of east Africa all the way to the Southern Cape: more than ninety percent of all the cattle on the eastern flank of the continent had perished, along with most of the zebra, antelope, and buffalo.
Without those grazing animals, grasslands reverted to thornbush, prime habitat of tsetse flies, and local people were overtaken by sleeping sickness – a conqueror’s dream, perhaps, to have so little resistance, with locals that slept – and died - through the invasion. After that, British settlers mistook empty lands for an untouched Eden and seized more tribal territory to ‘protect’ it. Some of those lands became private estates. Others became hunting preserves that are now safari lodges and national parks. The British declared subsistence hunting illegal and outlawed locals as poachers. In their place, adventurers flocked to Kenya to hunt for profit and gentry hunted for pleasure. In 1909, President Roosevelt celebrated his retirement with a safari to Kenya and returned with more than 10,000 ‘trophies’ of animals and birds.
Nowadays, poaching is the province of international gangs and complicit officials who use helicopters, infrared lights and machine guns to hunt the last rhinos, elephants, leopards and lions of Africa, and, in Asia, the last tigers. Their pelts and claws decorate wealthy homes; their bones are boiled for courage and powdered for fertility; their organs sit in shriveled lumps on makeshift tables, waiting for customers in need of luck.
Today’s poachers in South Africa build mansions: mile after mile of lean-to’s are punctuated by gated estates. They do things for their people that the government does not. Local people look up to them. At least the poachers are honest: We’ll kill every last rhino. We don’t care. Lest we condemn them from a distance, let’s remember that we say the same: We want our precious things and we don’t care. If anyone complains or wants in, we’ll build another wall.
Lately, civic life in the U.S. is focused on the latest war or mass shooting or the most incendiary post on social media. But, three thousand years ago, when the I Ching was written, the ancient, fundamental structure of social order at the time was represented by the figure of the Well (Hexagram 48). It consisted of eight fields, cultivated and tended by eight families, with a shared well in a shared field at the center. The ancient figure representing this resembles the cross-hatched grid for a game of tic-tac-toe: two vertical lines intersect two horizontal ones, with a single dot at the center. Its root meaning refers to the waters of life and to Heaven and Earth, the two Protectors that make life possible. The dot at the center illustrates a point of access to the underlying flow of the Way – a nipple of the Great Mother. A third layer of understanding means, All of us, together. The eight families in each group were responsible for keeping the well, the rope and the bucket in good working order so that the ever-flowing waters of life were available to all. Community cohesion protected the Well that sustained them. The relationship between the community and the numinous protected the protection.
I have a friend who fled her home in the Middle East many years ago. She is a doctor now, living in California. She remembers a childhood centered on community. She has experienced the ways people thrive when they’re cared for. She knows what it is to live in exile. She says, Going from I to We turns Illness into Wellness. Sometimes I tell myself this and find comfort. I suppose we can also turn Wall into Well. Getting from War to Well, on the other hand, will require that we change more than one letter. This is our sacred mandate, one that cannot be accomplished alone or by someone else. Only We can do it.
