A Murmuration of Zebras
“We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. ”
This New Year has brought an unexpected shift in identity for which I barely have words. It's been a strangely exhausting transformation, filled with unfamiliar silence, and the sense of my linear mind completely out of reach and reluctant to return. It's both alarming and welcome. I am stretched to the limit, holding the medicine of this unexpected expansion.
I spent most of December with my dear friend and teacher, Deena Metzger in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. The trip had been postponed many times because of the pandemic, then drought. In the interim, excitement and heartache accumulated in tandem as joyful anticipation rubbed shoulders with relentless news of violence and environmental collapse. We arrived with an armful of riddles: What can the elephants tell us about peace in Gaza? What will we come to understand in the presence of lions?
Here at home, I glance at the headlines and think, Yup. They're still at it. Daily, I wonder, What is the antidote? Botswana brought an unexpected answer. It took the form of profound relief as we realized we were surrounded by intactness instead of loss. The question quickly became, What's right with this picture? In the Okavango Delta the answer is, Everything.
At first, we couldn't quite articulate what we were experiencing. We felt it before we could name it: the sensation of being embedded in wholeness. We were in a landscape of unity; a holographic jigsaw puzzle composed of overlapping, interlocking lives unfolding, literally, in concert as grunts and roars, birdcalls and wind, and the soft pounding of hooves and paws provided the soundtrack to our meanderings.
At night there were fireflies, and tiny swamp frogs whose tinkling chorus sounded like an orchestra of bamboo wind chimes. The sand was inscribed with footprints, constantly changing, as lions, leopards, hyenas and elephants crisscrossed the landscape. Bones were strewn on the ground in sculptural array. Next to a tree, we saw a dead baboon covered in flies. Behind dry bushes, a creche of baby giraffes. Termite mounds are everywhere, built around trees, and with trees growing out of them. They jut from the ground like index fingers, like penises, like shrines. Above us, the sky was gowned in clouds with something to say. Everything birthing, bleeding, blooming, rotting, all the time, all at once.
One morning we went on a game walk at sunrise. The day was already hot and humid. The air stood still, refusing to move. Wilted hair, shirt sticking to skin, visor sliding on a film of sweat. Walking was an effort and a joy, in the way that only moving through and with discomfort can be. Sometimes, if we're lucky, it morphs into awe.
We entered a meadow as the sun rose. Fresh grass turned translucent; dried stalks came alive in the sun's borrowed light. There were zebras and antelope in a nearby clearing. They calmly turned to watch us watching them. Over the next few weeks, heavy rain will fill the dry riverbed. The meadow we were standing in will soon be submerged.
We saw the funnel-shaped web of a baboon spider, a tarantula who builds her nest in the ground. It takes her seven years to construct it. She lives for decades. We saw dung beetles pushing a baseball-size ball of dung. There are more than five thousand species of them, including some who navigate by the spaces between stars. We watched a murmuration of zebras veer in sudden unison like starlings pulsing through sky. Lions roared as they walked the perimeter of our camp. One night, the ground shook as buffaloes galloped past our tents. Elephants acknowledged us, and we them. One morning, a family of hyenas strolled by our vehicle and looked us full in the eye with such exquisite presence it took our breath away. It was one of those rare moments infused with the palpable presence of Life seeing and interacting with Itself.
The Okavango Delta is a UNESCO World Heritage site, linked by a network of cross-border wildlife corridors and contiguous nature preserves. The Delta's headwaters originate in the highland forests, lakes and peat bogs of neighboring Angola. The rainfall and seepage there provide freshwater to Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia and Botswana: the equivalent of nearly 170 million Olympic-size swimming pools each year. Ninety-five percent of that freshwater flows into the Okavango Delta system, the last remaining wetland wilderness in Africa. During Angola's protracted civil war, woodlands and forests were isolated and heavily mined. Now that people are moving back into the region, agriculture, settlements and illegal logging (primarily by the Chinese) threaten that water supply. Microplastics have sifted into the delta and multinational oil companies are drilling experimental wells in Namibia's fragile watershed. The region's water supply is teetering.
Global leaders have no understanding of how global ecology works; no sense of how whole systems function and interact; no understanding of colonial history. They are ignorant, and that ignorance is deadly. Data without wisdom cannot save us. Gizmos cannot cure our toxic culture.
We humans have lived in an intact world longer than we've inhabited a broken one. Wholeness is a limbic memory built into the cellular core of who we are. We can choose to align with unity, and the seamless connections that make life possible. When fragmentation intrudes, and public figures make idiotic statements that are disconnected from the reality of how the world functions, we have a choice: we can allow clueless politicians and the media to coopt our true knowing, or we can respond from a deeper understanding. We can refuse to see separation. We can insist on the truth of cellular connection. Our minds might forget, but our bodies know how to live from intactness.
