I used to want to visit the altars of modern killing to witness them and thus know they were real: Auschwitz, Rwanda, Cambodia, Argentina and the rest, but no more. Looking back, I suppose I thought it my duty to bear witness to the extremes of our time, and also that by exploring the descent of others I could immunize myself against my own capacity to destroy life, as if witnessing massive acts of brutality at arm’s length created a vaccinating dose of it. I can admit these things now because, at 62, I know that no such exemption exists, and that what one chooses to focus on has more bearing on one’s fate, and therefore, one’s legacy, than what one is able to avoid.
Some years ago during a time when I was overwhelmed with worries and to-do lists, I found myself spending yet another night ‘hamstering’ instead of sleeping. (If you’ve ever had a pet hamster, mouse or rat, you will know that – shamefully, we often put these nocturnal creatures in tiny cages with little wheels for them to ‘play’ in. All night, they spin - as I was spinning within my mind’s whirring little wheel…) In desperation, I got out of bed and lay down on the floor on my belly. The question that came was this: What relationships do you tend?
At the time, the primary relationship I was tending was with my computer and all the necessary administrative tasks that kept me from finding a sense of completion to rest in. I felt far from my deeper writing projects, far from finding joy in life. Most of all, I felt far from Nature.
What prevents us from hearing Nature’s howls of possibility? Where in our bodies do we sense our longing for restoration? For silence? For wildness? How can we grieve together and make amends for what we and our forebears have done to the earth, and, therefore, ourselves? When, if not now, is the moment before it’s too late? There is a course correction that comes naturally with knowing what relationships we tend, and deep satisfaction from tending our relationship with the natural world. Each relationship becomes a living altar.
I like being awoken in the middle of the night by the brightness of the stars. I want to hear wind with birdcalls in it, and maybe the night sounds of animals, preferably lions, hyenas and hippos, the occasional night heron or cricket, and those odd, unidentifiable grunts and coughs that make one feel small and in a bigger world one cannot know and therefore will never, thank goodness, control, or care to.
In the African bush, silence is measured by the movement of shadows, every tree and shrub a living sundial. Ring-necked doves whir in the heat, as long as the sun is out, and fall silent at twilight. Pit-prrh-it, pit-prrh-it, their cooing pulses in the dry air, a thousand living clocks that keep the hours marching in a great circle, ratcheting the light through woodlands and across the undulating plains and pans. It is these sounds that remind me to stop and lift my eyes to the farthest horizon, to sit in wonderment at how the day knows what to do, a vast harmony that is the everything and is what matters above all else and that will hold us indifferently so we are as free and as wary as anything else in the intervals between hunger and contentment, danger and rest.
This hunger for the sounds and silence of Africa began long ago, before I was born, a path shaped by human hands and laid out in a pattern that drew me toward it, though I had no conscious desire to explore it. In Africa they say that before you begin a journey, you own it, but once you take the first step, it owns you. The journey into Africa was not of my making, but it has illuminated my life. And Africa awoke in me the longing for silence after certain silences – and certain sounds - had entered my bones along the sand rivers of Tanzania in the summer of 2008, when I camped there for the first time. The silence of the bush is actually very noisy. In it are the interwoven sounds of fruit bats dipping and feeding like nocturnal hummingbirds in the trees above our tents; the lioness draped across the road – all the way across it – and roaring so loud and so close that our bodies felt like tuning forks reverberating with the notes of her voice. We sat in the back of our little open-sided cart, like bells still ringing, clutching each other’s hands.
When I got home from Africa that time, my house sitter had rearranged my furniture and ‘forgotten’ to put it back. The neighbors had begun adding a second story to their 1920’s cottage, and I arrived home to workmen jack-hammering the driveway beside my kitchen window as the McMansioning process began. (Several years later, the remodel remained incomplete and the couple was getting a divorce.) Why do we jackhammer things when what we crave is silence? Sometimes it takes a jackhammer to pulverize the life that can’t be repaired, the driveway that no longer takes you home. The closed door of silence opened my search for land on which to live where I could be in and with the wild. This mythic place that did not yet exist for me in any tangible way was also where I hoped to learn an intimacy with the wild that had eluded me, its absence creating a backdrop of sadness that infused everything.
It has been fear - only fear - that has kept me looking for shards of connection with the wild that could be pieced together into a vessel that would contain the longing for silence and for the aliveness that creates it. Perhaps it was my father’s death that finally set me free by placing me next in death’s receiving line, finally willing to seek a sense of comfort in the wild that I have not been able, or perhaps willing, to embrace until now. When the time comes, I wish to die outdoors, my body on the earth’s body, in a place I love and have come to know, releasing my last breath into her care.
