In the dream, there are rows of elephants, or rows and clusters, tied to a post like cowboys’ horses, standing in the dust, and suddenly collapsing as if they were inflated life-size models that had been punctured and just crumpled to the ground. No popping or whistling sounds of air escaping, suddenly they are just deflated and piled limp and empty in the dirt. It’s as if the Holy has gone out of them - it’s too painful, they’re her most complex creatures, and they’re under attack and struggling. She wants them out of their misery. Spirit can’t stand it any longer and just withdraws. Later, I am sitting in the rich afternoon sun facing the view of Santa Cruz Island. I close my eyes and ask what I can do for the animals, for the elephants, for whom and for what, what can I do and how can I do it, better said, what can we do and how can we do it, what are we to do? I see images of Elephants, Chimps, Tigers, and I hear them called The Beleaguered Ones. It is important for writers to write on behalf of The Beleaguered Ones, because, since they are big and were so numerous, they hold large amounts of Spirit, of the Holy, they are huge repositories of magic, mystery, and ancient knowing. They are indispensable. We cannot do without them. According to news articles, we can’t even do without their shit:
“A drop in the number of hippos has led to a reduction in phytoplankton in African freshwaters, and has caused a decline in fish populations.” The hunting of hippopotami for their meat is responsible for a change in the composition of the water at Kampala, East Africa, and this has led to a reduction in the catch of food fish.” (AllAfrica.com)"Hippos are extremely important in maintaining the ecological balance in rivers and lakes and nearby grasslands," says Marc Languy of WWF's Eastern Africa Regional Programme. "Hippo dung provides essential basic elements for the food chain, particularly for fish. The loss of more than 27,000 hippos in the past few decades is a double blow: fish catches have dwindled and the freshwater ecosystems are losing hundreds of tons of nutrients every day. Lake Edward supports over 20,000 people living around the Park who depend on fish for their livelihood." (World Wildlife Fund, East Africa Regional Programme Office)I go on the internet and find a chorus of articles about hippo poaching perpetrated primarily by ex-combatants. The hippo population of the Congo was once the world's largest but now may soon be extinct. In Virunga National Park, there are now less than 1,000 hippos, though in the 1970’s there were almost 30,000.
“The poachers are believed to be veterans of Congolese bush wars and former Hutu rebels who fled to eastern Congo in 1994 after killing Tutsis in the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. They hunt because they are hungry, but also for profit — the meat, though tough, is a pricey delicacy and a three-ton hippo fetches thousands of dollars in village markets across northeastern Congo. In his poaching days in the Congo forests, Guillaume Kasereka used a rusty Russian-made rocket launcher to kill hippos for meat. These days, he says, they're too scarce and the competition too fierce — rebels and militiamen machine-gun the animals and even dynamite lakes to bring dead hippo to the surface.” (CBSNews.com)My friend, Hassan Yusufzai, a Pakistani peacebuilder says,
“Violence is a form of communication.” Violence communicates frustration, rage, desperation that cannot see other options. I picture men with machine guns, AK’s and grenades, blowing up hippos and lakes and huge tracts of rainforest and I know that Hassan is right. I read headlines about car bombs and drones and I know he is right. I think of my Liberian sons and brothers who are ex-combatants, and I know he is right. I see my neighbor spraying poison on his weeds (a few yards from my well head), and I know Hassan is right. I reach for the fly swatter and I know that Hassan is right.
Colonization, religious zealotry, and, now, resource extraction, sunder indigenous people – including ourselves – from our connection to the earth and each other. The issue, then, is the trauma of isolation that pits us against ourselves and the communities we are necessarily part of. In our anguish, we lash out at the essence of that which sustains us.
Trauma is an epidemic that stretches across generations, geographies and centuries. Even our nervous systems are traumatized by the relentless onslaught of information, of light when there should be darkness, of noise in place of quiet.
Healing is a journey from trauma to wholeness that passes through many landscapes – mountains of forgiveness and grace, valleys of personal responsibility, forests of amends. I once knew a woman named Jean who said,
The opposite of enemy is personal responsibility. When we divorced, my ex-husband made terrible threats and I believed him capable of following through, though, thankfully, he did not. Since those harrowing days, we have gone in and out of détente, in and out of court, and in and out of touch. Because I didn’t understand conflict, I married an angry man. Because I found it difficult to forgive, I became fascinated with stories of people who could. What I had done, and hadn’t done, for my children was what I needed help carrying: The husband I chose, the grandmother in whose footsteps I had unwittingly walked... To stop that freight train of generations that pushed my ex-husband and me together and forced us apart, to make peace with all that, became as irresistible as a dare. Being around communities seeking to make peace after war has helped me put my own dilemmas into perspective and taught me to see possibility rather than impasse.
I had a friend in Santa Barbara who was a profound peacemaker. Forgiveness was a lifelong quest for her. She had divorced her husband when she found out he had molested their daughters. More than twenty years after the divorce she told me, “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t wish him harm.” She paused and gathered herself. “It’s taken me years to get that far. I have to let that be enough, because I doubt I’ll be able to forgive him in this lifetime.” We go as far as we can.
Why is it, then, that sometimes those who have lost so much more, lost everything, are able to make the leap into real forgiveness? Is there an inverse proportionality here between heartbreak and generosity, between suffering and the ability to transcend it, a chemical reaction that happens unpredictably and unexpectedly sometimes? And, if so, how to render the stories so that their medicine is distilled but not oversimplified, or, worse yet, so that we don’t mistakenly assume that extreme suffering is required – or is it? – or that suffering alone prepares us for feats of transcendence? Like the wildflowers in the California chaparral, are our human hearts fire-climax seeds, too? It’s possible, and it’s terrifying and dangerous to think so.
Liberian peacebuilder Samuel Gbaydee Doe once told me:
“Those who have perfected violence are saying, ‘I’m hurt’… and that is why we need to deliberately move into the field and lavish love on those incapable of loving.” May we be worthy of that challenge, whether giving or receiving. Like forgiveness, like love, grace is a big word. There are those that can naturally sense its coordinates and lock in, while the rest of us remain struggling. It requires that everything be given to those who seem to least deserve it, whether they reach out their hands to accept it or not. But, by accepting it, they begin to earn it, and to be able to offer it to someone else. Grace requires dedication to possibilities not visible to the naked eye, only to the naked heart.
