BAOBAB

A piece of bark given by a baobab tree sits on the altar. On it are the tracks and scrapings of beetles, worms and termites, the inscriptions of lives she once held. An elephant might have rubbed that piece of bark loose, or the tree might have lent it to the ground beneath her in the partnership of sheltering they have developed over time. In Africa, baobabs are known as ‘upside down trees’ because their branches look like gnarled roots. The elephants rub and rub against them until the trees get hollowed out. But this does not kill them. They simply regenerate from the inside out. Much of savannah life seeks refuge inside those hollow trees: birds, insects, foxes, bees, snakes and sometimes fugitives, usually poachers. Inside the hollow, the bark forms a rough skin with whorls and creases that look like the tips of elbows, or vulva, or turtle shells, each sculpted pattern a universe. In spring, the trees are festooned with huge, elongated fruits covered with circles that look like eyes looking at nothing, seeing everything.

We had been in the Ruaha game reserve in Tanzania for three days, sighing, gasping, at the edges of our seats and the edges of our breath. There were sand rivers like freshly raked zen gardens, pocked with hoof prints and lion tracks and elephant pot holes. Boulders and bushes were arranged just so, and water appeared in sudden veins and pools bluer than the sky, peeking through drifts of fallen gold leaves turning purple as bruises in the afternoon sun. A red-beaked guinea hen perched on a sable gray termite mound that rose from the scrub like a fist. A bat eared fox stared out from within a roadside cairn of stones at a crossroads. On the morning of my son’s and my shared August birthday, because we are Leos, he wished to see lions, and right away there were twelve of them feasting on a freshly killed kudu, dragged to the side of the road as if in gracious response to our longing. And in the shade of an immense sausage tree, a baboon sat motionless as the Buddha, watching us from an overhanging limb, his ash-white fur framed in tufts of dark brown, with only his eyes moving as he tracked us. Underneath the branch hung a beehive, a huge, suspended triangle of honeycomb white as the baboon, except for the glistening bees surging and buzzing around it. Even Peter Mathiessen himself appeared. We told him that we were there because of him, because we had re-read his book, The Sand Rivers, and so had chosen this place.

Gratitude casts a spell, and the force field of mystery is irresistible, so when I saw the Mother of all Baobabs and she whispered my name, I suddenly felt I had to get out of the car and walk towards her. Brandishing my camera, I asked our guide to please stop for a photo. His name was Josphat but he had the practiced patience of Job, and he stopped the car. When I asked to get out and walk a bit closer to that tree, he must have said yes because suddenly I was striding into the bush as if I had stepped onto a conveyor belt and had only to keep moving my legs while it carried me to the Mother Tree. I would soon be scrambling up boulders and clambering into her branches to rock in her embrace and look out over the plain to gaze into the far distance as she saw it. A ringing silence encased me and carried me forward as if dormant cells of her ancient roots had awakened in my belly and were suddenly reaching toward her and pulling me with them.

It was only the frantic shouts and whistles of Josphat, and then my son and everyone else in the car, that called me back. I heard them faintly at first, as if from another room. Then words like ‘Lions!’ and ‘Come back!’ filtered through, and began exerting a counterforce to the Mother Tree. I remember turning my head and seeing the looks of alarm on their faces, everything in slow motion like a flashback, then looking back at the tree, and turning away again to begin the slow, reluctant walk back to the car. I was so sure I was safe and that I was meant to go to her. Couldn’t they feel it, too? Though their upset surprised me and I regretted their worry, I regretted more having to leave her. Was it hubris, or maybe ignorance, that made me think I could just walk up there like that as if immune to danger, as if I could actually wander so far and scale that little cliff or shimmy up her massive trunk? Perhaps ignorance and hubris played their part. And yet, I know the call was real because I can feel the longing even now, fluttering in my chest like a memory of wings.

MWAGUSI

Arriving in Tanzania, we went straight to the Ruaha game reserve, the country’s second largest, in the less-traveled southwest of the country, a magical landscape festooned with baobab trees and woven with sand rivers. 

At Mwagusi Safari camp, where we stayed, we meet Adrian. He is in his mid-twenties, my daughter’s age. He is a second generation Tanzanian, born, like his father, in Dar es Salaam. Adrian has a gift for tracking animals. Every morning before dawn as we head out on safari, we see him with the local guides bending over fresh tracks in fierce concentration. He is gentle and soft spoken: a clipped British accent, swarthy good looks and impeccable manners. He is descended from Syrian slave traders, a family secret so shameful that no one will speak of it. He wants to know the stories so he can know what to do with this part of himself but his parents and grandparents refuse to tell him.

Mwagusi camp consists of ten thatched-roof tents perched at the edge of the Mwagusi sand river in the Ruaha reserve south and west of the Serengeti. Each room is unique. Each has a sturdy wooden bed and two solar reading lamps, a writing desk, a hammock, and a small sunken lounge with a sand floor and huge pillows where you can sit and peer over the curved ledge and watch the animals without being noticed. 

In the bathroom of my banda, the bones of a giraffe’s spine are embedded along a low, curving wall of river stones, and there are two giraffe skulls next to the shower. In the patio overlooking the sand river, tiny birds alight on the trunk of a fallen tree then hop over to drink from the hollow stone that is lovingly refilled with fresh water each day. It is so quiet I can hear their wings and tiny feet as they arrive and flit away. Listen. You could sit in that silence for the rest of your days, just murmuring the name of this place, Mwagusi, rolling it around on your tongue. To be able to say it, you have to purse your lips tight then open them wide to get your mouth around it, like a giraffe wrapping its lips around the thorny branch of a fever tree.



Back home, I sit on the bluff above a beach that held my children and me for so many years. Sand castles and pirate ships, dog walks and tears, dolphins, sea lions and whales. In summer there is soft, gray-white sand. In winter the sand washes away, exposing jagged slabs of rock stacked like the scales and spine of the dinosaur earth-mother herself. There are boulders with cross-sections of ancient bones that are likely dolphin vertebrae, or spines and fins of small, prehistoric whales. There is a man who sometimes drives a tractor along the beach and steals the fossil stones for his garden.

I watch the reflection of the late summer, late afternoon light. Listen: the gulls are calling below the cliff. The patterns of wind and currents on the ocean are pulling towards the shore and away, up the coast and down, below the surface and on it at the same time. The late afternoon light of Africa can’t help but be golden, but here in California, at the same time of day, the low sun backlighting the leaves of that rock rose over there is soft and chalky white. Even the red terracotta urn glows white. It is from West Africa. It is round as a globe, and covered with pointy bumps (antennae, actually) like raised spirals except the handle, which is a knob shaped like a man’s head. He has fine features and a steady gaze. He stares out over the ocean as if looking towards home, seeing nothing, seeing everything. Soon it will be dark. The sun is sinking and the wind is about to change.

TO BECOME A TALISMAN OF HEALING

Recently I was talking with a friend in Santa Barbara who is a physician specializing in PTSD. I asked her what the possible forms might be for healing trauma that are cheap, free, simple and require no outside expertise. Before I could finish my question, her reply was, “Basketweaving.” I sat in mute surprise for a moment, and then she went on to explain that she has been studying basket weaving with a local Chumash master weaver for the past eight years, during which time she has been able to unlock and heal her own severe childhood trauma. Many cultures, including the Maya, teach that the crafting by hand of everyday objects is an act of offering to the Divine, one that is uniquely human. Talismans, baskets, carving, beadwork, plates of food and libations on altars and in the wild are all ways of expressing love and appreciation to the mysteries of life, and of coming into alignment with them. That these things have been corrupted, co-opted or commodified only affirms their inherent power, offerings and talismans in particular.

In 2008, while on safari to Tanzania with a group of former child soldiers and several Liberian staff members of everyday gandhis, I dreamed I was cutting chunks of flesh from my belly and making them into talismans, folded and pinned shut with sticks. They looked like bulging tacos fastened with toothpicks. In the dream, I crafted the talismans quickly and easily, my fingers moving confidently to assemble all the necessary materials, in addition to my own flesh. I then re-inserted the talismans into my stomach – no blood, no pain – just these many folded packets containing I knew not what (but precious and benevolent, of that I was sure), each one fastened with a twig – perhaps a piece of a filigreed branch from a baobab tree. As I made them, I put them in my belly and there they remained as I went about my day, as if they contained tiny living beings and I had become a tranquil mother of baby talismans. When I told the dream at breakfast the next morning, several of the Liberian elders who were with us became greatly alarmed. They still mention it with great worry when we see each other. They regarded me with a strange new wariness, and gave me wide berth, no matter how often I assured them that the talismans were harmless and caused no pain, and that I had awoken from the dream feeling calm and reassured by its benevolence.

This question of talismans is especially interesting. In all cultures and religions, talismans are common. The word itself is derived from Arabic and Greek roots meaning ‘to initiate into the mysteries’. The tallis or orthodox Jewish prayer shawl, the mezuza, the crucifix, medals of saints, holy water, four-leaf-clovers, rabbit’s feet, charm bracelets, all these and more were and are talismans meant to provide luck and protection through a direct and durable connection with the Divine. Other forms, such as some types of voodoo and juju, make use of talismans for power and sometimes harm. Buildings, pots, statues, poems, anything given physical form by human hands can be intended as talismans or can become one. Here is a question: How do we ourselves become living talismans, embodied expressions of alignment with the earth and all that is holy, for the benefit of all?